Promises and Pomegranates

“Heat floods my cheeks at her question, shame slicing through my skin like the dull edge of a blade. ‘It’s only a couple of pounds,’ I say, trying to obey anyway by inhaling as deep as I can.”

On Elena’s wedding day, Carmen asks how much weight she’s gained since her last dress fitting. This criticism produces a painful sensation that Elena compares, via simile, to being sliced with a dull knife. She tries to obey Carmen’s command to suck in her stomach, despite her hurt feelings and shame. This exchange shows how powerless being ruled by “duty” can make one feel, demonstrating why following one’s desire is, ultimately, more enjoyable.

“His jaw is sharp enough to cut glass, covered in a thin layer of stubble and framing Adonis-style bone structure, while his dark eyes are more reminiscent of the evil he’s rumored to be.”

Elena uses hyperbole when she exaggerates the sharpness of Kal’s jawline, portraying his face as severe, masculine, and dangerously attractive. She indirectly characterizes him as possessing a godlike handsomeness and intrinsically sinister nature, foreshadowing his violent sexual predilections.

“Unlike most people I meet, Elena’s never had a problem with eye contact. She matches my gaze head-on, like she knows it’s exactly what I want and can’t help but give it to me.”

Maintaining eye contact is often indicative of a sense of equality between two individuals. Kal acknowledges Elena’s strength by referring to this symbol, but then he interprets it as her giving him what he wants. His comments simultaneously characterize Elena as empowered and bold and himself as one who anticipates that others will always cater to his wishes. He doesn’t yet realize that she can be just as powerful as him. Eye contact here becomes a contest over who sets the terms of looking, so the scene previews the shift from Kal’s consuming gaze to an exchange that gradually resembles mutual recognition, a step toward love rather than fixation.

“‘I thought picking you for this contract was the smart decision. Spent my whole life trying to keep you out of trouble, sure that if I could just get you married, everything else would work out on its own.’ Papá sighs, giving me a once-over. ‘I thought I could count on you, Elena.’”

Elena already said that she spent her whole life trying to please her father, even getting into fights to prove her strength to him. Now, she learns that all her attempts were for naught because he interpreted them as evidence that she needed him to intercede on her behalf. Despite her attempts to prioritize family duty over everything else, he is still displeased with her. The impossibility of always pleasing others becomes clear, paving the way for Elena to follow her own desires rather than whatever her parents dictate.

“His eyes darken, the mahogany color eclipsed with lust, flickering over me as his hand brings the meat of a Granny Smith apple to his lips. When he bites down, juices sparking in various directions, I feel the crunch in my core. In echoes in my ears, my gaze falling as he pulls the apple away to chew, his mouth moist as it moves.”

In the Garden of Eden, Satan offers Eve an apple, a symbol of temptation, disobedience, and sin. Here, the allusion to this Biblical story aligns Kal with the devil and Elena with Eve, an innocent who is lured away from goodness by the devil’s depravity and moral corruption. The look of Kal while he eats the juicy apple arouses Elena, and they end up having a sexual encounter almost as soon as she awakens on the plane. It doesn’t take long, then, for her to begin to follow desire when she’s been compelled to abandon duty. The lush sensory focus on bite, juice, and sound turns temptation into a full body cue, showing how desire overrides Elena’s learned deference and advances the arc from duty to self-chosen pleasure.

“I’ve already broken my own unspoken rule to take things slow by driving my fingers into her tight, needy heat, helpless against the way she looked at me while I ate that fucking apple.”

Although the allusion to the Garden of Eden seems to paint Kal as the one with the control in the relationship, he admits that Elena makes him feel “helpless.” In other words, she has some power over him. This foreshadows Elena’s acquisition of the “dread Persephone” power she gains when she joins her husband in his seedy underworld of sex and crime. By admitting “helpless[ness],” Kal cedes a sliver of control, which signals how Elena’s agency begins to reconfigure his obsession into responsiveness and prepares the later pattern of asking for her assent.

“You so totally are [a people pleaser]. Not that any of us blame you. We all chose whatever defense mechanisms worked best against Papá. Yours happened to be the path of least resistance.”

Much to Elena’s chagrin, her sister calls her out as one who always puts duty first. Ariana claims that each sister adopted her own way of handling their father, though her description of Elena makes Elena feel weak and powerless. If succumbing to one’s duty renders one essentially ineffective, then it makes sense that Desire Overwhelms Duty.

