Page 38 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

He delights in showing me around Paris, especially when he finds out that I’ve never been there.

He has the Louvre closed down so that we can tour it just the two of us, and I know that I should feel guilty for such extravagance, but it’s magical.

We eat croissants, and he brushes crumbs off my face like I’m cute and it’s not embarrassing.

Then he takes me back to the penthouse, and makes love to me until neither of us can breathe.

I brush his dark hair out of his eyes, and stare at him. “I think I might love you,” I say.

I wait for the ceiling to fall down on me. The whole world. He doesn’t run. Instead, he smiles at me. “Do you really?”

“Yes.”

“That is a gift, my Cassandra.”

He doesn’t say he loves me, but he doesn’t leave me.

I let that memory fade away. He didn’t love me. I wanted it to be love. I feel silly with how much I wanted it to be.

I’m angry that Paris feels gray.

“He’s a stupid man,” I shout into the emptiness of the apartment.

I buy canvases, so many canvases. I put minimal furniture in the room. Because I decide that it’s going to be a place devoted to my art.

Unfortunately, I only have one muse. I spend all day every day painting my husband.

The honed sinew of his bicep, a close-up, detailed rendition of his hands, on my throat. The tattoos, the strength.

His hands digging into my hips. The hard cut of his jaw, all that black stubble, his chin, his mouth. Close-up pieces, and no one would be able to identify the muse.

But I know.

After weeks of this, I accept it. He’s all I can paint, and I think I have to paint him if I want to even begin to wash out the memory of him.

I do an interpretation of him as The Thinker , his head in his hands, his scarred, tattooed body in living color rather than white marble.

It’s precision work, and yet I find I have no difficulty painting him from memory.

It’s not an ode to love. It’s an exorcism. Dragos Apostolis is my demon. My personal monster. But I don’t only need to paint him to remove him from me. If I paint him, then maybe I’ll understand him. If I paint him, maybe I’ll have power over him .

I have so many memories of him, of us.

I wish that I could look at those memories objectively, but I just feel so sad for myself. For how badly I wanted to believe in him. For how badly I wanted to believe in us.

A kiss in front of the Eiffel Tower, engagement in Singapore, the wedding in Romania. The honeymoon in the Swiss Alps. I can see his face in those moments, all the times I thought he was giving me a look of love.

What was it?

That’s why I have to paint him.

If I can look at that expression rendered in front of me, then maybe I’ll be able to understand it.

But I’m still working on my tortured thinker. I’ve been trying to get the muscles on his thighs just right, and the black dragon he has tattooed there.

I know it intimately. I’ve traced it with my tongue.

I paint and paint, and when I leave I smell like turpentine and have blotches of color on my fingers and arms. I eat in one of two cafés just beneath the apartment, every single day.

Every single day, I see the same man in line.

He wears a tan trench coat, and a nice suit.

His hair is light brown, his eyes the same color.

He is none of the extremes of Dragos. With jet-black hair, cold ice-blue eyes and he looks at me in that very particular way.

He looks like the nice man my mom thinks I should have ended up with.

I feel nothing. I don’t want to. I’m still married to Dragos, after all. He’s ruined me for men.

There’s a woman who sits at the window every day, and she smiles at me in a particular way, and I’m not interested in her either.

Logically, I entertain the thought that if he’s ruined me for men perhaps I should go on a date with a woman.

But I can’t even muster up interest for that based on novelty.

The realization I have in that moment is that he’s going to have to become my ex-husband at some point, officially.

He is going to have to find me. He’s going to have to send papers.

I don’t want any of his money.

I smile politely at the woman, and at the man. I sit down with my pastry and my coffee. The man is the one who approaches me, and this doesn’t surprise me, because men.

“Hi.”

I’m surprised that he speaks English, and even more surprised to discover he’s American.

“Hi,” I say.

“I’m Luke. I’ve noticed you here every day. And I’ve heard you talking to the cashier so I knew that you were American.”

“Yes. I am. Is my French that bad?”

He laughed. “Better than mine.”

