Adultery My Fiancee's Happiness

[sakurasan]

Chapter 2 — The Engagement Aftermath

Plastic chairs lined the walls of Isha’s childhood living room. Both families filled the room, talking carefully.

Rohan sat beside his father, hands on his knees. His mother spoke softly with Saroja near the doorway. Uncles compared village roads and train timings. Children peeked from the corridor and were shooed back.

Across the room, Isha sat between her aunts in a pale green saree. She kept her gaze down most of the time.

She and Rohan did not look at each other for long.

When their eyes met for a second, both looked away.

An elder uncle on Isha’s side cleared his throat and smiled toward Rohan.

“So,” he said, “you teach at her college. Have you seen her there?”

Rohan nodded once. His voice stayed even.

“I have seen her a few times on campus,” he said.

A soft murmur moved through the room.

Saroja turned toward her daughter. “And you? Have you met him before?”

Isha shook her head.

“No, Ma,” she said. “I have heard his name only. I have never seen him.”

Someone laughed lightly. Rohan’s father smiled quietly.

The formal talk continued. Horoscope notes were shown. Work after marriage was confirmed again. Dates were discussed. Plates of sweets waited on the side table.

They exchanged rings and took blessings while aarti smoke curled toward the ceiling fan. Photographers asked them to stand closer, then closer still. For the camera, Rohan and Isha stood side by side. His fingers brushed hers once when no one was looking. She did not move away.

The engagement was done.

Later, when the elders had drifted toward tea, Isha’s cousins found Rohan near the veranda steps. They came in smiling, already treating him like one of their own.

One cousin laughed and nudged his shoulder. “Listen when she talks, don’t make her wait for replies, and if she ever calls home crying, we will all come to Pune together.”

Another grinned and held up his phone. “I am saving your number right now. First sad voice note from her, and this whole group is on a train.”

A third clapped his back. “Keep her happy, sir. That is the whole job.”

Rohan smiled and nodded, caught in the circle of jokes, when Isha’s elder brother, Praveen, walked over and parted them with an easy hand.

“Enough,” Praveen said, laughing with them. “Leave the poor man alone. He will take care of my sister better than anyone standing here.”

The cousins groaned and backed off, still grinning. Someone pointed at Isha across the room and mouthed a last reminder, still smiling. Praveen stayed beside Rohan until the teasing thinned, then tipped his head toward the quieter side of the veranda.

“Come. Two minutes.”

They stepped away from the noise. For a moment Praveen only looked out at the yard. When he spoke again, the joke was gone.

“Our parents are not easy people,” he said. “You will learn that soon enough. I got out early. I was a boy, so they gave me that much rope. From senior college I pushed for hostel, fought for it, and left. Once I was out, their hands could not reach me the same way.”

He glanced back toward the house, then at Rohan.

“Isha never got that chance. She stayed under them. Every rule, every fear, every small permission — she paid for all of it. She has been the one who took their methods the hardest.”

His voice stayed low.

“I am asking you not to become another cage. Don’t control her the way they did. Take care of her. Let her breathe.”

Rohan met his eyes without looking away.

“I will,” he said. “I respect women more than anything else in my life. Their free will matters to me. I will never take that from her.”

Praveen studied him a second longer, then nodded once, quiet and satisfied.

“Good,” he said. “Then we understand each other.” He tipped his head toward the house, the host again. “Come. Lunch is ready.”

Rohan followed him in.

After the meal, Rohan’s family left first. His parents started for their village. Rohan left in his car soon after, with only a polite goodbye at the gate. One by one the other guests followed, until the house was quiet again.

In her room, Isha packed her bag. The new sarees from the engagement went in carefully, folded over one another, soft and bright under her hands. Saroja pressed a box of sweets into her hands and reminded her, for the third time, to call as soon as she reached Pune.

Praveen drove her from the village into Nashik to catch her bus. Near the stand he parked away from the crowd.

“Isha,” he said, “I spoke to Rohan. He seems like a nice guy.”

“Yes, Bhaiya,” she said.

“Looks are deceiving.” His voice stayed mild, but the caution under it was real. “I will do a background check on him. I don’t want you to get caught from one control freak to another.”

Lying to their parents had never cost her much. Her brother was different. With him, she could not hold the lie.

