blueberry?

---

1958, Malerkotla, Punjab, India

The first time Uzair Baloch saw Jaskirat Singh Rangi with any real interest, he was sitting in a mustard field behind his brother’s textile factory, pretending to work.

This had become a habit of his in the weeks since he returned from England. He carried ledgers and account books from the haveli to the factory grounds as if the numbers might look different beneath open sky, though they never did. A six remained a six. A deficit remained a deficit. Cotton costs rose regardless of whether he examined them beneath a ceiling fan or under the hard white sun of Malerkotla in June. Still, there was something to be said for the fields.

At the haveli, everyone expected him to be grateful, charming, clever, newly returned, and newly useful. At the factory, everyone expected him to be Rehman Baloch’s younger cousin, the London-educated boy who had come back with new suits, new words, and new plans for old money. In the fields, at least, the mustard moved without being impressed by him.

A diwan had been dragged out for him beneath the thin shade of a kikar tree because Ulfat bhabhi had nearly fainted from offense when she saw him sitting cross-legged on a reed mat the day before.

“You are not a fakir,” she had said, standing over him with one hand on her hip and Faizal sleeping against her shoulder. “You are not proving anything to anyone by ruining your spine.”

“I was communing with the people,” Uzair had said.

“You are going to get heatstroke.”

So now he had a diwan, a brass lota of water gone warm beside him, three ledgers open, two pencils, a fountain pen, an ashtray he had no use for, and a copy of The House of Mirth resting open across his stomach.

The numbers had lost meaning an hour ago. They had begun as money and turned into ants, long black strings marching across the paper, indifferent to his attention. Wages, cotton, dye, maintenance, transport, projected losses, projected gains. Industry was the future, Rehman kept saying. Industry was survival. Industry was how men with old titles and diminishing power remained men who were listened to.

Uzair agreed with him. He did. The Nawabs had lost more than land and sovereignty after 1950; they had lost the comfort of inevitability. Once, men came because they had to. Now they came because there was still money in the walls, because Rehman had the intelligence to turn inheritance into mills and accounts and contracts, because the Baloch name had not yet become entirely ceremonial.

Uzair understood the arithmetic of survival better than most people gave him credit for. Numbers comforted him because they did not lie out of politeness. They could be ugly, but they were never vague, telling him where the money went, where it could go, where Rehman’s generosity had stretched too far, and where the household still lived like history had not happened.

And yet, there were only so many columns a man could stare at before he began to resent those same figures.

He had abandoned the ledger in favor of Edith Wharton and had been reading the same line for nearly ten minutes.

Lily Bart had made some sharp observation about beauty, money, and the terrible business of being perceived. Uzair had admired it the first time, but by the fourth reading, the sentence had grown limp in his hands, and by the seventh, he had stopped seeing it altogether.

There was a group of women leaving the dye house, their dupattas drawn over their heads against the sun, laughing among themselves as they passed along the edge of the field. One of them, Naseebo, raised her voice at him.

“Sahib, today also you’ve abandoned your accounts for a novel?”

Uzair looked over the top of the book. “It is offering better advice.”

“Then give it Rehman sahib’s chair.”

“I tried. It refused the responsibility.”

The women laughed, not freely, exactly, but warmly enough. They liked him, he thought, or at least they had decided he was harmless in small doses. He knew there was fear under the fondness; there always was. It sat beneath every exchange like a low table one had to step around, because their livelihoods rested too close to his family’s hands for any conversation to be truly careless. Even when he joked with the workers, even when he sat on the floor of the weaving room and asked questions until the overseers grew nervous, there remained that faint distance, a politeness that would not be crossed.

In London, men had argued with him until their faces reddened and their cigarettes burned down to ash between their fingers. Women in severe coats and red lipstick had called him sentimental, vain, and brilliant. He had spoken in rooms where no one cared that his cousin had once been a Nawab, where his name earned him curiosity and contempt in equal measure. He had been made foreign, princely, ridiculous, exotic, overeducated, and undercivilized, all before lunch. He hated England. He loved it. He had learned its cruelties and its pleasures with the same open-mouthed hunger.

There had been lecture halls and polo grounds, and evenings where he wore a dinner jacket like armor. There had been debates where he quoted Ibn Khaldun, Aristotle, Cicero, Ghalib, and once, during a particularly stupid argument about empire, the Qur’an in Arabic so coldly that a blond boy from Surrey had gone silent for the first time in three years. There had been jazz clubs with low ceilings and American records smuggled into polite rooms like contraband, and there had been rock and roll too, vulgar and alive, making boys who claimed to love Bach tap their feet beneath tables.

And there had been, very occasionally and very secretly, other rooms. Other men. A glance held too long in a narrow corridor. A hand at the small of his back in a club no respectable person admitted knowing about. The hot rush of being seen and imperiled at once.

Then he came home, to a place where everyone loved him, everyone knew him, and no one quite knew what to do with him.

In the house, he wore his Balochi shalwar with soft cotton kurtas, sometimes adding a Sindhi topi when he wanted to be theatrical and earn an odd look from his brother. For formal dinners, he still had his Savile Row jackets, though Ulfat said they made him look more like a tired man who worked too much than the royalty he actually was. He slipped between worlds because he had been taught to do it, raised after his parents died by Rehman’s patience and Ulfat’s scolding, by household staff who remembered when he had been all elbows and grief, and by a family determined that no loss should reach him without first passing through their bodies.

It had made him loved, but it had not made him less lonely.

Uzair turned to another page without reading it, the book open in his hands while the afternoon pressed heavily over the field. The sun bore down on the factory grounds, and behind him the mill breathed smoke and cotton dust into the air. Metal clanged somewhere inside the shed, a pump coughed water through a pipe, and beyond the main road, Malerkotla shimmered in the afternoon haze with its domes and bazaars, its mosques and gurdwaras, its old stories of unusual peace.

Muslims and Sikhs moved through each other’s lives here with a closeness that outsiders liked to make sentimental, but Uzair did not sentimentalize it. Peace was not magic; it was practice. It was memory, bargaining, restraint, and neighbors choosing, again and again, not to become what the rest of Punjab had become.

He had been born into that inheritance too.

He had almost returned to his ledger when Rehman appeared near the cooling shed with a stranger beside him, though not a stranger precisely. Uzair had been introduced to him earlier that morning in the brief, distracted way men were introduced when both had been told by other people that they would be important to each other.

“Jaskirat Singh Rangi,” Rehman had said. “Our new legal counsel. Be polite to him, Uzair. He is expensive.”

“I thought I saw every expense that came through our books,” Uzair had replied.

“Yes, but trust me on this man.”

Jaskirat had smiled at that, barely. It was a controlled, private movement, there and gone before Uzair could decide what to do with it.

