Hi. Thanks for dropping by, dear reader.
(Note - there is not much actual sex in this chapter. I tried to work it in, but now it looks like chapter 3 will be a setup chapter with only some explicit content. But! I'm working on a spicy scene for chapter 4 which I hope will be to everyone's satisfaction)
This is chapter 3 of my series - 'Forgetting Trisha in Bangalore'. To recap what's happened so far, our main character, Arun, is trying to forget his ex, Trisha. Arun and Trisha had been in a long-term relationship for four years until Trisha left him to fulfil her parents' wishes.
So, how does our guy overcome his loneliness and regrets? Well, for starters, he goes ahead and loses his virginity to a mysterious prostitute. After shacking up with the prostitute a couple of times, Arun heads off to his day job.
But all is not well there either. His senior colleague, Raj, isn't happy that their newbie, Twinkle, was assigned to Arun. And neither is Twinkle too pleased about it as well. What happens next?
A point to note is that some of the things in this series actually happened. Whether it was the part where our main character worked a terrible IT job in Bangalore or the part where he had raw, unprotected sex with a hooker with a backstory, I leave it up to you to decide for yourselves.
All I can say is, my wonderful wife and I met around the time of these events, and a large part of our sex life till date is still influenced by what happened then.
It might be hard to follow the plot if you start right here, so I'd suggest looking into my profile and reading chapter 1 and 2 to get upto speed.
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'
Heyyyyy
' The WhatsApp message from the hooker read. '
Got a minute? <insert wink emoji>
'
Arun - taking care this time to not tap on the notification by accident - carefully pulled on the message to read the contents without opening it. Twinkle shot him an annoyed glare from the seat beside him, and sniffed. Arun merely Ignored her, and continued to peer into his phone.
She wasn't exactly wrong to disapprove though. They were sitting in the conference room on the tenth floor of their office building, where a project review meeting was currently underway. Ishita and the rest of their team were present, as were leaders from other teams, and senior executives who had apparently taken the shape of the letter 'C' from C-suite a little too inspirationally, given their waistlines.
Luckily, there were also steaming cups of coffee (the good stuff, not the crap they served in the cafeteria) and biscuits.
And anyhow, Arun's team had already finished up with their part of the proceedings. He had presented his report on testing, which had gone over the heads of the suits and under the radar of the marketing people. Still, he had tried to make something out of it by mentioning the help he'd gotten from Raj and Twinkle. It didn't seem like a bad idea to buy some cheap goodwill from the two people who were very obviously unhappy with their current arrangements.
Despite his efforts, however, Raj had responded with a stony expression. It looked like he was still smarting over Ishita's decision to assign the cute new employee to Arun instead of him. Twinkle herself, on the other hand, had merely gazed at her fingernails, as if the answers to life's mysteries were written there.
'Like they had a right to be unhappy, after the crap they pulled' Arun thought grumpily, as he considered a reply to the hooker.
For almost the entirety of the past five days, Twinkle had been complaining to anyone who would listen. Most of it was a repetition of what she had initially told Ishita - that Arun had lesser experience, he didn't have a lot of chest hair (okay, that was a joke) and he wasn't higher on the ladder. Evidently, she'd read one too many of those Billionaire CEO novels and thought that it was a rule for pretty young girls to be directly assigned to daddy big bucks.
So, he didn't begrudge her too much for grumbling over their state of affairs. He had just tried to teach her the basics of their project and the underlying code. Besides that, he had given her a rundown of the office like telling her which of their co-workers she ought to avoid, which were the gossips, which blends of tea from the pantry worked best with the code they were trying to write (black for fresh code, green for testing was his personal choice).
But then, she had to go and piss him off by insinuating that he was trying to hit on her.
Sure, Twinkle was an attractive girl. She had a pretty face, nice shoulder-length hair, and a short, feminine body that was well-camouflaged under the plain
kurtis
that she insisted on wearing every day. But she was definitely not worth the risk of courting unemployment.
Now, the collective IQ of their office was not going to break any records, not even on those fake online IQ tests. But even Arun's coworkers knew that it was Raj who was trying to spread the rumour through Twinkle that Arun was secretly a creep. So, with a lot more proactiveness than S&P just before the 2008 financial crisis, the gossip connoisseurs of the office gave it a D- rating (needs to be seen to be believed) and discarded it.
