What I wanted was a fantasy, with no reality intruding, but now that I’ve begun to question the fantasy it’s dissolving.
The plan is coming together. But tonight, he’s in the house.
I need to figure out exactly…
I close my eyes; they’re welling with tears. The problem is I still love him. The problem is the idea of leaving him seems as absurd as cutting my own arm off.
I’m dependent on him. He has become part of me. And I hate it. I hate it because it doesn’t feel nice.
Because it feels rough. Because it feels…
Overwhelming. All-consuming.
And I have to ask myself, as I make my way down the stairs and head toward his study, if there is a sinister reason that for me, the straw that broke the camel’s back is his absence, not his overwhelming presence. Because God knows I should’ve left him the first time he refused to let me go out when I wanted to. The first time he denied me a trip home when he couldn’t supervise me.
The first time he told me I could no longer invite people to our house.
Yes. I should’ve left then.
He’s not cruel to me. But I am a thing. One of the many that he owns.
That’s all I am to him.
I move down the stairs like a ghost. I do everything like a ghost.
I’m shocked when I see him in the kitchen—all black like everything in Dragos’s life—cooking like he’s a domestic of some kind. He’s barely been home for months and now he’s in the kitchen. Cooking.
I watch as he grabs a large knife, and quickly chops an onion. His movements are efficient and ruthless. I can imagine him taking that knife and stabbing it through my heart with the same efficiency.
He wouldn’t, of course.
I’d bleed on the rug.
It would be an inconvenience, and Dragos abhors an inconvenience.
“You are lurking,” he says without looking up from his task.
I slip into the light. “I wasn’t lurking, but I was surprised to find you here.”
“Why is that,dragostea mea?”
My love. I know what it means now, and yet I preferred it when I didn’t know the meaning, honestly. It’s just a mockery of everything I once believed in now.
One thing I do know about Dragos is that his sex drive is insatiable, and he hasn’t been exhausting it with me.
It’s way too easy for me to think of him, out at some function where he sees a waitress. Twenty, pretty, innocent.
I would never have suspected he’d want anyone but me at first. I interpreted our physical connection as love for him, just as it was for me.
I saw it as the beautiful tapestry, woven before our time on earth. Magical and fated. We were meant to meet that day; it was written in the stars. Why would I question it?
That’s what I told myself.
But there was a loose thread, and I could see it, even then. I didn’t pull it. I didn’t even want to get near it.
But now, as he’s grown distant and I’ve grown more unhappy, I’ve begun to pull at the thread, and now it’s unraveled everything. I can’t see the beautiful picture of us that I once did. I’m suspicious of everything he does, of all of his motives.
As quickly as I fell for him, as quickly as I leaped into that fantasy of us, I’ve destroyed it by asking the questions I refused to ask before.
