The Bestseller She Wrote (13 page)

‘I am sorry I upset you by saying your sex was cold,’ Shreya began. ‘It was your book. You are amazing.’

Aditya looked up. Shreya’s face was very close to his. ‘I know my sex is not cold. It could well be that I didn’t have the right inspiration while writing!’ he quipped.

‘Oh really!’ she said, setting her glass aside. ‘Sing for your supper! Seduce me!’ she responded.

‘I hoped you’d say put your money where your mouth is,’ he replied cheesily, and began to laugh.

She began to laugh too and dragged him down by his shirt, covering his mouth with hers. Their moans resonated in the room. ‘Kiss me baby,’ said Aditya, passion dripping from every word.

As he fell into her arms, kissing her hungrily, he didn’t notice her take something out of her clutch, and leaving it on the side table, a small red light blinking on the device.

She pulled back for a brief second, ‘You are indeed a damn good kisser. Fuck!’ she said.

‘It is the inspiration,’ he laughed again.

‘Tell me how you would make love to me,’ she said.

Like a dog in training, he immediately began, first by planting small kisses on her neck, then her collarbone.

‘Stop, stop, stop,’ she said. ‘Keep the commentary on. I like to listen.’

‘I will . . .’ he was breathing heavily.

‘You will . . .?’

‘I will kiss you on your neck, the side of your neck, down to your shoulders,’ and he paused, for he was licking his way to Shreya’s shoulder bones. ‘I will slide down your body, licking my way down to your breasts—your glorious mounds of flesh.’

‘Oh baby!’ Shreya moaned as Aditya slid down her body, reaching between her breasts. ‘Aah,’ she moaned, as he began to unbutton her shirt, slowly, one button at a time, stopping at the thin belt that held it in place. ‘Hold on, baby. Don’t remove my shirt. Slow.’

‘I want you naked in my bed,’ Aditya said as he ignored her protests, which were in any case cursory.

‘Go on then!’ she instructed impatiently.

‘Shush!’ he said and then let his lips linger on hers. ‘I will silence you with my kiss,’ he murmured as he smelled the vodka on her breath. Strangely it turned him on further. ‘For the first time vodka tastes so intoxicating,’ he whispered. She adjusted herself beneath him to give him leeway to manoeuvre himself.

‘Oh my gawddd,’ he exclaimed as he opened her shirt, discovering she wasn’t wearing a brassierie. ‘You are faster than I thought, my pussy cat,’ he exclaimed. ‘You just saved me the trouble of ripping off your bra.’ Glee spread across his face, like a little boy who had just been given candies to suck on. Without any delay, he bent down and took her right nipple in his mouth, wetting it and rolling his tongue gently in circles. ‘Go slow on my nipples baby, they are sensitive,’ Shreya’s voice was hoarse.

‘I can see that. Oh my god! he exclaimed. ‘Look at them. Ohhhh! How much I love them,’ he muttered as his tongue unleashed a fierce lapping on her right nipple as his hand mauled the left one.

‘Fuck!’ she exclaimed. ‘I have unleashed a monster.’

He lifted his head up and said, ‘You haven’t seen him yet!’ and grinned.

She giggled and began to ruffle his hair, and pushed him back down her body.

He obliged, immediately, leaving small kisses down her abdomen, and lifting her shirt over her hip, reached the edge of her panties.

She sucked in her breath loudly.

‘I love lace,’ he said and inserted a finger on either side of the panties. Just when he was ready to pull them down . . .

‘Stop!’ she said, ‘Aditya, stop!’ There was a firmness in her voice. She meant what she said.

‘Something wrong?’ he looked up with a start.

She was smiling, which perplexed him a bit, but she began pushing him back, and then proceeded to sit on him.

‘You are good!’ she said. ‘Your lips on my nipples felt like heaven, Aditya.’ He smiled back, and pulling her down kissed her hungrily. She gave in. She unbuttoned her shirt further, and pushing him down again, ran her nipple along his lips. ‘Oh my god. These are awesome. Your boobs are the best I have ever seen,’ Aditya panted.

