Page 50 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
I can’t let it go.
I leave my room and I make my way down the hall.
I don’t knock on his study door, because if this house is the only place I’m allowed, then I refuse to act like part of it might not be available to me when I want it. I refuse to act likehemight not be available to me. Even though I know he feels differently.
Dragos is in charge. We both know that.
Made even more difficult by the fact that we like power games in bed. We play lots of games, but in some of them he’s my master and I surrender everything to him. Sometimes, he puts a collar on me and it makes me feel good, because it makes me feel like I’m his.
But there are times that it bleeds into our lives, and it picks at my own insecurities. When we met I was nothing more than a waitress. He took my arm, he led me out of there and he made me his. But he is the one with money.
He is the one with power.
I feel that every single day. The wedding ring has become a manacle.
He is sitting behind a wide black desk. Polished, gleaming. Just like him.
Like we didn’t just have an earth-shattering conversation. Like he didn’t just tell me about childhood trauma I could never have guessed at.
Perhaps I should have.
Perhaps my mistake has been thinking he’s a man with a rough surface, who must have humanity beneath.
Maybe he’s rough all the way down.
His tattooed hands are pressed down on the surface of the desk, and he is focused on something in front of him. He looks up when I walk in.
“Yes?”
“I need to talk to you.”
I love him. That’s the thing that enrages me then. I want him. That’s the thing that hurts.
If I could only despise him. Then I would’ve left him. I would’ve left him six months into the marriage if I would’ve known what was going to be, as long as I didn’t love him. But the problem is I do love him. With every fiber of my being, with every part of my soul. And I try to tell myself that it can’t be love because it isn’t like we behave the way that a normal couple does.
But I wouldn’t know normal. I know Dragos. And that’s it. He is my only experience of men. He is my only experience of love. I want to leap over his desk and… Maybe strangle him. Maybe make love to him. I’m not entirely sure.
The feeling is too powerful to keep contained inside of me, though. I am finding it nearly impossible to breathe past it.
“I thought you might need your rest tonight after the conversation we had on the terrace.” He says this with his head tilted to the side, and someone who doesn’t know him observing the scene might mistake it for concern. Compassion.
I know him, however. Which means I know it’s neither of those things.
He does such a fantastic impersonation of a human man. And yet, in his deepest heart, he is more machine than anything else.
The way he took me to bed that first night and held me. The way he looked at me whenever he bought me a new dress. The way he proposed, with rough desperation in his voice, as if he didn’t understand what was happening between us either. Like I wasn’t the only one who was inexperienced.
If only that could change the way that I feel about him. It hasn’t yet. It probably never will.
“I’d like to know why you said that and then walked away. Why you didn’t even give me a chance to respond.”
“I didn’t need your response,” he said.
“Why?” I ask, my tone filled with desperation and I’m not even in the mood to hide it.
“Why would I need it?”
“When people marry they share things. When they care for each other they talk. I want to be there for you and you won’t let me.”
