[shivanikaur2]

Chapter 46: Valentine's Night

Poroma's perspective

The camera had been placed on top of the wardrobe. She understood that in the first few seconds, from the angle. Looking down at the bed from high in one corner, the way a security camera looks down at a shop counter. She had never seen it. In nine months of coming to that room, she had never once looked up.

On the screen, a woman sat on the edge of Rahul's bed.

It took Poroma a moment to recognise herself. The black chiffon saree from Valentine's night, the one she had bought for that party especially. Her hair coming loose from its clip. The halter-neck blouse already untied at the back and hanging open at the front, her breasts half out of it. Her lipstick smeared. Her face flushed and soft and dazed, like a woman who has been crying, or drinking, or something else.

She had told Ranjeet, in their bed, that it had all happened in the car. That they had been in the car near the Victoria Memorial for nearly an hour.

It had not been an hour. It had been twenty minutes.

She remembered those twenty minutes better than she remembered her wedding.

He had parked under the trees on the Queen's Way side, where the streetlights didn't reach, and switched off the engine, and for a moment neither of them said anything. Then he reached across without asking and pulled the knot at the back of her neck, and the halter blouse fell open, and the cold air from the AC touched her bare breasts.

"Rahul. Someone will see."

"Let them."

He pulled her across the gearstick towards him and bent his head and took her nipple into his mouth, and she gasped so loudly she clapped her own hand over her mouth. He sucked hard, rolling the other nipple between his finger and thumb, and she felt it in her womb, a hot pulling ache she had not felt in years. Her hand found his thigh, then moved up, and she felt him through his jeans, a long hard ridge of him pressing against the denim. She squeezed it. She had never in her life touched a man there who was not her husband, and her hand would not stop.

He pushed the chiffon up over her knees, bunching it at her waist, and his hand slid up the inside of her thigh. She was so wet that her panties were soaked through. He laughed softly into her breast when he felt it.

"All this," he said. "Just from the drive."

"Shut up."

He pulled the panties aside and pushed two fingers into her, all the way, without any gentleness, and she bucked against the car seat with a noise that was nearly a scream. He fucked her with his fingers, fast and deep, his thumb rubbing her clit in hard tight circles, his mouth going from one breast to the other, and she spread her legs as wide as the footwell would let her and rode his hand. She came in under three minutes. She came with her forehead pressed against his shoulder and her nails in his arm and her thighs clamped around his wrist, her whole cunt pulsing around his fingers. He did not stop. He kept going until she came again, harder, gasping his name, juice running down into his palm and onto the leather seat, with the gate lights of the Memorial blurring through the windscreen.

Afterwards he took his hand out of her and held his wet fingers up in front of her face. Then he put them in her mouth. She sucked them clean without being told.

Then he started the engine again, and drove her to the party, and walked her in through the side gate past the swimming pool, so that people saw her there. So they remember you arrived, he had said. And then, forty minutes later, while everyone was busy at the bar, he had walked her out again through the same gate to his car, and driven her to New Alipore.

The hour had been here. In this room. She had lied to Ranjeet even in her full confession, and she had not even noticed she was doing it.

On the screen, Rahul came into the frame from the bathroom. He had taken off his shirt. He stood in front of her, very tall, and she looked up at him the way she had never once looked up at Ranjeet. Hungry, and frightened, and grateful.

"Your phone," he said.

On the screen, she held it out to him. He switched it off and dropped it on the bedside table.

"He'll call," she said. Her own voice, small and husky on the laptop's tinny speakers.

"Let him. You'll tell him it died. Sutapa will tell him she was with you in the garden the whole time."

"Sutapa knows?"

"Sutapa knows what I tell her." He knelt down in front of her, between her knees, and slid both hands up under the chiffon. "Stop thinking about him. You've thought about him for ten years. Tonight think about yourself."

Poroma on the bed closed her eyes and let her knees fall open.

Poroma on the laptop watched her own thighs part for him and felt her stomach turn over, and something lower down tighten at the same time, and hated herself for both.

He undressed her slowly, the way he always did the first time with anything. The blouse first, sliding it off her shoulders, letting it drop behind her on the bed. He held her breasts in both hands, weighing them, squeezing, and she heard herself make a little sound. They were heavy and full that night, tight and aching. Rajiv had been feeding less, and she had not expressed before the party.

