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There are times that Ellen looks at her husband, and she wants to love him.
Despite the destruction he's caused — both with careful calculation and with reckless abandon. Despite the ways that he has hurt her over the years; the ease with which he can wield intimacy as a weapon against her.
Ellen longs to love. There is a great yearning inside her for it, to give and to receive. A painful ache for grand romance, for tenderness to underlie passion.
Orlok does not love.
To his credit, he has never said otherwise — no, he was honest from the start. He promised her companionship, he promised her an escape. Never once did he promise her love or sweetness. He met his end of the bargain, and so, despite the need in her, Ellen upholds hers.
She tries, at times. Crawls to him on bloody kneels and offers supplication. Offers her submission and gentleness. She does not ask him to love her in return; only to allow her to love him.
He seems to use her more ruthlessly than ever when she does. Ruts her like an animal and casts her aside, as though her soft touches and toothless kisses offend him.
Ellen leaves with her embers of affection hardened back into resentment, into bitterness, into something that is almost too cold to be considered hatred.
If he will not give her what she wants and will not allow her to seek out what she needs, then she will at least find a proxy — and hurt him in the process.
Because Orlok may not love, but he does bleed. He does feel.
That vicious ego of his is cruel but surprisingly fragile — and while he has never been much of a mentor, Ellen is a star pupil, a quick study. He has taught her, by example, how to slip the blade in, between the ribs and through the heart; how to wield intimacy as a weapon.
When one knows you, inside and out, they know how to inflict the deepest wounds.
So she takes lovers. She has flings. Empty and meaningless — she pretends to hide them, but truthfully, they are flaunted. It is that lack of import that inflicts the worst damage.
If she sought love, he would expect it. Not tolerate it, never that, but her dalliances would make sense to him. They would not strike at his pride, nor call his competency into question.
Instead she seeks what she could have with him. Less than, even. Boring, perfunctory sex, casual relations, nothing that would ever truly satisfy any of her desires.
Except the desire to hurt him.
They pretend this is not the case, of course. Ellen convinces herself it is not; sometimes she tries to connect. Sometimes she tries to share her appetites with them — the bloodless ones, at least.
Ellen convinces herself that she is seeking that which he would deny her.
And when the death toll rises, and they each pretend they do not know what the other has done until Ellen tires of the game, she convinces herself that it's guilt which puts an end to her ploy against him. That it is some shred of decency that still lingers in her that makes her lose interest and give up in her private scheme.
If that were the case, she wouldn't be looking at him tonight, where he sits across from her while they play their latest round of chess, and wish once more she could love him.
(Let me, she thinks, when they lie tangled together in his coffin before dawn, blood caking on their healing skin; You do not have to love me back. Only let me love you.)
(He never does.)