His sister, Dorian’s remark last winter, the week before her marriage, about how love could be defined:  "When I look into his eyes, I see myself reflected.  Not as I perceive myself, but as he sees me, truly sees me.  The virtues, the faults and flaws; the strengths and weaknesses, the beauty and the ugliness; he sees it all and loves it all because it is a part of me.  He chooses to love me, the whole package, not just the bits and pieces he finds more attractive and trying to change what he doesn’t.  It is acceptance, willing acceptance."

At the time it seemed to him so much romantic rhetoric.  He could accept the premise, that it is the differences that spark the interest, and the similarities which tend the flame; a nice fantasy if it was all so simple.  But how many casualties had he known in the age old battle for control.

"Everyone wants to be loved," Dorian admonished.

"I don’t," he retorted.  "Nor do I want to love anyone.  Ever."

All this talk of ‘unconditional love’, there was no such thing as UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, all love is conditional, and Edgar didn’t like the conditions.  Love is a devouring, an implied consent between the Eater and the Eaten.  What man has not plunged headlong into the musky embrace of woman and emerge as half—deflated, flaccid, emasculated.  What woman has not listened to promises in the dark only to later discover her identity a mere memory, her own replaced; inhaled, digested, then spat out as someone else.  Twins.  Same thoughts.  Same feelings.  Same tastes.  Same faces.  As if, somewhere in time, at some crucial point when the appetizers are all gone and the main course is about to begin, sacrifice must be made.  They must lay their individuality, what defines them as unique and separate, upon the altar and watch the blade render, for them to be reassembled as one entity.

Can not two live as one yet remain separate?  Can not two breathe the same breath without ingesting the other?

Yes, it was so easy getting swept up in the romantic pageantry a wedding invokes.  Seeing his sister resplendent  in white lace and veiling, clutching the arm of a man with eyes only for her, Edgar could almost believe in happy endings.  Almost.  That night, flushed with spicy mulled wine and slightly dizzy from the crush of bodies and the heat of what seemed to be hundreds of candles, he forgave Meera everything.  Whatever she had done, whatever she would do.  An immense task, given the circumstances.  This he told himself frequently, mentally donning his crown of thorns to denote his martyrdom.  But love?

"I thought you were going to bed."

"Too hot."

"I’ll soak the sheets in cold water, like last time."

"Then it will be too hot and too wet."

What he wanted to say was ‘I’ve been there.  I’ve been where you go and now know.  How you feel.  How I feel.’  Instead he chose to act like a petulant child, just for the sake of being difficult, regretting his tart words as soon as they passed his lips.  She had done nothing to deserve his anger, especially so since he was really angry at himself for not saying what was truly on his mind.

She sighed; an impatient tapping of her lacquered nails on the door frame.  She was restless, eager to be gone.  He could feel her annoyance prickling the back of his neck.  She was watching him with all four eyes:  The two smoky violet orbs, rimmed in black, large and liquid, regarding him from under a silky fringe of red hair; and the other two he always felt more than saw, tipping her heavy breasts, critical and demanding, lurking just beneath her tender nipples.  On the rare occasion Edgar had been able to see Meera’s true face, like a fleeting glimpse of a distorted image in a  broken mirror; ruthless breasts with a menacing stare and hungry teeth yawning from belly to groin; a Shelleyean nightmare.

He started thinking about the nail again.

Turning around, all he could offer her was a shy smile and a slight shrug, all that he wished to say dying in his throat.  Standing in the half light, her bare skin as luminous and precious as a pearl, she looked disappointed.  Edgar retreated to the bed, settling himself in with no further protest, pleasantly surprised that the sheets were dusted with baby powder.  She kneeled beside him, straightening the bedding, plumping the pillows.  He reached out, lightly brushing his fingertips over her cheek, his thumb caressing that pouty lower lip that turned down at the corners even when she was smiling.  He wanted to bite it until it bled.  She took his hand and kissed his palm, then his nose, then that tender place between navel and groin; the eyes looking up at him over his quivering belly reflecting promises of hungers to come, but only after hers had been sated.  She turned out the bedside lamp.  He watched her retreating figure between the lightening flashes; her outline blazing in brilliant electric blue growing smaller as she crossed the room, away from him, through the door and gone.  The back door slammed shut.

Edgar wanted to cry.  It was so unfair, all these changes, around him, inside him.  He did cry; with his arm pressed to his mouth to stifle his sobs, even though there was no one to hear him as he was achingly alone in an uncaring room, the taste of his own flesh his only comfort.  The clock was ticking in his head, synchronized to the beat of the rain upon the ground; counting the seconds, the minutes, the steps she was taking through the downpour, her beautiful nude body glowing pale against the storm tossed vegetation.

"I know where you go.  I know what you do," he whispered into the dark.