My hand left the frame. I did not tell it to. It simply came off the wood, the way a hand comes off a stove, and my weight went with it, heel first, the threshold passing under my foot into the dark of the front room — the table, the closed ledger, the shop in the morning, all of it waiting on the other side of one more step.

Behind me, the bed creaked.

Then a sound I had no name for. A wrist taken. Skin on skin, quick, and the sheet dragging, and the small catch of breath a woman makes when she is pulled up off her back before she has decided whether to go.

I stopped. My heel was in the front room. My toes were still on the bedroom floor. I stood in the doorway like a man in two houses and I did not turn around, because turning around would mean I had chosen, and I had just spent all night learning how much I hated that word.

Then the wet sound came. His mouth on hers. Not a kiss — a sound with weight in it, tongue and spit and the soft suction of a mouth that has already decided what it is taking. It reached me through the back of my head before it reached my ears. I knew that rhythm. I had heard it through the wall two hours ago, and I had heard it again with my hand on her belly, and I knew it the way a man knows the sound of his own front door.

I turned.

Abdul had her by the hair. His fist was closed in it at the back of her head, low, near the nape, and he had bent her head back until her throat was a long white line and her chin was up and her mouth was open because his mouth was on it. His other hand was flat on her lower back, holding her up against him, and she was on her knees on the ruined sheet with her sari hanging open down her front, one breast fallen out of the blouse and pressed against his forearm.

He kissed her the way he had fucked her. Same tempo. Slow at the start, then a long push, then a pause at the deepest point to let her feel how far in he was. His tongue went in and out of her mouth in that rhythm, and I watched a thread of his spit leave his tongue and run down over her lower lip and into the corner of her open mouth, and she swallowed it, and her throat moved around it, and she made a sound against his lips.

Not protest. I would have known protest. I have known her silence for seven years and I know the shape of her no. This was not a no. It was not a yes either. It was the sound a person makes in their sleep when they are being carried somewhere and have not yet woken up to ask where.

Abdul broke the kiss. He held her head back by the hair and looked down at her face, and he was breathing through his nose, and his beard was wet at the mouth.

"You chose both," he said. Low. Not asking. "I heard you. Both."

Her eyes were open. She was looking up at him past her own eyebrows because of how he held her head, and her lips were still parted, still wet with him, and she did not answer.

"Then let the other one watch what both means," Abdul said.

His hand left her back and slid down the front of her, over the soft fold of her belly, and he pushed. Not hard. Just enough. She went back off her knees onto the sheet, her elbows giving, her hair still in his fist so that her head did not touch the mattress until he let it, and he did not let it. He held her head a hand's width off the bed and looked at her throat and at her breasts fallen to either side of her ribs, and then he came down after her, onto the floor, onto the sheet, one knee between her open thighs, his shirt still on, his belt still buckled.

I had one foot in the front room. I did not move it.

Abdul put his mouth on her navel.

He did it slowly. He put his tongue flat at the top of it, just under the ridge where the sari had been lying all night, and he dragged it down through the hollow in one long wet stroke, all the way to the bottom, and I heard it — the soft wet sound of a tongue moving over skin that is already damp with something else. Then he did it again. Then he circled the rim of it with the point of his tongue, round and round, while she lay under him with her arms out and her hands opening and closing on nothing.

"Abdul—" she said.

"Hm." He did not lift his mouth. The sound went into her belly.

"Sandip is—"

"I know where he is." Abdul raised his head an inch and looked sideways, past her hip, at me, standing in the doorway. His eyes were calm. That was the thing about him I had never been able to hate properly, even when I wanted to. He was never in a hurry. He looked at me the way a man looks at a clock he owns. Then he put his mouth back down.

He bit her. Not a love bite, not a graze — he took the soft ridge of skin just above the hollow of her navel between his teeth and closed on it and held, and her whole body came off the sheet in a bow. Her hips bucked up against his chest and her heels dug into the mattress and her hands flew up and caught his shoulders and her fingers dug into the muscle there, hard enough that I saw the cloth pull.