Now, from across the field, Uzair looked at him properly and thought, first and rather uncharitably, that the man was not dressed for the heat. A man with sense would have surrendered to linen, loose cotton, or anything that did not insist so stubbornly on its own structure. But Jaskirat Singh Rangi wore a pale shirt tucked into high-waisted trousers, the sleeves buttoned at the wrists in a manner that suggested either discipline or vanity. His hair was thick, swept back from his forehead, too carefully arranged to be accidental and too softened by the heat to remain severe. His beard was trimmed close, framing a mouth that looked as if it had learned restraint through repeated injury.

He had the kind of face that did not ask to be beautiful and was therefore more dangerous for it: milky green eyes, startling even from a distance, a straight nose, and a quietness that seemed less like shyness than selection. He stood beside Rehman with his head slightly inclined, listening as Rehman explained something about the cooling apparatus and the channel that directed runoff away from the workers’ quarters. There was nothing showy in the way Jaskirat held himself, no nawabi ease, no Anglicized flourish. He was not trying to impress anyone, which irritated Uzair at once.

Men who had studied in London usually carried London around like a second watch, displaying it carelessly but often. A phrase here, a tailored cuff there, the faint flattening of vowels in English conversation, the little pause before eating with their hands in the presence of other men. Jaskirat, however, did not appear to be carrying anything except the legal file tucked beneath his arm.

When Jaskirat’s gaze moved toward him, Uzair lifted his chin in acknowledgment.

It was a small thing, barely a greeting: a dip of the head from one man to another, from one member of Rehman’s new industrial future to the next. But Jaskirat looked directly at him, and for one suspended second there was no factory, no field, no Rehman gesturing toward pipes with the urgency of a man who had decided industry would save them all. There was only the narrow line of sight between them and the strange, immediate discomfort of being held in it.

Then Jaskirat turned away, returning his attention to Rehman as though Uzair had not been there at all.

Uzair stared at him for a moment before looking back down at his book with the sharp dignity of a man who had not been insulted and was certainly not thinking about it.

“Fine,” he muttered to Lily Bart. “Be dull, then.”

He decided, in that instant, that Jaskirat Singh Rangi was exactly like the others: another London-returned man with a careful face and a private measure of superiority, another person who would speak of land, law, capital, and labor as if the world could be repaired by tone alone, another man who had already decided Uzair was a noisy, indulged younger brother with more education than discipline.

It did not occur to him that Jaskirat might not be any of those things. It did not occur to him that there might be a whole life behind that careful face, one made of obligations, family, work, and reasons for restraint that had nothing to do with arrogance. Uzair knew only that the man had looked away, and for the moment, that was enough.

So he closed the book and returned, viciously, to the accounts.

For three days, he did not see Jaskirat again, and he did not think of him much either. Or rather, he did not think of him in any way that deserved to be called thinking. The mind was an unserious organ in the heat, too soft and easily distracted to be trusted. It let things slip in sideways: a flash of green eyes while Uzair reviewed wage adjustments, the memory of a white cuff while he listened to Rehman explain projected expansion, a mouth made stern by habit when Ulfat asked why he was frowning at his tea.

“What has the tea done?” she asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know what?”

“What exactly is wrong with the tea.”

“So now even your favorite irani chai disappoints you. London has ruined my child.”

“I was ruined before London.”

“True,” she said, patting his cheek with great affection. “But now you crib about it too much.”

The heat worsened.

By the fourth day, the haveli had become a beautiful instrument of torture. The stone floors held the morning cool for an hour and then surrendered, the courtyards shone until they were almost painful to look at, and the servants moved slowly through the day with tempers wrapped in damp cloth. Naieem and Faizal were forbidden from running after noon, which meant they ran secretly and then appeared at dinner red-faced and damp-haired, lying with the solemn incompetence of children.

Uzair spent most of that afternoon in his room on the second floor, where the ceiling fan turned above him with more ceremony than effect. Nat King Cole played from the gramophone near the window, his voice smooth enough to make even the heat seem intentional, while Uzair lay half on his bed and half off it, one foot touching the cool floor and The House of Mirth open in his hands.

This time, he was reading.

He had reached the early section where Lily Bart visits Lawrence Selden’s rooms, that dangerous little interlude made almost entirely of conversation and implication. A woman stepping out of one kind of expectation and into another, if only for an hour. Freedom offered as a room, a chair, a cup of tea, and a man who sees too clearly but does not rescue her from the seeing.

Uzair disliked how much he understood her.

Not the poverty, not the aunt, and not the particular desperation of needing to marry into survival. He had Rehman, after all. Rehman, who had taken an orphaned eleven-year-old boy into his rooms, his routines, and his future. Rehman, who had bought him books in three languages, tutors in five subjects, horses he did not deserve, suits he had outgrown too quickly, and an education abroad because Uzair had once, at fourteen, said he wanted to see the world.

No, Uzair was not Lily Bart.

And yet, there was a kind of life arranged for people before they knew themselves well enough to object. There were rooms one entered already cast in a role, and people who loved you dearly but still could not see you outside the shape they had made for your protection.

He had just reread a line about the republic of the spirit when he heard a car in the front drive.

Uzair lowered the book as the gramophone crackled softly, Nat King Cole promising something tender from the corner of the room. He rose, crossed to the window, and leaned out past the carved jali far enough that Ulfat would have shouted if she had seen him.

A black Ambassador had pulled beneath the portico. A servant hurried forward, and when the back door opened, Jaskirat Singh Rangi stepped out.

For a moment, Uzair forgot the heat. Then Jaskirat reached back into the car for a leather travel bag, and the heat returned so sharply that Uzair felt it in his throat.

He wore a crisp sky blue button-down, open at the collar, the sleeves rolled to his forearms in concession to the day. His trousers were dark and pleated, held by a narrow belt, the fabric still falling cleanly despite the dust of travel. His shoes were polished, though the road had done its best to humble them, and a thin steel wristwatch caught the light when he reached for one of the trunks being unloaded from the car.

His hair had loosened slightly, and there was a faint dampness at his temple. When he passed a hand briefly over the back of his neck, Uzair watched the gesture as if it were something indecent instead of what it was: a man hot from travel, arriving at a house not his own, trying to remain composed while Punjab in June made a mockery of all composure.

Then confusion caught up with him. Jaskirat was not supposed to be here.

Uzair had seen the arrangements himself. Lodging had been prepared in one of the smaller villas near the old guest orchard, close enough for daily work and far enough to keep Rehman from turning counsel into household. There had been line items for servants, repairs, and transport, and none of them had suggested that Jaskirat Singh Rangi would be stepping out of a car beneath their portico with his trunks being carried inside.

Uzair left The House of Mirth open on the bed and went downstairs.

He took the steps too quickly and nearly collided with Naieem on the landing. The boy was carrying a wooden cricket bat and wearing the expression of someone who had already broken something and was deciding whether confession could be avoided.

“Chachu!” Naieem said, too brightly.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Not convincing enough, jaan. Where is your abbu?”

