Page 98 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“Trying?” Stephanie asks.
“That makes it sound precarious. Or like maybe I don’t want to be with him. That’s not true. What we’re trying to do is learn a different way of communicating. And that’s difficult when you spent four years not doing it.”
“Love’s not supposed to hurt,” Michael says, sounding sage.
I’m not sure that I agree with him.
I think anything that consumes you with the desperate enormity that Dragos consumes me with is bound to hurt sometimes.
But I think of art, and my relationship with it. How badly I’ve always wanted to express myself that way.
It hurts too.
Everything I’ve ever wanted has been painful.
That’s just who I am. I’m passionate, and I tend to wrap it up in the mask of overachieving. Dragos was the first thing I ever flung myself into that I was willing to fail at. He’s given me access to the messier parts of myself. The parts that don’t have to be perfect.
There’s a lot of good in the difficult.
And since we came back from Switzerland, we’ve been better. So much better. He talks to me now. And yes, some of it is moral triage. But I have to give him credit where it’s due.
“He had a very hard childhood,” I find myself saying. “And I didn’t really appreciate how much that affected him until recently.”
“He’s very controlling, it seems to me,” Cheyenne says.
I bristle. “He’s actually not. He was…” I want to call him paranoid, but that’s not really fair. There were real threats. He was involved in bad things. But I don’t exactly want to expose him either. “He has a lot of trauma in his past,” I say, because I know they can understand therapy speak. “And he’s working to unpack that. But it didn’t actually come from a place of wanting to control me. He wanted to protect me. He’s learning to accept that that needs to take a different form. He’s also trying to get involved in acts of charity. And I think it was really… It was really a lovely thing that he wanted to include me. And all of you.”
Whether they can understand it or not, I can.
I feel protective of him. Which is silly. My big bruiser of a Romanian husband hardly needs me to defend his honor. Such as it is. But I find that I want to.
I realize right then that I don’t have to please them. They don’t have to understand.
I understand.
I feel free of a burden I didn’t even realize I was carrying.
This need for people to understand what I’m doing and why.
Because honestly, who cares?
I’ve been burdened by that for a very long time.
I’m just not now.
It takes a while, but eventually my friends are satisfied that I’m not a prisoner of some kind. After that, I get to work on my paintings. Not the dark, gritty series of paintings I was doing of Dragos’s body, though someday, I would like to do something with those paintings, which have since been rescued from the flat in Paris.
Instead, I decide to paint concepts of home. I’m halfway through the series when I decide to call my mother, and invite my parents out to the auction. I also take it as an opportunity to tell her what I’ve been meaning to tell her for a while now.
“Dragos and I are back together.”
Her indrawn breath lets me know she doesn’t approve. And that butts up against all that perfectionist people-pleasing inside of me.
“He’s a good husband,” I say. “Maybe our marriage doesn’t look exactly like yours and Dad’s, but…”
“I don’t understand it,” my mom says.
It doesn’t come from a place of wanting to be mean. I can see that she doesn’t understand it. But I’ve always wanted a life she didn’t understand. It’s just that Dragos is a bridge too far.
