When their night started, Logan worked to a simple plan: dinner; coffee; a short drive home. His date acknowledging this whole thing was a mistake, better-if-we-stay-friends, etcetera. Logan retreating to the share house on Talbot Street, settling in for a beer and debrief. His flatmate, Donna, telling Logan, “I told you so.” Logan’s date would forget him and go on with her life, and they would never speak again.
Instead, Logan’s escorting Stina Herne along Currumbin Beach. Hitting the estuary and clambering onto the rocks. He figures the night is going well. The beach is a two-hour drive from the Thai restaurant, a fond memory from Logan’s childhood mentioned over tom kha gai. A place Stina Herne suggested they visit right after he paid for the meal.
“It’s a long drive,” Logan said. “We’d arrive back late.”
“I’ve got time,” Stina Herne said. That seemed like a good sign.
Currumbin Beach doesn’t match Logan’s memories. It used to be an open space, an unobstructed walk from car park to sand to water, all lit up by the moon overhead. Now spinifex and banksia smother the dunes, fences obscuring paths and view alike. The beach is brisk and damp and full of murder-alley gloom. Tainted with an undertone that’s more than salt spray and seaweed. Old bait, maybe? Or fish guts, discarded and left to rot after a fisherman sliced and scaled their catch?
Logan keeps returning to the same four words: cold, wet, dark, and frightening. Figures that combination for a fatality on the date front. The dark, alone, could be romantic. The cold and wet, less so. The threat of being murdered kills everything stone done.
“Sorry,” Logan says.
“For what?”
“For this. Currumbin wasn’t like this, back when I lived here.”
“It’s fine.”
“Perhaps.” Logan rubs both hands together, glares at the murky waves rolling in. “The whole place is more feral than I remembered.”
“Okay.”
“I’m… embarrassed. I dragged you down here, promising something…”
Stina considers the ocean and the gloomy sky. “Relax,” she says. “This is cool.”
Logan doesn’t relax, but he shuts up, at least. Knows it for the right play, despite his gut insisting otherwise. The stories he told over dinner focused on the beach in his memory: lights shining all the way to Surfers Paradise; the pleasure of climbing the Rock as a kid while his father went out to surf; nights spent there with dates throughout his teens, making out in the salt spray.
Now Logan’s facing things forgotten about: the rocks gleam in the moonlight, the wind is cruel as a predator’s tooth. The uneven surface isn’t much fun to walk on and they’re already damp.
He’s weighed down by the sand in his sneakers. Logan can taste the sea on every breath.
Currumbin Rock is a chunk of black argillite. A relic left behind as the waves devoured the shoreline, pushing the cliffs further and further way from the ocean shore. Transformed the towering heights into a stunted hill tucked beyond the parks and resorts and surf clubs, a place to get a decent view if you’ve got the money.
The Rock and the estuary didn’t soften with age. Sharp edges and sharper angles. The Rock like a spear-tip aimed inland. Its slope is steep, but he climbed it as a kid. Went up, quick and easy, and perched on the apex. King of the World, no worries to plague him.
Except that Logan was younger. Lighter and fearless with youth. Now Logan pulls his jacket close, skin tightening as the frigid wind rips past. He looks up the slope, sixteen feet high, and pictures them slipping off.
“We’d break our necks getting up there,” he says.
His date shrugs. “I’m game.”
“You sure?”
Stina Herne puts both hands on the Rock, searching for handholds. “You raved about the view, yeah?”
“I did,” Logan says. “The beach is just… not how I remembered it.”
Stina Herne looks back and flashes a grin that softens the anxiety roiling through Logan’s stomach. He fell hard for that smile before anything, when they first met at the café. His brain linking up the details in the seconds that followed: incredible grin plus silver hair plus raven tattooed on her left shoulder. Tall and pale and dangerously pretty. Logan going from stranger to smitten in record time. His flatmate Donna standing right beside him, putting two and two together. Delivering her immediate warning: “Don’t date the goth chicks, buddy. No way you’ll keep up with her.”
Logan ignored that advice. Nutted up and asked Stina out cold, before his nerve failed and common sense overruled his desire.
Now, on the beach, Logan figures Donna is right. His fingers are numb, just from walking out across the sand, and he doesn’t want to climb a great chunk of damp argillite in the dark. But she’s already going up, searching for fresh handholds, the toes of her boots digging into the pitted surface.
“Come on,” Stina says, and Logan follows. The stone is coarse beneath his fingers, like a calcified sponge. The wind slices past them and the sea roars, but the moon is full and bright, and he can identify a route up well enough. His pulse hammers, but they make it up and they huddle just shy of the tip. Young lovers perched side-by-side, exposed to the cruel gusts and bluster coming in across the water. The Surfers Paradise lights are pretty, but the darkness out over the surf is as beautiful.
“This isn’t so bad,” Stina Herne says, but her shoulders tremble and she’s breathing warmth into numb fingers.
“A-huh.” Logan’s contemplating the fall again. Or, truth be told, he’s mulling over the landing, and the breaking, and the bleeding, and the pain. Oh god, so much pain before death.
