There were consequences to that kind of beauty, he thought, a fact that she was yet to come to terms with. But today, he was on the boat house for his friend. Not for her. He'd always had an uncanny ability to sense women who could demand more of him than what they had to offer. That said, he didn't particularly hate her for the times her mere presence overwhelmed him. A tease. Else, what would he call the time she'd let her raven black hair unfurl in front of the men, in the board room?
Her back brushed against his hand that held the laptop bag over his shoulder. Only a moment and she'd instinctively turned around, hissing as if that brief contact had been like acid to her touch. A flicker of a smile came before a 'touch-me-not' nod and she moved aside to give way.
Dhri waved at the entrants and got to his feet from his grandmother's lap. "What a surprise, Man!" He took a few steps to come and punched his arm. "I knew Aditya might come, but didn't know you had time for a village amidst nowhere."
"Can't wait to see you dunk your arrow into the river. 10000 bucks says you won't light the akandajyothi," he said, slapping Dhri on his shoulder.
"Well, that's very encouraging." Dhri retorted, his face twisted with a laugh that wouldn't come.
"Never mind him, Dhri," Aditya came forward to shake Dhri's hand. "You know the man loves his bets."
Dhri stepped towards the other end of the deck and led them to where the other men had camped. And he would have gone along without casting a look back at her had he not sighted the weight of the armlet that adorned her upper arm, press into her skin. The patina that her skin held...the sheen that glossed over it like a dragonfly's wing.
As he shifted his eyes straight ahead, the men disappeared into whorls of visions from the past - a memory he hadn't expected to rise to the surface; sudden and flaming his senses with an unctuous alert. He'd only been eight then, but he'd understood what weakness meant. He could distinctly smell it and had a knack to weed out the weakest links from that of the strongest. Arnav, he could tell, would always second guess him, however, Yuvi and Dev truly behaved like brothers from another womb - a slave to their passions.
Dragonflies...the tips of his fingers twitched from that old sensation, as it climbed his arm in a slow crawl. He still remembered the sparks that crept into his chest, as he enjoyed taking apart the dragonfly Yuvi had caught a fine evening, one part at a time. Yuvi had roiled in agony, partly holding himself responsible for the injustice he'd caused to the poor creature. Dev had started a fight to avenge his brother only to be beaten up by the rest of the lot gathered around him. Arjun, however, had went straight to Dadaji and held court; the result of which had got him and his friends to run around a nearby playground until they had all dropped dead from exhaustion.
He wondered at the correlation of that remembrance with the sight of her he'd beheld a few moments ago and came up blank.
When he turned around to catch a glimpse of her again, she wouldn't look at him, though she was aware of his gaze trained on her. That splash of instinct still being there in his nerves, he couldn't comprehend, if that was caution from her allure or causation from her spell.
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