Well, snap out of it, Bindu.
“Is that why you called me trouble? Because you liked me so much? Without knowing the first thing about me.”
“Is that why you’re so angry with me? Because I called you that?” He searched her face, confident that there was more, as though he saw that there was more. Story of her life. Men who thought they saw her.
She stuck a finger in his face. “One, I’m not angry with you. I don’t do anger. Two, how would you like someone you’d never met throwing that word at you?”
“You think I meant it as a bad thing? You’re exactly the kind of trouble I’ve always wanted to be. The kind of trouble that changes things. Anything worth doing in the world only ever gets done because of the troublemakers. Especially the troublemakers who know exactly why they want things. Because it’s right to want them. Not because it’s easy.”
Her stupid heartbeat sped up. “Well, you’re wrong.” She’d always chosen easy. “But thanks for turning me into your preconceived notions.”
He blinked, then swallowed. “Haven’t you done the same? Assumed who I am?”
It was her turn to blink and swallow. She’d written his entire life history the first time she’d met him.
Suddenly he looked young and lost. “Even if you have, it doesn’t make it okay that I did too,” he said slowly. “I’m sorry.” He pushed his hand at her. “Can we start over? I would love to get to know you, if you’ll give me a chance. I’m Lee Bennet. I was a county circuit judge for twenty years. Recently retired. Widowed for ten years. One daughter. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’d love to be friends.”
This level of cheesiness from him was so unexpected that she took his hand and shook it. And giggled. It had been years since she’d giggled.
“That’s a line straight out of a Bollywood film. Where the hero asks the heroine to be friends with him.”
His smile was nervous. “And? Does she comply?”
Ah, what the hell. She’d eaten bugs today; she could do anything. “She does.” She gave his hand another shake. “I’m Bindu Desai, and yes, I’d like to be friends.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
CULLIE
How she could bear to go through life with such vulnerability, I’ll never know.
When I asked her how she was never afraid of anything, she said, “If I’d been afraid, I wouldn’t know what it was like to love you. If ever I’m afraid, I’ll remind myself that being fearless gave me you.”
From the journal of Oscar Seth
Here! I fixed yours, but my life is still an unmitigated disaster,” Cullie said as she handed Rohan’s computer back to him, his earth-shattering crisis solved.
Tears of relief sprang into his eyes. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he said the file she’d saved was his life’s work. With a quick swipe of his face against his shoulder, he wiped away the evidence, and a raging and unfamiliar warmth squeezed at Cullie’s heart.
She’d never met anyone as completely comfortable in his skin as Rohan. Borderline cocky might’ve been a more accurate description if not for the way he wore his emotions on his sleeve. When he’d called her, he’d barely been able to breathe from panic.
Over the past two weeks, he’d called her for all sorts of reasons. Advice on where to shop for groceries. Where to find cosmetics for his three older sisters, who kept sending him shopping lists from India. That was when he wasn’t texting her. To be fair, she’d been texting him at least as much.
At first it was only to test if the little uptick in her heartbeat when she heard from him or saw him was real. It was, and she liked it. It had even made hitting a wall with the app bearable.
The matches had only been getting worse. After their last experiences, Mom and Binji were refusing to help anymore.
“I think I might have fallen in love with you just now,” he said, staring at his screen.
Cullie couldn’t be sure if he was talking to her or to the file she had saved, which he was looking at with some seriously smitten eyes.
Then he turned those smitten eyes on Cullie. She had to smile, because he had what she’d come to think of as Bollywood eyes, the brown of burnt amber transparent to every feeling. Over-the-top eyes.
She’d never been attracted to men like him.
He is so your type, she’d told Bharat that morning. And he was. All intense with purpose yet gentle, like the quietly dramatic sky over the ocean before sunrise. Those deep dimples swooshing into that square jaw—soft over rugged—multiplied the impact many times over.
“May I at least see what this invaluable file I saved is?”
He stiffened imperceptibly. “It’s a digital print of the film I spent a lot of time restoring.” It was his passion, film preservation and restoration. Films are time capsules, he’d said to her when he first told her about it, the love for his work burning in his Bollywood eyes. The only way to go back to 1950 in any meaningful way is to watch a film from 1950. “There are privacy issues. So I can’t show you.” Then he got all sincere in a way that had taken to burrowing under her skin. “But I want to.”
“Fine,” she grumbled, surprised at how much his integrity moved her.
They were in the sitting room, every surface piled with stacks of paper and notebooks. How much was it costing him to stay in a suite like this? He’d been here over two weeks. She’d joked about it when she first got here. Since he was still struggling to get his debut film made, it felt like a lot. He’d responded with a quick “Trust funds have their benefits.”
“Now that you’ve saved my life,” he said, eyes warm with his boyish grin, “I can’t rest until I’ve solved whatever is making your life a disaster.” With an aggressiveness she hadn’t seen in him before, he saved the file she had rescued from the guts of his motherboard like the badass she was and turned to her.
“It’s not just a disaster,” she said. “It’s an unmitigated disaster.” Why had she thought she could create an app for a thing she understood so little? The last two dates she’d been on had been oddly silent and monstrously awkward, and she’d promptly laughed about them with Rohan afterward.
“Why do people say unmitigated? If they were mitigated, they wouldn’t be disasters.”
She slow-blinked. “That’s deep.” It was strange that they’d been friends for only two weeks. She felt like they’d known each other forever, and making friends was not one of Cullie’s strengths.
“Maybe you’re unable to code this app because you don’t know what you hope to accomplish with it. Maybe it’s just a matter of identifying your goal.”
“Wow, I can’t believe you just low-key mansplained my job to me?”
His smile turned only the slightest bit sheepish, because of course he had. “So if it’s mansplaining when a man says something you already know, then when a woman does it, it’s . . .”
“Help?” she filled in helpfully.
“Ah. And you’re telling this to a man who has three older sisters. Very helpful older sisters, I might add.” Something about his face tended to turn both younger and older when he mentioned his sisters.