“The sexual instincts are the most malleable of any instincts. Let them be repressed, let their direct aim be denied them, and they will soon assume unrecognizable forms…”
(From “The Mothers”, 1927. Written by the British surgeon, anthropologist, and novelist Robert Briffault)
Death was waiting for her in his arms.
He was still handsome. Fifteen years later, both of them married with children, and he was still fiercely handsome. He hadn’t given in to the robbing demands of everyday life; he hadn’t given in to mortality.
He was saying the same about her. Like in the old times, he kept repeating, “You’re still my little elf. Tender and exquisite, like porcelain untouched by time.”
His shirt was open at the neck, and Nina, the Little Elf, kept throwing furtive glances toward the smooth brown skin visible under the crumpled gray fabric. He still loved gray. “Suits my eyes,” he used to say.
He hunched his broad shoulders as he bent over the cup of coffee. He finished it in one gulp and said,
“Fancy a walk?”
And he still talked like some hero from the chivalry books in their Old English literature classes. Nina smiled. She reached for her credit card to pay her part of the bill, but his hand lay over hers.
“Please,” he smiled back at her. His teeth were perfect—straight and sparkling white. She had once asked him about those teeth. “Do you use a whitener or something?”
“No, I just don’t smoke or drink. And I brush daily. That’s enough to get a good natural color. Just like yours.”
Still not smoking? Still no drinking? With a maddening, underpaid teaching job, two boys, and a wife who was “not always very easy to handle,” as he’d put it?
Nina thought about her life. Her dull job as a copywriter. Her husband, always dead-tired after work, gulping down dozens of beers in front of the TV. His potbelly and occasional bad breath. Well, he wasn’t any different from her friends’ husbands—but a far cry from…
Him.
He was towering over her as they roamed the narrow streets of her hometown. The air smelled of lime trees and fresh fruit and vegetables from outdoor vendors. Just like before. They used to walk these streets once, walking for hours, watching the sun creep shyly between red roofs, listening to cats’ noisy evening fights, inhaling the aroma of trees, melons, and tomatoes, and looking at each other but never gathering the courage to hold hands. Because then, just like now, they weren’t single. He had a girlfriend; she had a boyfriend. Not their current spouses, of course, but still, they weren’t free.
Then life separated them. And now, fifteen years later, she had met him near the café, on his way home—just like that, by accident—and they had sat and talked, and talked, and talked. Now they walked, but they had fallen into silence. The town had imperceptibly slipped into dusk, and now there were the sounds of TVs coming from the open doors of balconies and the swooshing of cars from the nearby boulevard: cars hurrying to take their drivers home.
Nina felt homeless.
She felt like an astronaut drifting in space. She had always felt that way—an astronaut with a never-ending oxygen bottle on her back. She had a life, but she didn’t have a home.
Now there was a rope in the endless vastness of space. Nina could grab it. It would take her home.
Yet it would also mean her death.
Muscles bulged on his arms under the gray shirt. Nina could see he was shivering. He was not looking at her. Just walking. Slowly. Each step—a separate breath.
Drifting aimlessly forever or finding a home?
Leading a purposeless life or suffering a meaningful death?
Nina stopped. She carefully reached out and touched his fingers.
“Hey,” she whispered.
“Don’t,” he gasped. “You need to live. You know we can’t… we can’t be together. You’re an elf. I’m a wolf. Our species are not meant to be together. I’ll obliterate you.”
“I can choose what kind of death I want,” she whispered. “And I finally am. I’m choosing to die in your arms.”
His deep gray eyes fixed on her for a long second. Then he seized her in his arms. The whirlwind of strength dazzled her. It was a storm suppressed for years. For centuries. For eternity.
Nina felt his strong hands over her slender body. His ravenous lips were on her small, soft ones. He pressed her to himself, closer and closer, until she disappeared, forever hidden in the devouring castle of his embrace.
Choosing to be with him was the best way to negate everything she was ever taught and forced to accept. Everything she was shaped to be.
The best way to die.
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Always yours,
Dreamy Nev
I felt a real pull between Nina and the wolf, like those forbidden love stories in Filipino movies😜It's better to love and get hurt, than not to love at all
Dark and compelling. I hope they find a way to love and live, Nevena.