The Minotaur on Avenue B
a friend gave me this prompt, and it was a fun one to run with…
He was half-Persian, half-Filipino, and all Minotaur.
We met on Avenue B at two-something in the morning, the hour when New York’s air feels drunk on its own pulse.
I found him against a streetlight like sin had a waiting list…the smoke curling from his lips, the faint musk of bourbon and cedar, and the way his eyes caught the city’s neon as if it were worshipping him.
“Lost?” he asked.
“Only temporarily,” I said.
He smiled, a slow, ruinous thing, and the world tilted. I followed him without question, through the blur of bodies spilling out of bars, through puddles that reflected us as mythic creatures instead of people.
His hand brushed mine, and I swear the ground trembled.
Up close, he was impossible. His shoulders were too broad, his pulse too loud, his darkness too deliberate. There was something animal behind his calm, like he’d been pretending to be human just long enough to pull me into his web.
We landed in his apartment, a converted warehouse with walls that buzzed like portals. He poured whiskey; I poured my heart into the silence. Every word came out low and deliberate, as if language itself bent to him.
When he kissed me, it wasn’t tender. It was tectonic. His breath tasted of cigarettes and prophecy, and my body arched toward him like I’d been waiting centuries to be found.
Then I saw it, the shadow behind him, the curve of something not quite possible. Horns, faint in the dark. A reflection that bent a little wrong in the mirror. I blinked, but the room stayed warped.
“What are you?” I whispered.
He smiled, a match before the strike. “The ache that curls beneath your ribs at night.”
The sensation was visceral. Perhaps he was a myth, and I was the fool who prayed for one. Either way, I didn’t stop him when he pressed me against the wall, the city lights breaking across his skin like stained glass.
It wasn’t love. It was hunger, devotion, destruction…all braided into one heartbeat.
As the sun rose, I opened my eyes, and he was gone. The space was cold and cavernous, but the sheets smelled like rain and animal heat. A single dark hair lay across the pillow, a clue to a puzzle I didn’t know how to begin.
For days after, I looked for him in subway faces, in alley fog, in the hum of late-night jazz bars.
Sometimes I think I feel his breath on my neck when I walk home alone, the scent of his skin sneaking onto my tongue when I least expect it.
Maybe I conjured him. Maybe I dreamt him. Maybe I was never entirely human after him.
When it rains, I still walk the streets where we met. In every slick reflection, I swear I see horns behind me, and for a moment, I think I see myself reaching back.
The glass ripples, and my eyes search me, darker now, knowing.
As the ache spreads across my chest, I realize I’m still wandering, still wanting, trapped inside the labyrinth of eternal longing…searching, but never arriving.