Page 52 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
He looks furious. Offended, even, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen Dragosoffended. “You ask me this?”
“You’ve barely been home for months.”
“First you object to the fact that there is sex in our relationship, and now you are acting as if you would be wounded if I gave that sex to someone else. Which is it?”
He was scratching at the inconsistencies I was already enraged at in myself.
“It can be all of those things, actually. Because most people are complicated. But you… You are desperately simple, do you know that? I feel that you fancy yourself very important because you have a lot of money and you are constantly working, and everybody seeks out your opinion on things, but you don’t do anything except work and…”
“I know full well how I spend my time. And because you have given such a well-stated opinion on me, allow me to remind you of who you are. A waitress. You say you’re an artist, where’s your gallery? The hallway of your husband’s home does not signify. You were serving champagne to people with more money than you would have ever seen, and I elevated you.”
“You elevated me to the obscurity of the top floor of your house,” I say, his cruelty nearly taking my breath away, but I refuse to let him see it. I refuse.
“You hate me so much now,” he says, his eyes filled with a strange sort of wonder, and I think for a moment maybe regret.
A moment passes between us, and his eyes glint. “You still want me, though,” he says, and I want to kill him.
“I don’t know that I do. You haven’t touched me for two weeks.”
He grips the back of my head and holds me steady. And then he’s kissing me. And it reminds me far too much of that first night. Because I am lost in it. It’s not natural. We’ve been married for four years. We’ve had each other countless times, and I’m on the verge of leaving, so there’s no way this should capture me the way that it does.
Dragos has always been my form of addiction. His kiss is my drug. And I can’t turn away from him. Not now.
His kiss turns carnal, and he pulls me on top of his desk, sweeping everything else aside.
He strips his clothes off. It’s so rare that he does this, so rare that I get to see his body. He is fond of taking me while I’m naked and he’s nearly fully clothed. I know that it has something to do with power. Control. Because he is nothing if not a man who values his dominance.
But this time he gets naked. This time, I can see every line on his body. All of his scars. All of his tattoos.
Stories that he has never told me about his life, but that I can trace with my fingertips.
I don’t know him. That makes me want to cry. Because I never will. This is the last time, I realize, as he pushes my dress up past my hips—the dress I know he bought to take off of me—and claims me in one smooth stroke. As he takes me to new heights, each stroke of him within me a revelation.
It’s the last time. I know that it is. Because I am going to leave. He doesn’t care. He can look at my pain and return that pain with cruelty. He doesn’t love me.
And I have to go.
Some of what he said is true, and it’s my own fault. I’ve surrendered to him, utterly and completely. But this ends now. It has to end.
I arch up against him, and cry out my pleasure, and at the same time I want to weep. He shudders, spilling himself inside of me. I look around the room, and I see the destruction left behind by our passion.
My life is destruction. I am in the debris that surrounds us now.
I move away from him. “Good night.”
“Have you nothing else to say?”
“No,” I say. “I have nothing else to say. This is all we are. It’s all we will ever be.”
“You say that as if it’s a bad thing.”
“It is. It is, Dragos. How do you not know that?” I want to scream at him, but I know I could do that until I’m hoarse and it wouldn’t change a thing. He sees the world in this one, intractable way and he won’t let me reach him.
“What is love? What is it you think should pass between married people? I cannot understand you. This is passion. We have had it from the first moment we met, and it is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
He has never said anything like that to me. There’s something desperate in his voice, and I find that…
No. I can’t let him appeal to me. I can’t let it affect me.
