Page 33 of The Rules of Playing with Fire

“We shouldn’t. Tara will kill us both. Well, she’ll kill you first, then lecture me for my terrible decisions before doing me in.”

She sank into the pool and swam back to the shallow end. I followed. She turned around to face me. “This has been an amazing weekend. Thank you for inviting me.”

This time, I abandoned all decency and stared at her chest. Water bobbed around her breasts, and I spotted her nipples, big and taut. I wondered if they would feel like blueberries against my tongue. When I took one more step closer, her body erupted in goosebumps. As her dark brown eyes roved over my chest, she extended her hand toward it before quickly retracting her fingers into a fist and withdrawing.

“You can touch me,” I whispered. “I won’t shatter.” I took her hand and guided it to my chest. Her touch on my bare skin sent a swift zing up my brain. As my skin shuddered, she sucked in a ragged breath and let her hand rest on my heart.

I ran a finger along her jaw and said, “You’re so beautiful, Sona. I feel helpless.”

She looked into my eyes, the warmth of those browns touching me in places I didn’t think were possible. My heart raced and my cock throbbed for her.

“Sameer warned me to stay away from you,” I said. “But I can’t seem to. I promised him I wouldn’t make the first move, but I also won’t hold back if you do.”

This time, she removed her hand, and her gaze lowered to the space between us.

“I need you to tell me you want me,” I said with desperation in my voice. “Because you’re driving me out of my mind.”

I waited for her response, but I didn’t get the one I had hoped for.

When her gaze returned to my face, her body trembled, and she said, “I should leave. Goodnight, Mihir.”

I stepped back, and she climbed out. Without bothering to dry herself, she grabbed the robe, picked up her clothes, and dashed off.

SONA

Soaked and trembling, I rushed to the shower and stood under a blast of steaming water.

What was I doing? The idea was to have sex with Mihir—that’s all I wanted, a sordid, onetime fling. Then we could go back to being Tara’s friends, happy and content in our separate lives. Yet here I was, letting myself get drawn to him, because he’d aroused feelings I didn’t know existed. Things I didn’t know I wanted. Greedy, brazen desire, for one.

Sex had mostly been a means to an end for me, a way to satisfy my physical need so I could regain my mental acuity. Being wet and needy did weird things to my mind, and sex helped me reinstate myself within civilized society. It didn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it or that I wasn’t good at it, but it wasn’t something I sought out unless my body prompted me. But when I’d seen him the night before, I’d wanted him. I’d wanted the body cutting through the pool like a machete, the arms long and powerful, the legs pushing through the water as if it posed no resistance. Not just sex—I wanted sex with him. He was the end I was seeking.

It was a scary thought. I knew his propensity for short-term affairs, and that’s what I should’ve wanted too. But I was already in danger of falling head over heels for him, which made sex a very, very bad idea.

How shameful was it to have feelings for a man I knew to be a player? The way my mind skipped from one thought to another was the exact way he jumped from one playmate to the next. It was like he had attention deficit of the sexual kind.

Then again, how wise would it be to let this moment slip for fear of ending up hurt? I was a champion of dealing with hurt. I’d survived Ajay. I could survive Mihir.

You’re so beautiful. His voice in my ear promised to erase years of futile agony from an unworthy relationship. The look in his eye had said he really meant it, even if it was only to get me into his bed for a short few hours. Those words had felt validating, especially after the brutal rejection I’d suffered in the past.

It had been a long time since I had heard those words. From someone who meant them too. I had always been at ease with who I was and what I looked like, until the night Ajay had catalogued everything lacking in me. The night he had broken up with me. Because despite everything I had achieved, what mattered in that moment was the singular purpose of the female body: reproduction. Neither my accomplishments nor my desires stood a chance—only my body, its color, its capacity for bringing forth beautiful progeny.

Social status has always been inscribed on and through the female body. Men of means seek out thin, conventionally good-looking women for wives, even as they find sexual, emotional, and intellectual pleasure elsewhere. This is more sinister than the beauty-status exchange that is crassly labeled as the trophy wife phenomenon, which demonizes women as gold-diggers. The real question to ask is, why is it successful? Why can some women successfully trade their beauty for wealth or status? It’s because men, not women, have always set the terms of this exchange. When women were seen as property, having a gorgeous spouse was meant to reflect high status. I knew it. I’d studied it. I had seen it happen to women around me, but I had never imagined I would experience it so intimately.

I turned off the shower, but the shudders reappeared, and I let the stream of hot water run along my body again.

There was only one way out of this conundrum. I needed to maintain distance from him.

What was that rule about playing with fire? Keep it at arm’s length. That’s what my parents had taught me when I was little, and I’d wanted to hold the sparklers at Diwali. You can play with fire, but it is never safe or wise to bring it close to you. Hold it at a distance where it can’t accidentally injure you.

Those were words to live by. I had successfully played with fireworks after that and had never once been burned.

That’s what I needed to do. Sex but no feelings. Keep him and his charm at arm’s distance while I played with him. Set boundaries: once and done. Because the more you played with fire, the higher the chances of accidentally injuring yourself. It was math, a statistical probability.

I shampooed my hair and soaped the chlorine off my skin. When I stepped out of the shower, the trembling had ceased. After moisturizing my body, I pushed the heat diffuser into my hair and dried my damp curls. A dab of lip gloss, a frilly lace teddy, and lace shorts. I pulled on a thick robe and carried myself with diffident steps to the other end of the hallway.

Outside his room, I debated if this was about to be the most asinine thing I’d ever done, or the most adventurous. I knocked softly before I could talk myself out of it.

Mihir answered the door in low-rise gray sweatpants and a thin T-shirt that clung to every sculpted muscle on his broad frame. A towel hung from his left hand. His hair was wet and uncombed, his beard damp. In other words, he looked like a picture-perfect sex god.

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