‘How many have you seen, lover boy?’ she asked teasingly.

Aditya ignored the question and reached out with his right hand. His left went behind her and caressed her butt.

That was when Shreya stood up. ‘I want this badly, but we have to stop now,’ she said.

Aditya was aghast. ‘WHAT, Shreya?’

‘Yes, my darling. I wanted to show you that you can seduce a girl into doing what you want. And that if you think about it, you can write it like it is too! And if you still feel words fail you . . .’ She reached back to the device she had left on the side table, ‘Here! Replay the audio, and write it as it is,’ she said and gave him the small device, an audio recorder which was connected to her iPhone. ‘Connect it, download it to your iPhone and listen to it whenever you need inspiration to write a sex scene. If you write the way you make love, no one can beat you at erotica, Aditya. Not even EL James.’

There was a flood of emotion in him, going from surprise, to anger, to confusion, back to anger again, which she noticed.

She responded by taking his face in her hands. ‘Don’t be angry, Aditya, please don’t. Think of it as great foreplay. And you are a super seducer. I promise we will pick up where we left off!’ She stood up and began to button up her shirt. In no time she had worn her clothes and was out of the house. A stunned Aditya didn’t even have time to react.

She had only been out of the house for five minutes when she SMS’d him,

was all he could say.

His iPhone beeped in a few seconds. Shreya had messaged again.

He replied:

28

M
AYA CALLED SOON
after Shreya left. Aditya freaked out, thanking his stars that she hadn’t called when Shreya was around.

‘Everything okay?’ she asked him.

‘You mean except the fact that you are not here?’ Aditya flirted.

‘Shut up, I am sure you must be having a lot of fun with that girlfriend of yours,’ Maya joked. Aditya managed a chuckle. Aryan came on line. They coochie-cooed for a bit, and then hung up.

After taking a bottle of water from the refrigerator, he switched off the lights and was walking towards his bedroom, when he saw the neat spiral-bound copy of Shreya’s manuscript lying on the dining table and picked it up. It was a short manuscript. His estimate was that it would make a 175-page book, were it to be published in the form that it was in.

It was a story set against the backdrop of the Maoist insurgency. The story was about a girl from a small village in Chhattisgarh; a girl who at the age of twelve is raped by the village chieftain and then saved by an NGO worker. It was a tragic story, where the NGO worker’s wife eventually dies and he ends up marrying the same girl whom he saves. Very different from the thrillers that Aditya was used to writing, or reading.

*

Aditya was woken up by the incessant ringing of his doorbell.

Hurriedly Aditya got up and ran to the door. Sunaina and Shreya were standing there with a couple of bags in hand. Aditya looked around, just to make sure that none of the neighbours had heard the girls scream and jump in the corridor.

‘Breakfast!’ Shreya held up a bag, as she walked in. Sunaina just shrugged her shoulders. ‘I was just dragged by your friend. Don’t blame me for intruding.’

‘Not at all. You are a friend too,’ Aditya responded, though the conviction was missing. He excused himself and walked into his bedroom to freshen up.

When he came out, he walked up to them and sat down on the chair next to Shreya. Aditya opened the casserole and pulled out two
aloo paranthas
and served himself.

‘So?’ Shreya asked.

‘So?’ Aditya looked at her surprised, wondering what she meant.

‘So, how is it?’

‘The
aloo paranthas
are awesome!’

‘No, not
aloo paranthas
. The book . . .’

‘Aaah . . . I will tell you. Let me first finish my breakfast.’

‘Shut up and tell me now,’ she pulled Aditya’s plate from him, much to Sunaina’s amusement.

‘What makes you think I have read it?’ Aditya put up a facade.

‘Because you were “last seen” on your WhatsApp at 3.50 am, and there is no way you would be up for anything else for so long.’ Shreya was determined.