“Where you from?”

“California.”

“Idaho. So… West Coast also, kind of.”

He nods. I don’t invite him to sit down.

“I’ll probably see you here tomorrow.”

“Yes,” I say. “You will.”

It wasn’t bad talking to him. I get up and I bus my own table, then I walk out onto the street. A dark shape catches my eye, and I am immobilized. I look over quickly, but I don’t see anything. I don’t see anyone.

I swallow hard. It’s not Dragos. He would never come for me himself. He would send one of his people anyway. It would never be him.

I walk quickly back into the apartment. I spend the rest of the day painting.

When I sleep, it’s fitful. And filled with flashes of memory. Filled with Dragos.

I can see him clearly in my mind standing on a street corner in Paris. I wake up in a cold sweat, and I paint until the sun comes up. Then I go downstairs for my breakfast. Luke is there.

“Can I join you?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say definitively. He sits down, and I push my mug back and forth. “I have to warn you,” I say. “I’m married. I mean, I fully intend on divorcing him, but I just left.”

He nods. “That’s okay. I don’t really know anyone here. So… If I could just know you, that would be nice.”

It’s the nicest thing someone could’ve said to me. I find out that he’s twenty-five and has taken an internship here, and feels homesick. I tell him that I’m an artist, and he isn’t dismissive at all. We laugh about the fact that I’m a cliché. An American in Paris working on my paintings.

He doesn’t ask me about Dragos. I’m grateful for that, because it means that I can pretend. I can think about other things.

“Would you like to go out tonight? Just… For company. I don’t expect anything.”

He is so nice. “I would. Thank you. I’m… Going a little bit crazy cooped up in my apartment all day.”

“Same. Anything I can do to help out a fellow American.”

“Cue eagle screech,” I say.

“I’m not going to do it. Everyone in here already hates us.”

“True,” I say.

I want to tell him that my soon-to-be ex-husband is Romanian, and do an impersonation of Dragos’s grim voice as he monologues about large American chain stores and consumerism.

Because it’s something I always found funny, because he’s a billionaire, so…

whatever with the consumerism rant and also he married an American.

But I stop myself, because I don’t actually want to think about Dragos. And I don’t want to talk about him. I’m angry that I had a good memory of him. A thing that I used to find amusing.

“Are you all right, Cassie?” he asks.

I told him to call me Cassie. That’s what everyone calls me back home. It’s really only Dragos that insists on Cassandra. “Yes. Everything’s fine. I’ll… I’ll see you tonight. I just live upstairs? But we can meet down here in front of the café.”

“Great. Seven o’clock?”

“Perfect.”

He leaves to go to work, and I stay seated for a minute. I feel just a little bit lighter. Just a little bit happier. I feel like maybe everything isn’t ruined.

I’m not attracted to him. But I’ve met someone.

Someone nice. Someone I can have a conversation with.

After feeling like I was descending into madness for so long, it’s a relief.

Of course, spending the rest of the day working on my painting of Dragos pulls me back into a strange place.

And by the time I’m on the street waiting for Luke I’m feeling edgy.

The streets are busy, but still, there is movement that catches my eye, and I look quickly. I’m sure that I see a man with black hair, wearing a black coat slip around the corner.

My nerves rattle.

Dragos.

No. It can’t be. It can’t be Dragos. I tell myself that repeatedly. But I become more and more anxious until Luke arrives with a small bunch of roses. “I know,” he says. “But, I wanted to get them for you.”

“That’s very nice,” I say.

Of course then I have to carry them for the whole evening, because I’m not about to invite him up to my apartment before we even eat. I’m not about to invite him up at all, not under any circumstances.

I couldn’t even imagine.

Please come in, ignore all of the paintings of my naked ex-husband.

Yes, I am extremely horny, but not for you, for his jawline.

I wince. Thankfully, Luke doesn’t notice.

The restaurant he chooses for dinner is lovely, modern. We are seated by the window. I’m a glass of wine deep in the conversation when the hair on my arm prickles. I look out the window, and I see him. Standing there across the street, his hands in his pockets. Looking right at me.

