LOVE BIRDS (New Update*)

[naruto9211]

“It’s really bad to eat dessert first, you know,” Ayesha commented.
She knew she sounded boring, but she couldn’t help the
nervous chatter spilling from her mouth. Her anxiety over clubbing had been
escalating exponentially during the past week, and the main event was just
hours away now.

Also, Aditya was holding her hand.

Her palm sweated so badly she didn’t know how he could stand touching
her, let alone act like it was the most normal thing in the world. Oddly, she’d
handled foreplay better than this—up until the end, that was—and she’d been
naked for that. She couldn’t blame her reaction on her usual aversion to touch.
She liked Aditya’s touch.

As she and Aditya walked down the busy Mumbai sidewalk hand-
in-hand, passersby smiled at them. An old man in a newsboy cap winked at
her.

They thought she and Aditya were a couple.

Ayesha would have laughed if she didn’t feel like she was somehow taking
part in a duplicitous charade. A gaggle of party girls in low-cut dresses
flocked by, giving Aditya double takes, then triple takes as they giggled into
their hands and whispered to one another. They glanced at Ayesha with open
envy that she enjoyed even as she knew she didn’t deserve it. Wearing a slate-
gray suit and black oxford shirt, he was particularly scrumptious-looking
tonight.

“Here it is.” Aditya released her hand and held open the door for her as
she walked into 'Copetto Artisan Gelato', Sealink- Bandra. Black and white tiles
checkered the floor. chandeliers illuminated display freezers filled with
gelato and toppings. “What’s your flavor?”

She could barely think about ice cream with his hand resting at the base of
her spine like that. Did he know he was doing it? She’d seen men do that with
their girlfriends. Ayesha wasn’t a girlfriend.

“Mint chocolate chip,” she said.

“Really? That’s my favorite, too. I’ll get something else, then, so we can
try something new.” He idly rubbed her waist as he considered the gelato
flavors, and her body heated with awareness.

“Wait, what do you mean by ‘we’?”

A mischievous grin curved on his lips. “You don’t want to share with me?”
The college-aged girl behind the counter stared at Ayesha like she’d kicked
a puppy.

“No, that’s not it.” Not entirely. After all the kissing they’d done, she knew
it was silly to worry about germ transference. The fact was she’d made a
detailed analysis of ice cream flavors, and she’d decided this one was the best
in existence. “I just know what I like.”

“We’ll see about that.” He tapped on the display case. “Mint chocolate
chip for her and green tea for me.”

Ayesha wanted to pay, but he dug bills out of his wallet before she could pry
the credit card out from the bodice of her sapphire-blue sheath dress. Once
they were seated at a black wrought-iron table by the window, he dipped his
spoon into his gelato, tasted it, and grinned a slow, wide grin as he slipped the
clean spoon from his mouth and scooped out more.

“Oh, that’s just ridiculous,” she said. “You look like you’re auditioning for
a Colgate commercial. No one smiles like that after eating ice cream.”

He laughed. “It really is good.” His grin was out in full force, and, God
forbid, did he have a dimple?

“Now, I have to try it.” She lowered her spoon toward his bowl.

“Ah, ah, ah.” Instead of letting her scoop up some herself, he held his
spoon to her lips. Her eyes jumped to his, and conflicting thoughts skittered
through her mind.

She shouldn’t do it. This was too intimate. It was crossing a line of some
kind. It felt too much like dating—which they weren’t.

It was just gelato. Just his spoon. He might take it as rejection if she didn’t
do it, and she could never, ever in a thousand years hurt him, not even in a
trivial way.

She parted her lips and let him feed her the gelato. Her heart knocked
around her chest like a pinball as sweet green tea melted on her tongue. He
watched her with expectation, oblivious to his effect on her.

“Okay, it’s good.” She tried to sound casual. This didn’t mean anything.
This wasn’t a date. She was just another of his clients. Keep a cool head. She
stabbed her spoon into her gelato.

