“Rati, I have waited so long for this moment. If I’d had any idea… I would have shown you this heaven long ago.”

The words floated through the haze, reaching Rati like sounds in a dream. Her consciousness, submerged in a deep, lazy sleep, flickered. For a moment, the fog cleared. Until now, this had all been a fantasy, a blur of profound intoxication where the lines between herself and another had dissolved. She hadn’t been able to tell if the arms holding her belonged to her husband or some stranger.

But now, the spell was breaking. Or perhaps it was the voice—the first sound in this whole affair—that had shattered the silence. And that voice… it was definitely not Rohan’s. In the same instant, a wave of visceral certainty washed over her. The hands exploring her body were not her husband’s, nor was this the lap she had all but melted into.

The last coherent memory snagged in her mind was of stumbling out of the club, her heels catching, before collapsing onto the stairs. A sharp, spinning dizziness, and then a heavy curtain of sleep falling over her eyes. Everyone had been there, she remembered that much. Her husband, Rohan. Their friends—Sameer, Bhavesh, Arjun. They were all there.

Weren’t they?

As her senses struggled to return, Rati’s blurred vision swept the car. Not a single familiar face. One was behind her, the man whose lap she was nestled in. Another was below, a head of thick, dark hair buried between her thighs, the man himself lost beneath the seat. And then there were the eyes. Two pairs, faint and distorted in the car’s rear-view mirror. The driver, and the passenger beside him.

The grip of intoxication was still so strong she couldn’t distinguish one from the other. But she knew, with chilling clarity, that the man below couldn’t be Rohan. When had her husband’s hair grown so long? And Rohan’s hands were soft, not hard and rough like the ones now roaming her body with such freedom. That voice… it was the voice that had ripped her from her trance and delivered her to the threshold of this horrifying reality.

It wasn’t just the people who were wrong. Her beautiful gown, the one she’d been wearing when she left the club, was gone. Now, there was nothing against her skin but the night air and her own fine undergarments. She couldn’t remember when or how it had happened. The story, it seemed, had progressed far without her. Her thoughts were still so clouded, so heavy, that she couldn’t decide what was truly happening to her.

In another desperate attempt to solve the puzzle, she forced her eyes back to the mirror. This time, she understood. The eyes on the left, under thick, dark brows… yes. They belonged to her husband, Rohan. He was staring right at her, unblinking. Staring, and utterly devoid of emotion.

But it was the other pair of eyes that twisted her intoxicated, reeling mind into a new knot of confusion. They were not petrified and empty like Rohan’s. They were… satisfied. Calm. As if they had just witnessed something they had waited an eternity to see. And then, her gaze locked with his.

With every passing second, the intoxication receded, and consciousness rushed back in. She was grappling with the fact that the man holding her was not her husband, but a deeper, more unsettling truth was dawning: this wasn’t entirely forced. Her mind had returned, but her body… her body had never been truly still. It had been in motion. The realization shook her to her core. More jarring still were the open, steady eyes of her husband, stone-like even as he watched this unfold. For a fleeting moment, she wanted to scream, to fight, to tear everything apart. But then…

Her gaze fell again on that other pair of eyes in the mirror. He was watching her too. Not with the lifeless void of Rohan’s stare, but with a deep, unseen interest she had never felt upon her before. There was no lust in that look. It was a strange, powerful magnetism, as if he were trying to absorb a rare and precious sight. This attraction was beginning to overpower the rising storm of fear, anger, and humiliation.

Was it the intoxication, or was it real? Rati could feel the weight of his interest on her skin. It was the look of a man who, after years of penance, witnesses a miracle and can do nothing but watch, mesmerized. Those eyes were silently praising her. Or perhaps, they were praising her form, her very state of being. It was a praise beyond words, not for her clothes or her makeup, but for her existence—for this naked, vulnerable truth.

She didn’t know what he could possibly see in the dim, shifting light of the car. Her face couldn’t have been clear, nor the lines of her body. But whatever he saw, it held him captive. She had just surfaced from a deep unconsciousness, not yet sober enough to pass judgment on right and wrong. All she could do was see herself reflected in his gaze, an image she had never encountered before: dangerous, defenseless, but still being seen. Still being appreciated.

She had heard her beauty praised a thousand times. Her husband, Rohan, was a fountain of compliments. But this praise was different. It was raw, unsettling, and yet it pierced through the fog of her fear. It was a gaze that saw past the surface and into something she didn’t even know was there. The confusion, the terror, and this bizarre, magnetic appreciation all swirled within her, coalescing into a single, defiant thought that blazed from her own eyes, a silent question shot across the small space of the car, directly into his.

‘What are you looking at like that? Have you never seen a woman?’