“Bhaiya,” she said quietly. “Actually, I know Rohan very well.”

Praveen turned. Surprise cut clean across his face.

“What do you mean?”

“Actually, we have been in love for the past three years.”

For a second he only stared. Then the surprise broke into something brighter, almost boyish.

“I can’t believe this.” He laughed under his breath, shaking his head. “I am so excited you are marrying someone you love. I was scared what groom Dad would bring for you.”

Heat rose in her throat. She pressed on before fear could close it again.

“Actually, he is waiting here for me.”

She told him the rest. Praveen listened without interrupting, one hand on the open window, his face moving from shock to understanding to quiet pride.

When she finished, he sat quiet a moment longer. Then his voice changed. Softer for her, firmer for the house they had left behind.

“Listen to me carefully, Isha. From today, stop hearing Ma and Dad the way you always have. Their fear is not your life. Their rules are not your future.” He held her eyes. “Rohan is your future. Only him. You marry him, you build with him, you decide with him. Not with people who never let you breathe.”

Something in her chest loosened and shook at the same time. No one in that house had ever given her permission to stop obeying.

“You mean it?” she whispered.

“I mean it,” Praveen said. “I got out. You are getting out too. Don’t carry their voice into your marriage and call it duty.”

He exhaled once and nodded toward the road ahead.

“Come. Show me.”

They walked together past the stand noise until the car came into view a little ahead. Rohan was already outside it. When he saw Praveen beside her, his body went still. Isha reached him first.

“He knows,” she said softly.

Rohan’s eyes flicked to Praveen, then back to her. Before he could find an apology, Praveen held up a hand and smiled.

“Relax,” he said. “She told me everything. The act you two put on back home? Strong work. Even I believed it.” He glanced between them, warmer now. “Take care of each other. And you—” he tipped his chin at Rohan “—you already said the right things on the veranda. Keep them.”

Rohan nodded, still catching up, relief slow to reach his face.

“I will.”

Praveen squeezed Isha’s shoulder once, the way he had when she was younger and the house felt too large.

“Remember what I told you.”

She nodded, the words still sitting heavy and bright behind her ribs. He waited until she slipped into the passenger seat with her bag at her feet, until Rohan shut the door and started the engine, then raised a hand and stepped back into the stand crowd.

“We did it,” Isha said softly.

“We did,” Rohan answered.

They did not speak much after that. Fields slid past. Every few minutes Isha looked at her own hand, checking the ring.

Then she caught him.

He thought she was still watching the road. His eyes dropped, quick and careful, to the soft rise of her blouse, then lower, to the curve of her hip against the seat, before they returned to the highway as if nothing had happened.

If any other man had looked at her like that, she would have burned. She had burned before. This time the heat was different. She suddenly felt pleased that it was Rohan looking. In three years of closeness, his eyes had always stayed on her face. This was the first time, sitting this near, that she had watched them travel beyond it.

When his gaze held the road again, she let hers travel too. The line of his throat. His hands on the wheel. The shape of his shoulders under the shirt he had worn for the engagement. She looked away before he turned.

After that, neither of them quite settled. Conversation came in short pieces and broke again. Each time one of them thought the other was busy with the traffic or the window, a glance slipped lower than it should have. Marriage was fixed now. The old careful romance had begun to thicken into something physical, quiet and new between them.

Near Pune the traffic thickened. Evening light softened the city. He turned toward her flat.

When he stopped outside her building, neither of them moved at once. The street was quiet. The air in the car still held what the drive had started.

Then Rohan leaned in, the way he always had, aiming for her cheek.

Isha turned her face at the last second.

His mouth found her lips instead.

For a moment he went still, caught by the change. She did not pull back. The kiss stayed longer than either of them had ever allowed. Her hand found his shirt near the ribs. His palm settled at her waist. The kiss deepened, and their breath mixed.

When they finally eased apart, Isha’s eyes stayed closed a beat longer than his. Rohan looked at her as if he was still catching up.

“Good night,” she whispered.

“Good night,” he said, voice lower than usual.

She climbed the stairs with the taste of him still on her lips. He stood by the car until her flat light came on, then drove home.

The kiss had left him hard. Even on the drive back it did not go down. By the time he reached the duplex he was still aching in his trousers, and he thanked the day for one mercy. Kunal was out of station. At least his friend would not see him like this.

