you're too young & eager to love

Thank you, Seventh Sanctum Symbolitron, for an interesting, quick prompt.

“The love story where the main character moods map to creatures of Greek mythology.”

Bonus points for the readers that can deduce which creatures correlate with the two main characters, especially given my disjointed style. I only halfway followed the prompt – I don’t think you can call this a love story.

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Hadley wears her hair long and free, chestnut colored, and severely straight. The style matches her plain mouth, the nude lipstick she favors making her lips seem thinner than they are. When she smiles, her teeth are too white, too like a predator. She has the slender, stalk-like figure of a bird, the tallest of her siblings, and she has to fold her legs under her to sit comfortably in strict-backed wooden chairs. Her mother used to say she was fond of perches, but Hadley rarely laughed. She was not a humorous girl, and she did not grow into a humorous woman.
She is, however, persistent.


“You can stumble across all types of things if you’re patient enough to keep returning.” Hadley tells her youngest sister over the phone, filing her nails into the Ukrainian pointed style. They are long and fierce looking, a detail that contradicts her small fingers and delicate wrists.
“So, what’s his name?” Her sister’s voice comes through muffled, and Hadley can hear the distinct squawking of her blue-and-yellow macaw in the background.
“Mason.”
“The butcher?”
“That’s the one.” Hadley does not sound particularly enthusiastic, but she smiles to herself. The women in her family have always been private, conveying no more information than absolutely necessary, and she is no different. Sometimes, even the little bit she did offer had to be wrenched from her.
“Bring him to dinner.” Her sister suggests, the hint of cruelty in her voice as soft and subtle as hope.



Dinner is on a Tuesday evening when the weather is full of sharp winds. Hadley’s two sisters help set the table until there is barely space left on their mother’s expensive tablecloth. As is their habit, her parents serve too much: grilled costini spread with hummus, wild mushroom sformato, caprese salad, lobster agnolotti with truffled honey, and caramel custard tart with sugar-poached lemon. Mason eats everything. He eats so much that he barely speaks, the sound of his silverware scraping his plate as constant as Hadley’s bemusement.
He is much larger than the previous men she has brought home. Iron-willed and broad shouldered, built like the battle men of olden times, but swift on his feet and particularly cunning around the eyes. When she touches his knee beneath the table, he looks at her as though he would devour her too.
“Do all butchers posses such healthy appetites?” Hadley’s mother asks from her spot next to her husband, attempting politeness despite her harsh tone.
“I was taught that you shouldn’t leave anything behind.” Mason says, taking a hearty drink from his glass of water. His voice is so loud that it startles everyone but the brunette beside him.
“He sounds like a trumpet.” Annette, the youngest sister, criticizes between small bites of her tart. As though prompted by her distaste, the birds in the house start cawing, rattling the bars of their cages with their talons and scraping their beaks.



Mason is not a hurtful man, Hadley realizes. He is often quiet and sometimes elusive. There is not much truth to the rumors she hears around town, the gossip of housewives, coworkers, and unreliable children. Nobody is sure where exactly he was born and when she asks him his ethnicity, he says he’s a little of everything. Even his last name is ambiguous. The worst thing she has ever heard is how his insults can be poisonously harsh, but the mailwoman who said so had also, once, said that Hadley purposely punished all of the men in her life.
Everyone has secrets, she decides, and moves in with him a month later.