Page 27 of A Thousand Painted Hours

“Meet my new cat,” he said, “Chhoti Billi.”

The shape resolved itself, a round soft ball of orange and white, with long whiskers. His left front paw was half gone, a bandaged stump. I gasped. “A tiger cub! How did you find him?”

“Her.” He hefted her weight into my arms, and the cub made a mewling noise, turning her head toward me. “She was orphaned in a hunt, and her paw was mangled by a trap. My father brought her to me.”

My entire being glowed with the sandbag weight of her warmth. I bent my head to kiss her, and she rubbed upward against my chin. Instantly smitten, I plopped down right where I was so I could settle her on my lap. Her fur was soft, baggy on her muscles, and she leaned on me easily, titling up her golden eyes to look at me. “Oh, Tanveer, she’s so beautiful!”

He rubbed her ears and chin, and she closed her eyes, just like a house cat. “I kept her in my room for a while, and then this room was prepared. Eventually, when she’s healed, she’ll have a home in an enclosure we’re building, outside, so she can hunt and sun and all those things, but she’ll be safe.”

“Does she purr?”

“No, but she chases balls, and anything on a stick, and she likes to sit in boxes.” He pointed to a wooden box in the corner.

I cooed to her, rubbing her body, winding her soft ears through my fingers, touching her broad nose in wonder. She liked that, and rubbed hard against my knuckles, making me laugh. “I wish I’d brought my sketchbook down.”

“You can come back.” He glanced toward the door. “No one comes here until I tell them to.” He looked at me. “Only me. And now you.”

All at once, the strange thing between us awakened again. I could not look away from his reassembled and remarkable face, a vivid rustling in my throat, my torso, even my thighs. Embarrassed, blushing, I looked down, my gaze falling on the bright kara around his wrist, and the shape of his oval nails.

Silence hung between us, as alive as the dust motes wafting around each other in the bars of sunlight. I was afraid to look at him again, completely unsure how I should respond, if there had been some other thing implied in his words that I both wanted to hear and did not want to hear.

The tiger playfully clutched my hand and bit it with tiny teeth, and I squeaked, yanking my hand out of her mouth. The tiger, unafraid, reached out and grabbed me back, wrapping one white-tipped paw around my wrist and slamming her lower paws against my forearm like a bunny.

I laughed, and next to me, so did Tanveer. I hazarded a glance at him, and he was grinning at the baby, tugging her ear, and all at once, it was again the most precious face I had ever known. As if he felt it, he looked up, and, pierced, I looked down again.

“Elsie.”

I swallowed. “I can hardly look you. Something changed. It’s scaring me.”

He took my hand, which he must have done a hundred times before, but the feeling of his skin against mine sent a current through my bones. “I shall hate it if you are afraid of me. Imagine if it were reversed.”

At that, I did look up. “That would be terrible.”

“It is new,” he said quietly, and lifted a hand to my face. His fingers burned a tattoo over my cheek, brushed across the corner of my eye. “Is this all right?”

“Yes.” I could barely breathe.

And then, the tiger attacked my arm a little more forcefully, and I yelped. Tanveer swept her out of my lap, and we tumbled sideways into the soft hay, face to face. So close. Not quite touching, but only the smallest space between us. I smelled his skin, and again, it made me dizzy. “I never noticed how wonderful you smell.”

“I thought you might be wearing perfume.” He stroked my hair, my ear. I found my gaze on the sooty thickness of his lashes, the angle of his eyebrow.

Then I was snared in the depth of his dark eyes, and I tumbled into the moment, feeling as if our spirits traveled between us, mine to him, his to mine. I touched his jaw, some distant part of my brain mixing paint to capture the shimmer of light over his irises, the pure white of his sclera, the faint rose in the brown of his jaw, the red ocher of his full lips, cut precisely.

It might almost have been enough to just lie there. I felt suspended, alight. His hand moved on my neck, my shoulder, and then we acted as a single entity, and our lips met.

His mouth was so soft! So full! I made a little sound, and we moved closer, his arms coming around my shoulders, mine around his back, so that it was not only our lips touching, but chests and bellies and thighs.

We kissed slowly, with wonder, pausing once to open our eyes and look—so closely—into each other’s eyes, and then we dipped again, opening each to the other, and it was an entirely different sort of kiss. Intoxicating, delicate, exploratory.

After a time, a long time or a short one, I had no way of knowing, we paused, catching our breath. “I have never kissed anyone before,” I said.

“Nor I.” He smiled. “I quite like it.”

I laughed. “Me, too.”

“We should return before they wonder where we are.”

I suddenly thought of what my father would do if he saw me lying there kissing Tanveer. Whathisfather might do. “Yes. We might get into terrible trouble.”