In his room he lay down, opened his trousers, and took himself in hand. The kiss came back at once, and his mind did what it always did. It opened the moment wider and brighter than it had been. Her mouth turned under his. Her saliva tasted like honey. Her tongue was shy against his, then surer. The smell of jasmine and clean skin and her filled his head until thinking became useless. He stroked to that memory, slow at first, then harder.

When he came, it was only to her. The pleasure emptied him. His life felt complete. The PhD was done. The woman he loved was his. He passed out still breathing hard, fully content.

Across the city, Isha opened her flat door to noise and light.

Her two flatmates, Riya and Sneha, both colleagues from campus, were still awake in the hall. The moment they saw her bag and the ring, they were on their feet.

“There she is,” Riya said, grinning. “Mrs Almost Rohan.”

Sneha caught her hand and turned the ring toward the light. “Congratulations, madam.”

Isha laughed, awkward and pleased. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank us,” Riya said. “We are still recovering. You walked around looking so innocent and naïve, and quietly you landed the biggest fish on campus.”

“I did not land anyone,” Isha said, heat climbing her face. “It was not like that.”

“Of course not,” Sneha said, already laughing. “The sweetest lecturer in the university just happened to fall into your lap. Pure accident.”

Isha kept defending herself, but the teasing did not sting the way campus gossip used to. For once, she enjoyed it. Their jokes made the day feel real.

Sneha tipped her head toward the door, still smiling.

“Good. So next time we come home late, fewer of those faces from you.”

The smile on Isha’s face faltered. She knew those faces. She had given them freely.

“I am sorry,” she said. “For that. I will be different from now.”

Riya raised her eyebrows, surprised and pleased.

“All right, then,” Riya said, tapping the ring. “When is the wedding?”

“Soon,” Isha said. “We will know in a week.”

Sneha snorted. “What difference will a date make? Those two will just sit and stare at each other even on the first night.”

Riya tipped her chin at Isha. “Then what about kids?”

“I don’t think that is happening,” Sneha said before Isha could answer.

“I will have three,” Isha said at once, earnest enough that both of them laughed harder.

Sneha wiped at her eye. “Hope Rohan knows what to do in bed. I am very sure you know nothing.”

“You are too much,” Isha said, face burning. “We even kissed just now.”

Riya’s grin sharpened. “Where? On the forehead? Or did you mistake a cheek smooch for a kiss?”

“No.” Isha pointed at her own mouth, stubborn. “Here.”

That was as much as she could take. Under her saree her panties were already wet, and their laughter was climbing toward something she could not stand in the open hall. She grabbed her bag, fled into her room, and shut the door hard.

Outside, Riya and Sneha were still laughing.

Isha leaned against the door for a second. Outside, the laughing had thinned. Inside her, something would not settle.

She was wet. The cloth between her thighs clung, and a strange ache lived low in her pussy, restless and new. Her nipples had hardened under the blouse without her asking them to. She stood there breathing too fast, then began to strip because the clothes felt wrong against all of it.

The saree came off first. Then the petticoat. Then her panties, sticky when she peeled them down. Blouse and bra stayed on. She lay back on the bed with her bare legs open to the air.

Between her legs, her clit felt like it was vibrating on its own, a small bright itch she could not ignore. She reached down and touched it with her fingers.

It felt good.

She pressed again, unsure, then rubbed where the itch was strongest. Wetness spread under her hand. She kept rubbing, clumsy and curious, chasing the feeling without knowing what she was chasing. Her thighs tensed. Her breath shortened. A few minutes later her body shivered hard, pleasure breaking through her in a confused wave that left her soft and empty.

She slept like that, blouse still on, fingers still near the wet heat between her legs.

Around two in the morning, across the city, Rohan’s sleep turned.

In the dream it was already the morning after their first night. Isha woke early, got ready, and went to the kitchen. Relatives filled the space with tea and talk. Saroja stood near the stove and touched her daughter’s cheek.

“Beti, are you happy?”

“Yes, Ma,” Isha said.

Her mouth held the right answer. Her face did not. Something quiet and unfinished sat in her eyes, and Rohan saw it clearly from wherever the dream had placed him. Sweat broke across his skin. He woke with his heart racing, the room dark, that face still behind his lids.

