"Me too."
"So what do we do?"
I don't have an answer. Not yet. But I can feel something building, a pressure, a need, a hunger that domesticity can't satisfy. We're predators trying to live like prey.
And eventually, something's going to break.
The breaking point comes three days later.
I'm at the job site in La Mesa, framing out a kitchen remodel, when my phone buzzes with a text from Roxy.
R: Need you home. Now.
No explanation. No context, just urgency. I tell the foreman I'm sick and leave immediately.
The drive back to Ten Park takes twenty minutes, and every second feels like an hour. My mind cycles through possibilities, is it the police at the door, someone recognizing us, is our cover blown?
But when I walk into the apartment, Roxy's alone and she's in the darkroom.
The door is open, red light spilling into the hallway. I can hear music playing – The Cure,Disintegration, and the chemical smell of developer fills the air.
"Roxy?"
"In here."
I step into the darkroom and stop. She's surrounded by photographs, dozens of them, hanging from clotheslines strung across the small space. But these aren't the landscape shots or engagement photos she's been selling.
These are the real work.
Crime scene polaroids from our road trip. The dead fox from Utah. Roadkill documentation. Environmental decay. The trucker's rig where we killed Gary Hollis, photographed from a distance days after the murder.
All of our past secrets laid out in one room. It’s like a punch to the gut, mainly because what the hell is she doing, keeping these? But then another feeling of longing for us to go back.
"I couldn't do it anymore," she says without turning around. She's developing another print, her hands moving with practiced precision in the red light. "The fake work, turning into one of them with the lying mask everyday. I needed to see this again. To remember what I'm supposed to be doing."
I cross to her and look at the photographs hanging around us. They're raw, unfiltered, beautiful in their brutality.
"I can’t believe you kept these. Do you know how bad it would be for us if these were seen? How long have you been hiding them?" I ask.
"Since we got here. I packed them with my supplies, kept them in the back of the closet. I told myself I'd destroy them eventually, that they were too dangerous to keep."
"But you didn't."
"No. Because they're the truth. They're what I'm meant to create."
She pulls the print from the developer and hangs it to dry. It's a photograph of an abandoned building we passed somewhere in Nevada with the windows broken, graffiti covering the walls, the kind of decomposing that speaks to something deeper than physical deterioration.
"I've been thinking," she says, finally turning to face me. "About what you said, about finding a way to feed the urges without destroying the cover."
"And?"
"What if we don't have to choose? What if there's a way to do both?"
I study her face in the red light. She's vibrating with energy, with purpose, with the yearning I recognize because I feel it too.
"Explain," I say, crossing my arms across my chest.
"The art world loves edginess, crudeness. They love transgressive work, boundary-pushing photography, artists who document the underbelly of society. What if I built a legitimate career doing exactly that?"
