Page 76 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
Yet here I am.
He reaches out to me, and I can’t help myself. I let him take my hands in his. I smooth my thumb over the ink on his.
“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.
