October Flash - Day 1

The Flash Fiction Project at Google+ has something new going on! There will be a visual prompt for every day in October, and I'm going to try to write a (very) short piece for it every day as well. Due to time zone differences, I'll try writing and posting mine early in the morning, so it's a day after the original post for me, but still the same for them.

Let the fun begin! Here is the prompt for today:

Oh, no. Please, no.
She had left him another tamper-proof letter.
It had taken Sam months to get her away from that.
Now, after four years of freedom, there was another one.
It lay on his keyboard, oblivious to the pain it was causing him.


Back then, when Sam had fallen in love with his new flatmate, she had seemed such a fun, cute girl - very reliable, very sound, very self-confident. Only after their relationship had started, he had noticed her inner insecurities. She had started leaving him these letters he could not close once he had opened them. This was so she would see instantly whether or not he had read them, and it was only one of many ways she used to control him.
Sam had been annoyed at first, and a bit scared. It wasn't normal, was it? Then he had realized that she only did it because she was afraid of missing out, afraid of not knowing how he felt, afraid of loosing him, so he invested months and patience into showing her, again and again, how much he loved her. Finally, her insecurities levelled out, and she stopped leaving him these letters, restricting herself to little love notes instead.

He stared at the letter on his keyboard. If he opened it, he would have to react to what was inside. If he didn't, he would have to explain why. There was no way of knowing what the lesser evil would be.
Sam clenched his fists. It made him angry that she had done this to him, after all this time. No, he would not read that letter. He would tell her, once she came home, how much he hated those things, how much he hated her urge to control everything. She was crazy, that's what she was, and–
Damn curiosity.
The furled letter came away under his shaking fingers, to reveal a print out of a scanned black-and-white picture. Sam could not quite make out what it was of. There were little numbers and letters around the edges. He stared at them for a while. Then his eyes moved to the handwritten note beneath the photo. It told him, in the happily curved letters of her best handwriting, that he was required to give up his study in favour of a nursery, and that he had about seven months to do so.