Read The First Time (Love in No Time #1) for Free Online

now, Ms. Sharma? And please don’t say anything as stupid as ‘I don’t know.’ You know and I need the truth right now.”
    He stops, breathes hard into the phone as if he has just run a hundred meter dash through his office space. Of course, I have no words or sound. I try to formulate words that would not sound stupid or worse, inane. But I can’t. He has in fact rendered me stupid with his spiel. So I just wait for something to spark in my brain. He waits too. No, I don’t think of anything after maybe five minutes of being silent on the phone.
    So I just say, rather stupidly, “Sir, please . . ..”
    He immediately cuts me off and asks, “Please what, Ms. Sharma? Please come back and reacquaint your bum with my hands? Please come back and hold your pretty hands as you come into your pretty panties? Yes, Ms. Sharma I know what that squirming is all about. My hands can do things to you that you only read in your Mills and Boons romance books. My hands are at your beck and call, honey. They are yours, if you’ll have them. I can come to you right now and we can broker a deal between my hands and your bum. I look forward to that—very much so.”
    I drop the phone in its cradle. I cannot bear to hear anymore. I am moist everywhere. I know the veins around my vagina are beginning their strange throb and I am at the verge of exploding without much ado.
    Goddamn! I hate this man, I say to myself.
    But I know it's a lie.
    Yet the question is: What has gotten into this man?
    Since when did he become Mr. Sexy Verbosity? After all those weeks of remaining relatively uninterested, why is he suddenly unleashing on me? Is he testing me—to see whether the gauntlet he is throwing down is the exact response to the gauntlet I seemingly have thrown down at him since the first time I sat behind his scooter? Or is he trying to scare me away with all this sexpertise? Is he telling me that he knows what I am doing and that I better know what I am doing because he is up for a challenge?
    My head is beginning to hurt. This was meant to be easy or did someone fool the heck out of me?
    I decide to go home, blacken my windows, throw together the darkest curtains in my room, take a nap and get rid of this pain everywhere.

Chapter Seven
     
    The phone is ringing, again! My life and phones—it is becoming a rather sordid story. I am slow to open my eyes. Its dark. As I come to, I realize that I am waking up from a nap that instead of being short has become a rather long one. Its close to 7:00 p.m.
    I have napped into dusk, my least favorite time of the day. Dusk is depressing, especially if you nap like me. It is that time of the day which is neither here nor there. It’s neither day nor night. You really cannot do anything substantive in terms of work or even entertaining yourself before night falls and when the night falls sleep is nowhere to be had. So you are up for an incredibly long night of reading, wondering, tossing, and turning your mind inside out over silly one-sided phone conversations. So life is stuck between an in-between time while reality slips into the surreal.
    I don’t hear the phone anymore. Maybe I imagined it? Maybe. I struggle to get up. I need to splash some water on my face and get some work done. I was so behind. And his phone call had only added to my backlog. I needed to write that lesson on the tree-hugging movement. I am a native speaker of Hindi but that doesn’t make me competent enough to translate an English text into Hindi. There is an etiquette to translation that in order to be followed requires a knowledge of the compatibility/ incompatibility of grammars and in this case between Hindi and English. I know the grammars but never before had the issue of their incompatibility or compatibility become important. And until now I had not understood the hierarchies of language that directly fed into class, caste, and gender hierarchies in this former colony.
    Like a true colonial progeny, my personal