Don't know how this story will end

I had never seen her looking so beautiful or so sad ever before. In fact, she wasn’t beautiful, really — cute, yes, but she had told me never to call her that. She said that if I had to call her anything it would have to be beautiful, and since she wasn’t, I never did. I think it hurt her, but I didn’t want to lie to her. How did it matter anyway, when there was something about her that made me leave work early almost every day, take my Maruti (which I cleaned thoroughly everyday because otherwise she wouldn’t sit in it), give her a call to say I was outside her office, waiting with sandwiches and coffee. As she would come out as soon as I called (she never made me wait) she would look at me with a smile that never ceased to make me feel that I should tell I was madly in love with her right away. But I never did that, and that had made me lose her once, but hadn’t made me say it still, so I guessed I didn’t feel it strongly enough. And maybe because I never said it, she went away for a long time, married to a man who loved her more than me, or maybe a man who just said it without being cocky about it. But now she was back, and we had fallen into our old routine right away — lunches at our favourite Idli joint, coffee afterwards, and a game of chess, and then kissing feverishly later. But this time, she was different, and though she kissed me with passion when she did, she often gazed out of the window afterwards, avoiding talk or eye contact. And she never ever asked me to have the “talk”, never asked me where we stood, which was my luck I suppose, but it worried me that she never asked. I guess it had to do with the fact that the man who told her he loved her had died last year. And with him, died her expectations. And so now she was with me, without really being with me. I suppose I was talking like a woman right now, but I wanted her to say something to me, something that would make me feel she was into this.
“I am not going around kissing people and feeling them up in a smelly old car, if that’s what you want me to say. There is no one else I am doing this with,” she told me one day, when I had been all whiney and asked her if she even realized that she was with me. “No, I don’t want you to say that,” I said feebly.
“Then what do you want Gautam? Isn’t this what all men want? I don’t even mind it if you meet other women, just don’t tell me you tell them they are beautiful,” she had smiled, and I had taken her hand in mine and walked with her all over Lodhi Gardens, looking at the ancient structures sometimes, and sometimes at her uncombed hair, already showing traces of white. She didn’t look at anything, she just walked staring right ahead, her lips curled in half a smile, and once in a while she squeezed her hand around mine. We then sat under a tree, watching the love struck couples indulge in carnal sin all around us, behind bushes and on uncomfortable rot-iron benches. But we sat with a foot of space between us, when she suddenly said, ‘Do you love me?’
I must have stared at her a tad too much, because she then said, “why is that such a surprise…If you say yes, I won’t ask you to make an honest woman out of me. I just wanted to know if you capable of loving someone like me?”
Instead of answering her, I asked angrily, “capable of? What do you mean by that?
She started laughing, “you look funny when you angry. All I meant is that you have known me for so long now. You have seen me when I was dressed in a dowdy school skirt, with hair on my upper lip…and you have seen me naked, with my wobbly bits at your fingertips, you have seen me like a girl falling all over a man, and a girl who just doesn’t care anymore. After knowing me so intimately, can you love me?"
I didn’t know what to say. Was this is the time to tell her that somehow inexplicably, she had become the one woman I realized I hadn’t got, and that made her special. I had held her in my arms, yes, but I hadn’t got her. I had let that chance slip away long ago, and she now thought of me as incapable of loving her. I didn’t answer and but couldn’t stop looking at her.
And that’s when I saw her looking really sad, and for the first time, really beautiful. Maybe she needed to be sad to look beautiful. “You look beautiful today,”
“You mean that?”
“Yes, there is a sadness in your eyes that is making you look so incomparable.”
She stopped smiling and said, “Gautam, I think if you keep me unhappy for ever, I might just be as beautiful as Aphrodite herself.”
“But I want you to be happy,” I said lamely.
“Happy or beautiful? You choose.”
As we walked back to the car, our hands still touching, with an unspoken knowing look that said we were going to make love in my apartment later, I knew what I wanted her to be for now — I liked her when she was beautiful.
And beautiful she was, that night as I played with her hair, and she nibbled on my ears. She stood in the kitchen, making cheese omelets the morning after, and singing along with the her favourite, “I feel like a natural woman,” wiggling hips with the beat.
“So what’s the plan today?” I asked with an easy nonchalance, just so she didn’t think that whatever she did, I wanted to be included too. But I did, I wanted to spend another day with her. I wanted to see if I could answer her question, I wanted to test my feelings for her.
“Why do you ask? I checked your phone and saw that an old flame was in town. Aren’t you meeting her today?”
“You checked my phone?"
“Yes, what’s up with that? We are friends right?”
She suddenly looked mean to me, like a green monster covered in goo and with a tongue forking out — a monster who was pretending to be my friend and infringing on my life.
I got up and walked towards my room, “Yes I will be spening the day with the ‘ex flame’, and wewill be coming back here tonight, so be gone by then.” I screamed as I shut the front door.
I was really angry, and I was going too make her pay. I was going to go out, have a great time, and then ….i didn’t know what else, but I was going to make her pay.
The ex flame looked better than ever, but by the time the second beer was dwindling down my throat, she seemed less interesting. She laughed at the right times, cracked a few ood jokes herself, licked her lips seducatively and even offered to pay, but somehow it wasnt clicking. As we made out clumsily in the back of her big car, I found my thoughts going back to the laughing face that had told me that it had snooped through my phone.
One the games were over, I was graciously dropped home and somehow I managed to not invite the lady up, even though I knew my home was empty and the night was just young. The house seemed realy quiet, and I removed my shirt and got into bed without switching on the lights. Under the sheets, there was another body, she was still here.
“You back?”Yes”
“Good, now snuggle up and sleep. I had a long day,” she said as she kissed me lightly
She was here, when I had told her to leave, it was getting out of hand, but for tonight, it was fine.