Would he be enough?

He sat up, rubbed his face with both hands, and could not shake the look she had worn while saying yes.

---

In the week that followed, campus life returned, and the engagement news moved faster than either of them expected. Once students learned he was settling down, congratulations found them in corridors, stairwells, and the canteen line from people they had barely spoken to.

Isha received more of it than he did. Female students especially stopped her, smiling, curious, wanting a look at the woman their favourite teacher had chosen. Faculty who used to pass with a nod now paused to wish her well. She liked the new spotlight. It sat warm on her shoulders in a way her old careful life never had.

They met openly in the canteen now, close enough for the whole hall to see. In his free periods, Rohan walked to her lab and sat near her desk while she graded record notes. The room stayed quiet. She worked. He watched. When she glanced up, she found his eyes already on her.

He looked at her while she worked, at her face and the soft shape of her under the saree. Desire rose clean and simple, and under it the same private fear returned. Would he be enough?

She felt his eyes on her and grew wet behind her composure. For the first time she understood how physically hungry he was for her when they were this close and allowed. The hunger in his looking made her own body restless. She liked it.

Almost every day he drove to her building for pickup and drop. In the car they spoke little and looked at each other more than the road needed. At her gate he kissed her longer than before, then watched her climb the stairs before he left.

At night her novice touching continued. Her fingers found her clit again. It still felt good. Each passing day it satisfied her less. The shiver came smaller, or took longer, or left her wanting when it ended. Her body was asking for more than her hand knew how to give.

Across the city, Rohan’s nights turned to porn. It had always been his only real reference for sex. He searched for women built like her and men built like him. Clips with her kind of body were easy to find. Clips with a cock near his five inches were not. Again and again the matches skewed interracial, the men thick and long, some near a foot, moving into bodies that looked too much like hers. Heat and shame arrived together. His worry deepened.

By the end of the week she had mapped his gaze. It no longer stayed only on her eyes. Again and again it slipped to the shape of her under the blouse and to the sliver of waist the pallu left when it shifted. She noticed. She carried that knowledge into the weekend.

Sunday evening they came back from a movie. At her building he kissed her the way he always did. She wanted his hands to travel. Asking for more would feel unladylike, and the embarrassment sat thicker than the desire. So she tried another thought. If she gave him more to look at, he might take the next step himself.

Until now her blouses had always been stitched back home by her mother’s tailor. On the ground floor of their building lived a ladies’ tailor in her thirties. Riya and Sneha always used her and always praised the fit. Isha had walked past that door for months. The next day she went in.

Savita looked up from the sewing machine, took in Isha’s face and figure in one slow practical sweep, and smiled like a woman who already knew the work ahead.

“Come,” Savita said. “Sit. You have a beautiful body. I can make you look even better if you let me.”

The old Isha would have left at that. This Isha thought of Rohan’s eyes at the pallu’s edge and stayed.

Savita set the catalogue on her lap and looked at Isha properly. “Tell me. What do you need?”

Isha swallowed. “Two blouses. Something trending.” The next part came quieter. “And one nauvari. For my wedding.”

She had a whole list to stitch later. This was just to see how Savita’s work was.

Savita’s smile widened. “Blouses and a nauvari. Then I take the full body.”

She opened the catalogue and sweet-talked her through page after page, bold necks, open backs, sleeves cut high on the arm. Heat climbed Isha’s throat. She kept saying yes.

Savita stood with the tape already in her hands.

“Full numbers,” she said. “Saree off. Old blouse too. Bra can stay.”

Isha’s hands went to her pallu and stopped. Heat climbed her throat. Undressing here, in the open room, felt too much.

Savita’s smile stayed soft. “Just us two. Come.”

That was enough. Isha undressed where she stood, careful fingers on pins and hooks, freer now, until she was only in her bra and petticoat. Savita’s gaze moved over her the way a hand might, from throat to the heavy swell of her breasts, down the narrow waist, over the full hips that filled the cloth.

“Stand straight,” Savita said. “Arms a little out.” She paused, eyes dropping. “Panty on?”

Isha’s face heated. “Yes.”

“Then petticoat off,” Savita said, as if it were ordinary. “I need the bust clean. Waist and hip too.”

