Shape of the Sun

A nursery design

Manmeet flexed her arms for what was the umpteenth time. They hurt, working through colored pages.

Who said raising a baby was easy? Look how hard the search for nursery designs was.

Her body needed some respite.

She reached for her phone on the table and navigated to her gallery, swiping her screen until she got to the picture that she wanted to see. It was the one that always made her smile.

And she did here too, her features illuminated by a certain glow that she could quite name the cause.

In the picture, she and Rajkumar stood beside the nursery designer, arms linked. She had come out crappy, talking to the assistant at the time but Rajkumar had come out just right, a gentle smile on that handsome face. Manmeet remembered that it had taken a bit of wheedling on her part to get him in it to which he still insisted on having the flash turned off.

Yet, he came out best. There was something about her lover that stood him out from the crowd. The layered art piece that she never got enough of, her sweetness everything, every day. Her fiancee, Manmeet recalled her bold proposal under a working shower and the tenderness after.

There was nothing about Rajkumar Reddy that didn't fit into the puzzle called herself, perhaps just like the way she fit into his arms like that was where she was meant to be. Manmeet fit into his arms every time. She felt they were so perfect together except for one thing. It was ugly and had no place in their puzzle.

"What's my honey thinking of?"

Rajkumar had come out from the bedroom when she was still hyper-focused on the picture, and made himself comfortable, arms around her meeting at the center, just atop her raised belly. It was seven months now, a bursting forth of their newfound joy. She slightly turned her face allowing him to press a soft kiss on her right cheek. He smiled, his lips ticklish against her skin.

"What's my honey thinking...hmm? What do we have here?"

The amusement in his voice was telling and she knew why, her gallery was still open. Manmeet withdrew a bit so that they faced each other. There was a lazy look in her eyes, Rajkumar shivered just looking at the veiled seduction in there. This woman held every part of his soul to the hellish depths, an extension of the malice within. Her grip made him severely scold Anisha in his heart for being so useless. Her number was switched off and calling her doctor had informed him that she'd run away from the hospital, a few weeks after her procedure, and he wondered how someone could be so stupid and annoying all at once.

He needed to get her to sign those papers so that he could be free in the ways that he wanted with the one that he wanted. All Rajkumar wanted was this woman before him and the life inside her and the life she represented to him.

"Damn."

"What's the matter?"

"I want to hold you a bit longer."

"Why can't you?"

"No can do. I have some work to do."

He pressed a kiss to her hair, inhaled the scent of that mask that she used and that he loved so much. Rajkumar struggled with his approval of it every day.

It was at that moment that his phone rang, a distinct tone from the usual. It was brand new, his old one messed up, a careless owner allowing it to drench under a working shower in exchange for a kiss. But it wasn't all bad.

He had gotten proposed to. And even better, he'd finally gotten rid of that damned casing that was a gift from she-who-shall-not-be-named. Anisha was beginning to feel like a swear word on a constant.