Naieem shifted the bat behind his back. “With Ibrahim uncle.”

“The Nawab of Kunjpur?”

Naieem shrugged. All adults who were not immediately useful to him occupied the same vague category. “The one with the big moustache.”

Uzair sighed.

Of course. Rehman had mentioned it that morning, some visit about land, reform, and industry with a man who had never quite forgiven the new India for arriving. Uzair had agreed with Rehman in principle at breakfast, because mills and contracts made more sense than clinging to old titles and thinning estates. Still, the politics of convincing another man to give up the shape of his own importance had sat oddly in his stomach, and he had claimed too much work before escaping upstairs.

“Where is your ammi?” Uzair asked.

“In the garden. Faizal wanted to see the butterflies.”

Uzair closed his eyes briefly. “Go put the bat back.”

“But—”

“Naieem, it’s too hot to play outside.”

The boy went, muttering about injustice.

Uzair continued toward the garden, but before he reached the side corridor, Ulfat appeared with Faizal balanced on her hip and Jaskirat Singh Rangi beside her.

There were certain moments in life, Uzair thought, when the body behaved with humiliating independence from the mind. The mind, for instance, could say: this is Rehman’s legal counsel, a man arriving because of some practical inconvenience. The body, meanwhile, noticed the open collar, the line of his throat, the cloth in Jaskirat’s hand as he dabbed sweat from just below his ear, and the way his fingers moved once, carefully, over his stubble as if checking whether the heat had undone him.

Ulfat was speaking as they came closer. “—and of course you must not feel awkward. The room is already being prepared. Rehman said it would be nonsense for you to stay there while repairs are going on.”

Jaskirat inclined his head. “It is very generous of him. I did not want to impose on the household.”

“Nothing of an imposition at all,” Ulfat said warmly. “We’re grateful that you’re working with us. Rehman has mentioned you are the best person to help him make sense of all the new legal codes that have come in since Partition.”

Uzair nearly smiled.

Jaskirat did, though barely. Then his gaze moved to Uzair.

It was not like the field. Or perhaps it was exactly like the field, and Uzair had simply not been ready for it then. Jaskirat looked at him directly, without greeting at first and without the quick social softening most people offered in hallways. His eyes were pale and steady; in the shaded corridor, they seemed almost unreal.

“Uzair sahib,” he said.

“Rangi sahib,” Uzair replied.

Ulfat looked between them. “You have met?”

“In passing,” Uzair said.

“Across the mustard fields, I believe,” Jaskirat added.

Uzair could not tell whether that was humor, though obviously they had met earlier that day. He did not understand the point of making a private reference to that odd look they had shared, and he understood even less why it made something in him tighten.

“The water pump at the villa has broken,” Ulfat said, shifting Faizal higher on her hip. “Rehman sent word that there was no reason to have it repaired in a hurry when half the haveli is empty, so Rangi sahib will stay here until the work is done.”

“Half the haveli is empty because the other half is haunted,” Uzair said.

Jaskirat’s eyebrows rose, and Ulfat gave him the confused, wary look of a woman who knew exactly when Uzair was about to amuse himself at someone else’s expense.

Faizal gasped with immediate delight. “By who?”

“By Arjun kaka, perhaps,” Uzair said gravely. “In this heat, I would not blame any of our elderly house staff for leaving their bodies behind and haunting whichever corridor has the best breeze.”

Ulfat stared at him, scandalized in the practiced way of someone who has dealt with Uzair's morbidity many times before. “Do not start.”

Jaskirat’s eyes moved over Uzair’s face, and Uzair had the strange, enraging sense that the man was not merely looking at him but reading something he had not meant to put on display.

“And where have you put him?” Uzair asked, diverting the topic in what he hoped sounded like casual interest.

“The room across from yours.”

Something small and hot opened under Uzair’s ribs.

He hoped nothing showed on his face. He suspected everything did.

“Convenient,” he said.

“For work,” Ulfat said, though her eyes sharpened in a way that suggested she knew him too well and not nearly enough. “If Rangi sahib needs anything, he can call for a servant. Or, for quicker service, he can knock on your door.”

“Bhabhi,” Uzair said. “Am I staff now?”

“No, but you are often awake at indecent hours doing nothing useful.”

“I’m usually reading.”

“That is what I said,” Ulfat replied. “It is not as if reading is work.”

Jaskirat looked away first, but not before Uzair caught the faintest change in his expression. Amusement, perhaps, or interest, or nothing at all, and Uzair making a mountain out of a molehill because he had always had a gift for emotional architecture.

Dinner that evening was served in the inner dining room because the larger one was too difficult to cool. The punkah moved lazily above them, stirring the heavy air without truly relieving it, and the table had been laid with seekh kebabs fragrant with smoke and coriander, qorma rich enough to make the heat seem crueler, thin rotis wrapped in cloth, rice with cumin and browned onions, sliced mango chilled in a silver bowl, and lime sherbet sweating into its glasses. Ulfat insisted guests must be fed properly, Rehman insisted legal counsel could not work on an empty stomach, and the children insisted on everything loudly.

Rehman returned late from Kunjpur, irritated and triumphant in equal measure, and tore into his roti with unnecessary force as he said, “Ibrahim thinks a factory is an admission of defeat. As if poverty becomes noble if you inherit it slowly.”

“Did you say that to him?” Ulfat asked.

“Of course not.”

“You probably said it in a more direct way than that, bhaiya,” Uzair said.

Rehman pointed at him. “This is why I do not take you.”

“This is why I choose not to come.”

Jaskirat sat across from Uzair, listening more than he spoke. When he did speak, Rehman listened, and that was the first thing Uzair noticed with real displeasure. Rehman, who loved Uzair, who trusted his numbers, who called him brilliant in private and insufferable in public, listened to Jaskirat differently. Not more affectionately, but more seriously.

Jaskirat spoke of permits, land use, labor compliance, municipal hesitation, and the necessity of making expansion look less like aristocratic consolidation and more like local employment. Uzair knew little about where the man had come from beyond what Rehman had said in passing, and Jaskirat offered no great personal history with his advice. He only spoke plainly and precisely, his voice low and even, never rushing to fill silence or decorate an argument simply to prove he could. He placed each point on the table like evidence.

Uzair hated it, and hated even more that it was good advice.

By the time dessert came, the heat had gathered behind his eyes. He had eaten little; the qorma sat mostly untouched on his plate, oil shining at the edge, while the room seemed too full of everything at once: Rehman’s plans, Ulfat’s watchfulness, the children’s chatter, Jaskirat’s calm, and his own ridiculous awareness of the man across the table lifting sherbet to his mouth.

Uzair pushed his chair back. “Forgive me. I have accounts to finish.”

“At night?” Rehman asked.

“Just a couple of figures I could not wrap up earlier.”

Ulfat frowned. “You have barely eaten.”

