My first words to him were, “You look kind of dangerous.”

It was true, there was something about the way that he held his shoulders that produced a presence larger than himself. But he wasn’t small, by any means. At the party, his broad shoulders and 6’5 frame towered over my 5’4 figure. It was just that he domineered such a big shadow, oppressed those at the party - and myself.

But I was drawn to him anyways. I was drawn to that tousled brown hair, those sharp and aware gray eyes.

And that was when he smiled at me the first time, lips drawing back to reveal pointed canines. I thought of the sound that a rabbit would make as a wolf tore into its flesh - could imagine myself in the same way, limp in his arms.

And so started our romance.

It was, in many ways, one that was doomed from the start. I was a smart girl, moving up in my career, busy finishing up school; I was my parent’s perfect child. I had talked about boyfriends that I wished to meet, a sweet boy from next door who would buy me flowers and whisper compliments to me. How pretty you are, how smart you are, how perfect. I was a smart girl, but that’s not the boy that I ended up with. That’s not the boy that I would have just died for, like I told my girlfriends. Maybe I had a dangerous streak of my own.

I should have left him when he shut me out of his life, when he would shrug and shut the door when I would ask where he was going. Should have left him when he started hiding his phone.

But I didn’t. I thought that I could change him, that there would be something that would turn him back to me, that would make him realize how much I loved him.

Except, I don’t think the word ‘love’ meant anything to him.

“You shouldn’t live this way,” I said to him, when he came back to me with bruises from a street fight.

I stitched the cut in his eyebrow, dabbed at the spot of blood on his lip. As I hovered in front of him, gently treating the bruises, I could feel him look up at me. Those gray eyes were bright as they reflected the light of the lamp behind me.

“You’re right,” he sighed. “I don’t mean to. It’s just all I’ve ever known.”

He knew what danger meant, and I swear, in that moment, he was starting to learn what love meant. I think I saw a glimmer of it in his eyes when he looked up at me, a drop of blood glistening on his lower lip.

But I could never have known for sure. He wasn’t going to be the type that would have bought me flowers. He would have never been like that, but he could have lived a different life with me. He could have stopped going out to drink and fight with other men who were drunk, ignoring their wives at home. He could have stopped racing with those same men. Maybe he would have grown up with me, in the embrace that my arms provided him with.

“You’re going to kill yourself one day,” the man snarled. “Why do you have to start fights with him? None of us like him, but leave him alone.”

I started to pull him away from the man, begging him through my tears. “Let’s just go home.”

“Take him home. Keep him off the streets,” the man said. “He’s going to die out here if you don’t.”

But he wouldn’t ever tell me what was going on, why he had enemies hiding in the dark alleyways of the city, in the smoky bars. I just knew that he had enemies, and lots of them. It came from living a dangerous life, is how he explained it, the results of stealing from people since you were a kid. All the lies. He had enemies, for sure, but he never brought them home to me. He left them out in the streets. But there was some of those enemies that I would find on him when he was lying next to me. Skin underneath his fingernails, a chunk of hair missing.

I thought then that he was a murderer. But I knew he couldn’t do that. I knew he couldn’t because of how he had come to be while with me.

But then his hair grew out again, and then there wasn’t any evidence of that fight, and there wasn’t anything left of him, either.

I woke up one day and the bed was empty.

I asked around at different bars, wondering where that wolf with the gray eyes was.

But no one seemed to know.

And so I resolved that he had died, that a bear trudged through the forest one day and killed that wolf. Silenced his cry. I came up with a story that he had died a hero, that he died protecting me. Maybe it was true. I’ll never know. I just know I had learned to protect myself. Learned to put up walls.

And I think I was able to do that because my love died with him.

“You look like you have a little danger in your eyes,” the man said to me at the bar. “I wonder how that got to be there.”

I smiled at him then, no longer that innocent, quiet girl; my lips revealing a murderous smile.