Page 53 of The Spare
Iput a few files into my bag at the end of a long day. In addition to getting situated with how things ran here, I spent some time looking into the Amari Global board. Henry seemed suspicious about the eventual change in leadership, and my first thought was to shore up the board.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I started by looking into about half of the board members I wasn’t familiar with. But that could wait. I was exhausted.
I decided to head back to my family’s London property. Staying there felt weird. It had been remodeled and decorated recently, so it didn’t feel as old as it was, but being there made me feel like a kid again. We had only stayed there a handful of times, when we visited my maternal grandparents. Tense memories came with being there.
Deciding to channel my nervous energy into something productive, I stopped at the market on the way home and indulged in a favorite pastime.
Once I got home, I started cooking. Between work and social obligations, I went out too often to ever make cooking at home feasible. Growing up with cooks, I never really had memories that revolved around the kitchen as so many others did. One thing I did have was my grandmother. She was originally from northern India. She had grown up with a love of cooking and everything she made was heavenly.
My mom, being a socialite, never cooked much, but she tried to learn since Henry and I loved the food so much. My grandmother would teach her random dishes whenever we went over.
And I watched.
Cooking felt like therapy. It was by no means nearly as good as my Nana’s, but it always made me feel at home. Like I belonged.
I sat on the counter, scanning my social media feed as I waited for the parathas to cool. My mindless scrolling was interrupted when I heard a knock at the door.
My eyes met Marcus’s as I opened the door. “What are you doing here?” I gestured for him to follow me into the house.
“Checking on you.” He walked past me with a taunting smile. He inhaled deeply and looked around as he took off his coat. “I didn’t know you cooked.”
“I don’t cook.” We walked from the foyer to the kitchen. I didn’t love the idea of being known to cook, not that I would be, but I had other talents I’d rather people focus on. “This never happened.” My hands gestured in a circle in front of a stove.
“Understood.” He rounded the counter and peeked into the pan. “Trying to impress the date?”
“If I were trying to impress him, I wouldn’t use my cooking.” My heartbeats picked up. He was jealous, and ‘checking on me’ meant seeing if I ended up going on that date. “I turned him down.”
His shoulders relaxed, and his features lightened. A victorious grin spread along his face. He had done more to prevent the date than anyone else. He existed and made me feel things I couldn’t understand or stop.
He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms. “When you don’t cook, do you always make this much?”
I graciously allowed the pivot in conversation. “Usually Pen or Jax would come over and make something with me if I was cooking. Everyone else is usually good for an expensive bottle of wine.”
“Sounds about right.”
He looked comfortable, like he felt at home. Over the years, I had noticed that making him feel genuinely comfortable was a feat. He was always a little formal, no matter his surroundings. He took the bottle of wine chilling in the fridge, poured two glasses, and handed me one.
“It’s weird here.” I looked around. Marcus began putting down place settings on the kitchen island. It was endearing watching him silently invite himself to dinner. I leaned on the counter and looked around. “I have cousins, and they live here. I have never spoken to them.”
“Things were that bad?” He knew what I was talking about. Henry didn’t talk about it much, but he had told Marcus about the drama with our maternal grandparents over the years. They cut ties with my mom and didn’t attempt to change that until well after Henry was born. We never really knew that side of our family.
“I don’t remember too much of it, honestly. Just fragments.” I placed the serving dish with the parathas on the kitchen island. “I remember mom would cry a lot whenever we’d visit. Even when she agreed to come to London, she wouldn’t go see them. My dad was the one who took us to see them. They were civil to Henry and me, though.”
He didn’t say anything. Instead, he nodded, silently nudging me to continue.
“For so long, I wanted them to like me. I tried to be a person they’d accept.” I sighed. “A part of me blames them. They were the ones who kicked off a lifetime of being a chameleon. It’s exhausting.”
His brow furrowed.
I let out a small laugh. He didn’t get it because he’d never had to do it. “It's this feeling, that I am always code-switching based on who I’m with.”
A wave of anguish crashed over me. The weight of the unrelenting pressure to conceal parts of myself bore down on me. To friends, colleagues, and boyfriends who didn’t want to see all of me, just the parts they could relate to. The excruciating feeling that nobody wanted to see me as I was, that I, in my entirety, was something that needed to be hidden.
“It’s like walking around knowing that at any moment, you need to determine what someone is comfortable with and pull out any part of yourself they may not understand. All the time. Every second of every day.”
The jokes that I wasn’treallyone or the other stung the worst because they were often delivered as well-meaning. I spent my entire life feeling like I was straddling two worlds but belonged in neither. Half of each. I felt tears begin to pool around my eyes. I swallowed hard to stop them when I felt strong arms wrap around me, a blanket of comfort. I hadn’t even noticed him get up.
A soft exhale was the only reaction he offered. I looked up to find him looking straight ahead. I rested my cheek on his chest and felt an immediate calm once I was cloaked in his warmth. His thumb gently stroked my shoulder.
