He did not have a face that shouted with passion. His look did not burst with vitality, machismo. The paleness of his skin was enough that the bronze of life and the strength of health did not radiate from his pores. His teeth were even and white, but not shockingly so, not enough to live TV. He looked like an old, tired robot dressed in the young skin and meat of some forgotten librarian initiate. Just finished with growth hormones and childhood, his hair giving signs of white and salt, eyes sad and even, he was old in himself. Ancient, reasonable, the type to fade away, not die, full of bleached memories and hard little pebble facts. He looked like a man still waking up out of rebirth, resurrected before the ages of the old life had been washed away.

In love with a girl who was none of those things. She felt young, felt nubile, large pert breasts and deep shining eyes, with red lipstick and rag belts of bright colors, and she could not believe that there was passion, vitality, intensity in that quiet-faced old man two years her senior.
She may have been right, maybe. Maybe he was old.

(His face forgot to express too often, the pettiness of things rolled off and around him, hate was dead, sleep stretched deep into his hours, anger had been replaced by frustration, depression with disappointment, but still there was intensity. It hid behind his stability, his rationality, the long dignity of his cloth. Somewhere beyond his self-control it sat clean and direct, pushing him forward to where it was a struggle not speak, not to act, to even lie. )

(And in the place of his passion, hidden behind himself, he wanted her. Past the archetype intellectual, his hands hungered quietly for her hips, his tongue spread against the roof of his mouth for silence, his mornings with an emptiness of lips, his eyes focusing on some other speaker, teeth together, yet all peripheral, playing out in the corner of his mind's eye. This worried him, that she did not dominate his thoughts. That maybe there ought to be melodrama. )

He liked the talk of her, the move of her, the shape.

(All his unintentional attraction suppressed by heavy muscles of consciousness (long trained), attraction inappropriate, an attraction that lived in his stomach, bubbling his organs, an attraction whose reciprocity would bring complication, trouble, melodrama, relief.)

(But then, in his private moments, he wondered if perhaps this passion, this intensity he held as proof of humanity and life, was actually a small thing cast large by the contrast of what he was not. That this thing of his was just a spark in a cave, not the sun by which men live. He worried at the lack of infatuation, that it should hurt, that she dominate his thoughts, yet did not. . )

(In time, he released himself upon lesser women, found the attraction to be more abstract, more basic, and learned he was a man instead of a mind. )