the gold in their arms

this is a short passage from the story i am revising.

She wanted to swim under the rush of the waterfall and emerge on the other side. There, she imagined, was an indestructible water fortress. But she knew there was only a rock face and that she would be smashed by the force of the fall and dropped like a stone to the bottom.

She followed his feet to the shore and climbed up onto the cool mud. The banks of the ravine were smooth and tipped with brittle, yellow grass. The earth around was hard and strong and as she stood there she felt solid and graceful as the alders. The branches pointed up to the sun and some, broken, hung above the surface of the water, their straight white fingers just failing to reach their reflection. The opposite side of the bank held endless mysteries. He stood up and looked around at the expanse of water shaded by trees and the walls of rock that allowed their voices to travel but denied the invasion of others.

She felt everything all too much. If they stayed they would be transformed. To leave, she felt, was to make the ultimate sacrifice. Her feminine instinct, which raged sure as a river on its course, told her they could not stay. It was unforgivable. They were each separately, painfully aware of the wrongness that grew. Neither of them spoke while both minds raced in terror. She knew he could feel her shudder in every touch. His hard gaze thumped against the edges of her thought as on the stopped skin of a drum. It had in it a look of cruel, deliberate refusal.

He knew they would not stay, though he wanted it also. They were too pure for the world but would enter it nonetheless. He knew he must; his very maleness demanded it. He watched her, nymph like, her white limbs curled up by the water’s edge, as she stared at the surface. He suddenly resented the pleasure he took in her presence. She would resent him also. He somehow knew it was inevitable, for he was powerless to give her what she wanted or protect her from what would hurt her. This inevitability also, somehow, made him resent her. He wanted possibility, power. She created a sense of duty that could not be fulfilled.

Hatred’s first entrance; it rushes like the water over the lip of the fall, and pools like poison in the blood.