He squeezed again, harder, and a bead of milk welled up at her left nipple and ran down the curve of her breast.

"You're leaking," he said, sounding pleased.

"Don't—"

He put his mouth on her left nipple and sucked, and on the screen her head fell back and her hand went to the back of his head and held him there.

She remembered the feeling exactly. The pull of it, deep in her chest, down through her belly and between her legs, the sting and then the rush of the milk letting down into a man's mouth for the first time in her life. Ranjeet had never. She had never let him. She had told him it was for the baby. That night she did not say anything about the baby. She held Rahul's head to her breast and arched her back to push more of herself into his mouth and moved her hips against nothing and moaned. He drank from her. She could see his throat moving on the screen. When the left one was soft he moved to the right and did it again, and milk ran out of the corner of his mouth and down her belly, and she whimpered and rubbed her thighs together and begged him not to stop.

When he lifted his head his mouth was wet and shining. He kissed her with it, and she tasted her own milk on his tongue, sweet and thin, and on the screen she pulled him closer.

He stood up and unbuckled his jeans and pushed them down with his underwear. She had felt him through the cloth in the car, but this was the first time she saw him, and the woman on the screen stared. Poroma remembered that too. The size of him, thick and dark and already hard, curving up from a nest of black hair, the head swollen and shining at the tip, his heavy balls hanging low. Bigger than Ranjeet. Not grotesquely, not the monster she had described to Ranjeet later in her lies and her games. But longer and thicker, and arrogant somehow, the way all of him was arrogant.

"Touch it," he said.

On the screen, her hand came up slowly and closed around him. Her fingers did not quite meet. She stroked him once, carefully, as if he might break, and he laughed softly.

"Not like a wife," he said. "Like you want it."

She tightened her grip and stroked him again, harder, the whole length, from the root to the tip, and he hissed through his teeth, and she looked up at him with an expression Poroma had never seen on her own face. Triumphant.

"Now your mouth," he said.

Ten years of marriage, and she had done that for Ranjeet perhaps four times, quickly, in the dark, and had brushed her teeth afterwards. On the screen she did not hesitate. She leaned forward on the edge of the bed and licked the drop of fluid off the tip of him, and then opened her mouth wide and took the head of him in. Her lips stretched around him. Her lipstick left a dark red ring on his shaft. He put one hand in her hair and pushed, slowly, and she took more, and more, until he hit the back of her throat and she gagged and her eyes watered and she pulled back, coughing, a string of spit hanging from her lip to the head of his cock.

"Again," he said.

She did it again. She did it until she found the rhythm, her hand wrapped around the base of him, her head bobbing, her cheeks hollowing. She could hear the wet sounds of it on the laptop now, loud and obscene in the silent house, and her own muffled moans around him. On the screen her free hand had gone down between her own legs, under the bunched-up saree, and she was touching herself while she sucked him. She had no memory of doing that. But there it was.

He let her go on for a long time. Then he pulled her off him by the hair, gently, and looked down at her wet red mouth.

"Good girl," he said.

And on the screen she smiled.

He laid her back across the bed and pulled the saree away from her hips in one long unwinding movement, and then the petticoat, and her panties with it, still damp from the car. She was bare. She had shaved that afternoon, for the first time in her life, in the bathroom at home with Ranjeet's razor, telling herself it was just for herself, just to feel different.

"For me?" he asked, running his thumb over her smooth mound and down, parting her lips, showing her to the room.

"For me," she said.

"Liar."

He put his mouth on her.

Ranjeet had offered so many times and she had always refused. It's dirty. It's humiliating for you. On the screen she grabbed the bedsheet in both fists and arched off the bed with a cry that made Poroma, watching, reach out and turn down the volume without thinking, as though someone in the empty house might hear.

