Page 32 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER TWO

I’ M SURPRISED WHEN Dragos comes home that night.

It’s deeply out of character for him as of late.

There was a strange in-between space in our marriage, when he had isolated me from everything and everyone, and he was always with me.

It was always us. In this house. And it was heaven and hell all at the same time. My whole world was him.

But the problem with the two of us is that we don’t talk. It isn’t love. That’s what it’s taken me nearly four years to understand. He is obsessed with me. And I’m obsessed with him. Or rather, he was obsessed with me. Now he’s obsessed with… Something else.

It’s distressing to me how little I know about my husband. He’s from Romania. He never speaks about his family. I get the sense that he’s deeply enmeshed in a business that is connected to his family. Another thing I know spare little about. He keeps me separate. From everything.

He’s paranoid. He says that he’s afraid for my safety because he is a powerful man. And yet it all feels like being on a leash to me.

The dominance that’s so exciting in the bedroom is much less exciting when enacted in our actual lives.

One thing I do have is money. He’s given me my own account so that I can shop whenever I like. I know it has never once occurred to him that I might leave him. If I act quickly enough I should be able to use that money to get a place to stay.

I don’t know what he’ll do if I leave.

The truth is, there’s so much I don’t know about my husband, and it’s because I haven’t wanted the answers.

What I wanted was a fantasy, with no reality intruding, but now that I’ve begun to question the fantasy it’s dissolving.

The plan is coming together. But tonight, he’s in the house.

I need to figure out exactly…

I close my eyes; they’re welling with tears. The problem is I still love him. The problem is the idea of leaving him seems as absurd as cutting my own arm off.

I’m dependent on him. He has become part of me. And I hate it. I hate it because it doesn’t feel nice.

Because it feels rough. Because it feels…

Overwhelming. All-consuming.

And I have to ask myself, as I make my way down the stairs and head toward his study, if there is a sinister reason that for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back is his absence, not his overwhelming presence.

Because God knows I should’ve left him the first time he refused to let me go out when I wanted to.

The first time he denied me a trip home when he couldn’t supervise me.

The first time he told me I could no longer invite people to our house.

Yes. I should’ve left then.

He’s not cruel to me. But I am a thing. One of the many that he owns.

That’s all I am to him.

I move down the stairs like a ghost. I do everything like a ghost.

I’m shocked when I see him in the kitchen—all black like everything in Dragos’s life—cooking like he’s a domestic of some kind. He’s barely been home for months and now he’s in the kitchen. Cooking.

I watch as he grabs a large knife, and quickly chops an onion. His movements are efficient and ruthless. I can imagine him taking that knife and stabbing it through my heart with the same efficiency.

He wouldn’t, of course.

I’d bleed on the rug.

It would be an inconvenience, and Dragos abhors an inconvenience.

“You are lurking,” he says without looking up from his task.

I slip into the light. “I wasn’t lurking, but I was surprised to find you here.”

“Why is that, dragostea mea ?”

My love. I know what it means now, and yet I preferred it when I didn’t know the meaning, honestly. It’s just a mockery of everything I once believed in now.

One thing I do know about Dragos is that his sex drive is insatiable, and he hasn’t been exhausting it with me.

It’s way too easy for me to think of him, out at some function where he sees a waitress. Twenty, pretty, innocent.

I would never have suspected he’d want anyone but me at first. I interpreted our physical connection as love for him, just as it was for me.

I saw it as the beautiful tapestry, woven before our time on earth. Magical and fated. We were meant to meet that day; it was written in the stars. Why would I question it?

That’s what I told myself.

But there was a loose thread, and I could see it, even then. I didn’t pull it. I didn’t even want to get near it.

But now, as he’s grown distant and I’ve grown more unhappy, I’ve begun to pull at the thread, and now it’s unraveled everything. I can’t see the beautiful picture of us that I once did. I’m suspicious of everything he does, of all of his motives.

As quickly as I fell for him, as quickly as I leaped into that fantasy of us, I’ve destroyed it by asking the questions I refused to ask before.

Now I let myself wonder about his life before me. Maybe I’m not his first wife? He’s never really said. I never really asked. I thought that meant I was the first for certain, but the longer I live with him the less I know him. The less certain I am.