Isha’s fingers found the lace at her waist. She untied it and let the petticoat fall. The cloth pooled at her feet. She stood in bra and panty in the middle of Savita’s room, bare legs cool, body suddenly too much in the open air.

The tape came first around her bust. Savita’s knuckles brushed the soft underside through the bra as she pulled it snug, then settled the measure across the fullest part. Her palm stayed a beat longer than the tape needed, cupping the weight as if checking how it hung.

“Thirty-six,” Savita murmured, almost to herself, and wrote it down. Her thumb stroked once along the side curve, light enough to pass for adjusting the cloth. “C cup. Full. Soft.”

Isha’s nipples tightened inside the bra. Heat flooded her face. Maybe this was how good tailors worked. Savita was a woman. Women knew women’s bodies. That must be it.

Savita knelt and drew the tape around her waist. Her fingers spanned the narrowest place and pressed in gently, learning the give of skin. “Twenty-six.” Then the tape dropped to her hips. Both hands shaped the roundness before the number came, palms warm through thin panty cloth, thumbs resting at the soft sides as if the hip itself needed holding to be believed. “Thirty-eight. God, what a figure.”

She rose close enough. One more pass: tape from shoulder to bust point, then under each breast from the side, Savita’s hand sliding in to lift and settle the weight while she pretended to mark where a cup should sit.

“For the neck and the push,” Savita said, almost idle. “I need to feel how much you have.”

Isha stood still and let her. The touch was thorough and somehow still dressed as work. Savita’s fingertips traced the lower curve again, slower this time, and Isha told herself the shiver was only cold air on bare arms. Between her thighs she was wetter than a fitting should make anyone. She clasped her hands in front of her and waited to be finished, too shy to step back, too innocent to name what Savita was taking from the moment.

Savita wrote the last line in her book and smiled that same knowing smile.

“Next weekend,” she said. “Your two blouses and the nauvari. Deep. Sharp. You'll see.”

Isha dressed with fingers that would not steady. When the saree was back on, Savita clicked her tongue and stepped in close again.

“Not like that,” she said. “You are dbanging like a grandmother. Girls your age wear it like this.”

She loosened the saree at Isha’s waist and tied it lower on the hip, then drew the pallu further to the side with an extra fold and a steeper slant. Cool air found Isha’s tummy. Standing straight, a good portion of her hip showed above the new waistline. Savita’s hands smoothed the cloth once more than the dbang needed, then stepped back to look.

“See? That is how it should sit.”

Isha looked at herself in Savita’s mirror and something bright and rebellious lit in her chest. She smiled, pleased, already sure Rohan would like looking at her even more. She went back upstairs still smiling. If the work was good, the rest of her wedding list would come back through that door.

Monday morning she dressed the way Savita had taught her. She liked the mirror before she left. She walked the corridors with her chin a little higher, steps sure. More people greeted her now, students and staff alike. She told herself it was because she was Rohan’s fiancée. The real reason lived in the way she carried herself.

At night the shiver under her fingers came weaker each time. She lay awake wanting his hand where hers had been, wanting him to hold her tighter, rougher. She wanted him to know how hard her nipples stood inside her blouse whenever he stared, thinking she had not noticed.

Across the city, sleep started to leave him. She looked more like a sex dream every day, and the ache got worse. He had always guessed she had a porn-star body under those sarees. Now, with so much of her open to him, he was sure.

For all his intelligence, that sharp mind still did not read the new dbang as an invitation. He told himself she was only wearing what felt comfortable.

At night, watching porn, he stopped hunting for men his size. He searched only women built like her, and he studied their faces at orgasm, that open, undone look of a woman fully satisfied.

Then he closed his eyes and tried to build it in his head, the way he worked through any problem. He imagined himself inside Isha, moving with everything he had, and waited for that same look to break across her face. It never came. He changed the picture, gave himself more, tried her a different way, and imagined it all over again. However he ran it in his mind, her face stayed unfinished. He could not make himself believe he would ever put that look there.

By the end of the week she was offering him more with every sideways dbang of the pallu, and still all she got was a kiss. Frustration sat sharp in her chest. Three years of upright courtship had trained him dormant, and she cursed herself for it.

He drove home wanting her harder than before, unsettled by faces on a screen he could not honestly give her. He wanted her happy. Loving her with his whole heart no longer felt like enough.