Page 51 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“I do not require you to be there for me in that way. I don’t need anyone to do that for me. If I had needed it, I would have told you so.”
Is he getting what he needs from other places? Other women? I’m undone by all of this, and I can’t even pick which thing wounds me the most. That he might have betrayed me. That he doesn’t care about me. That he doesn’t share with anyone, or that he shares with someone who isn’t me. That I might want to stay, that I definitely need to leave.
I just don’t know.
“But I’m your wife,” I say.
“Yes. You are my wife. And you are a very good one. Very beautiful.”
I reach my breaking point then. All of my hurt, all of my regret, my pain, my everything wells up inside of me and explodes. “Is that all I am to you?” I’m yelling. In the sacred space of his office, I amyellingat this man. Who is fearsome and frightening, who just spoke to me of smiling over his father’s dead body and yet I don’t care.
Because I need to say this. I need to say what I’ve been holding back. I need him to hear me. I need him to see me.
“That is all a wife needs to be,” he says.
“No. I’m nota wife. I’m Cassandra. And I’m an artist. And I had dreams once, Dragos, and they were not to simply rattle around your house waiting for you to come to my bed.”
All the lies I let myself believe crash through me. Back in the beginning with him it seemed like I wouldn’t need art school when every moment with him was a canvas of inspiration.
Now all I have are canvases filled with black and gray.
“I told you I’d buy you a gallery.”
“Itoldyouit isn’t the same! You hear the words that I’m saying, but they don’t mean anything to you. You don’t know me, you don’t understand me. I’ve given you my whole life story and you still don’t know me. The information is just sitting inside of you like facts written on note cards but you haven’t…learned what that means to me. How it makes me who I am.”
“You are hysterical. You know full well that we often do not make it to bed.”
“But that can’t be all there is.”
Maybe I’m the one who isn’t being fair. Maybe I’m the one who’s changing the rules, but I don’t think so. I’m sure that even the sex used to be different. I’m sure of it.
“What is it you expect?” His voice has gone hard.
The word is on the tip of my tongue, but I’m almost afraid to say it. Still, I know this is it. This is the end. There’s no point holding anything back. Not now.
“Love. I would like love. For you to say it as well as show it, and it can’t just be…it can’t just be gifts and orgasms, because that’s not the sum total of a relationship. Of a marriage. If you wanted a mistress then you shouldn’t have married me.”
“Cassandra. That is not what marriage is to me. And I thought that we agreed on this. That what we have is all that is needed.”
“I’m telling you that it isn’t.”
“Are you?”
I lose my temper then, and I do move. And I find myself reaching across his desk. I grab hold of his black tie—why is he wearing a tie at home?—and I pull him toward me.
Our faces are nearly pressed together. “I’m unhappy.”
“Why?” he growls. “Look at this place that you have. You’re ungrateful.”
“Yes. The prison is very nice.”
“This is not prison,” he says. “You know nothing of prison. You’re having a temper tantrum, and I find it unseemly.”
“I don’t care what you find seemly. I am not an object. I’m not a mistress. Youmarriedme.”
“So I did.”
“Are you having an affair?”
