# Chapter Thirteen: Two Weeks of Hands

After the couch, the office got naughtier.

Nothing changed on the surface. Same floor, same fluorescent lights, same weekly targets nobody hit. But the current running between her desk and mine had gone from a hum to a live wire, and everybody could feel the weather. Only two of us knew why.

Monday morning she walked in ten minutes late, hair still damp from a wash, in a soft grey kurta I'd never seen and dark jeans, and she looked at me across the floor the way you look at someone when you know exactly what their hand feels like on you. Not the old look. The old one said I see you looking. This one said I remember.

Sheetal, two rows over, took one sip of her chai and mouthed something at me that I chose not to lip-read.

At 12:40 my phone buzzed under the desk.

Sneha: stairs. 2:40. don't be late, new guy.

I was there at 2:37.

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WEEK ONE — DAY ONE

The third-floor staircase at the far end of the building runs down to the parking level and nobody uses it. Too many steps, wrong end of the floor, no cameras. We'd found it weeks ago and it had become ours the way a bench in a park becomes a couple's.

She came down in that grey kurta with her hair still damp, and she didn't say hello. She took the front of my shirt in her fist, pulled me down to her, and kissed me.

The couch kiss had been slow because she'd made it slow. This one was a girl who'd had two days to think about it and had run out of patience. Her mouth opened under mine right away. Her hand slid up into my hair and closed, and she backed me into the wall and stayed there, the whole length of her pressed against me, kissing me like she was trying to get somewhere.

I got one hand on her waist over the kurta and the other flat between her shoulder blades, and she made a low sound into my mouth that I felt in my knees.

We kissed until I lost track of which floor I was standing on. Broke apart to breathe. Came back. Broke apart again and she put her forehead against my jaw and just stood there, …