Chapter 4 — The Argument
738 Words
It was two weeks into the marriage before they had their first real fight, and it started, absurdly, over a photograph.
Elena found it while looking for a phone charger in Damian's office — a room she'd been told, without being told directly, that she wasn't meant to wander into unaccompanied. It was tucked into the back of a drawer she hadn't meant to open, hidden beneath a stack of papers she also hadn't meant to disturb: a photo, old and slightly creased along one edge, of a boy who couldn't have been older than sixteen, standing outside a small brick house she didn't recognize, laughing at something outside the frame, his whole face open in a way she'd never once seen on the man she'd married.
She almost put it back immediately. Almost.
Instead she was still holding it, turning it over slowly in her hands, when Damian walked in.
"That's not yours to look through," he said, and his voice had a rawness to it she hadn't heard before — not anger exactly, something closer to exposure, like she'd walked in on him undressed.
"I wasn't looking through anything. I was finding a charger." She held up the photo, unable to stop herself from studying it a moment longer even as she offered it back. "Who is this?"
"Put it back, Elena."
"Why? It's a picture of a kid, Damian. It's not exactly a state secret—"
"Put it back." He crossed the room fast enough that she took an involuntary step back, and for a moment something dangerous moved through his expression before he visibly reined it in, physically forcing his shoulders down. He took the photo from her hand, gently despite the tension in every other part of him, but his fingers were shaking as he did it. "This isn't a conversation we're having tonight."
"Then when? You keep saying that — ask me again in a year, this isn't the night, that's a conversation for another time — when exactly is the night, Damian? Because I signed a contract that says I'm your wife for twelve months, and I still don't know a single true thing about you beyond your dinner schedule and your enemies list."
"You know plenty."
"I know what you let me know." She heard her own voice rising and didn't try to stop it, three weeks of accumulated frustration finally finding an outlet. "I know you eat dinner at eight and you hate being interrupted and you warn me off men at parties like you actually care what happens to me, but I don't know why you married me specifically, I don't know what Richard Voss meant by a great deal you don't yet know about your husband, I don't know why you looked at that photo like I'd caught you doing something illegal—"
"Because you did," he said, and the words came out before he could stop them, sharp and final and immediately regretted, and then he closed his eyes like he wished, physically, he could reach out and pull them back into his mouth.
The room went very quiet.
"Did what," Elena said, low, her heart suddenly pounding for reasons she couldn't fully explain.
Damian looked at the photograph in his hand for a long moment, his thumb moving once, absently, over the creased edge. When he spoke again, his voice had gone flat and controlled, every trace of the c***k sealed carefully back over, like watching a door close in real time.
"It's nothing," he said. "A picture of my childhood house. I don't like people going through my things. That's all it is, and I overreacted. I'm sorry."
She knew, with total and unshakeable certainty, that it wasn't all it was. But she also knew, watching him fold the photo carefully back into the drawer like something fragile enough to break under too much handling, that pushing any harder tonight would get her nowhere but a more securely locked door, and possibly one that stayed locked longer for the effort.
"Fine," she said, the fight draining out of her all at once, replaced by something closer to exhaustion. "Keep your secrets."
"Elena—"
"Goodnight, Damian."
She left him standing in the office, the drawer still open a c***k, his jaw tight with something that looked, for just a second before she turned away and refused to look back, almost like grief.
- Writer