“Why did this place matter to you?” Stina rubs her hands and breathes on them again. “Why here? What’s the attraction?”
Logan sucks in a deep breath. Exhales, quietly. “We came out here as kids. Me and my parents. They told me the lights were fairy land.”
Stina Herne peers into the distance, frowning. “Fairies are fond of neon?”
“I was seven. They were my mum and dad.”
“Ah,” Stina says, and grins. “So you were a trusting kid.”
“I guess.”
“A trusting adult, too,” she says.
“How so?”
“Well… I mean, here we are,” Stina says, “two hour’s drive from dinner. You’re climbing rocks in the dark beside a woman you don’t know. I could be crazy, up here. I could push you off and roll your corpse into the sea and walk off while you bled and water filled your lungs. Nobody would ever figure what truly happened, would they?”
She says it with poise and calm, as if such things were probable. Logan grips the Rock a little tighter, digs his sneakers against the pitted stone. “I guess not,” he says.
Stina Herne nods once, for emphasis. “See, trusting.”
“Okay.” Logan sucks in a short, nervous breath and says, “So… are you planning on doing that?”
Stina tilts her head back and smiles up at the moon. “No more than you are,” she says.
“Cool.”
They settle in there, on the Rock. Listen to each other breathe. It’s so cold, their exhalations plume. Logan’s hands are raw from the climb. They ache beneath their numbness.
“Besides,” Stina says, breaking the stillness, “the same is true for me. This could be the moment you reveal you’re all kinds of homicidal. I’m taking a risk with you, as much as you’re taking one being up here with me.”
More, Logan’s subconscious whispers, but he doesn’t say it out loud. It’s a thought inspired by bad assumptions, old gender roles and toxic thinking. You’re not automatically secure just because you’re a dude. Play it careful. Play it safe.
Logan wishes he could kiss her, despite the conversation, but the moment doesn’t seem right yet. Instead, he says, “I’ve got no plans to kill you, either.”
Stina Herne adopts a smile that would do the Mona Lisa proud. “Wouldn’t matter if you did.”
It’s not the response Logan expected. “No?”
“Not at all,” Stina Herne says, the words so terribly certain. Logan’s guts clench in panic as he wonders if Donna was right.
“You want to die or something?”
“No,” Stina says, “it’s just—”
She reigns in the explanation. Takes a long, slow breath.
“Look,” Stina says, “I know how this sounds, but the world’s destined to end.”
“No shit?”
“No shit,” she says. “It will end real soon.”
“We talking decades? Years?”
“Weeks. Maybe even days.”
“Yeah,” Logan says. “That’s coming up fast.”
He can’t dredge up anything else to say. What’s the play when your date predicts the apocalypse? How do you respond and stay polite? He considers the advice Donna gave him before he left, all the in-case-of-emergency scenarios for when he fucked this up. Her predictions seemed comprehensive, but they did not include doomsday prophecies while freezing to death on a chunk of argillite by the sea.
“Well,” he says. “That sucks. I’d hoped this date was going okay.”
“It is what it is,” Stina says, and she takes Logan’s hand in hers. Leans her shoulder against his side. Her presence warm and exciting against the cold wind. The closeness triggers a fresh jolt of adrenaline, sets Logan’s heart pounding. He’s conscious of every inhalation, senses every panicked heartbeat echoing through his chest.
“So how’s it going to happen? This apocalypse coming our way?”
“My grandfather will eat the moon.” Stina closes her eyes, rests her head against his shoulder. “Well, not my grandfather, he’s more the great-great-great etcetera etcetera kind of deal. My real grandfather is long dead. Cancer, right before he turned a hundred and twenty-two.”
“Sounds like he did okay,” Logan says.
“Yeah. I guess. It’s a good run.”
“Sounds like great-great-great etcetera etcetera is doing okay as too.”
Logan assumes that he’s playing along, being part of the joke. Then Stina says: “He is. Comes with the territory, when you’re an immortal wolf.”
Donna will piss herself laughing about this. The moment Logan gets home and tells her, Donna will piss her pants. She’ll cackle so loud their neighbours wake up, before she taunts Logan with “I told you so.”
“Your grandfather’s a wolf?”
Stina’s breath catches. “Well, the wolf.”
“The wolf,” Logan repeats, confused.
“You don’t believe me?”
“No,” he says. “It’s just—”
“It’s cool. I wouldn’t accept this the first time, either.”
“Okay.”
“But…”
“But?”
“But,” Stina says the word firmly, so Logan can hear the underline. She lets the pause linger, then carries on, “My grandfather really is a wolf. He’s Fenrir, the wolf begat by Loki, Wrecker of Havoc throughout the nine worlds.”
Stina’s eyes are still closed and her voice is low, reciting the words as a litany. “Brother of the World Serpent and Hel, Queen of the Underworld. Fettered by chains forged by the dwarves, captured by the gods at the cost of the Tyr’s left hand. Harbinger of Ragnarök, when he’s unfettered. Kicks off the end of everything.”
She said it naturally, put it out there. Like it was no big deal.
