I turned my face away before he could see that the simplicity of his answer had unsettled me. Men like Khanna made everything complicated on purpose. Men like Kabir made things simpler in a way that was almost more unnerving, because simplicity made room for honesty, and honesty was a door I had learned not to open too quickly.
At the corner, he stopped. My building was only a short walk from there, but I had not told him that. He had noticed on his own. Of course he had.
“This is you,” he said.
I nodded. “This is me.”
He did not move immediately. “Will he be there?”
“No.”
It was a lie, but not a strong one. Khanna might not physically be there yet, but his expectations were. His voice was already in the room.
Kabir studied me for a moment, then said, “If you change your mind about dinner—”
“I won’t.”
“You did not let me finish.”
“I know what you were going to say.”
“And?”
“And I know enough not to accept invitations from men who can read my mood from twenty feet away.”
That made him smile properly, briefly. “That sounds unfair.”
“It is. I live in unfairness. I have become expert at it.”
He held my gaze. “Be careful with him.”
I almost asked whether he meant Khanna or with men in general, with wanting, with myself. But the traffic surged, a bus groaning around the turn, and the moment passed into the street noise.
I said, “You too.”
For the first time, his expression shifted into something I could not name at once. Not pleasure exactly. Not relief. Something quieter, and therefore more dangerous. “I will,” he said.
He turned to go, then looked back once, as if checking whether I had remained where I was. I stood under the weak streetlight and watched him cross into the stream of bodies and vehicles, swallowed and released by the city like everyone else.
Only then did I realize that Kabir had looked at me as if I were salvation, and for the first time I wondered whether being wanted was beginning to feel like being trapped.