“I ate enough.”

“Uzair.”

“I’m only going upstairs.”

He had made it halfway around the table when Jaskirat spoke, not loudly, and not even quite to him.

“‘There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level.’”

Uzair stopped.

The children did not notice. Faizal was trying to put a mango slice into his pocket, Ulfat was telling him not to, and Rehman was reaching for more rice. But Uzair knew the line. Not from The House of Mirth, but Wharton still. The Age of Innocence. Dry, pointed, almost cruel in this context, though no one else at the table could have known why. It was exactly the sort of remark Uzair himself might have made if he were not already the one being quietly skewered by it: a comment on imagination, on restlessness, on a man abruptly overcome by something he would rather pretend was fatigue.

Uzair turned his head.

Jaskirat was looking at him over the rim of his glass, not smiling, and Uzair felt, absurdly, as if he had been caught doing something private in a public room.

He went upstairs.

That night, the ceiling fan did nothing except turn and turn, moving heat from one side of the room to the other with bureaucratic indifference. Uzair lay on his back with one arm over his eyes, listening to the haveli settle around him. Somewhere across the corridor, a door opened and closed softly, a servant’s footsteps receded down the hall, and beyond the outer wall, a dog barked once into the thick dark. The gramophone sat silent, and The House of Mirth lay abandoned on his bedside table.

He was embarrassed, and that was the worst of it. Not desire, because desire at least had the dignity of danger, but embarrassment, which was smaller and meaner. It made a child of him. It put him back in some London drawing room, nineteen and overdressed, realizing half a second too late that the men around him were laughing not at what he had said, but at what they believed him to be.

Jaskirat made him feel young, rowdy, and unfinished, as if all his languages, all his books, all his figures and arguments and careful English suits could be seen through at once. As if beneath them, he remained only Rehman’s indulged cousin, clever enough to be praised but not yet steady enough to be trusted.

The infuriating thing was that Jaskirat had done almost nothing: a look in a field, a quotation at dinner, and a few legal observations that happened to be correct.

Uzair turned onto his side and stared at the dark shape of the door. Across the corridor, Jaskirat Singh Rangi slept, or read, or removed his shirt, or did any number of ordinary things that Uzair had no business imagining.

The heat moved through him slowly, and it did not let him sleep.

Over the next few days, they became acquainted by force of proximity.

Rehman liked nothing better than bringing intelligent men into a room and giving them impossible problems, and because the estate, the factory, and the town all seemed to be held together by fraying thread, there were plenty to choose from. Uzair handled the numbers: expenses, wages, raw material, projections, debt, profit margins, where the old estate could be trimmed without alarming the old retainers, and where the factory could expand without making the town suspicious.

Jaskirat handled the law: ordinances, permissions, liabilities, the phrases that made officials relax, the phrases that made them greedy, and the phrases that made them afraid to refuse.

They worked well together, which annoyed Uzair more than it should have.

In rooms where Rehman was present, professionalism settled over them like a white sheet. They spoke clearly, disagreed cleanly, and passed papers back and forth without touching fingers. Jaskirat never dismissed him, not once. In fact, he often deferred to Uzair on accounts with a seriousness that should have pleased him. Still, when Rehman asked a question and both of them answered, it was Jaskirat’s voice that seemed to weigh more in the room.

Not because Rehman loved him more. That would have been childish. It was because Jaskirat sounded like a man who had already suffered the consequences of being wrong.

The worst of it came during a meeting about the factory workers’ quarters, when the heat had turned the boardroom air thick despite the slow churn of the ceiling fan overhead. Rehman sat at the head of the long table in a pale kurta, one hand resting near a glass of lime water no one had seen him drink from. Around him sat the men who had worked for his father, and for his father’s father before that: accountants, estate managers, two factory supervisors, a clerk with ink on his fingers, and one old adviser who smelled faintly of attar and disapproval.

Uzair had spent the whole morning preparing his figures. He had reviewed the costs twice, then again after breakfast because he knew Rehman would ask questions that sounded simple and cut deep. The workers’ housing behind the weaving sheds had become unbearable in the heat, and illness had already begun moving through the families there. Uzair’s proposal was straightforward, or at least it was to him: reallocate a portion of the estate’s ceremonial budget, delay the ornamental garden repairs, and use the money to add proper shade, water points, and ventilation improvements to the quarters before the monsoon trapped everyone in damp heat.

“It will cost less now than it will if sickness slows production later,” Uzair said, sliding the paper toward Rehman. “And frankly, even if it did not, the men cannot work like this while their families sleep in rooms that hold heat like brick ovens.”

A few men at the table shifted, and Uzair heard his first mistake as soon as he said it. There was a moral edge in his voice, a faint accusation underneath the numbers. He had not meant to sound like he was scolding them, but some part of him had wanted to. These men could discuss freight delays and cotton costs for hours, but the moment wives and children entered the account, their eyes went dull with inconvenience.

Rehman looked at the paper, expression unreadable. “And the garden repairs?”

“Can wait,” Uzair said.

The old adviser gave a soft cough. “The front garden is not merely decorative, Nawab sahib. Visitors see it first.”

“Visitors do not sleep in the workers’ quarters,” Uzair said before he could stop himself.

The room went very still.

Rehman’s eyes flicked briefly to him, not in reprimand exactly, but in warning. Uzair felt heat climb up the back of his neck and forced himself to sit straighter, even as his fingers tightened under the table.

Jaskirat, who had been silent until then, looked down at Uzair’s figures. He read them once, then again, his face giving nothing away.

Then he said, “The garden repairs should remain on schedule.”

Uzair looked at him.

Jaskirat did not look back. “Not because they matter more,” he continued, calm as ever, “but because delaying them will make every man in town ask why Rehman sahib is suddenly short of money. That kind of talk travels faster than truth, and once it starts, suppliers become nervous, creditors become bold, and officials become expensive.”

The old adviser nodded immediately, which irritated Uzair even more because Jaskirat had not said anything kinder. Only more useful.

Rehman leaned back slightly. “Then what do you suggest?”

Jaskirat tapped the edge of Uzair’s paper. “Do the workers’ improvements, but do not call them that. Make it part of factory modernization. Ventilation, water access, shaded walkways, all framed as productivity and safety upgrades for the textile works. Use the smaller repairs account first, then spread the remainder across maintenance and future expansion. The garden stays. The town sees strength. The workers still get what they need.”

Uzair hated, instantly, that it was better.

Not better in heart. His own idea was better in heart, better in honesty, better in the world as it ought to have existed. But Jaskirat’s version would pass through this room without making anyone feel accused, which meant it would happen. These men were not moved by need unless need could be dressed as prudence. They were self-serving enough to require virtue to arrive wearing the clothes of profit.

Rehman was quiet for a moment, his gaze moving between the two papers, before he nodded. “Jaskirat’s approach,” he said. “We proceed that way.”

