Page 64 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
“Oh. I suppose I’m going to stay up with you, then?”
“You are my wife.”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to tell him I’m trying tonotbe his wife. I don’t know what to do with an amnesiac, though. If you’re supposed to tell them, or if telling them the truth is like waking up a sleepwalker.
“How do you know you’re not supposed to sleep?” He’s so confident and certain in some things and I have no idea how or why.
I want to laugh, though, because the truth is he’s no less confusing with amnesia. I’ve never understood what was happening inside of him. He’s a wall and I’ve never known how to climb him.
“I don’t know,” he says. “There are certain things that I know, and many that I don’t. Some of this is simply feelings. A gut instinct.”
“You knew me,” I say.
He nods slowly. “Yes. I told you. I remember meeting you.”
“Okay,” I say.
Hedoesn’tremember that. He thinks he does. He probably would have felt this way about any woman he happened upon after this accident. Though, he clearly did go up my stairs to my door for a reason. Which means he knew where I was living. He has been watching me this whole time.
Impossibly, foolishly, my heart begins to beat faster. Because hecameforme.
I thought he wasn’t going to. I thought he didn’t care or that he had another woman in our bed already but he did come for me.
The joy that gives me is momentary and then I want to fling myself out a window. Because how is it that I can be joyous that my husband chased me down? When I was afraid of it. When I knew that it was necessary for us to be apart.
Truly, I am tired of myself. Of my obsession with him.
I’m in shock, I realize. I want to rage at him, at the world, at everything. I realize that the problem with myself and Dragos is that there was never a pattern for us from the start. There is no guidebook for this.
One thing I never imagined, though, is that it could get more absurd. So kudos to the universe. Hilarious stuff.
“I don’t think you know me,” I say. “Not in some magical way. I think I was maybe the last thought in your head because you were in front of my apartment, and clearly you knew that.”
I’m desperate to prove to both of us that me still existing in his washed-out memory doesn’t mean anything.
“Idoknow you,” he says, his tone fierce, his blue eyes wild. “And you know me. You painted me.”
I amwretchedthat he saw that. It was humiliating enough to let myself exist in that cycle where all I could think about was him, but I never imagined him seeing it. I never imagined him witnessing my obsession.
The trouble is, I think he’s unhealthy. Unwell.
The trouble is, so am I.
“Everyonehas to have a model for painting,” I say, gritting my teeth. “You’ve been mine.”
“The paintings areerotic.”
Heat races over my skin and my face gets hot. “How nice that you understand the concept of the erotic there among your scattered memories.”
He regards me, his perusal slow. I feel that gaze like hands on my skin and it’s far too easy to remember what it’s like. We have a very low success rate with not touching each other when we’re alone together.
We don’t even do that well with it when we aren’t alone together.
I can recall a business event he took me to where he put his hand in my lap beneath the table and…
No. I’m not going to remember that.
“For my wife, you seem to not like me very much,” he says.
