His Last Diwali
A Latina Stranger. An Indian Widower. Twelve Days.
— A Slow-Burn Interracial Age-Gap Erotic Novella
Twelve days to take a house apart. Eleven of them before he touches her.
A slow burn that takes its time and means it. Explicit when it gets there, and it gets there late. Grief on the page, a dead wife who is never once a rival, unprotected sex, one rough night that both of them ask for out loud, and an ending that opens a door instead of closing it. Not a romance. Nobody gets married.
Camila Carrizo is twenty-eight, American, and buys the best parts of old buildings from families who are losing them — carved doors, painted windows, a staircase taken apart and numbered piece by piece. This time it is a hundred-and-fifty-year-old haveli in Rajasthan. Forty-one items. One signature.
Dev Poddar is forty-two, a widower, heavy through the shoulders, with lime worked into the creases of his hands. He is selling her everything in the house his mother lit every Diwali for forty-one years. He hands her a glass of water before she knows she is thirsty. He folds her number into his shirt pocket without reading it. He asks her for nothing at all.
For a woman who has never once been given anything without finding out what it cost her, it is the most dangerous thing a man has ever done.
Then the marigolds start arriving by the cartload. Everything in that house is going into a crate except the festival — and before the four hundred lamps go up there has been a pan of warm oil, a folded blanket on the stone outside her door, a green saree that does not fit her at all, and one night when nobody on earth could have heard anything over the crackers.
Interracial · Latina heroine, Indian hero · Age gap, 28 and 42 · Widower hero · Slow burn · Diwali festival setting · Forced proximity · American woman in India · Unprotected sex · Explicit · Standalone novella, open ending
Adults only, 18+.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Camila Carrizo has twelve days to strip a painted haveli in Rajasthan and ship it. Devraj Poddar, the widower selling it, has just unlocked his dead wife’s almirah and given her what was in it.
She went up to the room to find out what she had just taken. She had never in eight years owned a thing she could not price. You learn an object with your hands.
So she took the green one out of its bag and put it on.
The blouse was two sizes down across the back; she got three hooks of five and left it. Then she stood in front of six yards of heavy silk with no idea where it started.
So she did it the way she did everything, by taking it apart. Tuck. Pleat the pleats. Tuck the pleats. The rest over the shoulder. She got it wrong twice and most of the way right on the third go, and threw the pallu over her left shoulder and did not pin it because there was no pin.
It still looked wrong, and it took her a second look to see why: there was nothing on her arms. Eight glass bangles onto one wrist and seven onto the other, because the eighth would not go over her hand. Then she sat down on the floor and did up the anklets.
In the long glass inside the almirah door, a woman looked back at her wearing green silk that sat too high, her own tanned shoulders coming out of a blouse that would not do up, dust in her hair and eight dollars of glass on one wrist.
She did not look like Meera Poddar. She was never going to. She stood in front of the glass and waited for that to be a relief, and it was not.
She went to find him before she could think about it.
He was in the courtyard with a bucket of lime wash and a brush on a pole, and what made him turn around with the brush still up was the sound of the anklets coming across the stone.
The brush came out of his hand. It hit the flags and the lime went across the stone in a white fan.
“Meer—”
He stopped. The first syllable was out. The second one was coming and he caught it, physically, she watched him catch it, his jaw closing on the word like a hand closing on something falling.
He stood absolutely still in the middle of his own courtyard with his hands shaking at his sides.
“Cam,” she said.
She watched his eyes come back from wherever they had been, three years and nine steps away, and arrive at her face. They found her height and her shoulders, the sunburn across her nose, the chipped front tooth. Nothing of anybody else’s in any of it.
She watched what happened to his face then, which was not recognition. It was a man setting something down.
“It does not fit you at all,” he said.
“No.”
“Good.”
“Help me with it,” she said. “I’ve got the pleats wrong and I know I’ve got the pleats wrong.”
He came across the courtyard wiping his hands on his trousers, twice, which was not about his hands.
He was no good at all. He went down on one knee in front of her and reached for the tuck at her waist and could not find it. She had to take his wrist and move it six inches to the left. His hands were shaking so hard she could feel it through six yards of silk. He got two pleats, and lost them, and started again.
She looked down at the top of his head, then she moved her head to look past it.
He was hard. He was on one knee in front of her with six yards of his wife’s green silk in his fists. He was not going to be able to do this, and he was going to keep trying until she stopped him.
“Dev.”
“Almost got it. Give me a minute.”
“Dev. Take it off me.”
He went very still.
“All of it,” she said.
Continue the story in His Last Diwali.
A little more spice — on me — for my lovers
This part is for my lovers only.
Sign up, sweetheart — it’s free, and I don’t bite. Unless asked 😉
All images are AI generated and do not depict any real person.