The old adviser murmured approval. The factory supervisor began asking about timing. The clerk bent over his notebook and started writing. Conversation resumed around the table, practical and relieved now that no one had to look too closely at the workers’ suffering.

Uzair swallowed his pride like something bitter and made himself continue.

He answered when Rehman asked for numbers. He adjusted figures when Jaskirat’s plan required them. He explained where the money could be drawn from without showing, even once, that something inside him had clenched at the moment Rehman chose Jaskirat’s suggestion over his. In his head, he knew he would have chosen it too, and that was the most humiliating part. Jaskirat had done nothing wrong. Rehman had done nothing foolish. The plan was stronger because it understood the room.

Still, Uzair sat through the remainder of the meeting feeling very young and very seen.

By the time Rehman called for lunch, the heat had deepened outside, pressing against the shuttered windows as if the whole town had been placed under glass. The men rose slowly, gathering papers, wiping brows, murmuring about cold drinks and afternoon prayers. Rehman stopped to speak to one of the supervisors, and Uzair took the chance to collect his ledger and escape before his face could betray him.

He had only reached the corridor when Jaskirat’s voice came from behind him.

“Uzair sahib.”

Uzair stopped because it would have been childish not to, though he had never felt more tempted by childishness in his life. “Yes?”

Jaskirat came to stand beside him, his own papers held neatly in one hand. He looked as composed as ever, collar still crisp despite the heat, hair in place, expression mild enough to be mistaken for indifference by anyone who had not spent the last few days learning how carefully he used it.

“Your proposal was better,” Jaskirat said.

Uzair stared at him. “That is a strange thing to say after arguing against it.”

“I did not argue against it. I argued for a version these men would accept.”

Uzair’s jaw tightened. “How generous of you.”

Jaskirat accepted the sarcasm without flinching. “You think like a man with education, and like someone who dislikes what wealth does to people forced to depend on it. That is not a weakness.”

The words landed too directly.

Uzair looked away first, toward the open courtyard beyond the corridor, where sunlight struck the stone so fiercely it seemed almost white. “It was not useful in that room.”

“No,” Jaskirat said. “Not in that form.”

Uzair gave a short laugh. “So your advice is to make myself more palatable to selfish men?”

“My advice is to let selfish men think your mercy serves their interests.” Jaskirat’s voice remained even, but something in it had warmed. “You already had the right answer. You only gave it to them in a language they had no intention of respecting.”

Uzair turned back to him despite himself.

Jaskirat looked at him then, not with pity, which Uzair would have hated, and not with triumph, which he might have understood. His gaze held something far more difficult to endure: recognition.

“You are very smart,” Jaskirat said simply. “Do not let men like that make you waste good ideas by offering them honestly when dishonesty would get them done.”

Uzair had no reply ready, and that annoyed him too.

He was accustomed to compliments from Rehman, from tutors, from visiting officials who admired a quick mind when it came attached to a young man in expensive clothes. He was accustomed to praise that felt like expectation, like affection, like another form of being claimed. But Jaskirat’s words were different. They did not make him smaller. They did not pat him on the head and marvel at his brilliance as though he were still a boy reciting sums for adults.

Jaskirat had seen the proposal. Seen the failure of it. Seen the part of Uzair that had made it fail. Then he had called him smart anyway.

Outside, the heat wave stretched on, lying heavy over Malerkotla’s roofs and courtyards, pressing the scent of dust, stone, and overripe mangoes into the air.

Inside Uzair, something stretched with it, something hot, unwelcome, and impossible to ignore.

On the sixth day of Jaskirat’s stay, Rehman left again to meet Ibrahim, armed with figures Uzair had prepared and legal language Jaskirat had sharpened. Ulfat took the children to visit a relative in town, and the haveli quieted behind them. By late afternoon, the factory office, which overlooked the main weaving floor through a wide interior window, had become a box of hot air and paper.

Uzair sat behind the desk in a light muslin kurta, sleeves loose, Sindhi topi tilted back on his head. His ledgers lay open before him, but the ink dried too quickly on the nib, and his wrist stuck faintly to the paper whenever he leaned too long in one place.

Jaskirat sat opposite him with a stack of municipal ordinances and a file of land records. He had made concessions to the weather at last: his navy shirt was open at the throat, sleeves rolled unevenly to his forearms, and one side of his hair had fallen forward slightly, no longer obedient to whatever oil or comb had disciplined it that morning. His trousers remained proper, but even they seemed tired of him. Every few minutes, he pressed a handkerchief to his forehead, then to the side of his neck, where sweat gathered and slipped beneath his collar.

Uzair had read the same column three times.

“You are going to ruin that handkerchief,” he said finally.

Jaskirat glanced up. “I was under the impression that was its purpose.”

“Its purpose is decorative. Men carry them to prove they have class.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t carry a kerchief, do I, Rangi Sahib?”

That got him a laugh. Not a large one, because Jaskirat did not seem like a man who laughed carelessly, but it was real, low and brief, and it changed his face so unexpectedly that Uzair forgot the next cruel thing he had planned to say.

Outside the office, the factory clattered on. The looms made their relentless music. Men shouted over machinery, and women moved between stations with cloth bundled in their arms, bright dupattas dulled by cotton dust. Above the desk, the fan turned in slow, useless circles, devoted to the idea of relief without ever achieving it.

“It is obscene,” Uzair said.

“The heat?” Jaskirat asked.

“The heat. The fan. The fact that bhaiya believes productivity is possible in this.”

“Your cousin believes productivity is possible during floods, funerals, and the end of dynasties.”

Uzair looked up. “That is quite rude.”

“I am legal counsel,” Jaskirat said. “Truths I speak are often mistaken for rudeness. My statements are accurate, Uzair Sahib.”

“No, no. Rudeness is often hidden behind accuracy. Different thing.”

Jaskirat’s mouth moved, amusement tugging at the corner of it. “You argue like you’re still in a classroom.”

“And you insult like you’ve just stepped out of a courtroom.”

“I was nearly a barrister, you know.”

“Yes, I heard. London.”

The word came out flatter than Uzair intended.

Jaskirat noticed. Of course he noticed. He leaned back slightly, studying him with the kind of attention Uzair had learned to find both irritating and difficult to step away from.

“Not so fond?” Jaskirat asked.

“Of London? There are things to like and dislike.”

“What about those who come back after being educated there?”

Uzair’s pen paused over the ledger. “Even more to dislike.”

Jaskirat’s brows rose. “That is a strong opinion.”

“I find them pretentious,” Uzair said, with the calm of a man delivering a fact rather than an insult. “They return after three years of rain and underseasoned food and suddenly believe they have been personally chosen to civilize the rest of us.”

“You also have an English education.”

“I never said I was not pretentious myself.”

Jaskirat stared at him for half a second before laughing.

Uzair felt it like a small victory.