My jaw drops, my heart begins to race. A bus drives by, obscuring my view. And after it passes, he’s gone.

“What is it?”

“I… I don’t…”

“You look scared,” he says.

“I’m not. I… I…” I shake my head. “I thought I saw someone I know. But they can’t be here. They aren’t in the country. It was just one of those uncanny things.” I try to smile. “I’ll slow down on the wine.”

I try to calm myself down, and soon I find myself relaxing. Dinner is lovely. I learned more about Luke over the course of that dinner than I ever did about Dragos in the four years we were married. And I still don’t want to see him naked. It’s too soon. That’s the thing.

Someday maybe I’ll want to.

I think of all my paintings. I guess you can take the mad wife out of the attic but you can’t take the madness out of the wife.

I’ve locked myself back in the attic so to speak. But I am trying.

When Luke and I leave the restaurant, I’m still carrying the roses, and I carry them in the hand closest to his so that there is no attempted hand-holding. If he notices this, he doesn’t let on. He talks while we walk, and I’m overcome by that same sensation of being watched again.

I look over my shoulder, and I don’t see anything.

My heart starts to beat faster, and the one thing that begins to frighten me is I don’t know that I’ve ever had a great instinct for whether or not I’m being watched.

But what I have always been in tune with is Dragos.

The way that he looks at me, the way that it feels when he’s near me.

No. I refuse to believe that I maintain any sort of mystical connection to that man. I refuse to believe that I’m having intuition. I’m being paranoid.

We arrive at the front of my apartment. “Thank you again. For the roses. For dinner.”

“Can we do this again?”

“Yes. But I really don’t want to disappoint you. I… I really just got my heart broken. And when I tell you it was an extremely dysfunctional relationship…”

“Is he who you’re afraid of?”

It’s a logical question, and in some ways the answer is yes. But… The truth of it is I’m more afraid of myself.

“It was very intense,” I say. “And he is very controlling.”

Luke looks angry. “No man has any right to control a woman.”

“I appreciate that. But I’m just trying to give context for…me.”

“I like you, Cassie. But I’m okay going slow. I won’t lie to you and say that I don’t feel something. But it’s okay if it only ends up being friendship. We’re two Americans in Paris. We might as well see, right?”

“Yeah.”

Though I don’t need to see. I know.

“Good night,” he says, and I’m grateful that he doesn’t make a move toward me, or wait for me to walk away. I stand there for a moment, until that strange sensation creeps up on me again. After that I go back inside quickly. Very quickly.

I make my way up the stairs and lock myself in the apartment, then put a chair in front of the door for good measure.

And here I am, left alone, surrounded by paintings of Dragos.

I sigh heavily, and pour myself another glass of wine, and I sit in front of my nearly finished painting. I take out my sketchbook, and I start to draw. I don’t intend for the drawing to be pornographic, but it is. Dragos, over me, his hand gripping my chin as he enters me from behind.

I won’t paint that.

I’m startled out of my guilty artistic fantasies by the sound of tires squealing on the street below, a strange thick whisking sound and a shout.

I run to the window and look out at the street below. There, bathed in the light of the streetlamps, I see a man dressed all in black lying on the sidewalk, with a pool of blood spreading around him.

And I freeze. Because all I can think of is the story Dragos told me about his father.

Dragos.

I run to get my phone, but I can’t remember where I put my purse. My hands are shaking. It’s not Dragos. But someone is hurt. Maybe they’ve been hit by a car? I have no idea what just happened.

But they need help. I need to call the emergency line. But I can’t find my stupid purse. I can’t find my stupid phone. The apartment is too small for it to be this difficult.

Finally, I find it, and I run back to the window with it in hand. But the man is gone. If it wasn’t for the red smudge on the sidewalk I would believe that I made the entire thing up.

And then I hear a large thump against my door.

My adrenaline spurs me, and I’m not thinking about anything but the fact that there’s an injured man who needs help.

I move the chair, and open the door. And my whole world falls apart.