It was another one of those lavish weddings, one of many I had attended that year. A stage decorated with the rarest of flowers for the the bride and the groom to sit, exotic food prepared by the most famous maharaj-jis in town, the bride and groom, dressed in spectacular fashion, beaming at each other with sickening sentimental love.
I sat at the table, slowly downing my glass of wine, dressed in my fitted lehenga-choli which I purchased for this occasion alone and counted on my fingers how many times I had been bridesmaid and never had the opportunity to walk down as a bride.
Riya’s wedding, one. Tanvi’s, two. Shivangi’s, three. And now Neha’s, today. Four weddings. I laughed to myself, four weddings…and a funeral. Possibly my funeral. It will be that long until I get married, I reason to myself, I will have a funeral before an actual wedding.
All of my closest friends sit in pairs, grasping each other’s hands possessively or engaging in romantic discussions and being the envy of almost every person who is single. I look away, momentarily disgusted.
“Beautiful dress.” I hear an American accent close to my ear and I look round to see the best friend of the groom standing dressed in his stunning tuxedo, I had seen him at the ceremony and when he stood to give his speech, and was hypnotized by how handsome he was. I smiled politely.
“Thank you. I struck lucky this time.” I laughed. The American laughed back.
“You certainly did. I’m Ben.” He put his hand out for me to shake.
“Pleasure to meet you.” I say, almost seductively and manoeuvre my dress a little, hoping to expose a little more cleavage. Ben is devastatingly handsome, with blonde hair, hazel eyes and dimples.
“Miera.” I offer.
“Pleasure.” Ben sits down to take a seat next to me, rubbing at his stubble with his fingers. “So Miera, I’m getting quite bored. What do you say we have a good time together?” Ben says, confidentially, leaning into my neck and whispering so that I catch a glimpse of his intoxicatingly spicy aftershave. I was taken aback by his straight forward attitude and confidence but it attracted me all the more towards him.
“Sounds good to me. All I have done today is watch couples smooch over each other.” We both laugh as we eye the floods of couples, engrossed in each other. We make a face.
“What do you think of marriage?” I ask curiously. Ben rubs his stubble thoughtfully.
“I think it´s a difference of character. Do you prefer long boring partnerships or quick fire passion?” Ben arches his eyebrows at me playfully. I hesitate for a moment, biting my lip for added affect.
“Quick passion.” I answer definitively.
“Well, you´re beautiful, why wouldn’t anybody who looked at you not want to be passionate?” I smile, feigning modesty.
“Why thank you.”
“So here is what I think, let´s finish the wine and see what happens?” I nod and Ben motions for the waiter, who already looks like he wants to bail out the rest of the wedding, he slopes over to us, handing us fresh glasses of wine. We down them, little bubbles burning in our throat simultaneously and head for the dance floor.
Ben is great dancer, his mouth breathes onto my neck as we begin to grind together, pelvises touching, becoming more and more aroused. We notice that some of the other guests are staring at us, entranced and rather calling me names for hitting on a handsome young man.
“Room 302 now.” I whisper.
We part ways and pretend to be interested in meeting other people around. As I open the door of the room, I see Ben walking up the stairs. I wink at him and enter, leaving the door open.
Soon as he enters, we grab each other and begin kissing, brushing our lips together roughly and locking tongues.
I can smell Ben´s aftershave ticking my senses and I allow my inhibitions to evaporate as I undo his flies and take out his cock, stuffing it into my mouth, I work up and down as Ben groans, steadying himself against the wall of the room. I bring him deeper into my throat, watching Ben lose his mind as I take him deep, in and out until he´s ready to receive me.
With no time to remove our clothes, Ben hitches up my lehenga and wraps my legs round him, placing me against the wall, he enters me in one swift movement, and moves his pelvis into me hitting my G-spot in the most toe curling way. I moan loudly as he slams into me over and over, knocking my head against the wall.
