Posted:
speechless....loved It!!!!!
continue ASAP!!!!
continue ASAP!!!!
Originally posted by: kyphfanzi was just wondering how tall have you imagined Gauri as?
Chapter 24: Late-Nite Studying
He couldn't sleep that night and when he finally gave up trying and walked out of his room to get some water, he noticed that the light was still on in Gauri's room. He walked over and knocked on the door and had to knock again before he heard her shuffled gait approaching the door.
"Shiv, it's 2 in the morning. What do you want?" She asked him with sleep clouding her eyes. She was wearing a long sleeping gown with thin straps, something he had never seen her wear before, and he wondered if this was more of the wedding present collection, although this one was more in the pink-and-cute category rather than of the come-hither variety.
"What are you doing up?" He asked.
"I really have to finish this paper for my 8 o' clock tomorrow morning."
Just then, he heard his parents' room open and he quickly came inside before he shut the door behind him.
"What's…" she started to ask and he pulled her towards him and covered her mouth as he hit the lights.
"My parents are up, I think…" he whispered and he saw her nod in the dark.
Just then, the light in the hallway came on and they could hear footsteps.
"What the hell are they doing up?" he whispered again as he walked her back towards the bed.
She had started wiggling in his arms and he caught her more tightly before he lifting her up to lay her down on the bed and leaned in close to whisper, "Sleep! I am not going to do anything!"
When she started to get back up, he followed her down to the bed and asked, "What do you want now?"
"I really have to finish that report Shiv! It's stupid of me, but I wrote all my notes out and now I have to type it up. And it's like fifty pages. I really have to do it before I sleep, honestly! It's due tomorrow morning."
She had started to get back up again and he pushed her back down against the pillow.
"Okay, how about this? You sleep now and I will wake you up in an hour. And then you can work."
She started to say something to object and he quickly interjected, "Gauri, if you work like this, you are just asking to make mistakes. Seriously, just an hour. A catnap and then you can work in peace."
She was swayed by how tempting that sounded - she couldn't keep her eyes open at all - and finally relented. "Alright. Just 60 minutes! You have to wake me up after that! Promise?"
He nodded.
"Cross you heart and hope to die?" She asked now crossing her heart and looking at him to do the same.
He smiled when he heard her say that. She used to say it all the time when they were younger, when she was convinced that he was lying to her about something – which sometimes he was – she would often say in that Gauri-like-tone of hers, "Promise you are telling the truth?" He would nod of course and she would immediately follow it with, "Cross you heart and hope to die?" He would of course cross his heart and hope to die and would be alive and kicking the next day, just the way he liked it. But for whatever reason, she took him for his word, and he never felt so bad about breaking a promise when she was threatening him with frequent death anyways…
So, he nodded now too, amused that she still took it so seriously and didn't seem to think that maybe it was a bit childish at their age. He made the gesture with his finger and they shook on it. She smiled then, a small quick smile, and he couldn't help giving her a similarly quick peck on her lips. She appeared surprised, but before she could get all worked up about it, he reassured her. "That was all. No more touching. Sleep…"
She was out as soon as her head hit the pillow and he wondered how many nights she had been staying up like this.
He went over to the table where her laptop was and looked at the piles of notes stacked neatly next to it. She had the best handwriting he had ever seen in anyone; it had always been somewhat androgynous – which was interesting – and it was impeccably neat, just like he would expect his little goody-two-shoes wife to be like… ah.. but she wasn't as prim and proper as she pretended… he thought back to their laundry room encounter and even farther to their college formal night… she had known it was him that night… she had known and she hadn't been able to stop… he couldn't even explain how that knowledge affected him… to know that she had stayed in his arms and reacted so intensely to his touch knowing that it was him of all people…
He sat down on the chair next to the table and waited out the hour reading through her notes. By the end of the designated time though, she was sleeping so soundly that he couldn't bear to wake her up. He just had to hope to die this time too…
When the alarm woke her up, she was marveling at how rested she felt until she noticed that the time on her bedside clock read 6 am. Shiv was nowhere to be found, although it was clear that he had set the alarm for her before he left. Her heart was palpitating too fast for her to be angry with Shiv as she thought of how she was possibly going to type up fifty pages of notes in an hour before she had to leave to get to class by 8. She scrambled up out of the bed with her heart in her throat and ran to her laptop. She didn't know how it was still on and not in hibernation; she had been sleeping for four hours. When she moved the mouse, the screen came on with the Word document that she had been working on. She sat down on the chair and started going through her notes to see if there was anyway she could condense the main points so that it was more like ten pages rather than its intended length. She felt a chill steal over her as she thought about how she could possibly do all that in an hour. Her hand was still absently moving over the mouse and that was when she noticed that the page count had increased drastically from the two that she had finished when she fell asleep. It was 35 now. It was all of it… all of her notes had been typed up… with no errors that she could see at a quick glance… God, that must have taken hours! Four to be exact, if she could judge it based on her laptop's status…
She sat back on the chair and sighed, first in relief, and then with something else… something soft that crept up over her heart as she thought of what her husband had done for her….
---------------------------------------------------------
comment:
p_commentcount