Page 45 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

“I worry that I am a bad man,” he says.

This isn’t the first time he’s expressed this concern.

“I know that you’re a rough man. A hard one. The ink on your hands is a warning that you’re not afraid to use force if necessary to get what you want.”

“I told you all of that?” he asks.

“No. You didn’t. I… Have guessed that. Based on knowing you. I told you, I don’t know all that much about you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have some sense for who you are.”

“And you’re different.”

“Yes.”

“From a nice family.”

“A very nice family.”

“They probably told you to stay away from me.” He grins, showing all his teeth. Every inch the predator.

I laugh. “No. They knew that they couldn’t tell me that. Because the moment that I met you I was… I was lost.”

He frowns. “This is why I think we could start over. If we can feel all of these powerful things without truly knowing one another…”

“The trouble is, I also know where that leads. To where we were. To all that unhappiness.”

“I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

His words wash over me like a healing wave. He doesn’t want me to be unhappy. This form of him, this version of him, whatever I want to call it, he doesn’t want me to be unhappy.

“That is really, very nice, Dragos.” My words are strangled.

“It seems like the bare minimum that one should want for their wife.”

We’re still holding hands. And I can’t stop myself from tracing the letters on his knuckles. “I didn’t know. I just felt mounting sadness every day, and I didn’t know if you wanted anything for me at all. Or if you just kept me out of habit. Out of a sense of pride. And I can’t ask you now.”

“I’m sorry. I am useless in so many ways, it turns out. And in many that I did not foresee.”

“I don’t think anyone can really foresee amnesia.”

“I don’t suppose. You need to go to bed,” he says.

“But you can’t go to bed.”

“I will sit,” he says. “And I will keep watch.”

“Over what? We are out in the middle of nowhere. No one’s going to find us.”

“I will keep watch,” he says firmly.

Then he pulls me up from the couch. He sweeps me up into his arms, like it’s our wedding day all over again. And he begins to carry me up the stairs.

I cling to him, looking up into his face, carved with hard lines like granite, at his hard obsidian eyes.

The trouble is I can see the man that I fell in love with.

I can see the man that I want him to be.

I can see a whole future that I wish was a possibility, but that I know isn’t.

It would be insanity of a kind to continue to cling to the idea that it could be.

I’m beginning to think the definition of insanity is not simply doing the same thing over and over again.

The definition of insanity is love.

And that is a terrifying realization.

He lays me down on the soft mattress and I cling to him for a moment.

Because I don’t know what it is to be put to bed by him without sex following.

We know the steps to this dance. His body does, even if his mind doesn’t.

I’m confident in that. I see it, in the barely banked black flame in his eyes.

Every other time he would’ve kissed me. Touched me.

Held me down, restrained my hands, thrust into me and made me cry out his name.

He doesn’t do that. Instead he smooths my hair back from my forehead and gazes at me as if I am a sight that he has longed to see for millennia.

Time ceases to exist.

There is nothing beyond the two of us. The affection in his touch. Something that I’ve never felt from him before.

“Like the sun coming out from behind the clouds,” he says softly.

“Like finding a missing piece to my soul. Like finding a lifetime of missing peace.” He lets out a hard breath.

“I don’t remember everything, in fact, I barely remember a single thing.

But that feeling inside of me is so large, so all-consuming.

I think nothing could banish it. That’s why I remember you. ”

He’s talking about me like we might be soulmates. That’s how I felt. From the first moment I saw him I thought…

No. I tried so hard to stop romanticizing that moment. To sit and recognize it for what it was. Lust overtaking sense. I’m not immune to that. Who is?

“It was sexual attraction,” I say. “Us and all of humanity. It isn’t that unique.

We start wars and religions to try and contain sex.

We paint our feelings and turn them into song lyrics, poetry and films. It’s a playground game.

Kiss, marry, kill. There’s a reason those three go together.

We kiss and marry and kill the one we love.

” I touch his face. “I don’t want you to go thinking that we had some beautiful life and I’m denying us.

Our feelings were real, but I’m not sure that I believe in love anymore. ”

As I say that, I feel my heart begin to crumble. I feel like I’m doing to him what he did to me. I looked at him, hoping, praying that he would give me something. That he would tell me that he cared for me.

That he loved me.

Now he’s looking at me like he wants the same reassurance and I’m refusing to give it. And I can’t figure out if I’m being punitive, or if I’m just trying to save us both.

He moves away from me, but stays sitting at the foot of the bed.

“Sleep,” he says.

“You don’t have to babysit me.”

“I don’t want you out of my sight. You’re the only thing I know. Without you I’m… I don’t exist.”

My eyes begin to drift closed. I think I’ve been awake for twenty-four hours. I don’t want to sleep, actually, I want to answer him. But I feel myself being dragged under into unconsciousness. And when I wake, none of this is a dream.

I am still living in Dragos’s nightmare.