Page 126 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

He was good. She was bad.

It had only made him want to protect her, to be better to keep the focus off of her. It had made him feel like...like he had to be hard on her sometimes so his father wouldn’t be. Like he could protect her with his correction because he actually did care.

It had ended badly anyway.

He navigated his way into the kitchen, listening to the sounds of her moving around. Something was cooking, and it smelled good.

“Nothing fancy,” she said. “Just some soup and bread.”

“That sounds sufficient.”

As he stood there, surrounded by a hominess that was completely unfamiliar to him, he felt as if he might be willing to make this trade. His sight for this life. This normalcy that was so beyond anything he had ever known.

Of course, she was having to take care of him, and she might feel different. He was potentially a burden to her, no matter what she said.

The girl who had been running away from this for so many years.

“Sufficient,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself with compliments.”

“Of course I was being dry.”

“I know,” she said. He could hear the warmth in her voice.

“I made a fire in the parlor; I thought we might sit in there and enjoy the warmth and the soup.”

“You put a lot of thought into it.” It was a bland thing to say, and yet there was nothing bland about it. The realization that she had done this for him. That she seemed to put effort and thought into this care.

“It feels like... Like reliving another life here.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m going to dish everything and bring it into the parlor. Do you think you can find your way?”

He paused, and oriented himself in the room. He found his touchpoints, and then he figured out which way he needed to go to make it into the next room, locating his path and making his way there slowly.

There would be a time when he wasn’t entirely dependent on her to take care of him. He was getting better.

Do you want to get better at this?

This was the strangest thing of all. He wasn’t living his life. The life he had been living for all these years. One of endless revenge.

No. He was... Living life. In a way that he never had before. In a way he had never thought he might want to.

But this wasn’t him. It wasn’t anything he had earned. He had to stay wounded in order to stay with her. It was a strange dichotomy.

He moved carefully to his chair, feeling the warmth of the fire. He took a seat, and heard her walk into the room.

“I have a tray with two bowls on it, soup and bread.”

She was telling him so that he knew what to picture. But he didn’t care about the food. Instead, he thought of Auggie herself.

Tried to picture her face as it might be right now. The strongest image of her was of how she had looked the last night he had seen her. When they had been together as lovers for the first time. He had touched her countless times since, and had tried to memorize each dip and hollow of her body with his fingertips.

But he missed her face.

“What are you wearing today, Auggie?”

She chuckled. “You used to actively avoid calling me by my nickname.”