The next few days were spent in a strange reverie — she was next to me, and I was her man. We shopped for fruits, made salads, laughed at people in the malls, ate greasy Punjabi food every night, and then hugged each other with a fervour that I hadn’t felt with anyone ever before. It almost felt like a relationship. I listened to the Snow Patrols singing a weird version of Beyonce’s Crazy in Love, but it struck a chord, her love was having me look crazy in love, and I couldn’t let it be like that. The balance of power had to be managed. At least for now, it seemed in control. I had a date today with another woman, and she had just nodded when I told her — no tantrums, no sulks — she had even laid out the table and spread new sheets on the bed. She had removed her kajal from my batroom cabinet, and her underwear from the clothing line outside. She did have a home somewhere in delhi, but I had never been there. But she was there tonight, and I strangely felt at ease. IT was my home after so long. I wined and dined my date, and the let her entertain me.

And just as I was falling asleep, my head in her hair, my phone beeped, “I miss you” her message read, don’t you miss me.” I slept without answering.

She came over around noon the next day with a bunch of daisies and dressed in a dress I hadn’t seen before. “I have realized something. I love you,” she said as if it was an epiphany that had just dawned on her. “and I am going to make you love me, I know I can, enough of this sleeping around pretending things are a okay, pretending I am just a friend I Love you and I know you are capable of loving me. Let’s move on, Help me move on Gautam. Only you can,” she was smiling, she looked happy, and hopeful, and it was sad at all, and she wasn’t beautiful at all.
And though all the days I spent with her whizzed past my eyes in that moment, I knew this was te right thing to do, “I am sorry,”I found myself saying. “You are great, you get me, you know what I need, you know I love the middle of the bed— not the right, not the left, but the middle, and whenever I see you squeezing yourself into a ball on one corner, so that I can be comfortable, I know I should love you. You know that I am incapable of sometimes looking for things that are right in front of my eyes, and you make sure you help me see them — be it a gesture, or my pj’s that I can never find. And every night when you hand me my plate full of all that I like seeing for dinner, I know I should love you. And I would have loved you, only that I can’t now, now that you have asked me to. Why did you have to go and spoil it all? Why do you even need to be in a relationship again? Isn’t one dead husband enough? You’re free now. Enjoy it.”
Her face lost the colour, and she was Aphrodite herself — beautiful beyond imagination. She walked upto me, and for a minute, I was sure I was going to get a shiner. But no, trust her to do what I never expect her to. She slowly kissed my nose, and then my lips, and whispered, “remember the feeling, because you will never feel it again.”