I'm His Second Wife, But He Vowed to Never Touch Me

The marble beneath her feet felt like ice, even through the silk soles of her sandals. Subhadra had expected the palace at Indraprastha to be magnificent—she had heard the stories, the boasts—but nothing had prepared her for this: corridors that stretched like the ribs of some great stone beast, ceilings so high they swallowed sound, and everywhere, the smell of something sharp and metallic, like blood mixed with incense.

Arjun’s hand touched the small of her back, guiding her forward. It was the same hand that had once traced the curve of her waist in the dark, calloused fingers that had learned her body with reverence. Now, it was just pressure—polite, firm, impersonal. He didn’t look at her. His eyes moved ahead, scanning the shadows, the doorways, the faces of passing attendants. His jaw was tight, the way it had been before battle, but this was not war. This was home.

She wanted to say his name, just to hear it aloud, to remind them both that they were still the same people who had laughed together on the road from Dwaraka, who had stopped to fuck beneath a banyan tree while the horses grazed nearby, her back scraped raw by bark, his mouth hot on her neck. But the words caught in her throat. Something had already changed.

They passed a courtyard where water spilled from the mouths of carved lions into a lotus pool. The sound should have been soothing. Instead, it echoed like a warning. She glanced at him. His face was unreadable. She had never seen this expression on him before—not in the tent the night before their wedding, not when they had argued, not even when they had parted at the edge of her brother’s kingdom. This was not the man who had whispered, “You are the only thing I want,” with his lips against her collarbone.

A servant opened a heavy door. Inside, the chamber was vast, draped in fabrics the color of saffron and ash. The bed was raised on a platform, its pillars carved with vines and birds. It looked like a place made for display, not sleep. Not touching. Not sex.

Arjun stepped inside with her, but only just. He lingered near the threshold, as if the room itself might trap him. His eyes flicked to the window, then the door. He didn’t sit. He didn’t touch her again.

“You’ll be safe here,” he said. His voice was low, careful. “They’ve prepared everything.”

She nodded, though she didn’t know who “they” were. She wanted to ask: Do you remember how you used to sneak into my room in Dwaraka? How you’d kiss me until I couldn’t breathe? But she said nothing.

He turned to leave. Just like that.

“Arjun,” she said, finally.

He paused, his hand on the doorframe. For a moment, she thought he might come back. That he might look at her—really look.

But he only nodded once, stiffly, and was gone.

The door closed. The silence was sudden and total.

She stood alone in the center of the room, her hands cold, her stomach hollow.

This was not the beginning she had imagined.

The hall was a forest of silk and gold. Subhadra walked between rows of courtiers whose eyes flicked over her as if she were a new tapestry—interesting for a moment, then forgotten. At the far end, on a low dais, Draupadi waited beneath a canopy of white jasmine. Her sari was the color of dried blood, embroidered with tiny lions that caught the lamp-light like teeth.

Arjun’s stride lengthened; Subhadra felt the pull like a rope around her ribs. He stopped two paces short of the dais and bowed—precise, warrior-like. Subhadra copied him, palms pressed together, the gesture she had practiced on the road. When she straightened, Draupadi was already smiling.

The smile was narrow, symmetrical, finished at the edges. It did not crease the skin beneath her eyes. Those eyes moved over Subhadra’s face, then lower—neck, breasts, waist—inventorying. “Sister,” Draupadi said, the word cool, polished, “Indraprastha is brighter for your arrival.”

Subhadra felt the court listening. She answered in the same formal Sanskrit, voice steady, though her pulse beat between her legs with a sudden, shameful memory: Arjun’s mouth there, the night before they reached the city, her heel digging into the small of his back. She flushed. Draupadi’s smile widened by exactly the width of a jasmine petal.

Ceremony dissolved into music and movement. Subhadra was guided to a seat slightly lower than the queen’s. Arjun took the place beside Draupadi, their shoulders almost touching. Servants brought wine in gold cups; the wine tasted of cedar and something metallic. Subhadra drank because her throat was dry, then drank again because the taste matched the smell of the palace, and matching felt like order.

Hours later, in her chamber, the lamps had been turned low. She stood at the window, untying the heavy earrings that had cut grooves into her lobes. The door opened without a knock; Arjun stepped in, closed it softly, and leaned back against the wood as if barricading something out.

He looked tired. There was sand in the hair at his temples, a small cut at the corner of his mouth she hadn’t noticed in the hall. She wanted to lick it, to taste copper and him, but she stayed at the window.

“We need to speak,” he said.

