Rebel Hard (Hard Play #2)(23)

“If you insult me again, I’ll hunt you down,” she muttered, unfolding the two sheets.

It was handwritten, Raj’s scrawl generous and taking up far more room than it should.

Dear Nayna,



* * *



I was a complete bastard at lunch. I can’t go back in time and fix that. What I can do is tell you why I acted the way I did. I’m not great at words—English was never my favorite subject at school. So I’ll stick to the facts.



* * *



I’m not sure if your parents told you, but I was adopted at six years of age from an orphanage in India. I was abandoned there at four years of age. I knew I was unwanted, but I didn’t know how unwanted until I was twenty-one and the orphanage had to turn over my records when I requested them.



* * *



I didn’t want to find my birth parents. I have clear memories of being kicked and left alone in dark rooms. I knew they weren’t people who loved me. But I wanted to have a sense of my history.



* * *



Usually the records are pretty bad. Mine was too, but someone had saved the letter with which I’d been left. It was written in Hindi, and since I never learned the written format, I had to translate it piece by piece using the internet.



* * *



It said: Boy was from my first husband. First husband was a drunk and he’s dead. I have a new husband now, and I’m going to have a new baby. I don’t want my first husband’s ugly-faced son and my new husband doesn’t either. Boy will probably end up like his father—no good to any woman and not even able to feed his own family. Will probably live on the hard work of some unlucky woman. I don’t care what you do with him.



* * *



I hope you’ll keep that to yourself. I haven’t even told my parents, and I never will. It would cause them a lot of hurt.





Nayna’s tears rolled down her face, her heart breaking for the solemn twenty-one-year-old boy who’d gone looking for his history and found only rejection, but she forced herself to read on.

I’m not telling you this as an excuse—what I did was inexcusable—but so you’ll understand what it does to me to be around a woman who could have a great deal of power over me. I don’t, as you might guess, deal well with rejection when it’s people who matter. And I think if I let you in and you rejected me, you could break me.



* * *



It makes me afraid down to the core—and because of that, I acted like a complete bastard to you. I was trying to find a way to be the one in control so you wouldn’t have that power. I’m sorry for what I said, and I’m sorry I made you feel anything but beautiful. You are the sexiest, most fascinating woman I have ever met.



* * *



Raj





Nayna stared at the closing paragraphs, reading them again and again and again. Her hand trembled as she raised it to thrust her fingers through her hair, unraveling it in the process. What was she going to do? Because in his unadorned words, she’d read the thing he hadn’t written: that he might be incapable of ever truly letting any woman in… letting Nayna in.

If she took a chance on him, she did it knowing that he might keep a part of himself forever separate. Such a relationship would destroy her. Because Nayna didn’t love halfway. And Raj… he’d angered and hurt her because he already mattered. If they went further, this wasn’t a man she could keep at arm’s length.

He could break her too.



* * *



Ten o’clock at night and Nayna sat in her bedroom, staring at the letter as she’d been doing for what felt like hours. The truth was, she’d had to go out for a couple of hours to attend a ceremony in the lead-up to Pinky Mehra’s wedding, but mentally she’d been here the entire time.

She needed to talk to Raj. Picking up her phone, she sent him a message: Meet me in the small park a few minutes down from our house.

He replied within seconds: I’ll meet you by your house. Don’t walk down to the park alone.

Since the perfectly lovely family park could appear creepy at night, Nayna agreed. Leave your car down the road. If her parents spotted him, the shit would hit the fan.

I’ll message you when I’m there.

Nayna took the time to get out of her pj’s and into jeans and a T-shirt. Then she tiptoed through the house, Raj’s letter in hand. Her parents had turned in, but Aji busted her in the kitchen.

“Are you going out?” she whispered from the stove where she was heating up some milk in the saucepan.

“Just to talk to Raj about something. He’s waiting outside.”

Her grandmother frowned. “Be careful, beta. I think he’s a good boy, but… I don’t want you to be hurt like Madhuri.”

That was another thing they didn’t talk about; how Madhuri’s husband had abandoned her for another woman after two years while Madhuri was scraping by in a minimum-wage job. If Aji hadn’t sent through enough money for airfare, Madhuri would’ve been stuck on the far side of Australia with no way home.

“I’ll be okay, Aji.” Nayna hugged her grandmother’s comforting form, the velour of Aji’s yellow tracksuit still not as soft as her grandmother’s skin. “I know you’ll always have my back.”