He ate her for a long time. He did what he did at the Holi party, what he would do to her a hundred times afterwards. He licked her slowly from bottom to top with the flat of his tongue, over and over, then sucked her clit between his lips and flicked it until her thighs shook against his ears. He pushed his tongue inside her. He slid two fingers in and curled them up, pressing at the place inside her that Ranjeet had never found, and sucked at the same time, and her whole body went rigid. He took her right up to the edge and then stopped. Pulled away, and waited, watching her face, while she gasped and cursed and pushed her hips up at his mouth, her cunt clenching on nothing. Then he started again. And stopped again. On the screen she was begging within five minutes. Please. Rahul, please. Please let me. Please let me come. She had her hands on the back of his head trying to force his mouth back onto her. And he lifted his head and smiled up at her over her own heaving belly, his chin wet, and said, "Not yet. First we talk."

This was the part. Poroma's hand had gone cold on the touchpad. She knew what was coming now. She had known for ten months, in the part of her mind she never allowed herself to visit.

On the screen, Rahul lay down on his side next to her, propped on one elbow. His fingers moved lazily between her legs, sliding up and down through her wetness, circling her clit, just enough to keep her where she was, not enough to let her fall. His cock lay hard and heavy against her hip.

"Holi," he said. "Sutapa and Dilip's place. Five weeks from now."

"I know."

"I want you there."

"Ranjeet will be there."

"I want him there." His fingers slid inside her and she gasped. "I'm going to bring something to the party. A story. About a woman called Poroma and her husband Ranjeet. A game at a party. Ten minutes. If the man can make her say fuck me in ten minutes, she belongs to him for an hour."

She laughed breathlessly on the screen. "You're mad."

"I wrote it for you. I've been sending you pieces of it for a month."

"I know. I read them." Her hips were moving on his hand. "In the bathroom. At night. While he slept. I touched myself reading them."

"I know you did." He curled his fingers, and she cried out. "So. I bring the story. We argue about it in front of everyone. You're stubborn. Everyone knows you're stubborn. You say no woman would break in ten minutes. I say you would. You take the bet."

"In front of everyone." Her voice had gone very soft. "In front of him."

"In front of him. That's the point, Poroma. Think about it." He leaned down and spoke right against her ear, and the camera on the wardrobe caught every word. "If you just come to me, you're a cheating wife. If I win you in a game in front of him, in front of all of them, if he watches you fight and fight and lose, then it isn't your fault. Then you're the poor wife who was too proud and got tricked. He'll be angry. He'll be humiliated. But he'll forgive you. Because he'll have seen you fight."

On the screen, Poroma was silent for a long moment. Her hips had stopped moving.

Then she said it.

"I'll fight you," she whispered. "Nine minutes. Maybe nine and a half. I'll make it look real. I'll make him believe it. And then I'll say it."

Rahul smiled. "Louder."

"I'll fight you so he sees me fight." Her voice was steadier now. Clear. The voice she used when she had decided something, the voice she had used to tell her father she was marrying a boy from Behala. "And then I'll lose. I'll scream it so everyone hears. And he'll forgive me, because he loves me, and he'll never know I chose it."

"Sutapa will hold the stopwatch," Rahul said. "She'll be slow to start it. That'll give us time."

"Fine."

"Say you want it, Poroma."

"I want it." Her hand came down and covered his where it was buried between her legs and pressed it harder against her. "I want you to win me. In front of him. I want it more than I've ever wanted anything."

"Then say it now. Practise."

She turned her face to his, her blue eyes enormous, and said it, the two words she would scream five weeks later in Sutapa's bedroom with her husband outside the window.

"Fuck me."

He rolled on top of her then. He did not put on a condom. Not that night. That had come later, after the Holi party, when she had made her rules and pretended to herself that rules made it different.

On the screen she reached down between them and took hold of him herself and guided the head of him to her opening. He rubbed it up and down through her wetness, teasing, and she lifted her hips and wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him into her with her heels. The sound she made as he pushed in, slow and deep, stretching her open inch by inch, was a sound Poroma did not know her body could make. He was so thick that she felt every ridge of him going in. When he was all the way inside, his balls pressed against her, he stopped and held still and let her feel how full she was.

"Tell me," he said.

"Bigger," she gasped. "You're bigger. He's never— I've never felt—"

"Say his name."

"Ranjeet's never filled me like this."

He pulled almost all the way out and slammed back in, and she screamed.