“I told you so.”

“I still like mine best.” She put a spoonful of mint chocolate chip in her
mouth. The complex combination of vanilla and mint exploded on her palate.
Bits of chocolate crunched between her teeth. Perfection.

“Let me try it.”

She held her bowl out toward him, but he didn’t put his spoon in it. He
trailed his fingers over her jaw as he tipped her head back and sealed his lips
over hers. His tongue speared into her mouth, and the salt of him mixed with
the flavor of the ice cream. She didn’t know if she was mortified, shocked,
aroused, or all three.

With a lingering lick on her bottom lip, he pulled away and grinned, his
dark eyes intense and hazy.

“I can’t believe you did that.” Flustered, she tried to scoop herself another
spoonful. Her white plastic spoon skittered onto the tabletop.

She grabbed for it, but his hands wrapped around hers. In the next instant,
he was kissing her again—sweet, closed-mouth kisses that still felt
scandalous. And too delicious to resist. The gelato shop dropped away. The
people disappeared. In that moment, it was just her and Aditya, the taste of
ice cream, and their slowly warming lips.


• • •


As Aditya eased his tongue between Ayesha’s parted lips, the chilled silk
and mint chocolate sweetness of her mouth drove him out of his mind.

He forgot he was seducing her. He even forgot why. All he knew was her taste
and the hot sighs of her breath. He wanted to devour her.

Did she know she was making those soft humming sounds as she returned
his kisses? Or that her cool fingers had snuck beneath the cuff of his shirt and
were caressing his wrist?

He wanted to slide his hands up her bared thighs and slip them beneath the
short hem of her dress so he could touch her again. But the last time he’d
done that, he’d scared the hell out of her.

Because she didn’t want to make him feel the way she had with those three
assholes.
Clients never worried about him like that. Why did she? He wished she’d
stop. It was fucking with his head.

“Easy, man,” a laughing voice interjected. “You’re in a public
establishment.”

Ayesha tore away, touching trembling fingers to her red lips. She’d
surprised him today by trading her glasses for contacts and leaving her hair
down in loose waves. She even wore makeup, though he’d kissed off all her
lip gloss. That was fine. Like this, she was almost too beautiful to be real.

When the group of patrons at the next table started clapping and
cheering, Aditya expected her to grow flustered and embarrassed. She
didn’t. She ducked her head in that shy way she had and laughed along with
them. Her soft smile and the luminous look in her eyes, however, were just
for him, and they made him feel like he’d single-handedly vanquished an
army. He was the one she saw, the one she smiled at, no one else.

His plan to seduce her out of her anxiety was working. He had no doubt
that by the time he took her home tonight, she’d be ready to check the big
boxes on her lesson plans. He should have done this from the beginning.

Everyone knew if you wanted inside someone’s pants, you didn’t start in the
bedroom. That was what seduction, romance, hand-holding, and dancing were
for. That was what these ice cream kisses were for.

The problem was they were working on him, too. The more time he spent
with her, the stronger his attraction to her grew—and not just physically. If he
couldn’t check all her boxes within the next two lessons, he’d feel obligated
to extend the length of their arrangement, and that was a bad idea. He might
do something stupid and fall for her.

Never once did he imagine he could spin a fairy-tale ending out of such a
scenario. Not only were they worlds apart in terms of education and culture,
but Ayesha was rich. If she learned about his dad and the shitty things he’d
done to get his hands on money, she’d never be able to trust Aditya. 


There was a reason they had sayings like the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, 
like father like son, and a chip off the old block. He fought against it and hated his
dad for it, but he carried that same badness inside himself. He was a ticking
time bomb, and he didn’t want Ayesha to be around when his endurance ran out
and he exploded, hurting everyone around him.

Sex was the way out of this. Check the boxes, finish the lessons, move on.
Only now that he knew her better, he wanted to do more than teach her how
to be good at sex. He wanted to give her the best nights of her life.
Tonight, he was giving her fireworks.