She made a sound I had never heard her make. It came up out of her belly, not her throat. It was not a word. It was the noise a woman makes when something she has been holding down for years gets its teeth into her.

Abdul let go of the skin and licked the place he had bitten, flat-tongued, slow, soothing it, and then he moved lower — down the slope of her belly, into the wet at the top of her thighs, and I saw his beard go dark and glossy at the edges.

I should have walked out. I had been told to walk out. The front room was three steps behind me and the door was four past that and the stairwell was dark and cool and smelled of the neighbour's cooking, and my shop was a rickshaw ride away, and my name was on the sign, and none of that had changed. It was all still there. Abdul had said it himself: leave. He had said it in his own voice with the ledger in his hand and I had felt my foot begin to go.

And then he had put his hand on her wrist.

I watched her hips lift again, not into his mouth this time but away from the bite of his beard against the inside of her thigh, and I watched her settle back down, and I watched her hand leave his shoulder and slide up into her own hair, the other one still gripping him, and I understood something I did not want to understand: that she had not asked him to stop. Not once. Not in the kitchen, not at the table, not on this bed, not now. Seven years of a woman who would not tell me what she wanted, and here she was, wanting something out loud with her body, and the body was not lying.

"Bhabhi," Abdul said against her skin. The word was muffled. It sounded like a name and a joke at once, the way it always had when he said it at our table with a plate of fries between us. "Open."

She opened her thighs.

I saw the wet on her. From here, from the doorway, in the low lamplight — the shine of it on the inside of her thighs, the two of them, and the darker mark on the sheet under her where the first two loads had gone, and the way the ruined sheet had twisted up around her right knee so that one leg was caught in the fabric and the other was free. She had washed that sheet at the bucket on the back veranda every week for seven years. I had watched her do it from the window with a cup of tea in my hand.

Abdul put his mouth on her cunt.

She came off the sheet like a fish. Her whole back arched and her free heel skidded on the mattress and her hand in her own hair closed into a fist and her mouth came open and stayed open, and no sound came out of it at all for a long moment — and then it did, low and long, and it was his name, and it was not mine.

He worked her with his tongue and his lips and the flat of his jaw, and I heard every part of it — the wet suck and slide of it, the small breaks where he came up for air and she whimpered at the loss, the way he said shh into her and went back down. His hand came up her body and closed over her breast, the one that had fallen out of the blouse, and he squeezed it, and I watched her nipple stand up fat and dark between his knuckles.

"Look at him," Abdul said, lifting his head. His mouth was wet to the beard. "He is still standing in the door."

She turned her head on the sheet. Her hair was across her face and she pushed it away with the back of her wrist and she looked at me. Her eyes were half shut and her lips were swollen and there was a red mark coming up on the skin above her navel where his teeth had been. She looked at me for a long time. Longer than she had looked at me in years.

"Sandip," she said.

Just that. My name. The way she said it when we were first married and she still had hope for me.

I did not answer. I did not have an answer. My hand had found the frame again without my knowing, and my other foot was still on the bedroom side, and I stood there in the doorway of my own bedroom with one shoe in each of two lives, and I could not make the last step either way.

Abdul's hand went lower on her belly. Down past the mark of his teeth, down through the wet, and I watched his fingers spread her, and I knew what was coming next — I had watched him do it twice tonight, I knew the shape of it, the way he would settle his weight, the way he would look at me over her shoulder when he pushed in — and I had not seen it begin. Not yet. My heel was still in the dark of the front room. The fan turned overhead with its old wobble, the one I had never fixed, and the lamp threw my shadow across the wall and across the bed and across the two of them on the floor, and the shadow did not move, because I did not move, because my body had already chosen and my mind had not caught up to it, and Kamala's hips lifted once more under Abdul's hand and she made a sound that was not quite a word.