Page 125 of The Photograph

“You still have it? Please tell me you don’t do that.”

His face is a streak of misery.

I step forward and take his hands.

“I’ve ruined tonight, haven’t I?” he mumbles.

And this makes me laugh. “Yes, but you have a great boyfriend who’s a genius at raising things from the ashes.”

This gets me a half smile.

“Why am I not one in a long line of men for you? If this only lasts two years and then I lose you, it’ll kill me,” he whispers.

Now is the time.He’s just had themostsuccessful first show. We’re away abroad, and I don’t care how cold it is: This is romantic. Letting go of his hands, I grin at him, then I go down on one knee and his eyes go wide.

“Alex Sachs,” I say. “You are the love of my life. Will you marry me?”

And he starts crying.

The hammering in my head when I wake up is like listening to road construction in New York, except we’re not living there anymore. When I turn my head on the pillow, all I see are empty, creased sheets.

“Alex!” I call. The sound of my own voice makes the pounding in my head worse.

There’s no footsteps or skittering of nails across the slate floor. He must have taken Mitzi out for a walk. I run my hands up over my face. Alex is rarely drunk, I can probably count the incidences on one hand, but all that stuff last night about other men and the photograph of George … It all spilled out of him and over the sidewalk like shattered dreams. How do I even begin to make it right for him?

You went down on one knee.I groan into the silence of the apartment. As the cold seeped into the knees of my pants, he told me to stand up and stop being so silly and that we were wasted and we should forget the whole conversation. Then we caught a cab back, and he poured us both a whiskey and I must have fallen asleep on him on the couch.

God, we need to talk.

The proposal was genuine: I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t, drunk or not, but he didn’t answer the question. I sit up gingerly and my head swims, so I stagger into the bathroom and grab a couple of Tylenol, taking a shower by holding on to the tiled wall. It’s Saturday, and today is our chill-out day. Usually, we mooch around the apartment or the city.

Two hours later, there’s still no sign of Alex. A stream of text messages and ten unanswered calls later, I’m pacing up and down our lounge rug. He could be lying in a ditch somewhere. Perhaps he’s gone. Maybe he got up and went back to the US. My whole throat tightens. I close my eyes and sink down onto the couch, letting my head roll back against the cushions. He’s never been out on his own for so long. How safe is Seoul? Fuck, now I’m itching to research crime statistics. Perhaps my proposal pushed him over the edge. When will I learn to stop being so impulsive? The answer to a crisis is calming things down, not pushing it further. I’m not an idiot, I know that. Executing it is a different matter, however: Some drama ignites in my blood and before I realize what I’m doing, I’m off down some crazy path.

I’m woken up sometime later by the latch on the door clicking, and I blink over the back of the couch to find Alex standing in the entrance hall to the apartment in his running gear, hair all ruffled by the wind, cheeks pink from the cold.

“Alex.” It comes out on a long gusty sigh.

“Hey,” he says, frowning.

“Hey? Hey?” I glance at my wrist. Okay, I was only dozing for like thirty minutes. “Where have youbeen?”

“On a run.”

“Alex, you’ve been out for hours.”

“Yeah, I went too far, and Mitzi got tired. I couldn’t get an Uber, so I had to carry her back. Walking.” He gives me a small smile. “Let me grab a shower.”

Let him grab a shower?My head explodes. “I proposed to you last night, and you basically turned me down and I wake up this morning to find you’ve disappeared and normally a walk with Mitzi is thirty minutes max and you’re gone for likeforeverand I’m blowing up your phone and …”

“My phone died. We didn’t plug them in last night. I plugged yours in to charge and went out.”

“That’s what you want to say to me? After that whole diatribe, the thing you want to sort out is that you charged my phone?”

He runs his hand through his curls. “Look, I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what was wrong with me. I had a huge panic attack about the exhibition and came out with a lot of nonsense. Truth be told, I’m feeling like a bit of an idiot this morning.”

My heart is aching, but at least he’s being honest.

I fold my arms on my chest. “How do you think I feel?”

---