Hey all, welcome to the first sneak peek at the Privileged Bad Boys. Abhijeet is a maniac, and if you like bad boys, he’s for you.
Abhijeet
I look at her, my eyes unblinking, my breath shallow and slow, the kind of stillness that comes not from patience but from ownership. She has worn red today, the dress I gave her for her last birthday. She still fits into it, and that’s magical.
But Tanya has always been conscious of her body. Maybe it’s because she knows it’s not only her body. Actually, it’s not hers at all. It’s mine.
Watching her is my favorite thing. There is nothing complicated about it, nothing I need to justify to myself. I could go to her right now, walk across, and leap through her window, and she wouldn’t question it, because she knows better than to pretend she has a choice. But tonight I stay where I am, one shoulder resting against the window frame, a cigarette between my lips.
She knows not to close the curtains. I made sure of that a long time ago, pressed it into her so gently and so thoroughly that she stopped thinking of it as a rule and started thinking of it as simply the way things were. The bed is positioned where I want it. The study table too. Everything in that room is arranged the way I like it, and she has never once moved anything back. I arranged it in such a way that I got a clear view of her.
I pull a slow breath through the cigarette and let the smoke out in a thin, unhurried stream. It curls and disappears into the night air. And then, as though something shifts in the atmosphere between us, she looks up. Straight at me. It happens like that sometimes, this sudden awareness she has of being seen, as if my gaze has weight and she can feel it land on her skin.
I raise an eyebrow. Even across the distance, I can see the color leave her face, watch the slight unsteadiness move through her body as she runs her tongue along her lower lip. I bring the binoculars up.
Her lips are a soft shade of pink in the lamplight, slightly parted. Once I look at them, I cannot look away. They have always been that way, her lips, something I notice before I notice anything else about her. I gesture to her with my fingers, a small and practiced movement, and she shakes her head, quickly, vigorously, as though speed might make the refusal more convincing. A sigh moves through me, and I tilt my head slowly to one side. She knows she has no right to that. She has always known.
Her hands are trembling as she reaches for the buttons of her top. I watch through the binoculars as the first gives way, then the second. Her cleavage hints through the scarce opening of her top.
My eyes stay on the milky white skin as I gesture through my fingers again, and the third button comes undone. Then she grips the hem with both hands and pulls the top over her head in one motion, and I feel the corner of my mouth pull into a grin. She has worn a red bra to match the dress. Of course she has.
I can’t wait to undo it; I can’t wait to feel what’s underneath.
The binoculars stay fixed to my eyes, and I watch the small tremor in her lower lip, the way she is holding herself very still in the way that people do when they are trying not to show fear. She has done whatever I have asked of her since we were eleven years old. I have had so many years of her, so many years of her being whatever I needed her to be in a given moment, that last night when I kissed Rima, and Rima kissed me back, all I could see behind my closed eyes was Tanya’s face.
Should I ask her to let go of her bra? No. I want to be the one in the room when that happens. I want to feel it give under my own fingers.
Right now, I cannot go over because my father is somewhere in the house, and I have spent years learning to stay out of his way whenever possible, learning to find other rooms and other places to be until he is gone or asleep or occupied with something that does not involve me.
The first time I found myself doing that, running from one end of the house to the other to avoid him, I ended up on the wrong side of the garden wall and discovered the neighbors’ house. And in that house, a girl with long pigtails and shorts who had looked at me with the open, uncomplicated curiosity of a child who does not yet know to be careful.
That ended that same day. She cried the whole night, and something in me sat very quietly. I felt satisfied. I literally enjoyed her tears. Knowing you can instill that kind of fear in someone is an achievement in itself.
Her terrified eyes became my center, and I could forget the horrors of my home.
Tanya moves to cover herself with her hands, instinct and shame moving through her at the same time, but I give one small shake of my head. She pouts, the way she has always pouted when she wants to argue but knows she cannot, and then lets her hands fall back to her sides.
A knock comes at my door, and I gesture to her once. One gesture is always enough. She drops quickly below the line of the windowsill and moves out of sight just as the door opens behind me.
It is Brijesh, my father’s PA, standing in the doorway with the particular careful blankness of a man who has spent years making himself unreadable.
“Sir would like to see you,” he says.
I breathe through the irritation that moves through my chest and keep my face still. What is it this time? What have I done, or not done, or failed to be?
I press the lit end of the cigarette against the window pane and watch the ember die. I stand without hurrying, and I do not reach for the deodorant on the shelf because there is no point. My father is not the kind of man who notices how his son smells when he walks into a room. He is not that kind of father, has never been, and I stopped expecting him to be a long time ago.
Brijesh steps aside as I pass him in the hallway, and I walk into the living room the way I always do, with my hands loose at my sides and my face telling nothing.
We have two houses. The first is the one the state gave him, large and well-lit and full of people who smile at the right moments, the house where my mother lives and maintains the image of a family that is whole and presentable. The second is this one, where my father does the kind of work that cannot be done from a house with a guest register, official visitors with cameras at the gate.
He is the Chief Minister of Delhi, and everything clean and photographable happens there. Everything else happens here. And I stay here, because those are his orders, have always been his orders, and I learned early that there was no version of my life in which I was consulted about how it was arranged.
He is sitting with papers in front of him when I enter, though he is not reading them. He looks up.
“Reports?” he says.
I take the seat across from him and keep my posture easy, unhurried. “I don’t have much to report.”
I know before the words are fully out of my mouth that it is the wrong answer. He rises from his chair, and his arm moves. The hit comes exactly where I expect it to. I do not flinch. I do not move my jaw to test the ache or bring my hand up to my face.
Pain is information, and I have learned to receive it the way you receive any other piece of information, neutrally, without letting it mean anything more than it is.
“I need you to have something over all the reputed people,” he says, and his voice has returned to the flat, even tone he uses when he is not angry but simply disappointed in the way one is disappointed by a machine that has failed to perform its function. “That was the order.”
“Yes, sir. I’m working on it. But I’m seventeen. I don’t have that kind of reach over them yet, not the kind that holds.”
He looks at me for a moment. “Are you getting the information? Are you making them vulnerable?”
“That is the plan. It is still a work in progress.”
He straightens and adjusts the sleeve of his kurta as though the conversation has already ended and he is simply tidying up after it. “Don’t give me the same answer next week.”
He walks out. His security falls into step behind him, and Brijesh follows without a word, and the room empties in the way that rooms always empty after my father leaves them, as though his absence takes something extra with it, some remaining air or warmth that was there before he arrived.
I stay on the couch, and I do not move. My face is arranged the way I have trained it to be arranged, still and unreadable and offering nothing. Somewhere beneath that arrangement, there is a rage so old and so dense it has almost stopped feeling like rage and started feeling like weather, like something that simply exists inside me the way a season exists, cycling and patient.
I can feel it. No one else ever can. I have made certain of that, because I learned early and I learned completely that rage is weakness, and weakness is the one thing you cannot afford to let anyone see, not in this house, not in any house, not ever.
The End of the Privileged Bad Boys Sneak Peek. Stay tuned for more.
Author Payal Dedhia independently publishes books on Amazon. You can check out her collection by clicking here.
If you like to read more about twin flames, click here.