“But at least I am honest about it,” Uzair continued, looking back down at the ledger as if the numbers had not dissolved completely under Jaskirat’s attention. “The others pretend they are simply practical, modern, efficient men, when really they are waiting for India to apologize for being itself.”

Jaskirat rested his forearms on the arms of his chair. “You think I am one of those men.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Everyone says no.”

“Then everyone is sometimes telling the truth.”

It should not have pleased Uzair. It did.

He lowered his gaze again, hiding whatever satisfaction had tried to reach his face. “In England, people spent half their time insisting civilization began with them.”

Jaskirat’s laugh came easier this time.

“They were very impressed with themselves,” he said.

“Constantly. And with such poor food. One should not be arrogant over boiled vegetables.”

“I missed mangoes,” Jaskirat admitted.

“I missed mangoes, proper tea, and people who knew when to stop talking.”

Jaskirat raised an eyebrow.

Uzair pointed his pen at him. “Do not say it.”

“I said nothing.”

“You were about to.”

“I was about to say England cannot have been entirely wasted on you.”

“Because I came back just as annoying as I claim to hate?”

“Because you came back with a penchant for Edith Wharton,” Jaskirat said.

Uzair stilled, and Jaskirat nodded toward the book lying near the edge of the desk. Uzair had brought it without thinking and tucked beneath his ledgers

“You know Wharton?” Uzair asked.

“I know some of her writing.”

“You quoted her at dinner.”

“I did.”

“That was deliberate?”

“Yes.”

Uzair hated the little thrill that moved through him. “Why?”

Jaskirat’s gaze stayed steady. “You looked as if your imagination had risen above its daily level.”

“That is a very polite way of saying I looked scatterbrained.”

“You looked hot.”

The word landed between them with a softness that made it worse, and Uzair looked at him.

Jaskirat’s expression had not changed, and yet the room had. The same desk remained between them, along with the same ledgers, the same sweating glass of water, the same legal files and municipal papers and distant factory noise, but the air seemed to have thickened, as though some invisible door had closed.

Uzair reached for sarcasm and found, alarmingly, that his hand was empty. “It is a heat wave,” he said.

“So you have mentioned,” Jaskirat replied.

“You have been dabbing your neck like a tragic heroine for an hour.”

“Ah, but Uzair sahib,” Jaskirat said, tilting his head, “a tragic heroine does not dab. I think that is the trait of a rugged statesman.”

Uzair stared at him, then laughed before he could stop himself.

The laugh broke something, though not the tension; nothing so merciful happened. Instead, it changed the tension’s shape, loosening the air between them just enough to admit pleasure.

They spoke after that with less caution. Not freely, perhaps, but with the first dangerous resemblance of freedom. They talked of Wharton and of how Americans wrote about money with the disgust of people who loved it too intimately. They talked of Henry James until Uzair accused him of being intentionally boring, and Jaskirat defended him with such grave dishonesty that Uzair nearly threw a pencil at him.

They talked of London too, though not the grand London men boasted about when they returned home. They spoke instead of the other one: damp rooms, bad heating, loneliness, and the humiliation of being observed too closely while still being understood too little.

Then, because the heat had made all things indecently possible, Uzair mentioned music.

“Do not tell me you listen only to ghazals and approved classical forms,” he said, glancing over the top of the ledger. “I will be forced to lose respect for you.”

Jaskirat did not look up at once. “I do not require your respect.”

“You have it, unfortunately. That is the problem.”

Jaskirat glanced up at that, and Uzair looked quickly away.

“I like jazz,” Jaskirat said.

“Everyone likes jazz.”

“And rock and roll.”

Uzair’s head snapped back toward him. "You?"

Jaskirat’s eyes warmed with something almost mischievous. “Me.”

“You like rock and roll?”

“Some.”

“Define some.”

“Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.”

Uzair sat back as if he had been struck. “Rangi sahib.”

“Yes?”

“You continue to surprise me.”

“I apologize.”

“No, don’t,” Uzair said. “It is the first interesting thing that has happened all week.”

Jaskirat looked amused. “Your family must be very dull.”

“My family is wonderful. That is different. Wonderful people can be dull. Bhaiya thinks music became abhorrent after K. L. Saigal. Ulfat bhabhi pretends to dislike Western records, but I have caught her humming Chris Barber twice.”

“And you?” Jaskirat asked.

“I am a man of broad tastes.”

“That sounds like a confession.”

Uzair’s pulse moved once, hard.

Jaskirat’s gaze did not drop. He had said it mildly, so mildly that Uzair could have stepped around it if he wished. There was room enough to pretend they were still talking about records, about jazz clubs and gramophones and the difference between private taste and public decency. There was room, too, to understand that the word confession had not landed where music lived.

Uzair did not know whether he wished to step around it.

The fan turned overhead, stirring hot air into different shapes rather than cooling it. Jaskirat set his pen down.

“Uzair sahib,” he said.

The use of his name made Uzair’s mouth go dry. “Yes?”

“Do you feel hot?”

Uzair stared at him.

For a moment, he genuinely did not understand. He almost laughed. Of course he felt hot. Everyone felt hot. The entire state of Punjab felt as if it had been placed on a griddle and forgotten by Allah. They had spent half the afternoon discussing heat. Heat had entered every sentence, every pause, every damp collar and restless shift of the body.

Then Jaskirat rose. Enough to place both hands on Uzair’s desk, palms spread among the ledgers, fingers bracketing columns of figures that had once seemed very important. He leaned forward across the polished wood, close enough that Uzair could see the green of his eyes was not pale throughout but threaded with darker rings. Close enough to see a bead of sweat slip from his temple toward his jaw. Close enough to smell starch, paper, warm skin, and the faint trace of shaving soap losing its battle with the day.

“Do you feel hot?” Jaskirat asked again, quieter. “Here. In this room. With the fan running and cold water in the pot. Is it still hot?”

Understanding arrived slowly, then all at once.

Uzair had felt this kind of heat before, though never here. Never in his brother’s factory office with account books open and Rehman’s trust lying all around him in ink and paper. He had felt it after polo matches in England, when the body was already exhausted and therefore less able to lie. He had felt it in jazz clubs where the room was underground, where American records shook dust from the ceiling and men stood too close because there was nowhere else to stand. He had felt it in narrow corridors behind respectable buildings, in the second before a hand touched his wrist and both men understood the cost of not pulling away.

That heat had always come with fogged windows, foreign streets, and the safety of being no one’s beloved cousin.

This was different.

This was worse.

Jaskirat looked at him as if he already knew the answer and was offering Uzair the courtesy of saying it himself.

Uzair swallowed. He hated that Jaskirat could stand there, almost shameless in his restraint, and make the question feel like a hand laid flat against his chest. He hated the calm of him, the authority, the sense that even desire, in him, had discipline.

