Best Trick of the Night

The circus came to town the way her laugh used to come, sudden, without warning, filling up everything around it. I saw the striped tent from my office window one afternoon, the colors almost too bright against the dust and concrete. Lunch break, half an hour left, and my first thought was of Meera. She had said a few days ago she wanted to do something reckless, something that didn’t feel like routine.

So I texted her, “Want to run away and join the circus?”

Her reply came before I could put the phone down, “Only if you’re buying the popcorn.”

We had been circling each other for months. Coffee that always stretched into dinner, doorways where one of us lingered too long. Careful sentences, careful distance. That night, though, something had shifted. Maybe the tent itself had bent the air.

I picked her up on the bike. She climbed on behind me, her arms sliding around my waist. At the first red light I placed my hand over hers, and kept it there longer than necessary. She didn’t move. She smelled faintly of jasmine oil, and of something else that wasn’t perfume, something I kept catching and losing in the wind.

The circus was smaller than I had imagined. A single tent, ropes tied down to the mud, the smell of popcorn mixing with diesel from the generator. Children tugged their parents’ sleeves, teenagers shared paper cones of roasted chana. We found seats near the back, away from the noise.

The lights dimmed red. The magician walked in, an older man, silver hair, movements slow but sure. Coins, scarves, the usual. But his hands had the kind of rhythm that pulled you in. Beside me, Meera’s shoulder brushed mine. I didn’t know if she leaned or if I did.

“You’re not watching,” she whispered.

“I am,” I said. “Just not what you think.”

She turned slightly, and for a second the light caught the side of her face, her eyes reflecting the red like glass. I wanted to say something stupid then, something like “I could sit here forever,” but I stayed quiet. My thumb found the back of her hand, tracing lines slowly, and I felt the smallest hitch of her breath.

The magician asked for two volunteers. “Two people who trust each other,” he said, his voice carrying strangely in the tent.

Before I had thought it through, my hand was in the air with hers still caught in it. The spotlight blinded for a moment. We stepped into the ring. He gave us each a card.

“Write something you’ve never told the other,” he said.

Meera bent forward immediately, hair falling across her face as she wrote. My hand stayed frozen above the blank card. I thought about all the things unsaid, all the exits I had kept open. Then I wrote the first thing that refused to stay back, “I’m afraid of how much I want this.”

The cards went into his hat. He shuffled, drew one out, glanced at it, and smiled as though he already knew everything.

“The magic of truth,” he told the crowd, “is that it always finds its way to the right hands.”

He passed me a card. The words, written in her neat, slanting hand, “Every time you laugh, I want to kiss you.”

I felt heat rise to my ears. He passed the other card to Meera. She unfolded it, and I watched her eyes shift, widen slightly.

The audience clapped like it was part of the trick. For me, the air itself had turned heavy, alive.

We went back to our seats. Neither of us said much. The magician finished with doves, but all I could think about was the paper in her hand, my words now in her pocket.

Later, we walked out into the night. The tent behind us glowed faintly, already less magical, more like tarpaulin and rope. My bike stood under a weak streetlight. I started it, then stopped, waiting.

“So,” I said.

“So,” she echoed.

I wanted to ask her if she meant it, if she wanted to cross that thin line we had been tracing. But before I could, she said softly, “Yes.”

The ride back felt different. Her arms tighter, her breath close against my neck. Not holding on. Something else.

Her apartment was half-dark, curtains open to the moonlight. She dropped her purse, then hesitated, fingers restless. I stepped closer. “Are we,” I started, but the question fell apart midway.

She reached up and touched my jaw like she was answering anyway. Her thumb rested near my mouth, and I closed my eyes.

“I should have done this a long time ago,” she whispered. Then she kissed me.

It wasn’t fireworks. It was softer than that, but deep enough to undo every wall I had built. Her mouth on mine, the smallest smile against my lips when I whispered her name.

When we broke apart, I muttered, “I think the magician switched the cards.”

“I know,” she said, laughing quietly, forehead against mine. “I saw him do it.”

“And you didn’t mind?”

Her hand slipped into mine again, squeezing. “Best trick of the night.”

We ended up on her couch, hours folded into each other. Touches, small confessions that had been hiding between sentences for months. Her head on my chest, my fingers in her hair.

“I was scared,” she said once.

“Of what?”

“Of wanting more than you did.”

I tilted her chin so she had to look at me. “You think I didn’t? I’ve been gone on you since the poetry debate with Sharma sir.”

She smiled, that smile that always landed somewhere in my chest. “That was the second class of the semester.”

“Exactly.”

Much later, tangled under her quilt, the city half-asleep outside her window, I thought of the tent again. By morning it would just be canvas, packed up, leaving no trace. But the magic stayed, not in the trick, not in the show. In the silence between her breaths, in the way she murmured my name without knowing.

Some illusions don’t hide things. They reveal them.

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