“Wow,” Logan says. “Unfettered?”
“It means he’s free.”
“I know what it means. Never heard it used in conversation.”
“Well, I’m using it now,” Stina says. “My grandfather’s free and soon he’ll be devouring things. He’ll start with the moon, then the sun, then the sky. And when he’s done, the Fimbulwinter will begin and the last twilight will overtake all.”
“That’s… highly specific,” Logan says.
“A vague prophecy does nobody any good. Ambiguity gives people the room to insert their own message, and important shit gets lost. Some folks concentrate on the wrong thing, and next thing you get doomsday preppers and whackjobs and cults.”
Logan runs through the implications. “If you’re right, doomsday prep isn’t such a bad call, yeah?”
“It won’t help. Not with the winter that’s coming, and everything that follows.”
Logan says nothing, groping for words. Still half-hoping Stina’s joking.
“I don’t think you believe me,” Stina Herne says for the second time.
Logan goes to lie, to tell her she’s wrong, but the words lodge in his throat. He remembers Donna’s advice, when in doubt, go with the truth. “Well, it’s a lot to process, isn’t it? End of the world. Disappearing moon. The woman I hoped to kiss tonight being descended from an immortal wolf.”
Stina looks up at him and smiles.
“Besides, if we assume the apocalypse thing is true,” Logan says, “why on earth say yes to a first date? What’s the point, if we’re all going to die?”
Stina’s teeth are very sharp and it’s very bleak up there, in the wind. “Just because the end is coming, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t live.”
“Right.” Logan swallows his nerves and says, “We should get down, yeah?”
“Not yet,” Stina says. “But soon, okay?”
“The view’s not that good.”
“But the company is.”
“Oh.” The blushing warmth creeps up Logan’s neck, and the cold wind makes it seem worse.
Stina’s amused by that. “You said you planned on kissing me?”
“Hoped,” Logan says. “I hoped to kiss you.”
“Well, do that,” Stina says. “Make hope a reality.”
“Up here? We’ll fall.”
“That’s part of the fun, yeah?” Stina eases back, lying flat along the slope. Pale skin glowing in the moonlight, silver hair tugged by the wind. “Besides, it doesn’t matter, right? Falling off, hurting ourselves, breaking our necks.”
“Because your grandfather's coming?"
"Yes," Stina Herne says, serene and deadly certain. "This won't seem cold, soon, compared to the Fimblewinter. Best we enjoy ourselves, for as long as we can."
She waits, and he thinks she's so very like the moon, that blend of pale flesh and darkness that hides so very much. Logan shifts on the Rock, some part of him conscious of falling even as he positions himself to make out.
Logan presses his lips against Stina Herne's, the trembling warmth of her beneath him. Hears Donna's questions tumbling through his mind: are you really going to do this? You're really willing to kiss this woman? After everything she just said?
Yes.
Yes?
Yes.
Yes, it seems he is.
They don't fall off the Rock while making out, and Logan's grateful for that. When they don't push each other off to die on the estuary rocks, that pleases him too. He climbs down first and helps Stina back to terra firma. They return to the car, Stina's fingers entwined with his, Stina's shoulder brushing against his arm. They get into his beat-up Volvo and start the long drive home, the stereo turned down, a buzz of noise and the hiss of the tape and Logan's thoughts all about her instead of the highway. Logan doesn't think about what's coming next. He doesn't know, doesn't care. Figures it's easier to play along, fall into whatever he's falling into, regardless of where he lands.
He takes her home. They kiss goodnight. First, in the car. Again, at the door. She does not ask him in. Logan's grateful for that too. If Stina Herne suggested going in, Logan would go. He guesses he's not ready for that. Better to wait, figure this out. Enjoy the courting, as Donna says, before things starting getting real.
So, Logan drives home. Lets himself in, very quietly. Ignores Donna, in the other room, playing Xbox and drinking beer. Sneaks past and shuts his bedroom door, pulls off his sneakers and his jacket and his jeans. He crawls into bed and nestles into the covers. Logan's lips feel like they belong to someone else. He closes his eyes. Too wired to sleep.
The end of the world is coming. He repeats that idea, over and over, replays all the details: immortal wolves and Fimblewinter. Googles, reads Wikipedia entries. Takes in all the myths and legends until his eyes are hurting. Logan wonders if he should text her, figures it's too soon.
Instead, he picks up his phone and opens the calendar. Puts a note there, for next year: on this date, we kissed for the very first time. Just in case Stina's wrong. Just in case he needs it, in years to come, if things turn out the way Logan's hoping. When first kisses mean less than the accretion of time. When first dates mean less than the days and the months and the years spent together afterward, but remembering the day it started feels like something you ought to do.
Just in case she's wrong, and the world keeps spinning.
Then Logan puts the phone down. He breathes in cold air and exhales.
The night is very dark. The Xbox explosions out in the lounge room seem very far away, and very unimportant. Computer games are a bad way to pass the time, if the Fimbulwinter proves to be real.
Logan shuts his eyes and remembers that kiss, and he knows there's no sleep coming.