Page 83 of Midnight Wedding

I head over, batting away spider webs. “Where are you?”

“Here.” Some shuffling sounds come from inside the damn crawlspace. It’s a narrow storage area that extends nearly fifty feet in pure darkness. We keep my fucking skis in there.

“What the hell are you doing?” I ask, raising my phone and hitting the flashlight.

I find her looking at me sheepishly. She’s curled on her side halfway down in the pitch darkness. “Exploring?”

“Get out of there, you madwoman,” I say, reaching for her ankle.

She kicks me away. “I was curious! I saw some stuff inside so I started shimmying in, and then—” She grins a little. “I got kind of stuck.”

I groan and curse at her in Armenian. I have to force myself in after her and manage to unhook her belt loop of her jeans from where it got caught on a loose flooring nail. We slither out together and spend a few seconds brushing dust and dirt from our hair and off our clothes.

This isn’t what I pictured when I imagined marriage: two filthy people knocking mouse droppings from their shoes.

“You can’t keep doing stuff like this,” I say, scolding her as we head back upstairs. “That was dangerous.”

“It’s no big deal,” she says, waving me off. “I knew you’d find me. Eventually. Probably.”

“Fuck, woman, you can’t do that. You’re pregnant with my child! I was upstairs working on the nursery?—”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“If you get in trouble, you’re not just risking yourself.”

She glares at me defiantly. “I thought you liked it when I got all curious?”

“I like that it’s a part of your personality, but you can’t go getting yourself trapped in crawlspaces!”

“It’s not like I set out to get stuck on purpose.” She storms past me and stomps upstairs. I follow her into our bedroom.

“At least wait until after the baby’s born before you start cave diving.”

“I wasn’tcave diving. I was just looking around in my own house, that’s all.” She arches her eyebrows, arms crossed over her chest. “Or do you have more skeletons down there you don’t want me to find?”

I groan and look at the ceiling. “You know this isn’t about that.”

“I get it,” she says, spreading her hands. “It was reckless, okay? I shouldn’t have been crawling around there in the dark. But I was poking my head around earlier and I just couldn’t help myself.”

I rub my temples. It’s bad enough running a fractured and warring Brotherhood. But now I have a crazy wife with anexploration obsession, and I’m afraid one of these days she’s going to get herself killed.

How am I supposed to explain that to my people?Sorry, brothers, my wife starved to death when she got herself trapped in the crawlspace.

“I want you to be yourself. I really do. I just also want to make sure my child is born and my wife survives until we die clutching each other of old age.”

“Aw, you want to die holding each other?”

“Buried in the same grave for all eternity.”

“Bleak. Weird. I like it.”

“Good. Come here.” I pull her against me and kiss her softly. “Want to see what I’ve done in the nursery?”

“Only if it means this fight is over.”

My eyebrows raise. “We’re fighting?”

“I thought we were.”

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