“If Elena is even half as divine as the fruit in the Garden of Eden, I absolutely understand Eve’s surrender.”

Again, Kal alludes to the Garden of Eden and the temptation of Eve, but this time he compares Elena to the fruit rather than to Eve. He paints Elena as the object of temptation and himself as Eve, relatively powerless to resist his desire for her. This objectification of Elena emphasizes The Boundary Between Obsession and Love and how obsessed Kal is with her. Recasting Elena as the fruit keeps her objectified, yet it also reveals Kal’s vulnerability, since he positions himself as the tempted one, a contradiction that marks the theme’s contested middle ground.

“I gasp as he finishes his sentence, the image of my parents watching Kal fuck me deliciously forbidden and intoxicating for some reason. An ultimate act of defiance, I suppose.”

As Elena follows her desire away from duty, represented by her home in Boston, she enjoys herself more, associating that enjoyment with Kal. In this fantasy, Elena casts Kal as an instrument she might use to shock her parents, the people she’s always tried to please, calling attention to The Boundary Between Obsession and Love. He is a means to an end, a part of the fantasy, and not a fully realized individual in her mind.

“[M]y parents are still pushing the narrative that I’m some sort of unwilling victim in this marriage. Ironic, considering they had no problem tying me to the same fate with another man, though I suppose my relationship with Mateo benefited them in a way mine with Kal doesn’t.”

Elena’s surprise draws attention to her dawning realization that she’s only important to her parents as a pawn. Further, their behavior highlights the fact that Carmen doesn’t know what Rafael has done, just as Demeter was unaware of Zeus’s complicity with Hades. This is what Carmen’s pursuit of duty has led to: an unhappy marriage to a man who acts without regard for her feelings. No wonder she allowed herself to follow her desire, pursuing multiple affairs with other men.

“Satisfaction rolls through me like a thick fog, settling deep in my soul as I focus on the pain, using it to propel me into action.”

Elena connected pain with pleasure in her youth, when she got into fights that gave her a sense of satisfaction and empowerment. She used violence to prove to her father that she could take care of herself and make him proud of her; though it didn’t accomplish this, the fights did prepare her to match Kal’s violence later. He finds solace in spilling others’ blood just as Elena is satiated by getting injured by and injuring others. Pain becomes instrumental rather than merely punitive, which clarifies why Elena later interprets marking and blood as routes to power and choice within a constrained marriage.

“I blink at the wall in Jonas’s office, waiting longer than necessary to see if the call revives itself before I’m met with the ear rape of a dial tone.”

Kal’s metaphor, comparing the sound of a dial tone (which shows that the call with Elena has ended) to something that “rape[s]” his ear, demonstrates two things. First, it highlights the extent of his misophonia, how unbelievably violated he feels by certain auditory stimuli. Secondly, it shows that he’s beginning to care about Elena, not just as an obsession or object to possess but as a person to protect. He is so disturbed by being cut off from her, by the possibility of someone hurting her, that he compares the sound associated with that possibility to rape.

“Took her from one cage and imprisoned her in another, possibly for naught, depending on what I find inside.”

Kal uses a metaphor to compare the restrictions placed on Elena, first by filial duty and then by his physical isolation of her, to a cage. He doesn’t want to be like her parents, or limit her desire, but he does want to control her to a certain degree. His feelings are complex and, at times, contradictory, especially as he crosses The Boundary Between Obsession and Love.

“I try to recall the events beyond when I slipped into unconsciousness, but everything comes up hazy. A blurred film with no sound, only the sensation of being trapped. A feeling I’ve spent my whole life trying to escape, only to continually find myself wrapped in its arms.”

Elena uses a metaphor to compare her experience of unconsciousness to a blurry and muted movie. She can only identify what she felt—trapped—a feeling she personifies because it seems so powerful and prominent in her life; it feels like more than a feeling.

“I don’t know how, but every time our lips meet, she tastes fucking divine, like a holy scripture written to absolve me of my sins, something sweet and succulent and entirely too pure for her own good.”

As Kal’s feelings for Elena begin to cross The Boundary Between Obsession and Love, he uses multiple figures of speech, as if to parallel his intensifying emotions and how flustered they make him feel. First, his bewildering simile compares her to something one might “taste” as “holy scripture” (which is not something we usually taste); then his metaphor compares her to some kind of “sweet and succulent” fruit. Finally, his use of polysyndeton adds a compounding, snowball effect to these figurative layers. The sacramental diction refigures sex as absolution, which complicates obsession by attaching moral release to intimacy and nudges the language toward love’s transformative register.