Uzair had made speeches in London rooms full of men waiting for him to embarrass himself. He had argued with professors twice his age. He had quoted Latin drunk and Arabic angry. He had returned to India with degrees, suits, opinions, and a head full of economic theory sharp enough to cut his family a future from the cloth of their past.

And yet Jaskirat Singh Rangi leaned over his desk and asked him if it was hot, and Uzair felt twenty-two in the most unforgivable way.

Young. Seen. Unsteady.

“Yes,” he said at last.

Jaskirat did not move.

Uzair’s voice, when it came again, sounded less like his own. “Yes, it is hot.”

Outside, the looms continued their heavy rhythm. Down below, workers called to one another. Somewhere in the yard, a pump shuddered and caught. The whole machinery of the Baloch future ran on, indifferent to the small disaster taking place above it.

Jaskirat looked down, briefly, at the open ledger beneath his hand.

“You’ve made an error,” he said.

Uzair blinked. “What?”

Jaskirat tapped one column with his finger. “Here. You carried the six incorrectly.”

For one stunned second, Uzair could only stare.

Then he laughed.

It came out breathless and offended and far too loud. Jaskirat’s mouth curved, and there it was again, that transformation, that glimpse of the man beneath the careful man.

“You are so difficult to speak to,” Uzair said.

“I have been told.”

The words should have been light. Perhaps they were. But Jaskirat’s hands remained on the desk, and Uzair remained seated beneath the weight of his attention, and the room had become a country neither of them had yet agreed to enter.

Uzair looked down at the mistake in the ledger. It was small. Embarrassingly small. The kind of mistake he never made unless distracted.

Jaskirat had noticed.

Of course he had.

Uzair lifted his eyes. “Will you tell Rehman?”

Jaskirat’s expression did not shift.

“About the error,” Uzair clarified, though the room had gone too still for the ledger to be the only thing between them. “Or anything else you think you have noticed.”

“No,” Jaskirat said.

“How generous.”

“How self-preserving. If I tell him you made one error, he will ask me to check every page you have touched since April.”

“That would keep you occupied.”

“I am already occupied.”

The silence after that was not empty.

Uzair could hear his own breathing. He wondered if Jaskirat could too. He wondered if Jaskirat knew about England, about the clubs, the corridors, the men whose names he had not kept. He wondered if Jaskirat had his own hidden rooms, his own careful histories, his own reasons for looking away in mustard fields and then looking too long in offices.

He wondered what would happen if he stood.

He did not stand.

Jaskirat straightened first, slowly, taking his hands from the desk as if removing them from something warmer than wood.

“The application for the mill permit needs your revised figures by tomorrow,” he said.

The return to business was so abrupt that Uzair almost admired it.

“Of course,” Uzair replied.

“And drink water. You look faint.”

“I do not.”

Jaskirat shrugged and gathered his papers, but before he returned to his chair, his gaze moved once more over Uzair’s face, carefully, as if committing something to memory he did not yet have permission to keep.

Then he sat down.

The fan turned. The water warmed. The ledgers waited.

Uzair corrected the six.

The afternoon dragged on, a slow, heavy procession of hours marked only by the sluggish turn of the ceiling fan and the relentless rhythm of the looms below. The heat, though unspoken, had not truly left the room. It had simply changed its nature, sinking from the air into Uzair’s blood, a low, simmering current that made him voracious. He tried to focus on the columns before him, on the neat march of figures that had once brought him such comfort. But the numbers had lost their integrity, their stark honesty dissolving under a new, more urgent arithmetic.

His gaze kept snagging on Jaskirat’s hands. They rested on the open file, long-fingered and capable, the nails trimmed short and clean. Uzair had seen those hands tap impatiently, gesture with precise economy, and press a handkerchief to a damp neck. Now, his mind, unmoored by the day’s heat and the man’s proximity, began to catalog their potential. He imagined those fingers, not turning pages or pointing out legal clauses, but tracing the line of his own jaw. He pictured them unbuttoning his kurta, one slow, deliberate button at a time, the fabric parting under a touch that was neither hesitant nor rushed. He thought of those fingers gripping his hips, the pressure a point of exquisite agony, or sliding into his hair, tilting his head back for a kiss that would taste of lime sherbet and unspoken truths. The thought was so vivid, so visceral, that a shiver traced a path down his spine, a startling contrast to the suffocating warmth of the room. He was hardening in his trousers, a slow, insistent pressure against the rough fabric, and he shifted in his chair, the scrape of wood against the stone floor sounding unnaturally loud in the quiet office.

Jaskirat, for his part, seemed absorbed in his work, though Uzair felt the weight of his attention even when it was directed elsewhere. It was a focused presence, one that filled the space between them without effort. Every time Jaskirat turned a page, the soft whisper of paper was a small punctuation mark in the symphony of Uzair’s unraveling. He felt exposed, as if the man could see the frantic, wanton calculations happening behind his eyes. He was no longer Uzair Baloch, the London-educated cousin, the man with numbers. He was just a body, a collection of nerves and needs, sitting across from the person who had inadvertently ignited them.

When the grandfather clock in the hall chimed six, its sound was both a release and a terror. Jaskirat straightened, the motion pulling his shirt taut across his shoulders in a way that made Uzair’s mouth go dry.

“That will be all for today,” Jaskirat said, his voice even, as if the last few hours had been nothing more than a routine accounting of municipal ordinances. He began gathering his papers, the neat, methodical movements a stark contrast to the chaos roiling within Uzair. “I’ll be heading back.”

A flicker of something—disappointment, perhaps, or a desperate sort of hope—crossed Uzair’s mind. He could stay here, in the relative safety of the empty factory, and let the heat cool into manageable loneliness.

“The car came for you?” Uzair asked, his own voice sounding foreign to his ears, tighter than he intended.

“Nawab Sahib arranged for it this morning.”

“Good. I’ll come with you. There are a few things I need to review at home.” The lie was thin, flimsy as the muslin of his kurta, but it served its purpose. He needed to be near him, to test the space between them in a different setting, to see if the tension would hold or break.

The ride back was a special kind of torment. Rahim sat impassively behind the wheel, a solid, respectable presence in the front of the black Ambassador. Uzair and Jaskirat sat in the back, the wide leather seat suddenly feeling impossibly small. The space between them was no more than a foot, a chasm of air thick with unspoken things. Uzair could feel the warmth radiating from Jaskirat’s body, could smell the faint, clean scent of him—starch, sweat, and something else, something uniquely Jaskirat—that had now become inextricably linked with desire in his mind.

He stared out the window, at the sun-bleached landscape of Malerkotla sliding by, but he saw none of it. His awareness was entirely focused on the man beside him. He imagined crossing that small distance, imagined the rustle of fabric as he moved, the shock in Jaskirat’s eyes as he closed it. He pictured himself sinking to his knees on the floor mats, his hands working at the buckle of Jaskirat’s belt. The thought was so obscene, so potent in this enclosed space with Rahim just feet away, that a jolt of arousal shot through him, sharp and undeniable. He was fully hard now, a throbbing, insistent ache that demanded attention. He shifted again, angling his body slightly, and pulled his leather work bag onto his lap, a flimsy shield against his own betrayal. He felt like a schoolboy, caught in a state of disgrace he was powerless to hide.

