Incense and Sensibility (The Rajes #3) - Sonali Dev Page 0,38
needed a purpose.
Her hand stopped short of the plastic-covered hangers all the way at the very back corner. The lilac silk embroidered with silver thread looked faded behind the aging plastic. Next to the ghaghra hung the white and silver palazzo pants with the halter top. In the months after Nisha’s wedding, India had refused to bring what she’d worn back from the dry cleaner’s, unable to bring herself to look at the clothes she’d worn when she’d met Yash. Clothes she’d let him touch her in.
India had always taken her physical being seriously. Human touch was a powerful thing, and her body always told her whom to trust. Yash Raje was the only person her body had ever gotten wrong.
Tara had picked the clothes up from the cleaners for her and left the hangers hanging behind her door. It had taken her months to move them to her closet. Since then she hadn’t touched them. Not for the first time, she considered taking them to Goodwill. But that would involve touching them. Touching the feelings she’d buried with them. The casual rejection. The confusion that had followed.
At least he’d walked away again, which meant she didn’t have to deal with any of it. She was ten years older. Ten years wiser. Ten years stronger.
At this point the only thing that mattered was that he was okay.
But he’s not okay.
Slamming the closet shut, she went to the kitchen and laid out vegetables for today’s soup. Mom was keeping soup down. She was spending all her time in the incense workshop upstairs churning out incense sticks by the hundreds. She was also being extremely stubborn about not wanting to discuss treatment and doctors.
This was the mother who’d laid out every form of menstrual product and birth control on the dining table and given her children the sex talk in great detail, in middle school, with illustrations. Tara did not avoid conversations. Tara was avoiding this conversation. For someone who had no experience, she was really good at it too.
India really needed to clear her head, not to mention her chakras. This feeling of being blocked up was not a good one. Making her way down to one of the studios, she laid down a mat and went through a few sets of surya namaskar. Then she made her way into a sirsasana. The headstand required full focus; any shift in concentration could result in falling out of the pose wrong, and that could result in injury.
She’d been in the pose a little longer than was advisable when the doorbell rang. India took her time coming out of the pose. When she came up to standing, her head felt completely reset. Good.
It lasted all of thirty seconds. Because when she pulled the door open, tortured gray eyes met hers.
The impact was full-bodied, hitting her like the blood rush after a sirsasana held too long.
He waited for her body to absorb the impact, as though he felt it too.
Behind him Brandy stood utterly still.
“Hi.” India waved to Brandy and she waved in response. “Did you want to come in?”
Was there a stupider opening line? Given that he had knocked on her door. Then again, it was Yash Raje, so his actions and intentions weren’t exactly interrelated. They obviously weren’t something she had any skill in interpreting.
Instead of coming in, he gave her another tortured look. Then he made it worse by trying to cover it with stoicism. “That depends,” he said, voice low enough that she had the urge to lean in.
On what? She wanted to respond, but not responding was probably a better approach if she wanted to convince him that it didn’t matter if he came in or not, if he’d called or not.
“Do you have time to talk?” He sounded tentative and hopeful, not studied and strategic, and it reminded her of the man she’d met years ago. Before the Yash on TV took over.
Wasn’t he the busy one? Then again, maybe he was here because he couldn’t do the things he was supposed to be busy doing. She couldn’t imagine how devastating it must be for him to not be out there campaigning right now.
“I can leave if this isn’t a good time.”
She did want him to leave. Not because it wasn’t a good time, but because she couldn’t take him on as a client. Ethically she would never cross professional boundaries with a client. Neither as a yoga therapist nor as a stress management coach. Not that there