I pull up the choli and expose my breasts and Ben takes my nipples in his teeth, biting them playfully which drives me wild. Ben grinds his pelvis and I feel the full force of his erection as we move together on the wall.
Just as Ben is about to come, he releases me from the wall and takes his cock across my lips, coming all over my face, spraying me with his hot semen so I can taste him on my tongue. He groans loudly as he explodes, grabbing my hair in passion. I am so consumed with passion too and want to orgasm so bad.
Ben turns me round so my ass and pussy is facing him and puts his face between my thighs, licking my clitoris over and over, sweeping me into a pre orgasmic stupor. I moan, hypnotised and allured. He puts his tongue inside my pussy and stimulates my clitoris guiding me down the path of a huge orgasm, I come for three blissful minutes and shake uncontrollably.
After we are done, we clean up and head outside, the air tasting all the more fresh and sweet in our lungs from our erotic exertion.
Some of our fellow guests spot us and we try and stroll nonchalantly to the salad bar, but the grins on our face cause a few of the engrossed couples to raise their eyebrows quizzically at us.
“What do you think, Miera?” Ben says, grabbing my elbows as we approach the dance floor. “Still into short hot passions?”
“As long as they keep coming.” I smile.
“I can certainly make sure of that.” Ben says back confidently, leading me to the dance floor.
The dance floor was a crush of silk and sweat and Bollywood remixes played at a volume that made conversation impossible and eye contact inevitable. The sangeet had been going for two hours, and the whisky was flowing with the generosity that only a Punjabi wedding budget allows. I had lost my dupatta somewhere near the bar, my heels were in my hand, and I was dancing barefoot on marble that still held the day’s warmth when I caught him watching me from the edge of the floor.
He was leaning against a pillar wrapped in marigold garlands, his sherwani unbuttoned at the collar, a glass of something amber in his hand. He wasn’t dancing. He was doing something far more dangerous — he was paying attention. In a room full of people performing joy, he was simply watching, and the weight of his gaze landed on me like a hand on the small of my back.
I looked away first. Then I looked back. He was still watching, and now there was the ghost of a smile on his face — not smug, not predatory, just the quiet acknowledgment of a shared frequency. The DJ switched to a slower track, something by Arijit Singh that turned the dance floor into a sea of couples swaying against each other, and suddenly there was space between the bodies, and he was walking toward me.
“You dance like you don’t care who’s watching,” he said, close enough that I could smell sandalwood and single malt.
“I don’t.”
“I know. That’s why I was watching.”
We danced. His hand found the curve of my waist through the chiffon of my sari, and every point of contact sent a current through me that the whisky couldn’t explain. The music wrapped around us like a cocoon, and I was aware, with a sharpness that cut through the haze of the evening, that this was one of those moments you recognise as significant while it’s still happening.
Sneaking away from an Indian wedding requires the stealth of a cat burglar and the alibi of a diplomat. I told my cousin I had a headache. He told his mother he needed air. We slipped through a service corridor that smelled of biryani and industrial detergent, past the caterers loading steel trays, past a bored security guard scrolling through his phone, and emerged onto a terrace overlooking the venue’s gardens where the fairy lights had been strung between neem trees like a constellation brought down to earth.
The noise of the wedding was muffled here — bass notes and laughter filtering through the walls like a heartbeat heard through a stethoscope. We were alone for the first time, and the silence between us was charged with the particular electricity that builds when two people have been orbiting each other all evening and have finally escaped the gravitational pull of social obligation.
“We should go back,” I said, not meaning it.
“We should,” he agreed, stepping closer. His fingers traced the edge of my sari where it draped over my shoulder, following the embroidered border with a concentration that suggested he was reading it like braille. “In a few minutes.”
A few minutes stretched into something longer and more reckless. The terrace was dark enough for courage and bright enough to see the way his eyes moved over my face before he kissed me — slowly, deliberately, as though he had all the time in the world and intended to use every second of it. I tasted whisky and cardamom on his tongue, and the wedding carried on without us, a joyful machine that neither noticed nor needed our absence.
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