Chapter 26

Nandani walked downstairs that Saturday morning in a threadbare blue tank top and sleep shorts with unicorns on them. She had bought them when she was thirteen and they fit a bit tighter now, but she loved them and was not ready to let go. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun. The girl's voices and the smell of coffee greeted her as she made her way toward the kitchen.

Mukti, Alya, and Emma were sitting around the table talking. They were dressed casually, but their makeup was done. Given the relatively early hour, there was some plan in place Nandani did not know about.

"Hey, Nandani!" Alya called when she heard her feet on the steps. "We are going to the mall, then later to the beach. You should join."

It had been unseasonably warm that fall. This was why Nandani used to wake up sweating even though she used to wear bare minimal.

Rounding the corner to the kitchen, she stopped short. For standing before her was Manik in flesh and blood, complete with bottomless brown eyes and tousled hair. The best part? He was holding the coffee pot.

"Want some?" Manik asked with an innocent grin on his face.

It was not enough for him to be in her head 24//7, that now he had to be in her kitchen? Nandani thought. She was grumpier than usual. That happened when a girl did not get her sleep. When she lay in bed at night thinking about lips and tongues and...

"Should you not be at your house? You know it is Saturday morning, right?" Nandani grabbed a mug from the cupboard and set it down in front of him so he could pour.

"Funny. You know I come here for the exhilarating conversation." Manik's voice was smooth and pleasant.

"Mmmm. Big word for 9:00 a.m.," Nandani muttered into her coffee cup as she took the only empty seat at the table.

"It means brilliant and clever. See, hanging with you is teaching me all kinds of new things," he said.

Nandani nearly choked on the coffee. She glared at him out of the corner of her eye. If it were possible, his grin got bigger.

"So are you in or what?" Mukti interrupted their exchange, blissfully ignorant to the subtext.

Nandani loved the beach but had committed to finishing the first draft of their business plan. Crystal her boss under whom Nandani had done the summer internship in New York, was going to review her business plan and give feedback at the end of November, also one of her business professors at college had volunteered to look it over once, first.

"I will stay back. Maybe catch up with you later," Nandani replied to Mukti. Turning to Manik, she asked him, "Is shopping part of your lifelong learning experiment?"

"Nah, I just came to drop off the car so they could." His dimple flashed.

"What a good brother," Nandani emphasized the last two words, wondering if he would get the hint. He clearly did and ignored it.

"I am, aren't I?" He was leaning up against the counter, looking maddeningly at home. In her kitchen. "Thought I would stay and study for a bit, figured it would be quieter here than at my house."

"Knock yourself out," Nandani said. Fate was clearly trying to throw him in her face. Punishment for letting him do wicked things to her.

"We should go." Mukti jumped up and gave Manik a quick hug. "Thanks for the car. Stay as long as you like. But fair warning, Nandani is pretty obsessed when she is working, and she has been extra cranky lately."

Nandani opened her mouth to protest, and from the corner of her eye, she saw Manik's lips twitch. "If you are not quiet she might take your head off. Consider yourself warned!" Mukti added.

The girls grabbed their bags and vanished out of the door. It was suddenly too quiet and Nandani was in a bad mood. She stared at her mug of coffee, hoping it would swallow her up or do just about anything to get her out of this situation.

"Are you going to take my head off?" Manik smirked.

She had to look at him. "Are you here to study or piss me off?" Nandani countered. Her tone was unusually biting.

"You are right." Grabbing waffles that jumped out of the toaster, he popped one in his mouth and put the other on a plate. He walked across the room with that damned catlike grace and dropped into a chair across from her. It looked like he actually was going to study, Nandani thought as he reached down and grabbed a stack of books that she had not noticed were lying on the floor. He opened one on the table in front of him as he chewed thoughtfully, lashes lowered as he focused on something on the page.

Maybe he was just provoking her and had gotten past his ulterior motives. She had not received any more heated texts since earlier in the week. If he was making peace she could at least try to be cordial.

"What are you working on?" She asked as she stood up to go wash her mug out in the sink.

Manik glanced up, then back down. "Physics. The foundation of every good engineer's training," he replied. He played with the corners of the book while he read, absently fanning through the pages with his thumb and index finger. "Everything you need to know in a mere six-hundred and seventy-eight pages."

Maybe the funny, easy Manik she could relax with was making a comeback. "I never took it. Probably a good thing I am in business studies. If it does not have a dollar sign in front of it I don't care," Nandani said. She did not sound like herself but was mostly looking for things to say. Safe things.

He did not look up when he spoke again. "Money is fine, but physics is real. Dollars are just something we cooked up a few hundred years ago so we did not spend our lives trying to figure out how to trade goats for medicine."

"But I don't know anything about physics," she argued, "so it is not that real to me. What is real to me is finance. And marketing, and production. It is a matter of perspective," Nandani replied.

"What is this? You mean to say, 'my major is better than your major'?" Manik's voice had a teasing note under the challenge. "Because if it is, I am going to win."

"Mmm. I did not say the business study was better. I just said it made more sense to me," Nandani told him. She felt his eyes on her even though her face was turned on the other side.

"But that is the beautiful thing about science. It is the backdrop of our experience. Gravity, light... you might not know all the formulas, but everyone gets it intuitively," he said.

Nandani was cynical. "That was why I had stopped taking science after grade ten. Somehow the numbers that were friendly when it came to accounting and economics became tricky when applied to weights and forces," she said.

"I bet you I can teach you the first three chapters of this book in five minutes," he said.

Nandani risked a glance over her shoulder, and sure enough, he was watching her. "Is engineering that easy? Maybe I should look into a transfer." There were other dishes in the sink and she started on them since she was already home.

He fell silent for a moment and she figured he had not heard her. Or he had gone back to studying. The water was running, and she put another clean dish on the mat beside the sink.

"Nice PJ's." Nandani froze at the sound of his voice just behind her. It was definitely not from the table. Was he checking her out? It suddenly occurred to her that her outfit left too little to the imagination. She had not planned on having an audience this morning. Especially a Manik Malhotra audience.