Still, even a whiff of this kind of talk was risky business. Especially when HR was constantly watching with one eye on the payroll budget. Not to mention the theatrics that Arun was forcibly subjected to when Raj would "swoop in" from time to time to loudly proclaim that he would personally ensure that nobody with "ill-intentions" would harm Twinkle.
Arun remembered thinking at that time that it was big talk for a walking harassment timebomb.
Well, Whatever. He was done with his presentation. Nobody would care that he was on his phone so long as his ringtone wasn't something obnoxious like Drake. He started working on a reply to the hooker just as one of the MBA interns played out a SWOT presentation that somehow involved a quote from Oprah.
'
Yes. I'm free right now'
He wrote.
'Now, to wait for her to text back,' he thought in satisfaction.
It wasn't exactly a coy response, but he didn't want to give away too much of his eagerness to meet her again. Their last encounter had fanned the flames of certain feelings that Arun thought he had buried. Feelings like 'Why Trisha, why' and 'I don't think I like the dark void of loneliness anymore'. Those kinds of feelings tended to feed into desperation.
For a hooker, however mysterious and friendly she might be, desperation was like a neon light on a guy's forehead that said 'I'm a sucker for giving my money away.' Arun wasn't that dumb just yet.
But he was hormonally challenged enough that he had allowed himself to get angry at the prostitute for not replying to him sooner.
Yes, he knew that even Hallmark movies had more original scripts than the whole 'guy develops feelings for the hooker and they save Christmas' (Diwali in India, perhaps?). And logically, Arun understood that he was just a client to the hooker. There was also not a doubt in his mind that since their night together, she would have been fucked by more people than the fans of the Royal Challenger's Bangalore Cricket Team.
Still, he was unable to keep his brain from becoming acutely aware that more than ten days had passed since he had fucked her tits and cummed in her pussy in a shady room at the Hotel Grande De La Grand. He was also unable to stop his brain from reminding him, just as he was trying to fall asleep every night, that she had promised to get in touch with him when she was ready for another session.
But, there had only been total radio silence so far. Until now.
The first couple of days had been fine - he had floated in the vivid memories of their night together. All he had to do was close his eyes and she would appear. Her black hair would be untied, falling over and below her shoulders in delicious curls. She'd bat her eyes coquettishly, begging for him to gently yank her close to him by her hair. Her slim, soft body would sway for him as she ran her hands over his chest.
The next four to five days were also fine. His imagination had to work a little overtime, but she was still there, for him to touch and feel her pert breasts, so solid yet soft. If he put on a little ASMR, he could bring himself to be entranced by the thought of her shapely hips stretching a scanty, black g-string to its very limit. His mind's eye could then revel in the sight of her firm buttocks, her toned legs, and the light brown skin that was accentuated by her sheer sensuality.
On the seventh day, to give her the benefit of the doubt, he had dropped her a quick text asking when they could meet again. Throughout that day, Arun constantly checked his messages to see if she had responded. At one point, Twinkle had even demanded to know if he was expecting an offer from a rival company.
But there had been no reply from the hooker. And now, he'd gotten a plain 'Got a minute?'.
Hmph. He would be damned if she was going to get his attention that easily. The logical part of his brain, seeing no hope in the effort to stop him from catching feelings, decided to redirect his thoughts to something else that had been bugging him.
Ishita's weird behaviour.
After Raj's misinformation campaign that Arun was making a play for Twinkle, he had gone to see Ishita. Right from the get-go, he had planned on telling her that he would have to step away from babysitting (sorry,
mentorship
) duties.
"No" Ishita had said, not even bothering to look up from her screen. "You're the only one I want going near her, Arun" Her phone rang.
"Raj doesn't know crap. Sundar and Jack already have too much on their plate." She had continued, ignoring the phone. "Beena isn't back from maternity leave yet."
She finally picked up the receiver just as it was about to fall silent. 'That leaves you.' She had mouthed.
Arun shook his head. What had she meant by 'You're the only one I want going near her'? Was he some kind of bodyguard for Twinkle? Was he in a nineties TV serial as the older, mentor character who valiantly tries to protect the heroine, but dies for her character development?
