Suresh heard the words.
He heard them the way a person hears something that arrives too cleanly, too clearly, with none of the protective ambiguity that softer language provides — 'I already gave my virginity to this man' — and his face did the thing faces do when the last version of a hope they were carrying gets addressed directly.
It collapsed.
Not dramatically. The quiet, internal collapse — the , structural failure of a man who had been building something in his chest for six weeks and has just been informed that the foundation was never available.
"MMMPH~—"
The silk scarf.
His jaw working against it.
The muffled, wet, helpless sound of a man who has something to say and has been ally denied the means of saying it.
Preet felt it.
She felt him hearing her.
And the warmth — the , humiliating, involuntary warmth of being witnessed — spiked through her lower body with the honest, indiscriminate force of a thing that did not care about context.
She hated herself for it.