“‘I mean, she sits on your balcony, every single night, staring out like you’re dead or something.’ Sadness weasels its way into my soul […] It’s something I plagued myself with, even as a child, going to great lengths to be what my parents wanted.”

Ariana’s description of Carmen’s behavior in Elena’s absence sounds a great deal like Demeter in the myth of Hades and Persephone. Further, the guilt this provokes within Elena demonstrates one of the effects of duty; it doesn’t make her feel anything positive but, rather, only imparts feelings of inadequacy and sadness.

“I’m working on thawing his icy heart, and each day, my affection for him grows tenfold. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that it’s such a stark contrast to how I felt at the start of our union.”

Elena describes Kal’s emotional “coldness” figuratively, by calling his heart “icy”: an example of metonymy. Her description also draws attention to the way her feelings for him are changing, crossing The Boundary Between Obsession and Love. She believes that his feelings for her are unequal to hers for him, creating dramatic irony and tension.

“How, in the entire time we’ve been on Aplana, this is the first time I’ve seen her look something other than miserable, barring sexual activities.”

Kal begins to care about Elena’s feelings, wanting her to be happy rather than simply wanting to have sex with her. His feelings for her are changing just as surely as hers are for him, though neither recognizes this development in the other, which creates feelings of vulnerability and anxiety for them and tension for the reader. Elena is no longer an obsession, but he actually cares about her internal life in a way that he never has before. This attention to her nonsexual happiness ties Kal’s care to Elena’s interiority, a concrete pivot from possession to concern that evidences movement across the boundary.

“My fingers twitch in my lap, nerves eating away at any source of comfort created by my husband’s proximity.”

While Kal used to represent danger and her parents were associated with relative safety, Elena experiences a reversal that becomes obvious when she and Kal visit Boston after a few months on Aplana. Now, in the face of her dishonest and manipulative parents, it is Kal whose presence is comforting. This is further evidence that Elena’s feelings have crossed The Boundary Between Obsession and Love.

“For a moment, I can almost forget that he risked my safety by forcing my hand in a marriage for personal gain. Twice. I can almost forget the fact that he overlooked years of abuse, just because he so badly wanted to maintain his power in Boston and needed the alliance with [the de Lucas] to do so. I can forget all of that. But…I don’t.”

Faced with her parents again, and with her eyes fully open to their shortcomings, Elena consciously chooses her desire for Kal over her former sense of duty to them. When she reflects on what obedience got her—a complete lack of freedom and choice—Elena decides to abandon “duty” and refuse to forgive and forget her father’s transgressions.

“The woman who helped me get ready for my wedding and the woman standing here now are not the same person. Not even a little bit. Or maybe the problem is that I’m different.”

If Elena wasn’t aware of how much she has changed since leaving her parents’ home before, she becomes aware in this moment. Her realization that she has changed in very significant ways—prioritizing herself and what she wants over her parents’ goals—showcases Elena’s dynamism and growth. She can not only see her parents more clearly for who they are and what they value, but she can recognize her own priorities and chooses to privilege them.

“She may have loved me, but I never loved her […] [It] never felt like spending your life as a sinner and finally getting a taste of heaven […] But it takes a woman like Elena to elicit feelings like that.”

This line provides evidence of Kal’s dynamism. He realizes the depth of his feelings for Elena, feelings he never expected to have or felt worthy of before, and how much more significant they are than what he felt for Carmen. He switches into the second person voice, referring to “you” instead of himself, as if to mitigate how vulnerable this realization makes him feel. It’s harder to name these feelings as his own, especially now that he’s so fearful of losing Elena. Dismissing the past with Carmen while elevating Elena marks the text’s ethical recalibration, since love is now defined by exclusivity, confession, and risk, not by conquest.

“Everyone who met you was so captivated by this…aura you had. This brightness that drew them to you. And you were good at everything you tried: reading, writing, creating. Even gardening, which I never mastered. Sometimes it seemed like you’d just walk into a room, and plants would bloom.”

Carmen’s description of Elena again recalls the characterization of Persephone. As the goddess of spring, Persephone is lively, magnetic, and vibrant. She is effortlessly beautiful and lovable, and this is what draws others to her, including Hades. Elena evidently possesses a similar magnetism. This not only made her an object of Kal’s obsession but also renders her hopelessly lovable.