The haze of the heat, or perhaps the haze of his own lust, was making his head foggy. The world outside the car windows seemed to shimmer and warp, and the only thing that felt real was the solid presence of Jaskirat beside him and the frantic pulse of blood in his groin. He was grateful when the Ambassador finally rolled to a stop under the haveli’s portico, the journey feeling both endless and far too short.

As they stepped out into the waning light of the evening, Ulfat’s voice called out from the veranda, cheerful and oblivious. “Uzair! Rangi sahib! Come, have some watermelon. It’s been cut and chilled.”

The image was a fresh torture: Jaskirat’s lips, stained red with juice, his tongue darting out to catch a stray drop. Uzair knew, with absolute certainty, that if he stopped, if he sat at that table and watched that, he would do something unforgivable.

“I can’t, bhabhi!” he called back, his voice strained. “I need to—” He didn’t even bother finishing the sentence. He turned without another glance at Jaskirat, without acknowledging Ulfat’s puzzled look, and fled. He ran up the stone steps, his sandals slapping against the cool surface, not stopping until he was in the long corridor that led to his room.

He burst into his room and slammed the door, the sound echoing in the sudden silence. He threw his back against the solid wood, his hand still clutching the brass knob, as if he could physically hold the world at bay. He breathed heavily, his chest rising and falling with ragged, desperate gasps. The room was dim, the last of the sun filtering through the jali screen in stripes of gold and orange. With a surge of frustrated energy, he threw his bag onto the desk chair, crossed to the window, and pulled the heavy curtains shut, plunging the room into a grateful, private twilight.

He moved to the small table beside his bed, his hands trembling slightly as he pulled open the drawer. He rummaged past letters and stray rupees until his fingers closed around the small, familiar tube of Afghan Snow. It was a mundane, household thing, meant for dry faces and chapped lips, but in his hands, it felt like a vessel of illicit intent. He looked at the locked door, his mind painting a vivid picture of Jzaskirat downstairs, accepting a slice of watermelon from Ulfat’s hand, or perhaps, excusing himself as well, retiring to the room across the hall. He imagined him shedding the sweat of the day, unbuttoning his shirt, the tanned skin of his chest appearing in the gloom.

The thought was too much. He needed release. He needed to feel something other than this gnawing, wanting ache.

He moved to his bed, sitting on the edge of the mattress. He unscrewed the cap of Afghan Snow, the faint, manufactured smell filling the air. He squeezed a small amount onto his fingers, the cool, greasy gel a stark contrast to the heat of his own skin. He lay back, his head sinking into the pillow, and closed his eyes.

He didn’t start with a fantasy of a kiss, or a touch. He started with the moment that had broken him: Jaskirat leaning over his desk, his hands spread on the wood, his voice asking, “Do you feel hot?” He replayed it in his mind, the way Jaskirat’s eyes had seemed to see right through him, peeling back his layers of wit and sarcasm to find the raw, wanting thing underneath. He imagined Jaskirat not just asking the question, but answering it, his fingers tracing the line of Uzair’s throat, feeling the frantic pulse there.

He brought his slick fingers to his own entrance, circling the tight ring of muscle, teasing it as he imagined Jaskirat would. He thought of those clever, capable fingers, the ones that had found the error in his ledger with such infuriating ease. He imagined them exploring him with the same precision, the same focused intelligence. He thought of the sly, smart way Jaskirat used his words, how he could disarm Uzair with a simple observation or a well-placed quote. He imagined that same cleverness applied to this, to the art of undoing a man completely.

He pushed one finger inside, a slow, deliberate breach. A soft gasp escaped his lips. He catalogued every moment they had shared: the first, charged look across the mustard field; the quiet, infuriating way Jaskirat had listened to him at dinner; the surprisingly genuine laugh in the factory office; the low, heated question that had started this all. Each memory was a fuel, feeding the fire building in his groin. He worked another finger in, scissoring them, stretching himself open. The burn was a welcome distraction, a grounding sensation in the sea of his fantasy.

At some point, the fantasy shifted. His own fingers, moving inside him, began to feel different in his mind’s eye. They became Jaskirat’s fingers. He imagined the weight of Jaskirat’s body over his, the press of his chest against Uzair’s back. He imagined the way Jaskirat would fuck him—not with rough haste, but with a controlled, deliberate intensity, the same way he approached everything else. Each thrust would be measured, each movement designed to elicit a specific response, to break him down piece by piece until there was nothing left but sensation. Would Jaskirat be disgusted by the rawness of Uzair’s thoughts? Or would he be pleased, pleased that Uzair had understood the invitation in his question, that he wasn’t just a clever boy, but a man who wanted?

The thought of Jaskirat’s pleasure, of Jaskirat wanting this too, sent a shockwave through him. He curled his fingers, searching for that spot inside him, and when he found it, a choked moan tore from his throat. He quickly brought his other hand up, pressing it against his mouth, muffling the sounds of his own pleasure. The pressure against his lips made him think of Jaskirat’s mouth, of Jaskirat kissing him, swallowing his cries, his tongue doing the same devastating work as his fingers.

He was lost in it, lost in the imagined weight and scent and feel of the man. He pumped his fingers in and out, his hips moving to meet the rhythm he was creating. The coil in his belly tightened, an exquisite, unbearable pressure building and building. He was so close. He could feel it cresting, a wave of pure, unadulterated sensation. He didn’t even touch his own straining cock. The stimulation from within, combined with the overwhelming power of his fantasy, was enough.

The orgasm crashed over him, silent and intense. A sharp, helpless cry was muffled by his own hand as his body arched off the bed, his release pulsing out of him, hot and wet against the fabric of his trousers. It was a shattering, all-consuming release that left him breathless and trembling.

He lay there in the aftermath, his body limp and sated, his mind a haze of sex-clouded thoughts. The air in the room felt thick, heavy with the scent of his own release and the faint, lingering smell of face cream. For a moment, there was only the sound of his own breathing, slowing gradually. He knew, with a clarity that cut through the post-coital fog, that he would abhor himself later. He would feel the shame, the guilt, the fear of what he had just done, what he so desperately wanted.

But not now. In this moment, lying in the twilight of his own room, with the phantom feel of Jaskirat’s hands still on his skin, he felt only a fierce, defiant resolve. He needed to know. He needed to know what Jaskirat was, beyond the hints and the suggestions, beyond the carefully constructed professional facade. He would not deprive himself of the possibilities that lived in his thoughts, not anymore. The line had been crossed, and there was no going back.

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