The Vibrant Years(62)
The matches had only been getting worse. After their last experiences, Mom and Binji were refusing to help anymore.
“I think I might have fallen in love with you just now,” he said, staring at his screen.
Cullie couldn’t be sure if he was talking to her or to the file she had saved, which he was looking at with some seriously smitten eyes.
Then he turned those smitten eyes on Cullie. She had to smile, because he had what she’d come to think of as Bollywood eyes, the brown of burnt amber transparent to every feeling. Over-the-top eyes.
She’d never been attracted to men like him.
He is so your type, she’d told Bharat that morning. And he was. All intense with purpose yet gentle, like the quietly dramatic sky over the ocean before sunrise. Those deep dimples swooshing into that square jaw—soft over rugged—multiplied the impact many times over.
“May I at least see what this invaluable file I saved is?”
He stiffened imperceptibly. “It’s a digital print of the film I spent a lot of time restoring.” It was his passion, film preservation and restoration. Films are time capsules, he’d said to her when he first told her about it, the love for his work burning in his Bollywood eyes. The only way to go back to 1950 in any meaningful way is to watch a film from 1950. “There are privacy issues. So I can’t show you.” Then he got all sincere in a way that had taken to burrowing under her skin. “But I want to.”
“Fine,” she grumbled, surprised at how much his integrity moved her.
They were in the sitting room, every surface piled with stacks of paper and notebooks. How much was it costing him to stay in a suite like this? He’d been here over two weeks. She’d joked about it when she first got here. Since he was still struggling to get his debut film made, it felt like a lot. He’d responded with a quick “Trust funds have their benefits.”
“Now that you’ve saved my life,” he said, eyes warm with his boyish grin, “I can’t rest until I’ve solved whatever is making your life a disaster.” With an aggressiveness she hadn’t seen in him before, he saved the file she had rescued from the guts of his motherboard like the badass she was and turned to her.
“It’s not just a disaster,” she said. “It’s an unmitigated disaster.” Why had she thought she could create an app for a thing she understood so little? The last two dates she’d been on had been oddly silent and monstrously awkward, and she’d promptly laughed about them with Rohan afterward.
“Why do people say unmitigated? If they were mitigated, they wouldn’t be disasters.”
She slow-blinked. “That’s deep.” It was strange that they’d been friends for only two weeks. She felt like they’d known each other forever, and making friends was not one of Cullie’s strengths.
“Maybe you’re unable to code this app because you don’t know what you hope to accomplish with it. Maybe it’s just a matter of identifying your goal.”
“Wow, I can’t believe you just low-key mansplained my job to me?”
His smile turned only the slightest bit sheepish, because of course he had. “So if it’s mansplaining when a man says something you already know, then when a woman does it, it’s . . .”
“Help?” she filled in helpfully.
“Ah. And you’re telling this to a man who has three older sisters. Very helpful older sisters, I might add.” Something about his face tended to turn both younger and older when he mentioned his sisters.
“Well, aren’t older siblings supposed to be wiser than you?”
“Wiser, huh? Thank you, only-childsplainer.”
“Ha! Did I miss the part where people with siblings have had to put up with only children assuming they know everything better?”
“So women never assume they know better than men?”
“They aren’t trained by society to assume it. Were you ever told there are things you won’t understand simply because you’re a man?”
They were both sitting up now, leaning into the sparkly tension that suffused the air like glitter.
“Like fashion, and cooking, and decorating?” He made a thoughtful face. All his mannerisms were so darned expressive, it was maddening.
Every man ever would make the same argument. Cullie was a bit disappointed that Rohan would do it too. She didn’t bother to hold in her sigh, because they might as well both behave like they were in one of those Bollywood films Binji loved, hamming up every feeling that passed through them.
“Sure, if fashion, cooking, and decorating were things generations of men hadn’t been allowed to do before you, and even now men weren’t allowed an equal shot at. As far as I know, men do quite well at fashion and cooking and decorating and always have. My best friend is a chef in New York City, and I’m pretty certain no one has ever told him he couldn’t be one because he’s a man.”
Bharat felt the pressure to add an Indian flair to everything he cooked, but he’d be the first to tell you that being a man had never gotten in the way of his being a chef.
“Fair,” Rohan said, and she knew he meant it, because instead of teasing her, his Bollywood eyes were now telegraphing concern. They were a potent thing, his eyes.
For a few seconds she sat there lost in them, the sparkles electrifying the air between them. A lock of hair fell over her eye, and his hand twitched as though he wanted to push it back, but then he seemed to catch himself, and something in his eyes darkened. “So, is that what’s going on with your app?”