The salacious image of the bathing woman from the barrio persisted, taking on a life of its own. In a sense Fernando was forever striving to recreate this experience, to recast it in some form or fashion with every woman who strayed across his path.

He sought for it with fiendish single-mindedness, all while keeping his fiendishness tightly under wraps. It hadn’t taken him long to recognize that his inclinations were aberrant. Highly conscious of his own deviancy, he maintained an iron grip on his lusts, determined not to become like his hedonistic father—an object of ridicule to himself and the world at large.

It suited Fernando to do this anyway. To keep his passions in a stranglehold went precisely with the grain of them. He savored the tantalizing bittersweetness of yearning unfulfilled. Delayed gratification taken to the extreme of absolute conjugal denial.

It was this sense of control that he relished. His practice of abstinence was an exercise in willful defiance. A spiteful dominion he imposed over the wild thrashings of instinct, over the wiliness of women and the chaos of the world—and over himself most of all. Taking his primal urges by the reins, he brought them into vindictive submission.

He’d had a few girlfriends in his teenage years. These were carefully chosen and primarily just for show. Society girls who were good-looking, yes, but more than anything, prim and chaste to the point of total prudishness.

The only real pleasure he got out of them was at the end. He’d spend long months pushing the envelope with them, breaking down brick by brick their stout and icy walls. He did this first with a look, then with a touch. Kisses that would deepen, embraces that would linger. The melting contact between them would extend, until in that moment of unguarded surrender he would slide up his hand and cup like a piece of ripe fruit in his fingertips the underside of a pert young breast.

There would be a breathy gasp in his mouth. She would think that the touch was incidental. Then he would smooth his thumb in an arc over that captive mound, depress its budding peak. Behind the birdbone ribs, he would feel the flutter of her heart in its cage.

Trembling, she would draw back from him then, breaking their kiss with the grudging compulsion of conscience. A lifetime of catechisms had ingrained this reflex into her stony Catholic heart. She would look at him with her swollen lips slightly parted, her eyes dark and liquid. Sheening with doubt and fear, misted with longing. Coaxing and cautious all at once—

The sublime spectacle.

“Fernando,” she would whisper, and he would know then that he had her under his sway.

He could go either way from here, and she would follow his lead, her soul be damned. It was this knowledge he craved, this knowledge he would bring himself off to later, when he was alone and well rid of her.

And so in the moment he would back off and apologize. The cloud of desire would pass from her eyes, like a spell dissolved. She would feel ashamed, and he would let her. He would leave her to her guilt, to agonize and internalize the moral fallout in his absence.

From that moment on, their relationship would become strained by her own self-estrangement. She would put a formal end to things not long after, taking the fault upon herself as if it were entirely her own. Cut cleanly loose, Fernando would be nothing but gracious to her in the face of her tearful regrets. He would leave her to wonder in her troubled virgin’s mind whether her brief lapse in conviction had lost her the finest man alive.

It was laughable. Pathetic, really. But Fernando’s sympathies only extended so far. She had extended the invitation to him, after all.

Denying the desires of women gave him perverse satisfaction. At the high cost of fulfilling his own base urges, he turned the paradigm of seduction on its head. In this way, Fernando saw himself as a sacrificial revenger of man. It was beyond punishing, to cast aside opportunity after opportunity. Yet he felt uniquely qualified to the task.

Toying around with his naïve girlfriends was one thing, however. No greater test of will presented itself than when Fernando was confronted with the sort of woman he really burned for.

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La Gorgona © CS Dark Fantasy