I am twenty-six and have been running The Sitter for two and a half years. A wife goes away; I go in, cooks, I run the house, I keep the husband company. Cooking, housekeeping and the company are on the invoice. Nothing else, ever, because if anything else were to happen, it is my choice. The moment it is on an invoice, I have to do it. And I do not provide that kind of service.

The booking came from a Nairobi number — Wanjiru, whose husband Marcus was coming to Shimla for a fortnight on a mountain railway handover. I took it because a country code that far away meant nobody in this town would talk.

He had been in the flat three days and had said almost nothing. There were looks exchanged and the pressure was building. Something had to give.

***

I had Thursday to myself and I spent it walking. I got back at four and started making bread.

He was home by six.

I was on day five of a fortnight and had stopped dressing like staff somewhere around the Wednesday. Not a decision. I had run out of clean kurtas, put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts to do the laundry in, and then never quite got round to changing back, and he had noticed the day I did and said nothing whatsoever about it, which is how that man deals with everything.

So I was at that counter with my hair loose in a pony, and flour to the wrists and more of it down the front of me than the bread was ever going to need.

I heard the door and thought nothing of it until he appeared in the doorway and stopped.

He looked at me the way he looks at things. Completely and without hurrying.

Then his eyes went down and stayed somewhere they had not stayed before. I looked down and understood why. There was a broad pale smear of flour across my chest, low, where I had leaned into the counter, and it had gone into the cotton and in the valley between my breasts.

I did not brush it off.

I looked back at him instead and let him finish.

“Riya.”

“Yes,” I said. Not a question.

A lock of hair had came down across my face and I put it back with the back of my wrist. I did not think anything of it and didn’t realize what the flour at the back of my hand would do.

He crossed the kitchen. He put his thumb on my forehead, at the hairline, and wiped the flour off it. Slowly. With his eyes on what he was doing and not on me.

Then he took my right hand out of the dough, held it up between us and looked at it for a moment. And then he put my first two fingers in his mouth and cleaned them with his tongue, one and then the other, all the way down to the knuckle, without breaking eye contact once.

The noise I made in that kitchen was not decorous. He mumbled into my finger.

“You have been doing that since Monday,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Waiting.”

“Yes,” said Marcus.

I got my left hand up and put it flat on his chest and left a whole white print on him, deliberately, the way a child does.

He looked down at it. Then back at me. And then he waited, because he had worked out that something was coming.

So I got a fistful of flour off the counter and drew a line down his throat with it. He stood absolutely still and let me do it. I looked down. A part of him had refused to stay still.

I got his shirt open two buttons and put my mouth on the line and licked it off him, and he said something in Swahili above my head with nothing organised about it at all.

Then he got a hand into my hair, pulled my head back and kissed me properly, and there was flour in that too, on both our mouths, and neither of us cared.

I kissed him back with both hands flat on his chest and he made a low sound in his throat. We stood in that kitchen for a long moment doing nothing else at all.

It was enough, and then it was not.

I took his hand and led him to my room, which had a lock on the door, and I did not lock it, and I noticed myself not locking it.

Continue the story in The Husband Sitter – Part 4: The Growth.

All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.