Page 129 of His Arranged Wife
Not quite friends yet.
But something that had the shape of a beginning.
That Evening - Master Bedroom, 10:34 PM
Samarth came to bed to find Nimisha already there, propped against the headboard with her manuscript notes spread around her and her reading glasses perched on her nose.
He stopped in the doorway.
She looked up. The glasses made her look—he didn't have a word for it. Soft. Scholarly. Entirely herself.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He came in and closed the door.
He changed, brushed his teeth, went through the routine of a man learning to exist in the same space as another person with genuine comfort rather than tolerance.
When he got into bed, she gathered her papers and set them on the nightstand, taking off her glasses.
"Tanisha came to see me this morning," she said.
"I know."
"She apologized."
"I know."
She turned to look at him. "Did you ask her to?"
"No." He met her eyes. "She did it because she wanted to. She's capable of it when she's not blinded by something."
Nimisha was quiet for a moment. "She said something to me. About you."
He waited.
"She said you love me," Nimisha said. "That you're working up to saying it."
The room went very still.
He looked at her—at the careful neutrality on her face that wasn't quite hiding the thing underneath, the hope she was trying to protect herself from feeling.
He'd been planning to say it differently. At a specific moment, with preparation, with the right words arranged in the right order.
But she was looking at him like that, and he was so tired of waiting for the right moment when every moment was already right, was already her.
"She wasn't wrong," he said.
Nimisha's breath caught.
"I love you." The words arrived without the difficulty he'd expected. Like they'd been waiting at the threshold for so long that when the door finally opened, they simply walked through. "I've been trying to find the right way to say it, the right moment, and then tonight—" He reached out and tucked her hair back from her face. "Tonight you're sitting in my bed with reading glasses and manuscript notes and you're looking at me like that, and I realized there isn't a right moment. Every moment is the right moment."
She stared at him.
"Say something," he said.
"I'm—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "You're going to have to give me a moment. I've been waiting a year to hear that."
"I know." He pressed his forehead to hers. "I'm sorry it took this long."
