Page 128 of Modern Romance January 2025 5-8

“Were you ever happy?”

“I never thought about it. I just... Lived. As any child does.” He was silent for a moment. “Were you?”

“I suppose it was the same for me. I didn’t think much about whether or not it was all difficult until it was over. No. That isn’t true. Toward the end it all got very hard. And knowing, I think that it would end I started just wishing that it would. It made me feel... Terrible. Once she was gone. Like I had made it happen faster. Like I had been impatient, selfish.”

“No one wants to watch someone they love die. I understand. I...” It was very hard for him to get out the words that he needed to speak now. “My sister was lost in her addiction for a long time. I worried about that phone call. The one that we eventually got. There was a time when I did treat her as if she was fragile. And then I got angry. And my father’s anger fueled me. I forgot my fear. Because part of me just thought... If it happened, then I would be able to move on. That I would be able to live. Without thinking of her all the time. Without worrying all the time. The first thought that I had when I found out she had overdosed was that at least I didn’t have to worry about her anymore.”

That tore at him. It made his stomach ache. It made him feel like he was falling. And surely she would tell him what a monster he was. Because it was a monstrous thing to think. It was. Truly.

“I understand,” she said. “I do. When my mother died... The night that she was the most poorly, I gave her pain medication, and I went to bed. I woke up at four in the morning. She was gone. And I felt... Relief. It was like all the breath left my body, and like everything that was tying me to that town, to that house, was suddenly just released. The worry. I didn’t realize how much worry I carried. Because every time we would think she was getting better, I would just find out later that she wasn’t. Waiting for test results. Waiting for everything. And I hadn’t realized how much it was weighing me down. And of course if I had a choice I would choose to keep her. Of course I would. But nobody gave me that choice. So in the end... In the end, there was something easier about just being free.”

“Do you still feel free?” he asked, his voice rough.

“I don’t know. Not every day. I feel like I don’t recognize myself sometimes. Like the life that I live now is so different from the life I had then it’s like I’m someone new.”

“I don’t feel free,” he said. “Because in that one moment when I realized that I was happy, I didn’t have to worry about my sister anymore, I also realized that I was the one that had pushed her. I was the one that had done it. I was the difference between her staying and going. And I could’ve changed the entire time, but I didn’t. Because I didn’t know how. Because... My entire foundation is rotten, but that is not an excuse. It just isn’t.”

“Why isn’t it? You didn’t choose to have the parents that you had. Neither did she.”

“No. But it... I don’t want to think about it anymore.”

It was too painful. All of this. Just too damned painful.

“We don’t have to. Tell me one good memory from your childhood.”

He laughed. “That’s the problem. There are no good memories. Not anymore. It’s just... Everything that was good is now sustained by grief.”

“No. It’s like this. Like this moment, completely taken out of time. Remove it from time. Nothing came before, nothing came after. Tell me.”

He took a deep breath. He didn’t have to close his eyes to block anything out. And he could see in his mind, a clear view of the olive groves, of the cypress trees that he and his sister used to ride horses through. The only time that they were free. “I remember being young with my sister. Pretending we were vagabonds. That we were running away. We would pack up green apples and bread, and put them in a pillowcase, and ride our horses until we reached the edge of the family estate.” He could see it so clearly. The horizon stretching out before them. There had never been a wall there. But they had acted like there was. Like that boundary was impassable. “I don’t know why we didn’t just keep going. We should have.”

They had built a fence with their own minds. But it had been as real as it needed to be. It had kept them in line. Their father had created it with his cruelty. With the control that he exerted on all of them. He had waged a battle with their minds when they had been only children, and he had won.

Does he still wage that same battle?

But then, she was there, putting her hand over his, and he could feel the warmth of her body, could taste her breath. It was sweet, and lovely just like she was. And when she pressed her soft mouth to his, he allowed that warmth, that need, that desire to spread through his entire body. This was real. Everything else... It could wait. Everything else... It didn’t matter. No. How could it? This time out from his real life felt like the most consequential thing he had ever experienced. He could not explain it. He would not try.

Instead, he just let her kiss him. Instead he just pulled her onto his lap, and saw his way into her beauty with his fingertips. Moving them over her soft face, down her back. He pulled her shirt up over her head, and then unhooked her bra with deft skill. He stripped her bare and learned her every curve. He moved his hands down her hips, and then pushed one between her legs, feeling how wet with need she was. That she could see him like this and still want him, that she could hear those pathetic stories from his childhood and still be like this...

He was grateful, and even that made him feel like less, but when her mouth rained kisses down upon his face, his neck, when she pulled his shirt up over his head, and continued down to kiss his chest, down his abs, he did not feel anything like pathetic. And yet at the same time this did not feel like a return to the man he had been. It did not feel like the real wakening of a playboy. It felt like something entirely new. Something he had not yet experienced before.

She slid off of his lap, and he could feel that she came to rest on the floor between his legs. Her hands moved to his belt, where she undid that, and the closure on his slacks. She pulled his pants down just slightly, freeing him. And then she leaned in, her mouth soft now on his shaft, her tongue making dark magic as she tasted him, as she took him into her mouth, sucked him deep.

He felt like pushing through the darkness inside him, and he wished... He wished that he could see her. Wished that he could see her with her head bent over his lap like this. Because he hadn’t seen Auggie enough time since he had truly begun to see her, in ways that his eyes could never have comprehended. And now that was lost to him.

They had that night. That night when he had really understood, how beautiful she was, how singular she was. And all the times before that, he had been bringing women on his private jet, women who weren’t her. He had been satiating himself on bread and water when there was a feast on the other side of the door. Because as lovely as those women were, they had not fit him in this way. It wasn’t the same. There was something singular at work between himself and Auggie. He would’ve said that he was not capable of a singular connection. He would’ve said that he wasn’t capable of connection at all.

That it was lost on him, wasted on him.

He had learned to feel one thing. The driving desire for revenge, and it blotted out everything else, but with her he had found something more. It was not the loss of his sight that had heightened his senses. It was her.

Knowing her, talking to her, feeling for her. Wanting to know her, rather than simply wanting satisfaction for the death of his sister. And he wanted to resist it, but here and now he simply couldn’t. In the same way he couldn’t resist her.

He had decided that he would no longer feel helpless. That was the thing. He had decided that there would be no more invisible fences. He had taken his life and fashioned it into whatever he wished it to be. He had fashioned himself into an instrument of revenge. He was not at the mercy of anything anymore. Not of his feelings, not of the way he wanted another person, but right now he was.

And he wanted to believe that it was all right, that he could have it because they were here, and he couldn’t see. Because he was being forced to take a break from everything he was.

But it felt like something deeper than that. Felt like something more powerful.