Page 56 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“That’s not how being an artist works, my Cassandra. You don’t need school to make you an artist. That’s something you find in your soul, I am told. Having no soul of my own, it’s very difficult to say if that’s true.” He lifts me out of the tub, carries me to the chaise lounge where he sits behind me and combs his fingers through my hair, braiding it with deft skill. I want to tell him I know he has a soul. It has to be a beautiful one. Because it captured me from the first.
Surely, surely, I never could have fallen for a man who didn’t.
Iamfalling for him. I have to admit that to myself as he holds me, his hands gentle in my hair.
He delights in showing me around Paris, especially when he finds out that I’ve never been there. He has the Louvre closed down so that we can tour it just the two of us, and I know that I should feel guilty for such extravagance, but it’s magical. We eat croissants, and he brushes crumbs off my face like I’m cute and it’s not embarrassing. Then he takes me back to the penthouse, and makes love to me until neither of us can breathe.
I brush his dark hair out of his eyes, and stare at him. “I think I might love you,” I say.
I wait for the ceiling to fall down on me. The whole world. He doesn’t run. Instead, he smiles at me. “Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“That is a gift, my Cassandra.”
He doesn’t say he loves me, but he doesn’t leave me.
I let that memory fade away. He didn’t love me. I wanted it to be love. I feel silly with how much I wanted it to be.
I’m angry that Paris feels gray.
“He’s a stupid man,” I shout into the emptiness of the apartment.
I buy canvases, so many canvases. I put minimal furniture in the room. Because I decide that it’s going to be a place devoted to my art.
Unfortunately, I only have one muse. I spend all day every day painting my husband.
The honed sinew of his bicep, a close-up, detailed rendition of his hands, on my throat. The tattoos, the strength.
His hands digging into my hips. The hard cut of his jaw, all that black stubble, his chin, his mouth. Close-up pieces, and no one would be able to identify the muse.
But I know.
After weeks of this, I accept it. He’s all I can paint, and I think I have to paint him if I want to even begin to wash out the memory of him.
I do an interpretation of him asThe Thinker, his head in his hands, his scarred, tattooed body in living color rather than white marble.
It’s precision work, and yet I find I have no difficulty painting him from memory.
It’s not an ode to love. It’s an exorcism. Dragos Apostolis is my demon. My personal monster. But I don’t only need to paint him to remove him from me. If I paint him, then maybe I’ll understand him. If I paint him, maybe I’ll have power overhim.
I have so many memories of him, of us.
I wish that I could look at those memories objectively, but I just feel so sad for myself. For how badly I wanted to believe in him. For how badly I wanted to believe in us.
A kiss in front of the Eiffel Tower, engagement in Singapore, the wedding in Romania. The honeymoon in the Swiss Alps. I can see his face in those moments, all the times I thought he was giving me a look of love.
Whatwasit?
That’s why I have to paint him.
If I can look at that expression rendered in front of me, then maybe I’ll be able to understand it.
But I’m still working on my tortured thinker. I’ve been trying to get the muscles on his thighs just right, and the black dragon he has tattooed there.
I know it intimately. I’ve traced it with my tongue.
I paint and paint, and when I leave I smell like turpentine and have blotches of color on my fingers and arms. I eat in one of two cafés just beneath the apartment, every single day. Every single day, I see the same man in line. He wears a tan trench coat, and a nice suit. His hair is light brown, his eyes the same color. He is none of the extremes of Dragos. With jet-black hair, cold ice-blue eyes and he looks at me in that very particular way.