She watched the man's broad back move on top of her. She watched her own hands slide down it and grip his buttocks and pull him deeper. She watched her own face over his shoulder, eyes open, staring straight up at the ceiling, at the corner where the camera was. Not seeing it. Not seeing anything.

He fucked her slowly at first and then not slowly. He hooked her knees over his arms and folded her nearly in half and drove down into her, hard and fast, the slap of his hips on her thighs loud on the laptop, the wet sound of him going in and out of her. The bed creaked and knocked against the wall. Her breasts shook with every thrust and leaked onto both their chests, milk and sweat smeared between them. Her mangalsutra had slid round to the back of her neck and the gold pendant bounced against the pillow. She was saying things on the screen, a stream of them, Bengali and English mixed. Harder. Don't stop. Fuck me, fuck me, I'm yours. Things she had never said aloud in her life.

She came with a long broken wail, her heels drumming on the backs of his thighs, her cunt squeezing him so hard he grunted. He did not stop. He kept going through it, and then he pulled out and flipped her over onto her hands and knees like she weighed nothing, and took her from behind, one hand twisted in her hair pulling her head back, the other gripping her hip. On the screen her face was turned towards the camera now, mouth open, eyes squeezed shut, her breasts swinging under her, dripping onto the sheet. He spanked her once, hard, and she cried out and pushed back onto him for more. He reached around and rubbed her clit while he pounded into her and she came again almost at once, clawing at the sheets, sobbing his name into the mattress.

He turned her onto her back again for the end. He wanted to see her face. He put his hand on her throat, not squeezing, just holding, and fucked her in long brutal strokes, looking down into her eyes, and she held his gaze and wrapped her legs around him and said, "Inside. Come inside me. I want it."

When he finally came, he drove into her to the hilt and held there, groaning into her neck, his whole body shuddering, and she felt it on the screen as clearly as she had felt it that night, the hot pulse of him deep inside her, again and again, filling her. She held him and stroked his hair and laughed, a low drunk happy laugh, with his weight crushing her into the mattress and his seed in her womb.

When he pulled out of her she lay with her legs open, too spent to close them, and on the screen Poroma could see him running out of her onto Rahul's sheets.

He looked down at it, satisfied. Then he lifted his head and looked straight up at the camera. And winked.

The file ended.

Poroma sat on the edge of her own marital bed in the empty house with the laptop on her knees and did not move.

She had always told herself the video was a threat because of the sex. Because Ranjeet would see her naked under another man, see her moaning, see her body doing things it never did for him.

But Ranjeet knew about the sex. He had stood outside the bedroom window at the Holi party and watched it. She had told him about Mandarmoni, about Rahul's flat, about the hickeys and the blowjobs and the nights. She had described it all to him in their own bed, sometimes to hurt him, sometimes to arouse him, sometimes just because she couldn't stop talking about it. Rahul could have sent Ranjeet a hundred videos of her naked and it would have changed nothing.

That was not why she had obeyed Rahul for nine months.

She had obeyed him because of seventy seconds in the middle of this file. I'll fight you so he sees me fight.

Everything Ranjeet had forgiven her for, he had forgiven because he believed she had been tricked. He had said it to her on the first night she came back from Mandarmoni, standing in the hall with his packed suitcase by the door. You're correct there. You fought. And she had cried and held him and let him believe it, and built every day of the last nine months on top of that lie, the way you build a house on a filled-in pond.

The Holi party had not been her defeat. She had not been defeated at all. She had planned it, in this bed, with another man's fingers inside her, five weeks in advance.

The real defeat was this. Sitting alone in the dark watching herself, and finally understanding that there was no version of the story in which she was the victim. She had told herself for nine months that she was protecting her marriage. She had been protecting this. The lie that let her keep both.

Outside, a dog barked somewhere in the lane, and then stopped.

Poroma closed the laptop very gently, as if it might wake someone. Then she went into the bathroom and was sick.

Her phone buzzed at 2:14 in the morning, while she was sitting on the cold bathroom floor with her back against the tiles.

An unknown number. A WhatsApp message.

You've watched it, haven't you. I can always tell. — R

A second message came before she could move.

Let's talk about what happens to it next. Tomorrow. I'll call you at noon. Pick up this time, Mrs. Sen.