Page 125 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

Because for the first time in a very long time, she wasn’t simply moving forward. She was still.

She intended to feel everything in this stillness. Because it was probably the only time this was ever going to happen.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THENEXTDAYshe became a taskmaster. All night she had been pliant and beautiful in his arms. And now that night and day were all the same to him, the hours bled into one another seamlessly. Time had stopped meaning anything. There was only the darkness, and Auggie. He could not say that he minded it. But then she became a little taskmaster. Forcing him to memorize the layouts of the different rooms.

“This is not permanent,” he said as he stood at the threshold of what she had informed him was the living room, trying to make him navigate his way into the kitchen. “Neither my lack of sight, nor staying here.”

“But it is now,” Auggie pointed out. “It is the reality we’re both living in. And I don’t want you to break your neck.”

“You are much happier when I’m breaking your back.”

He heard her sputtering, blustering, and he really did wish that he could see her expression.

“That is a crude thing to say.”

“I rather thought it was clever.”

“You are an enigma. Because sometimes you are still that...shameless, charming playboy, and then other times you are...”

“A black hole of impenetrable darkness?”

“Yes,” she said. “That.”

“Maybe both things are true. Maybe both men are me. Though, I don’t know if I can figure out how to join the two together. I don’t know if I would want to.”

“I don’t know. I like both.”

She liked him. She liked him. He turned that over within himself. He couldn’t recall a woman everlikinghim before, not the real him. What a strange thing.

He was used to the world having a favorable opinion of him. To being regarded as a highly likable person, but he knew that it was fake. Because he knew that he was fake. She knew something else about him, and she seemed fond of him anyway. She was still here.

“Why are you here with me?”

“Where else would I go, Matias?”

“Back to your real life?”

“This is my real life right now. You are my real life.”

“Because you are an endless martyr to your need to care for other people?” That was possibly taking it too far. But she had cared for her mother as a teenager, and it was entirely possible that it was what drove her now. She had said herself. They were all walking altars to their own trauma, after all.

“No,” she said. “It’s about me. It’s about... The sex, frankly. I feel more in touch with myself than I have in a very long time, and actually, I would’ve told you that were I faced with another situation where I had to take care of somebody having a medical issue, I would run fifty miles. To get away from it. To get away from them. But it doesn’t feel the same. I want to be here. With you. Don’t let it go to your head.”

“My ego is as big as it can possibly get.”

“That isn’t true at all. You are the most self-loathing person wrapped in a cloak of false ego that I have ever met.”

Her words struck him. And he decided that he was done talking. So he went on navigating through the kitchen. And he managed to do it without running into too many things. Though part of him resisted the exercise, because he was not going to become accustomed to blindness. It was not a permanent state.

In that he was determined.

She continued to work him like that for the week. But at night, she went to bed with him, and the intimacy that they built there was like a glimmering kingdom. He might not be able to see anything, but that had become more real to him than anything else ever had. It was the only reality he cared to lose himself in.

They could have called in staff, but he was resistant to it, and she didn’t seem to mind. She was the one who had to do all of the work in the absence of anyone there to cook for them. Because he was at such a disadvantage. But he found himself growing in his trust for her.

He couldn’t recall ever having trusted another person before. Growing up with a father like his, he had only ever been able to trust himself. Especially with the way he had pitted him and his sister against each other.