I had followed no trail. Only the hush of instinct and the strange pull of warmth beneath my ribs. Somewhere deep in the far north of Pakistan—beyond the villages, beyond the reach of any call to prayer or the dust of roads—I had found it: a hidden lagoon cradled between limestone cliffs and flowering jungle, where the air shimmered heavy with humidity and birdsong fell in lazy arcs across the water.
The place had the hush of myth. A stillness not born of silence, but of reverence.
And then—he emerged.
Not from behind a tree. Not from the cliffs. From the lagoon itself. As if the water had birthed him.
He stood half in shadow, half in gold, where the canopy cracked open to let the sun spill directly onto his skin. And what skin it was—burnished like honeyed bronze, smooth and glistening with water that clung to him like worship. His chest rose and fell with the slow, unhurried breath of someone who didn’t belong to time. The kind of breath taken by gods, or those who’ve never known fear.
His hair—long, black, soaked—trailed over his back like liquid ink, the strands moving as if they had minds of their own, drawn by breeze or magic. Every curve of him—shoulders, spine, hips—moved with a dancer’s precision, but his presence held something older, something primal.
When he turned, the full force of his beauty struck me.
Hazel eyes. Not the gentle brown of earth, but the wildfire kind—amber-flecked and impossibly bright, like sun through resin. He looked at me, and it was as though the land itself held its breath. Somewhere above, a koel cried out—sharp, distant—and then all sound vanished again.
He took a step forward. The water barely shifted around his hips.
I felt it, then—heat licking across my skin in places the sun hadn’t touched. My chest tightened. Every nerve alive. The scent of wet stone and wild tuberose rose thick in my nose. I wasn’t cold, but I shivered. Not in fear. In longing.
He spoke no word.
But there was language in the way his gaze roamed—curious, amused, achingly intimate. As though he already knew what I dreamed about alone. As though the flicker of my breath, the tremble at the base of my spine, were verses he’d read before.
And for a moment, beneath the shadow of towering palms and distant snow-peaked silence, I forgot my name. My past. My place in the world.
There was only him.
This golden, dripping being.
—bathing in some secret Eden the world forgot.