‘Okay, okay. You ask the questions, I will answer.’

‘How was it, damn it?’ she yelled.

‘I loved it,’ Aditya said, licking his fingers.

‘Really?’ Shreya’s hands went up to her face and cupped her cheeks. Her eyes glistened with tears of joy.

‘It’s a nice story, very emotional. I loved the way you have depicted the girl’s life—her thoughts, her fears, the trauma and finally the ecstasy when the NGO guy proposes marriage.’

‘Why then did the publishers reject my book?’

‘One did, right? Where did the plural come in from?’ Aditya corrected her. ‘We need to take it to other publishers, the bigger ones.’

‘YOU will take it to them. Not WE.’

‘Yes, fine. I will. Send me the soft copy and a brief bio of yourself.’

‘A biodata?’

‘Yes. Publishers love marketable authors. If an author is an MBA, or well qualified, foreign educated, young, well-networked, he or she finds many backers. This is because the publishers know that they will be able to sell a significant number of copies in the author’s own personal network.’

‘Sounds elementary when you hear it, yet nobody thinks of these things,’ Sunaina stepped into the conversation.

‘That’s why we have the biggest commercial fiction writer in India backing us,’ Shreya said, as Aditya’s chest swelled a few inches with pride. ‘I am just going to sit back and watch the famous Aditya Kapoor take me under his wings and make me fly high.’

Aditya smiled at both of them and said in a mock-serious tone, ‘Your dreams are mine now.’ Everyone started laughing.

On the way back, Sunaina again confronted Shreya. ‘He is completely besotted with you. Don’t lead him up the garden path.’

‘Not at all, Sunaina. What makes you think so?’

‘You guys fooled around?’ she asked abruptly.

‘What? Oh wow! That was pretty straight,’ Shreya was taken aback at the sudden question. ‘You want to know if we had sex?’

‘Yes, I do. So tell me?’

‘We flirt a bit, we kissed once but no sex yet.’

‘You kissed? Shreya, you kissed him?’ Sunaina was surprised.

‘Infact, he kissed me. In one of those weak moments I kissed him back too. What’s the big deal?’

‘No sex?’

‘Nope. Just a little petting.’

‘Why?’

‘What is this? An interrogation? An exposition of my sex life, Sunaina?’

‘Just felt like asking. Chill!’

‘I have a feeling that the day we have sex, the day we fuck, regret will kill him. He wants me, but feels guilty about our relationship. He is into me, but he is not out of his family. He wants the best of both worlds.’

29

S
HREYA CAME IN
late that morning.

‘How was the apartment? Any good?’ Aditya asked her. He knew that Sunaina and Shreya had gone to check out an apartment to rent.

‘It was kind of average. One of the bedrooms is small. Sunaina is fine with it. But rent is an issue.’

‘Rent?’

‘The
Indian Express
does not really pay her too much. So she will have a problem with the rent.’

‘Tell me,’ Aditya interrupted her, ‘why on earth did she join the
Indian Express
after an MBA from IIM Bengaluru? Do you want me to check out something for her here? In the bank?’

‘Can we talk about that later?’ Shreya said, irritated at Aditya’s sudden surge of interest in Sunaina.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Aditya smiled as he patted her on her back. ‘What were you saying?’

‘I told her that since she will be taking the smaller room, I will pay a larger portion of the rent. If we do that, it will work out for her.’

‘Great. So a big issue is settled for you.’

‘The biggest remains . . .’

Aditya looked at her with apprehension. He didn’t understand what she meant.

‘The book?’ Shreya rolled her eyes.

‘Oh yes,’ Aditya gave her a big smile. ‘Don’t fret over it. I will get it done. I am sending it out to publishers today.’

‘Thanks, Aditya. I owe you a big . . .’ The ring of Aditya’s phone cut short her commentary.

‘Someone here to meet you,’ the receptionist’s voice came on the line.