Page 37 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER FOUR

I WON’T LIE , I’m somewhat surprised when he doesn’t come after me. And yet, it also feels like confirmation. Maybe this was what I was afraid of all this time. Not that he had me locked in, a prisoner serving a life sentence. Not that he would hunt me down in the streets.

That he wouldn’t come for me at all.

Maybe he’s moved a new woman into our home. It’s shocking how easily I can imagine that. His hands, his mouth, on someone else.

Someone who’s willing to play his games and live by his rules.

If it’s regret I feel knotting my stomach, I do my best not to acknowledge it.

I stay at a hotel in London. I work on selling my car for some cash. I find a little attic apartment in France and laugh because I’m putting myself in the attic now.

After three days, while I’m preparing to board a train to Paris, I call my mother.

“Cassie,” she says. “I’ve been worried about you. I haven’t heard from you.”

I smile at the wall, because I want to sound like I’m fine. “I… I separated from Dragos.”

There is deafening silence on the other end.

“That’s probably for the best,” my mother says after a good while, and her certainty about that hurts.

“Do you think so?”

“He’s very…cold.” My mother is quiet for a moment. “Your father and I never wanted to interfere, and really, we couldn’t. You were so in love with him. But it wasn’t like you. I imagined you with…a nice guy who might want to bring you back here.”

Of course my mother didn’t imagine me with a man like Dragos. I’d never even imagined a man like Dragos existed.

I see flashes of the two of us together. Of our passion. He isn’t cold physically. But in so many other ways he is.

I try to imagine what it was like watching me fling myself into my relationship with him, like nothing else on earth existed, but I just end up missing that feeling and I hate myself for it.

“It just wasn’t working,” I say.

I’ve been back to visit my family since the wedding. Three times. And Dragos went with me every time. I was never allowed to travel home without at least his security detail, but him preferably.

I know that it bothers my family, that they never were able to see me alone.

I know my father has been worried. And who can blame him?

I brought home a rich man who rarely smiles, has tattoos all over his body and never lets me out of his sight.

I’m actually aware of how it looked, I just wanted so badly for it to be okay that I pushed all of that down, and I never invited any conversations with either of my parents about it.

“He’s never hurt me,” I say.

“That is a very low bar, Cassie,” my mother says softly.

I want to shout at her that I love him . Can’t they understand that? It was so big I couldn’t do anything but rearrange my whole life around it. It was love. It was love and it was real and it changed me.

But what’s the point of defending something that I’m killing? I can’t figure it out. Why I still feel the need to defend the choices that I made.

Why I need to hold onto how real it was.

I suppose because if it was never real there’s no point in me being scarred and bloody inside over it.

“I’ve decided to move to Paris,” I say.

“You’re not coming back home?” I can tell she’s disappointed and that makes guilt twist in my chest.

But I can’t do that. It’s for small, petty reasons. But I can’t go back. Because I was this overachiever. I was going to make it .

I didn’t date. I didn’t go out. I threw everything into my art and a perfect GPA so that I could get the scholarships I needed, so that I could leave Idaho and travel the world and not be so stuck.

I thought that I was better than the other girls in my hometown who were going to stay there and marry their high school sweethearts. I’d had goals and aspirations that reached beyond the main street of that little place.

I can’t face going back with my tail between my legs.

My own ego makes me want to laugh bitterly now.

I would’ve been better off marrying a Kyle or a Josh. That’s the honest truth.

I flew too close to the sun and I got my wings burned off for my sins. I understand all too well now why some people never want to leave their homes. Why they don’t want to reach high.

The fall is a bitch.

I’m still falling by the time I arrived in Paris, and take up residence in the small apartment with a window that faces the Seine. It is small, but the sort of place I dreamed about as a child. The building is ornate, with glorious scrollwork, and the walls inside are robin’s-egg blue and gold.

I eat bread and cheese and drink the most glorious wine. It is a fantasy I had often when I was in high school. A small nook in Paris to live the romantic life of an artist, comfortable and cozy, glamorous in its simplicity.

And yet for me, it is not the Paris I came to that first time.

It doesn’t feel as bright or beautiful or glorious, no matter how many opulent galleries I visit. No matter how many architecture tours I take, or how many designer shops I go into.