She nodded. The earrings came free; one dropped, rolled, stopped against his foot. He didn’t pick it up.

“The year is divided,” he began, voice flat, rehearsed. “Each brother spends twelve moons with Draupadi. It is her time now.”

Subhadra felt the words hit her stomach like swallowed stones. She had known—of course she had known—but hearing it aloud was different. “So I am a calendar,” she said.

Arjun’s jaw tightened. “It is dharma. It keeps peace.”

“Peace,” she repeated. Her sari slipped from one shoulder; she left it there, skin bare to the night air. “And where do I sleep while peace is kept?”

He looked at her then—really looked—and she saw the war in his face. One step and he could be at her, mouth on her neck, lifting her against the wall the way he had in a fisher-hut weeks ago, her legs around his waist, both of them too hungry for preliminaries. She saw him calculate it, saw him discard it.

“I will come to you when the turn changes,” he said. “Nine months.”

“Nine,” she echoed. The word felt obscene in her mouth.

He turned to leave. His hand was on the latch when she spoke again, voice low. “Will you think of me at least once each night, or is that also against dharma?”

His shoulders rose, fell. He did not answer. The door closed with the same soft certainty as before.

Subhadra stood in the middle of the room, earrings on the floor, sari sliding lower. The jasmine from Draupadi’s canopy clung to her hair, sweet and suffocating. She breathed through her mouth until the scent thinned, then began to undress for a bed that would not be warmed by anyone else.

The bed was too large. Its expanse of embroidered cotton stretched on every side like a bleached desert, and when she lay down the center dipped so deeply she felt swallowed. She had left one lamp burning; the flame guttered in its glass, throwing long ribs of shadow across the ceiling. Every time the wick flared she saw the carved birds in the rafters, beaks open as if mid-scream.

She had stripped to her underskirt, then removed even that, unable to bear the rasp of silk against her nipples—sensitized, traitorously alert. The night air slid over her bare skin, cool, invasive. She pressed her thighs together and felt the pulse there, a low, insistent throb that had started the moment Arjun closed the door. On the road it had been simple: a look, his hand sliding beneath her antariya while the caravan rested, her own hand stroking him through linen until he shuddered against her palm. Here, the same hunger felt grotesque, unmoored.

A gong sounded somewhere deep in the palace—three measured beats, then silence. She counted her heartbeats to thirty before the next sound came: the scrape of a bronze bolt, faint voices speaking a dialect she did not know, laughter that ended too abruptly. Each noise arrived filtered through stone and corridor, stripped of context, like ghosts rehearsing their deaths. She listened for his step anyway: the quick heel-toe rhythm she had learned beside the Yamuna, the way his boot buckles clicked once if he was tired, twice if he was eager. Nothing.

She rolled onto her stomach, arms beneath her, pelvis grinding involuntarily into the mattress. The friction gave a moment’s relief, then worsened the ache. She imagined him in another bed two wings away, Draupadi’s long hair coiled around his wrist the way hers had been weeks earlier when he took her from behind beneath a date-palm, her knees bruised by fallen fruit. The memory was so precise she could smell the sap, feel the grit of sand against her forearms. Her body clenched around emptiness; a small sound escaped her throat.

To punish herself she slid one hand between legs already slick, gathering wetness with two fingers and spreading it upward, circling the swollen peak until the sensation bordered on pain. She did not allow herself completion. Instead she brought the fingers to her mouth, tasted salt and iron and the faint residue of the oil with which she had anointed herself that morning—jasmine, the same suffocating note that drifted in from the garden below. The taste made her gag; she turned her face into the pillow, breathing through linen until the nausea passed.

Outside, a night bird called once, a falling note that sounded like her name distorted by wind. She lifted her head, hope stupid and bright, but the corridor beyond her door stayed mute. The lamp finally died; darkness sealed the room. In it she felt her own pulse everywhere—wrists, throat, cunt, the hollow behind her knees—each beat reproaching her for wanting what was no longer hers to take. She spread her legs wide, inviting the cool air, inviting anything that might substitute for the weight of him, the particular heat of his chest against her back, the way he always exhaled just once, deeply, the instant before he entered her.

Nothing came. The palace held its breath with her. She lay open, shivering, until the first hint of charcoal gray crept under the door. Only then did her hand return, furtive, efficient, bringing herself off with the same mechanical detachment she had used to check her travel packs the night before. The climax was thin, bitter, left her eyes watering. She wiped her fingers on the sheet that would be changed by unseen servants, rolled onto her side, and waited for the gong that would call her to a breakfast she would not taste, in a city that had already begun to forget she existed.