Maybe this is something he does every few years. Find some young, dumb creature, seduce her, shower her with jewels and clothes, then trade her in for a new one.

If that’s true, then what I can’t understand is why he married me.

I thought he loved me. That’s the very sad thing. I thought that because I loved him, he loved me, and it never occurred to me that it might not be true, even though he didn’t say the words.

I thought he was showing me every time he touched me.

I thought the diamond ring he slipped on my finger when we were naked, in his infinity pool on the roof of his penthouse in Singapore, was the evidence.

I thought it was love, the way he looked at me that first night.

I convinced myself I was different. Why would he keep me with him all day every day from that moment on if it weren’t?

But he’s never said he loves me; I just decided he did.

So much of this relationship has been in my head, in my heart.

I can see myself now for the fool I was.

I saw a dangerous man with tattoos, and wanted to believe he would have a heart of gold.

I saw a man who was aloof, mysterious and decided I could decode him, never allowing myself to believe there was nothing before behind that hardness.

I saw a field of red flags and decided they were roses. Because it was what I wanted, what I craved. I wanted to mold this man into the fantasy I desired, but you cannot reshape a mountain.

Only in the last six months did I start to question it, and to my shame it was because he wasn’t paying attention to me.

I could accept all of it—the mystery surrounding his work, his past and his feelings.

That sex was a replacement for discussions of emotion or romance. Gifts instead of words of love.

I could accept it all, as long as I was sure he belonged to me.

As long as his obsessive attention insulated me, I could accept the fantasy. Believe it wholeheartedly.

I was happy until I realized he didn’t feel the same way I did. Until I realized I couldn’t simply rest on my belief that when I said I love you , and he responded with sex, it didn’t mean for certain he loved me.

It was the distance that made me tug the thread.

The dissolution of the fantasy didn’t mean I no longer loved him; it was only that I could suddenly see he didn’t really love me.

Once I accepted that I started to realize…

It wouldn’t last.

I’m scared of what that means. I’m scared to ask too many questions.

Part of me would rather wonder forever if he did love me, than know for certain he didn’t.

And so I drive myself mad. Day after day.

“I’m surprised because in the last six months you’ve been home a handful of days and you certainly haven’t cooked.”

“I missed you.” My heart hits my sternum, and lurches up into my throat. “I wanted to have dinner with you.”

Why am I still so susceptible to him? Why did that make me hope?

I guess I should be relieved that even after all this time the pull to him is so powerful. If it wasn’t I might hate the girl who left the charity event with him that night, a little more than I do now. That girl with her eyes full of stars, about to embark on her very first night of wildness.

But I still feel like her when I look at him sometimes. Especially when I look at his hands and remember all the wicked ways he’s ever touched me.

Great sex isn’t a marriage, alas.

If it were, we’d be the happiest people on the block.

I want to take what he’s just said at face value, but the small, mean part of me that finds everything he does suspicious and painful simply can’t.

It wasn’t always like this. No, when we were first together it was fire and stars and beauty that obsessed me in ways I could never explain. It made my art feel insufficient for the first time in my life. I’d never loved anything but art until him.

He told me I was beautiful; he told me my art was special. That I was special. My parents are such lovely, sweet people but have always been worried about me getting a big head or dreaming too much. Dragos made it his mission to make me feel powerful, talented and particularly singular.

After a lifetime of taking in the importance of work ethic and practicality, a man who showered me with praise, gifts and affection like none of them were in short supply, or anything I had to learn was thrilling.

But over the years it’s changed. Slowly, over time, he’s gotten distant.

It feels like he’s trying to make up for something. Apologizing to me by cooking for me.

Another woman.

I keep obsessing about that, I’ve been thinking it constantly. It sneaks into my dreams at night and I wake up howling—more points for my theory that I’m going mad. I ask myself why I even care.

If he’s betrayed me then I should rejoice, honestly, because it gives credibility to this deep dissatisfaction I feel, to my resentment. If he’s sleeping with someone else I can leave him easily.

I let myself imagine it, those hands on someone else’s body.