Page 108 of The Encore’s Crown

“Because I need to know there will be a five years from now!”

“Why?”

The word came out harder than I meant it to. She recoiled. I kept going anyway.

“Why can’t we just be in love and not turn every fucking night into a negotiation?”

“A negotiation?”

“Yes.”

“I said I'd want our baby to have your eyes.”

“There's no baby. I don’t want to talk about one.”

“Then say that without behaving like a fucking child.”

“I've tried. You keep doing this.”

“I keep doing what?”

“Marriage. Children. Meeting my parents. Every time we’re together, there’s another thing I’m not giving you.”

“Because every time we're together, you remind me how little of your life I actually have.”

“You have me!”

“Do I? For how long?”

“I don’t know!”

The words cracked through the room. Radhika went still. I dragged both hands through my hair.

“We’re twenty-four and twenty-five.”

“You're almost twenty-six.”

“Fine. I’m almost twenty-six. We’ve barely been together two years. We both have insanely busy lives. Why can’t we just be together without constantly worrying about what comes after? Fuck!”

What I meant was that the thought of children chilled me to the bone. I had no compass for how to be a good father. No example I wanted to follow. All I could see when she spoke about babies were small, helpless people who would look at me expecting something I didn’t know how to give them. Children I might love and still damage. Children who might learn to read the air in a room before they learned to read words.

I saw my father in every future version of myself. I saw Radhika learning to fear the sound of my footsteps. It made no sense. I'd never touched her in anger. Never would. But fear didn’t need sense. It only needed memory.

I wanted her to forget the future. To lie beside me now. Love me now. Why was that so goddamn difficult? I stomped toward the door and her face crumpled. The first sob escaped before she could stop it and the sound cut straight through me.

“Radhi.”

“No, you don't get to call me that.” She grabbed the sheet and wrapped it around herself. “Not after you just said telling me you loved me was a mistake.”

I froze. I didn't say that, did I?

The fight came back in fragments.

I had.

I'd said it somewhere in the argument.

I just couldn’t remember exactly when.