Chapter 14: Spreadsheet Humiliation
The soft blue glow of the laptop screens was the only light in the room, painting their faces in cool, clinical tones. Rohan leaned back in his chair, the familiar creak a comfort. He’d just closed a tedious bug report. The clock in the corner of his screen read 10:17 PM. A normal night.
“Can you come here for a second?” Priya’s voice was calm, measured. She didn’t look up from her own laptop.
“What’s up?” He swiveled his chair, rolling the short distance to her desk. She had two spreadsheets open side-by-side. He recognized the format instantly—their monthly household budgets.
“I’m just doing some reconciliations,” she said, her finger tracing a line on the left screen, his screen. It showed the direct deposit from his firm: ₹89,672. A good salary. A solid salary. The number he was proud of.
Then her finger moved to the right. Her screen.
His brain stuttered, trying to parse the columns. The salary transfer was there, but it was a number that didn’t immediately make sense. Three lakh, fifty thousand? And below it, other columns, neatly labeled: ‘Freelance Retainers’, ‘Dividend Portfolio’, ‘Algorithmic Trading’. The numbers stacked, one on top of the other, building a tower he couldn’t see the top of.
He blinked. “What is that?”
“Our income,” she said, her voice still impossibly even. She tapped his screen. “This is yours.” Her finger then hovered over her screen, encompassing the entire financial structure she had built. “This is mine.”
The silence in the room was no longer comfortable. The hum of the computers felt like a swarm in his ears. His mouth was dry. Three and a half lakh. Plus. Plus all that other stuff. It was more than triple his. Maybe quadruple. He’d had no idea. Not a clue. She handled the investments, said she was good with numbers. This wasn’t good. This was a different league entirely.
“How long?” The words came out rough.
“About eighteen months.” She finally turned to look at him. Her expression wasn’t smug. It was… focused. Analytical. Like she was assessing a complex piece of code. “The project lead promotion last year came with a significant bump. The rest… I just built it.”
He stared at the screens, the digits burning into his retina. All those late nights. All those times he’d teased her for working too hard, for missing his cricket highlights. She wasn’t just working. She was building an empire next to him on the couch while he watched replays.
Priya moved suddenly. She pushed her chair back, its wheels gliding silently on the hardwood floor. She looked at him, then at the space between her knees. An unmistakable, silent command.
A flush of heat traveled from his chest up his neck. This again. Here. Now.
“Priya…”
“Come here, Rohan.”
The memory of the car, of leather against his back and her thighs caging him, flashed through his mind. His protest died. He stood, his legs feeling unsteady. He took a single step forward until he was standing in front of her seated form.
Her hands went to his hips, firm and sure, and guided him down. He wasn’t a small man, but she maneuvered him with an unsettling ease, pulling him until he was settled sideways across her lap, his legs dangling over the armrest. The position was absurd, infantilizing. His face was level with her collarbone.
“Look,” she whispered, her breath stirring his hair. One arm wrapped around his back, holding him securely against her. With her other hand, she pointed back at the screens. “Look at the numbers.”
He didn’t want to. He wanted to shove himself away, to reclaim some fragment of dignity. But her arm was like a band of iron, and the warmth of her body was a anchor in his spinning world.
“See?” she murmured, her lips close to his ear. Her finger traced the staggering difference between the two figures. “Look how small you are here.”
The words landed not as an insult, but as a devastating, simple fact. In the financial landscape of their life, in the architecture of their future, he was a footnote. His face burned, pressed against the soft cotton of her shirt. He could smell her perfume, something light and clean, a stark contrast to the violent upheaval happening inside him.
He felt her hand slide from his back, her fingers splaying across his stomach. He flinched. He’d always been soft there, a fact he accepted with a vague, never-acted-upon intention to hit the gym. Now, under her touch, it felt like a failure. She wasn’t mapping his body with desire now; she was taking inventory of its complacency.
“All those times your mother talked about my ‘little job’,” she said, her voice low and conversational, as if they were discussing the weather. “All those times you nodded along.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. He had. He’d never corrected her. It was easier.
“You’re mine, Rohan,” she stated, the words final and absolute. There was no feverish kiss to accompany them this time, just the cold, hard evidence on the screen and the firm pressure of her hand on his body. “You know that, right? After everything? You’re mine.”
He couldn’t speak. He could only give a single, jerky nod against her collarbone, a surrender that went deeper than the one in the car. That had been about passion, about a strange new current in their marriage. This was about bedrock. She had quietly, efficiently, become the foundation of everything, and he was only now realizing the ground had shifted beneath his feet months ago.
Her arm tightened around him. She didn’t say anything else. She just held him there, in the glow of the screens that told a story he was only just beginning to read.