He looked at the damp fabric.
She felt him look at it.
Her face went nuclear.
"That is not—" she started.
"Meera."
The specific, quiet way he said her name. Not using it as a weapon. Just placing it, the way you placed something fragile on a surface — carefully, with attention.
"Tonight," he said. "Just tonight. Let me feel something real."
The room.
The warm room and his hand warm at her hip and his eyes and the evening from beginning to here and Vikram's voice through a toilet wall and the parking lot and the car and 'she was never enough' and the specific, invisible two-degree warmth that had been in this room since she arrived that she had been attributing to the hospital's HVAC system.
His fingers closed around the waistband.
She lifted her hips.
She did not decide to lift her hips. Her hips lifted.
He pulled.
The underwear coming down — the specific, slow pull of fabric over the particular, full hips of a five-months-pregnant woman. Over her thighs. To her knees.