It is like a different city altogether.

I spend a week or so pondering that. Was it really more beautiful the first time I came here, or was I just with Dragos? Was I still seeing the world through rose-colored glasses that are shattered now?

I remember it all too well.

I’m giddy. Because not only do I have a boyfriend who touches me in ways that intoxicate me, he’s… Obsessed with me.

It feels naughty, and I feel a small amount of guilt over the pleasure I take it. He’s in his thirties, and if the girls that I hang out with at university knew, they would retch and gag about age gaps and how problematic it is. They would shout at me about power dynamics .

I love the power dynamics.

He makes me feel like he holds the whole world in the palm of his tattooed hand, like he could take care of anything I needed.

Like I didn’t have to try so hard. He didn’t know me, he just saw me and wanted me.

Not for what I could do, and he wasn’t drawn to me because I’d worked so hard to get where I was. He just was. Like it was magic.

Every boy my age around me in class now looks so insipid by comparison. They wouldn’t know how to do the things Dragos does to me in bed.

But it isn’t just the sex, though it’s incredible.

It’s everything. He loves to take me shopping. He takes me to gorgeous restaurants. He shows me off. Like he’s proud of me. He’s a very important man. The owner of a major conglomerate that has its hands in nearly every industry on earth.

Another thing my friends would be horrified by. There are no such things as ethical billionaires, after all.

But there’s something about even that which makes it all feel that much more amazing. The truth is, he can have any woman he wants just because of his money. He can have any woman he wants because of his raw physical appeal. He can have any woman he wants and he wants me.

What am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to fight that? And why would I want to?

Secretly, deep down, I’ve always wanted to be special. I’ve accepted that I have to work hard to get what I want, but part of me has always wished someone would look at me and see me. See the hard work, the talent, and just…recognize me and lift me up.

He has.

No, it’s not my art, but he seems to see me. I’ve been so focused on this, all my life. I ignored men, I ignored any desire for romance and now I feel like I could drown myself in this feeling and be happy forever.

When he asked me if I want to go to Paris for the weekend, I imagine a long train ride, and instead, we take his private jet.

We stay in the most gorgeous penthouse that I never could’ve even imagined.

It overlooks the Eiffel Tower, we have private dining on the rooftop and the first night he draws me a bath with rose-scented water.

I sink into it, and he sits behind the tub, lathering up my hair and washing it for me. I look up at him, and he smiles, and I’m certain that no one has ever been this happy.

I imagine explaining this to my mother.

I haven’t told my mom and dad about Dragos.

What is there to say? Hi, Mom and Dad, I was waiting tables at an event and I met a man who told me I was pretty so I fell into bed with him without asking his name and let him take my virginity, and now I’m in the world’s most delicious whirlwind courtship?

Now I’m rethinking everything I ever thought I knew about myself and planning a future that can’t actually happen because there’s no way a man like him will ever marry me.

But I don’t care. I let him take me to Paris and I’m letting him give me a bath.

Letting him wash my hair.

“I was not looking for this,” he says, a note of wonder in his voice.

“Well, I wasn’t either.”

“No?”

I laugh. “No. I was a virgin, Dragos. Men were not on my mind. They still aren’t. It’s just you.”

I wonder if I’ve said too much, but he doesn’t look upset. In fact, he looks pleased.

“What are you going to do after university?”

“I don’t know. I’ve spent so long working so hard. To get the scholarship, to keep my place in this really competitive program. I haven’t had time to think about what I want to do after.”

“You’re an artist.”

“Yes. Well, I want to be.”

“That’s not how being an artist works, my Cassandra.

You don’t need school to make you an artist. That’s something you find in your soul, I am told.

Having no soul of my own, it’s very difficult to say if that’s true.

” He lifts me out of the tub, carries me to the chaise lounge where he sits behind me and combs his fingers through my hair, braiding it with deft skill.

I want to tell him I know he has a soul.

It has to be a beautiful one. Because it captured me from the first.

Surely, surely, I never could have fallen for a man who didn’t.

I am falling for him. I have to admit that to myself as he holds me, his hands gentle in my hair.