Chapter 1
It was the middle of summer, and everyone had left the country on vacation. Esha and I sat a little apart on the step of the extended portico of the building, that overlooked an open area enclosed in the centre by a slightly copper-faded boom gate. It had been only the two of us because all our friends had left by then, and she was due for a flight the next day.
“What do you want to do?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. We’ve already played hopscotch, table tennis, and monopoly.” That had been our rotation at the time. A few months later, all of us had a little phase with our bicycles, before primarily sticking to sports like football and badminton for a few years.
“Don’t you have to go eat lunch?”
“It's okay, I want to play a little longer. Dad said we were ordering a pizza in a couple hours anyway.” We had been playing since I think 7 in the morning. It was about 1 in the afternoon then. She was definitely late for pizza that day.
“Okay. So what do you want to do?”
“Hm,” she closed her eyes for a moment, then looked at me, smiling.
“Let’s ride our bikes around the building.”
Though we weren’t allowed outside the compound unsupervised, the inside of the building on the ground floor was an open parking lot, so the space to ride around had always been enough. I rode up to her. She put out a hand in front of me.
“And you sir? Your ticket?”
“Sure! Let me just-” I pulled a fast one on her and cycled away as fast as I could. I was always able to pull ahead of her every time we played robber-robber. She tried to keep up with me, but I had always been faster. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep my control around the third turn of the building, and I crashed into the boundary wall, landing on my bike and the surrounding plants.
“Are you okay?” She ran up beside me, dropping her cycle to the ground.
‘Okay’ was the first word I registered after the ringing in my ears quietened. I was sprawled across flowers and shrubbery that had been planted along the hexagonal boundary of the building, like a sliver of a garden along the walls. I dusted myself off while my blurred vision oriented to her face.
She was intently measuring a scrape on my knee. Normally, my friends would’ve just laughed it off, but she always seemed more concerned than amused, every time it had just been the two of us. She ran a finger below my wound, and proclaimed her diagnosis confidently.
“You’re bleeding a lot, but it’s not as bad as the last three times. If you keep scraping your knee like this though, it may all just come off one day.” She shot the wound an unimpressed look, as if to say ‘you’re going to have to do better than that’.
I pretended the wound was a deep cut and winced. Her smile faded and she hesitated, before asking me again.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I said, hiding a smile. It worked, like it always had.
She studied me a moment, and then got up, turning her attention to my bicycle, “Looks like your bike’s had a hard time of it.” It did, though it didn't look to bad, considering how many accidents I tended to get myself in. I had that bike for a decade longer, before the frame broke, and I had to throw it away. “It’s probably more in pain than you are.” Probably was. It did in fact look like it was fed-up of my constant crashing, almost cussing me from the grass.
She wasn't though. That same look of concern stuck.
I had always been embarrassed by my clumsiness. One time in my eagerness going down the staircase, I missed a step and fell flat on my face. Everyone laughed it off, they always did; everyone but her.
So around her, I tended to be just that little clumsier, just to get a look at that concerned face of hers. Sometimes, it was a faint smile, because I think she also found it charming.
“Give me a moment,” I half-groaned.
I sat up and she left to fetch her water bottle. With it, I rinsed off the blood and patted all the red down my leg. It didn’t hurt that much, but I knew the real pain started with the stinging that came after taking a shower.
I took a sip of it and was about to get up, when she extended a hand beside me just past my cheek. I froze. She plucked a small white flower from a plant still standing from the accident. She brought it close to her eyes, and carefully pinched the pistil between the nails of her thumb and index finger, pulling it out. Bringing the bottom of the cutoff stem to her lips, she sucked on it. She plucked another one, took out the pistil, and handed it to me.
The sweet nectar inside the stem - what we all liked to call juice - was always short in supply, lasting barely a second on the tongue, but we still enjoyed the little ritual of consuming it. To us, it was like a hidden little secret of the building only we knew.
“Lets head back to the starting spot and go again?”
She lifted her head in defiance, “Nope, this crash counts as a death, I win,” and scoffed, twisting the rules of the game on a whim.
The scent of grass was fresh on my knee, but what hung around was the faint scent of her musk in the sweltering middle-eastern heat. It was the peak of summer, but somehow it wasn't the sunshine that seemed to burn itself onto my skin.
