Page 103 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
I feel it begin to cover all the other things that have ever stood between us. All the terrible things that have ever happened to me.
“That’s why I pushed you away. Because I loved you, and I didn’t want to. It terrified me. I don’t know how to love another person. God, it’s awful. It is the worst thing that I have ever felt. This desperation. This knowledge that another person is now inextricably linked to my happiness. If I don’t have you, I might as well not be here. I also want to live because of you. That was the feeling that I had right from the first. I went from never knowing love at all to feeling all of it in a single moment when I saw you there.”
I am on the verge of laughing hysterically. Because of course that’s what it was. All this time. It wasn’t sex. It never was. It was always love.
“From the very beginning,” I say to her. “It was love. I didn’t know how to express it properly. I didn’t know how to show you. Because I didn’t even know what to call it inside of myself. I didn’t even know how to feel it. I turned it into manipulation because that was what I understood. I’ve never loved anyone. And no one has ever loved me. But you said that you did. That night in Paris, and I have never wanted more of something as badly as I wanted more of that.”
“I was afraid that I would chase you away,” she says, her voice trembling.
“No. Of course not. Because I needed it. But I didn’t yet know how to do anything but take. That was all I wanted to do. Take it and use it to heal the broken places inside of me. But… When I fell, and I lost everything, the only thing that was left was you.”
It’s like a revelation. A slow-turning epiphany. “My foundation was always that pain. My foundation was always the way that my father shaped me. The way that my mother hurt me. The way that their violence played out in front of me. It is what made me into the man that I am. But when I lost all of that the only thing that remained was you. It was the first thing. And now… That’s why I’m different, Cassandra. My Cassandra. Because I am built now upon a foundation of loving you. Of you loving me. And it’s changed everything. Everything that was ever possible, everything that I’ve ever known about myself. You’ve changed it.”
Her eyes fill with tears, and then they overflow. “Dragos,” she whispers. And she flings her arms around me, kissing me deep and hard.
We’ve made love countless times. We’ve been rough, and we’ve been soft.
Fast and slow. But it has never been like this. It has never been filled with an overflow of the love between us, which is now spoken, which is now acknowledged, out in the open between us.
And as she kisses me, I know that I will never be the same again.
“I’m the virgin,” I say as she begins to undress me, her hands on my body.
“You can’t use that on me twice,” she says, shaky.
“But it’s true. Because I never understood what this was. I didn’t understand what it was for. All this passion. I don’t know what I thought I had found when I found you. Some new sort of pleasure, a new kind of sensual torment, but it isn’t that. Of course it’s not. It was always love. And I’ve never experienced anything like it before. I’ve never experienced anything like this. My Cassandra.”
I pick her up, and I carry her up the stairs. I take her into my bedroom, and as I lay her down on the bed I whisper against her mouth. “This is going to be our house now. This will be our room. You will not be banished to an attic. You can paint anywhere you like.”
She laughs against my lips. “I thought that this was a form of madness. I thought that I was going to be in the attic forever if I didn’t leave.”
“And you might’ve been. You might’ve been, because it took all of that to reach me. To change me.”
I strip that beautiful pink dress off of her, and I worship her body. Every action is one of love. But when I make my way back to her neck I bite her, because for us it will always have an edge. She growls at me, and bites my lower lip as she moves in for a kiss. We are a passionate fire. But now I know what to call it.
It really is like my first time.
Like every time before it was training for when I finally, finally knew what it meant to make love to my wife.
I lavish attention on her breasts, kiss my way down her stomach and bury my face between her thighs.
I will never tire of the taste of her.
I will never want anything but her.
And I make that promise to her as I bring her to climax, over and over again, teasing her with my tongue, my fingers.
By the time I finally bury myself inside of her tight, wet heat, it’s like my fear goes away entirely.
I’m not afraid of the work. I’m not afraid of all that I don’t understand.
In many ways, I was a wiser man when I knew nothing. I was more able to find my way to the truth.
Letting her love be my foundation. And it is now. It is. So I don’t have to fear the darkness. I don’t have to fear becoming a creature made by my father.
Because I am a man wholly and completely created by Cassandra.
My wife.
