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Chapter 57: A Dark and Terrible Beauty – Part 5
Yes, she admitted it, albeit reluctantly…. she was an avid consumer of the reading genre that was conceived by most as 'women's fiction' at best and as 'trashy dime novels' at worst. It was her secret vice, one that she indulged only in the most treasured privacy, although it was her opinion that there were many authors in the genre who were undervalued. For instance, she thought that Loretta Chase's Lord of Scoundrels had some of the wittiest banter between the main leads that she had ever read. One of her favorite dialogues came at the beginning of the book when the heroine explains to her slightly stupid brother the essential difference between men and women. It went something like,
"That, Bertie, is a consequence of the feminine brain having reached a more advanced state of development. She recognizes that the selection of a gift requires the balancing of a profoundly complicated moral, psychological, aesthetic, and sentimental equation. I should not recommend that a mere male attempt to involve himself in the delicate process of balancing it, especially by the primitive method of counting."
She thought that that little gem was incredibly true. Take her situation for instance. To understand the thought process of a woman who kissed another woman's husband required the grasp of a complicated moral, psychological, aesthetic (no, no, forget aesthetic… that has nothing to do with this), and sentimental (yes, that bit was a little ironic to her too) equation. She didn't recommend that any male attempt to involve himself in the delicate process of comprehending the intricate algebra that was a woman's mind.
And so she was surprised when she pulled away from Shiv after she kissed him so publicly. She had fully expected him to look at her with derision, maybe insult her, or the very least, push her aside to go to his wife who was standing in the crowd around them. But he didn't do any of those things. In fact, aside from glimpsing a moment of surprise in his eyes, there was no other evident expression at all… no disgust, no lust, nothing… he just looked at her curiously for a moment before looking back at the crowd.
She wondered what he was going to do. She hadn't left him many choices with how publicly she had done what she did. She knew any other man, even if he may have privately enjoyed her kiss, would have publicly slapped her, which was really no less than she deserved. She had known that Shiv wouldn't do the latter – he didn't seem the type of man who would ever hit a woman under any manner of provocation; in fact, she wasn't even sure he could be sufficiently agitated into hitting a man. Aggression and violence went against the grain of what he truly was, and what he truly was was a lover. But the other part of her generalization about every other man - that he may have enjoyed what she did if so many people had not borne witness to it – she wasn't entirely sure anymore that Shiv would be in that category either.
He scanned the crowd quickly and she knew exactly when he found Gauri, because he stopped and stared for a few moments. Then he looked back at her and leaned in close to whisper in her ear,
"I wish you hadn't done that Thalia. I don't think you want me like you pretend you do. That much is clear now. You could have just told me what you really want. There would have been an easier way than this."
And then he walked away from both her and the crowd and out of the room.
She wanted to look to see Shashank's reaction, but for some reason she couldn't. All the energy that she had stored up for this night was suddenly entirely depleted. Her clothes felt too tight, her heels too high, her make-up too heavy… She wished now that she had driven here in her own car. She really didn't want to stick around to see how upset Gauri was or how Shashank was going to console her… probably just the way that he had done earlier when Gauri had stumbled and he had caught her… and then held her without letting go… it had been that sight of them in each other's arms that had finally allowed her to regain her resolve and work up the courage to lean up to an unsuspecting Shiv to press her lips against his when she had been about to chicken out from the whole scheme.
She didn't look at the crowd now as she tried to maintain enough of her bravado to walk out of the room with her spine straight. Her stilettoes were starting to pinch her feet and she made her gait purposefully slow; better to let people think that she was sauntering rather than let them see her limping out. She wouldn't give anyone the pleasure.
Once outside, she paused to look either way and when she found no one in sight, she took off her heels and started walking down the long driveway. If she didn't think that her outfit and her bare feet would invite every rapist, thief, and criminal within a fifty mile radius, she would have walked all 20 miles to her home. But there was reality to consider and so she called her ever reliable Raju kakka - who did anything and everything around the house and had been with her family since before she was born - to come pick her up, apologizing profusely for getting him out of bed at such a late hour. She managed to find the shade between some trees in the garden to rest while she waited, making sure the shade was sufficient enough that she wouldn't be seen by anyone. When Raju kakka finally arrived thirty minutes later, she thanked him and climbed into the back seat of the car and lay down, exhausted.
She fell asleep as the car sped along, something about the open windows, the rambling road, and the bumpy movements lulling her into a slumber that was denied to her in her sinfully expensive bed in the dead quiet of her mammoth of a house.
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