Page 123 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

But right then, she knew that wasn’t true. He would hurt her. Because in the end they would go their separate ways, and it would tear her into pieces.

But he wouldn’t do it on purpose. He just would. Because of who they were.

This wasn’t real. And neither were they. How could they be? She was taken out of her life, and he was removed from his. He had even lost some of his senses. Maybe that was part of why they were out here, naked in a field. They had lost their senses.

“Why haven’t you been with anyone?” he asked.

“Well, I have now.”

“Before. Us... This. It got swallowed up by the accident. By everything.”

She lifted a shoulder, but then realized he couldn’t see the gesture. “I would’ve thought that us sleeping together was just a mundane thing to you.”

“It wasn’t. It meant something. I know you, Auggie, and I can’t say the same for any of the other women that I have ever taken as lovers. I respected them, I even liked them in a casual sense, but I didn’t know even half about them that I know about you. And I find myself curious.”

“I just didn’t have the time. And mainly... I don’t think I wanted to let anyone in. I had great practice at being a fortress, and it’s difficult to be something else. In the last seven years my life has changed relentlessly. Every month, every year has felt different to me.”

She plucked at a piece of grass. “When my mother’s health declined even more than it already had, I had to be as strong as I possibly could be to get through that. To finish high school while I was taking care of her. I had to grieve her while she sat in front of me. I had to keep going, because you can’t stop, because when someone is dying it doesn’t stop. It changes by the day. And so do you. I wanted it to stop. There would be a moment when it all felt manageable. Where she wasn’t in too much pain, and she was still there, and I would wish that everything could just... Stop. For a moment. And then when it was hard, sometimes I would just wish...”

She swallowed hard, the truth, the honesty, cutting her throat on its way out. “That it was over. But there was no one that I could say that to. Nobody that I could share with. I got used to processing all of that inside myself. While I tried to look okay, tried to be brave. Then my mother died, and I had to learn how to grieve while I kept on walking. Because I had the opportunity to go to school, so I had to keep moving. And I did. Farther away from home with every step. Farther away from who I was, but I was the same, really.”

She swallowed hard, her throat feeling tight. “Some days I feel like I’ve never actually sat down and sorted through all of it, but really, what’s the point?” She looked at him, beseeching, even though she knew that he couldn’t look back. “When you go through something that painful, isn’t it better to just keep going?”

“That’s the only way that I know,” he said. “But I managed to find the time to have sex.”

She laughed. “I dunno. I don’t know why it was different for me. Maybe it was just not knowing how to connect with another person.”

“Again, I managed to have sex without doing that at all.”

“Do you really think so?” she asked. “Do you really think you don’t know how to connect with another person?”

“I know I don’t. I don’t even know how to connect with myself.” He smiled. He stared on, unseeing at the flowers that she had told him about but that he hadn’t witnessed himself. “Sometimes I wonder if I am hollow. If I became the character that I fashioned for myself. If there’s nothing left anymore. Of who I really am. I would almost hope so. Because the man that I was... He was also nothing.” She watched as he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, a muscle in his jaw jumping. “I was my father’s creation then. But what you said earlier haunts me. I am little more than his creation now. Because everything I do is in response to him.”

“I didn’t say that to be mean,” she said. Though she was conscious of the fact that it had been quite mean, and she had been frustrated. “I think it’s true of all of us, isn’t it? Our bodies are temples that house our greatest successes and failures, that build altars to our trauma and our tribulations. It’s what keeps us going. I think we’re all objects forged in the fires of the good and bad things we’ve been through. We are all just doing things in response to what happened before.”

“Let’s say I think you’re right,” he said. “I think I have not lived for myself. And now that I can see nothing... I see that.”

“Oh, I’m right now, am I?”

“Yes, and I am sorry I threw the glass. I was not thinking. I could have hurt you and I didn’t—”

“You didn’t hurt me,” she said. “But you can say I’m right again.”

“Don’t push me.”

“Why not? You wouldn’t see me coming.”

He looked annoyed, and she loved it. She liked sitting with him, talking to him. Teasing him even when they were talking about deadly serious things.

“How do you stop? How do you...get ahead of the action? I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do, and yet, then my father came in and showed that he still has the ability to pull the pin on the grenade sitting dormant inside me.”

“I think in this case, your father proved that being a sociopath makes that easy.” She looked at her hands. “You’re a lot of things, Matias Javier Hernandez Balcazar. But a sociopath isn’t one of them.”

The ghost of a smile touched the corners of his mouth. “You know I wish that felt like an accomplishment.”

She touched his hand. “Maybe someday it will.”

“Maybe. You have very neatly turned this around. I wanted to know why you were a virgin.”