Mumbai Overnight

The client dinner had run long, and by the time the cab dropped Dev and Nisha at the hotel it was past eleven. They stood in the marble lobby in the particular daze of the successfully finished — the relief of a meeting that could have gone badly and didn't, the looseness that comes with good wine and the knowledge that work is done for the day. "One drink?" Nisha said. He'd been working with her for two years. He knew her the way you know people you spend fifty hours a week alongside — her coffee order, her poker face in negotiations, the particular gesture she made with her pen when she was skeptical of something. He'd spent a long time not knowing other things about her, deliberately. She was his senior by two years and they were colleagues and these were all sensible reasons to leave certain thoughts unexamined. The hotel bar was mostly empty. They sat in low armchairs by the window with the Mumbai skyline spread out below, and talked for an hour about everything but work — family, music, the city, the good and bad of their respective twenties. At some point she had moved from her chair to the edge of his, sitting on the arm of it, and he wasn't sure when that had happened. "Dev," she said. "I know," he said. She looked at him steadily. "What do you know?" "That this is complicated." "It doesn't have to be," she said. "Tonight it doesn't have to be anything." She put her hand on his jaw, turned his face toward hers. "Unless you don't want to." He kissed her. Her room was on the fourteenth floor, with a low king bed and the city visible through wide windows. He unzipped her dress and ran his hands over her shoulders, her back, the curve of her hips, taking his time in the way that feels like both reverence and patience. She was everything he'd been careful not to think about: warm and curved and completely present, reaching back to pull him closer. He spent a long time with his mouth on her before she pulled him up and over her. She was vocal about what she wanted, which he found immediately and intensely attractive — direct about her pleasure in a way that matched every other thing he'd admired about her. He gave her everything she asked for, learning the particular rhythm that made her hips tilt and her nails drag across his back, until she was gasping against his shoulder and gripping the sheets. He kept going until she came completely apart underneath him and then gave himself over to his own pleasure, which arrived with more force than he'd anticipated. They lay quiet in the city-lit room. "Complicated?" Nisha asked eventually. "Not tonight," Dev said. She smiled and closed her eyes, and he pulled her in close, and outside the window Mumbai burned and glittered on into the night.