The thepla on Dev’s wooden board looked more like a cracked plate than a circle, and cumin already dotted the steel like spilled punctuation.
I kept my own dough moving because Harmony Residency’s picnic roster still had our two names on it, and I was not going to let a grown man ruin fifty more discs.
He had walked into the clubhouse kitchen at five, sleeves rolled, talking about a vendor call at seven. The other adult women on the committee had believed him too, which was why they had handed me the oil tin and gone upstairs to their serials.
In Surat the humidity clung to cotton and made the rolling pin slip whenever I paused.
Across India I had watched the same Sunday pattern: volunteers vanishing after the photogenic work, leaving whoever stayed last with the stove.
Dev chased a seed with two fingers that did not know the job. His phone sat face down beside the salt, dark and quiet, though the wall clock had already crawled past seven-forty.
Oil hissed on the tawa. I flipped my thepla, counted to eight, and did not look at him until the edge browned.
“Your vendor call was at seven,” I said. “Why are you still here?”
The Story About the Call Came Apart
He froze with the belan in the air, as if the wood had become evidence.
“The vendor postponed.”
“Your screen has not lit once. I have been standing here.”
Dev set the belan down. Flour marked his wrist like a poorly drawn watch. He was thirty-three, a neighbour from C-block, the man who always offered to carry water cans and never stayed for the dull work. Tonight he had stayed, and the excuse had a hole in it.
I was twenty-nine, an adult woman who had signed the picnic sheet because I hated leftover batter in the morning, not because I wanted company. Yet the kitchen had shrunk to the width of two boards and one quiet phone.
“I made the call up,” he said. “There was no vendor.”
The admission landed harder than the lie. Heat from the tawa pushed against my knees. I turned the flame down so the last thepla would not burn while we stood there being stupid.
“Then say the true thing.”
He wiped his hands on a towel that already had turmeric on it. “I wanted the kitchen to empty. I wanted you not to leave with the others.”
My pulse jumped in my throat, practical and unpretty. I had noticed his mouth in the lift for months and had done nothing because committee work was supposed to stay committee work. The roster had not asked for this. The dough had.
I stepped around the counter until the smell of ghee and his soap mixed. “If you wanted me, you could have said it without a fake timetable.”
“I know.” His voice dropped. “I still want you.”
That was the opening I used. I put my flour-dusted fingers on his jaw, felt the day’s stubble, and kissed him as if the picnic could wait on a steel plate. He kissed back at once, no startled freeze, hands finding my waist over the kurta.
When we broke for air I kept my forehead against his. “Yes. Here. Don’t talk about the picnic.”
He nodded, and we stopped pretending the belan mattered.
My mouth found his again, hungrier. His palm slid up my back, gathering cotton, and I bit his lower lip because the caution in me had already spent itself on the clock. The clubhouse door stayed as it was, half-shadowed, the compound noisy with distant scooters and a television from A-block. Nobody else was on the roster. That was enough risk to keep my blood loud and not enough to make me stop.
I pulled his t-shirt up. He lifted his arms, and the shirt landed on a dry stool, not in the dough. Bare chest, a thin line of hair, the heat of a man who had been standing too close to a stove. I dragged my nails down it just to watch his stomach tighten.
He tugged my kurta. I raised my arms and let it go. The palazzo stayed for a moment longer, then I pushed the cord and stepped out, leaving me in a plain beige bra and panties that had not been chosen for anyone’s eyes. His gaze did the choosing anyway.
“Ritika.” He said my name like a warning he did not mean.
I answered by guiding his hand to my breast over the bra, then under it. His thumb found the nipple already tight. I made a sound I would not have made in the lift. He unhooked the bra, and the straps slid, and his mouth followed, wet and intent, while my fingers worked his belt.
Jeans, then underwear. His cock was already thick, the head slick when I closed my fist around it. He hissed through his teeth and pressed his forehead to my shoulder as I stroked him, slow because the kitchen had no bed and I wanted him shaking before we used the only clean stretch of counter.
He lifted me onto the far edge, away from the boards. Cold steel met the backs of my thighs. I hooked my calves around him and pulled his mouth back to mine while he dragged my panties down and dropped them on the palazzo. His fingers slid between my legs and found me wet enough that the first stroke made my hips kick.
Two fingers, then a third, curling. I held his wrist and rode the motion, not polite about it. The tawa still ticked as it cooled. Somewhere a pressure cooker went off in another building, ordinary India continuing while I soaked his hand in a society kitchen.
“Inside,” I said, when the edge got too sharp.
He reached for his jeans, found his wallet, and tore a condom packet with his teeth because his other hand was still on my hip. Latex rolled down. I watched him do it and did not look away. When he was sheathed he paused at my entrance, the head pressing, waiting for my pull.
I pulled.
He pushed in on a long breath, filling me until my spine met the tiled splashback. The stretch made my mouth open on nothing. I locked my ankles and dragged him deeper, and he started to move, not gentle after the first three strokes, because I had already shown him I did not want gentle.
The counter edge bit my skin. I did not care. Each thrust shoved a small sound out of me that I swallowed against his neck. His hand braced beside my thigh, flour still ghosting his knuckles. The other hand found my clit and rubbed in tight circles that did not match his hips at first, then did, and my thighs started to shake.
I came like that, clenched around him, forehead jammed to his collarbone, the orgasm punching through the leftover smell of cumin. He held still through it, shaking, then drove again when I dragged him by the ass and told him not to stop.
He lasted maybe a dozen more strokes. His rhythm broke, his breath went ragged, and he buried himself and came into the condom with a groan he tried to keep inside his teeth. I felt the pulse of it, contained, and kept him there until his arms loosened.
He pulled out carefully. The condom stayed on until he tied it and dropped it in the lined bin under the sink, not on the floor, not in a storybook gesture, just a man who did not want the morning committee to find anything. I sat on the counter a few seconds longer, legs open, pulse slowing, then slid down onto cool tiles.
The Tray Left Before I Did
We dressed without ceremony. Bra, kurta, palazzo. His jeans, his t-shirt inside out until I turned it for him because I could not watch him walk into the compound looking freshly stupid.
The last theplas had gone leathery on the plate. I stacked the decent ones anyway. He washed his hands twice, then mine, the tap too loud in the quiet.
Nothing in the room had become tender. The roster was still a roster. What had changed was the way he would not meet the clock.
He lifted the steel tray of finished theplas, the one job he had actually come to fake. “Fridge in the passage.”
“Put it on the middle shelf. Label facing out.”
He nodded, tray against his chest like a shield, and went through the inner door. I heard the fridge suck shut. When he came back he did not cross the kitchen. He stopped at the threshold, looked at my mouth once, and left by the compound door without another excuse.
I turned the gas knob until it clicked dead, washed the belan, and stood in the doorway long enough to see him clear the gate light. Then I locked the clubhouse because that was still my name on the duty list, and I walked the other way, toward B-block, flour still faint in the lines of my palm.
More stories to read
Related Stories
More stories like thisCheating With My Friend’s Wife in a Chandigarh Society Basement
Rajat's wife kept Nikhil's chain on during society work in Chandigarh, and their cheating affair moved from the garland table to the inner store after a caretaker warned them about the electrician.Read story
More stories like thisTwo Lucknow Wives Swap Partners When Priya Halts the Exit
While Harish waited with the water glasses, Meera went with him, and Sameer stayed so the two wives could swap partners in the Tandon flat until Meera reached for the wrong cloth on the peg.Read story
