i wanna know

“I wish that I could take a journey through your mind and find emotions that you always try to hide.”

Archer saw her hiding before she even knew she was. They had been fighting. A vehement argument. The kind that, upon climax, ends in either passionate intimacy or days of silence. As the fight had escalated, Archer was sure this was one that would end passionately. Although he hid it from Lana, his anger had already subsided and he was more than ready to move on to the make-up part of the game.

Then he saw her hide. He was so caught up in the motions of the fight that he truly wasn’t even sure what he had said. Archer thought but he couldn’t find his words, whatever painful chord of truth he had struck in Lana. But he saw her face. The brief moment where the surprise and pain and shame and disappointment shook her, the moment her façade immediately faltered and she was more vulnerable than he had ever seen.

Archer stepped towards her. He wanted nothing more to comfort her, fight or sex be damned. But the moment had passed and now she was hiding. Her face was no longer angry from the fight. And what was most carefully hidden was that flash of vulnerability. It had vanished, and had taken Lana with it. True, she was standing there in front of him. Her face was poised, her stance confident, her voice steady. Too poised, too confident, too steady. She wasn’t fighting anymore. She had retreated to some safe, inner place. A place Archer desperately wanted to touch, to see, to hold and comfort, but a place which he was strictly forbade.

So this fight ended in silence. A silence that Archer knew would end in a few days. But this silence would be different than the ones before. This one came with the unsettling realization for Archer that there was a broken part of Lana. A part that she wasn’t ready to fix, or to even take the first step towards fixing by sharing. A broken part that planted a seed of doubt in Archer about he and Lana’s relationship. And Archer wasn’t sure if he could or should ignore it.