“If you walk out now, don’t come back with another speech about my hours,” Sana said.
I kept my hand on the metal handle of her consultation room door. She still wore the white coat over a dark green salwar kameez, the stethoscope dropped on the desk like a thing she had already finished using.
“You missed my mother’s seventieth,” I said. “You sent a voice note from this same room. In India a family still notices when the doctor’s chair is empty at a function, Sana. They asked me if you were real.”
She laughed once, not kindly. “You lecture me as if every doctor in India can close at six and still call it care. I had a man with chest pain. I am not going to apologize for keeping him until the ambulance took him.”
The waiting area beyond her door was already dark. Staff had gone. Coimbatore traffic still muttered faintly past the shuttered front, but inside the clinic the only sound was the ceiling fan and our unfinished fight.
“I am not asking you to apologize for a patient,” I said. “I am asking you to stop treating me like an appointment you can bump.”
“Then go.” She pointed at the door with two fingers, clipped, the same way she dismissed a bad report. “If this is how little my work means, Rohan, don’t wait in my clinic like a man who still wants an answer.”
My palm tightened on the handle. I had driven across the city after the function because I was tired of explaining her to relatives who thought a physician in private practice could simply leave. The quarrel had started on the phone and had not ended. Leaving would have been clean. Staying would not.
I let the handle go.
Choose the Door or Me
Sana watched the door stay shut and did not look triumphant. She looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with the last case. The coat hung open. A thin gold chain sat at her throat. She was thirty-two, and I had known her long enough to stop pretending this was only about one missed party.
“You stayed,” she said.
“I stayed because you asked me not to come back with another speech. I am not giving you a speech.”
She came around the desk. Her sandals made a small sound on the tile. When she stopped, she was close enough that I could smell antiseptic soap and the coconut oil she still put in her hair after a long day.
“If you stay, I want you,” she said. “Not as a lecture. Not as a man collecting dues because I missed a cake. If that is not what you want, the door is still there.”
I put my mouth on hers before I could dress it up. She kissed back hard, teeth catching my lower lip, one hand fisting the front of my shirt. There was no slow circling of the room. We stayed where the argument had left us, between the desk and the door.
Her coat slid off one shoulder when I pushed it. She shrugged the other side free and let the white cloth drop over the back of her chair. Under it the kameez had a row of hooks. I opened them while she pulled my shirt from my trousers. The fan kept turning. Neither of us reached for the light switch. The desk lamp was enough.
“Don’t be gentle because you are angry,” she said against my mouth.
“I am not being gentle.”
I backed her to the examination couch she used for patients who needed to lie down. The paper sheet whispered when she sat, then lay back on her elbows. I drew the salwar down her hips. She lifted to help, practical even then, and kicked the cloth toward her sandals. Her panties were plain cotton. I hooked them aside rather than wasting time on a ceremony.
She was already wet when I slid two fingers along her. Sana made a sound she would never have made with a stethoscope in her ears. Her knees opened. I kissed the inside of one thigh because I wanted the taste of her skin, not because I was stalling.
“Rohan.” My name came out short. “If you are going to put your mouth on me, do it. I have wanted that since you walked in with that face.”
I did. I held her thighs and licked her until her hips tried to follow my tongue. She was not quiet. The clinic walls were thick, but she still bit the side of her hand when I sucked her clit. Her other hand stayed in my hair, not shoving, just keeping me where she needed me.
When her thighs shook, I did not stop at once. I stayed with her through it, slower, until she tugged my hair hard enough to mean enough. I wiped my mouth on the inside of my wrist and stood. My trousers were still on. She sat up, breathing through her nose, and opened my belt herself.
“Wallet,” I said.
She knew what I meant. I took a condom out, tore it, and rolled it on while she watched with that same assessing look she used on a chart. Then she pulled me in by the hips.
I pushed into her in one steady line. She was tight from the climax and still wanting. Her mouth opened on a breath. I held still only long enough to feel her adjust, then I started to fuck her the way the fight had promised, deep and unpretty, the couch complaining under us.
“Harder,” she said. “You came here furious. Use it.”
I hooked her knees higher. The kameez was bunched under her breasts. I shoved the fabric up and put my mouth on one nipple while I thrust. She arched. The gold chain slid. Each time I bottomed out she made a low noise that had nothing left of the clipped doctor in it.
Sweat collected at my hairline. Her nails found my back through the shirt I had never fully removed. The desk lamp threw a hard oval of light across her stomach. Outside, a scooter went past and faded. We did not pause for it.
She pulled my hair so I had to look at her. “I missed the function. I will miss others. That is the work. This is not payment for it.”
“I know,” I said, and drove into her again because talking had already failed us once tonight.
Her second climax took her with less warning. She clenched around the condom and dragged me with her. I came with my face in her neck, hips stuttering, the anger finally used up in muscle instead of sentences. We stayed locked like that for a few breaths, the fan still ticking overhead.
Nothing Professional Left
When I pulled out, I held the condom in place until I could tie it. She sat up slowly, kameez still rucked, salwar on the floor, hair coming loose from the clip she used on clinic days. For a moment she looked like any woman who had just been fucked, not like the physician who had argued me down from the door.
I dropped the condom in the bin she used for clinical waste and washed my hands at the small sink. The soap smelled like the rest of the room. She watched me from the couch and did not cover herself at once.
“You are still angry,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Good. I would not have believed a sweet version of you tonight.”
She stood, found her panties, and stepped into them. The salwar followed. Hooks on the kameez closed one by one under her fingers, quicker than I had opened them. The white coat went back on last, as if the cloth could put the evening back into order. It did not. Her mouth was still swollen. A red mark sat at the side of her throat where my teeth had been careless.
I tucked my shirt in. The belt buckle clicked. My legs felt used. The fight about the seventieth had not been solved by any of it. We both knew that. What had changed was smaller and more stubborn: I had not left when she told me to, and she had not pretended she only wanted an apology.
“My mother will ask again whether you exist,” I said.
Sana smoothed the coat. “Tell her the doctor in Coimbatore exists. Tell her I work. Do not tell her I kept you on the examination couch.”
“I was not going to.”
She almost smiled. It did not last. “You can still walk out. I am not holding the handle.”
The door was where I had left it. The handle was cool again. Staying longer would have turned into another round of the same quarrel with softer voices, and I did not want that. The sex had been specific. The rest was still a mess about time, family, and how a clinic in this city ate evenings.
I picked my phone up from the desk where I had slammed it at the start of the argument. The screen showed missed calls from a cousin who wanted a ride back from the function. I did not answer them in front of her.
“I am going,” I said.
“I heard you.”
She did not ask me to wait. She did not offer tea from the kettle in the staff corner. That restraint was the most honest thing she had done besides pulling me in by the hips.
The Street Took Me
I opened the consultation room door. The dark waiting area smelled of floor cleaner and old magazines. Plastic chairs sat in two rows, empty. Her nameboard on the inner wall still read Dr. Sana Krishnan, MBBS, in English and Tamil.
She stayed by the desk. The lamp made a small island of her. I did not cross back to kiss her forehead or make the exit tender. We had already used tenderness as a kind of hunger, and I was empty of it.
The outer latch of the clinic gave under my thumb. Night air from the Coimbatore street came in, warmer than the fan, carrying fried oil from a stall that had no business still being open. I stepped through and let the door fall shut behind me without checking whether she watched.
On the pavement I did not look up at the first-floor window of the neighboring shop. I walked toward where I had parked, shirt stuck to my back, the taste of her still in my mouth. The fight would keep. So would the fact that I had stayed when she told me to choose.
An auto-rickshaw rattled past and did not stop. I kept walking.
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