Interesting story. The warning made me expect it to get a lot darker than it did. I was seriously expecting, like, I dunno, the unicorn to actually rape the girl or something appalling like that, because it was explicitly billed as worse than the Conan story about unrepentant goddess-raping and as dark or darker than "Mermaids' Tea Party," which featured (implied) necrophiliac fish sex and (unconsummated) pedophiliac urges. Fade-to-black sex on an animal carcass? Eh.
Man, the Internet has really pushed the bar on "disturbing" way, way up for me. I'm not exactly happy about this.
Olivaw has basically covered my overall reaction with "A sweet story about an abusive relationship." That was really, really NOT a healthy dynamic those two had going there, and I foresee tears and bitter recriminations in their future, followed by a slow spiral into maudlin regret. When you spend THAT long hankering for something and restraining yourself, reality will NEVER be able to live up to it.
I'm troubled by the thematic implications, as I usually am by unicorn stories that delve into the idea of virginity qua virginity. Her sole - or at least her primary - attractive quality is her unattainability, and the story never questions the inherent dynamic of woman as provider-of-sex for man as seeker/attainer-of-sex, which is one that I think isn't tremendously positive or helpful, however much it might be modeled by biology. At this point, culture trumps biology in terms of selection pressure for humans, and I'm lukewarm on celebrating the Old Bad Ways. The specific relationship within the story is ameliorated somewhat by the hints that Duncan is, in fact, attracted to her as a person in addition to a prize or object - he admires her pride and her bearing, for example - but the story's climax (no pun intended) doesn't leave much room for Eleanor to function as anything other than bait. She lures the ultimate unicorn, and immediately afterward lures the ultimate man, and thus... fulfillment! Hurrah for womanhood! It's all about getting the choicest horn, the one that's hardest to attract and entrance. Does the horn respect you as a person or care about you in any meaningful way beyond its immediate desire for you? Who cares!? It's huge!
Unicorns are always about sex, though, and specifically about female sexuality as seen through the prism of the male perspective. Virginity is a strong attractor because, biologically speaking, you're guaranteed that children you get on a virgin are yours (Biblical cuckolding aside). For the male, who - again, biologically speaking - doesn't care about a partner so much as just getting as many receptacles for his seed as possible, a virgin at peak fertility is about as good as it gets. Thus, the traditional patriarchal control over women's body parts, iron-fisted and released slowly and with much backpedaling, if ever accomplished at all. Unicorns are the mythological embodiment of the Male Gaze, a walking phallic symbol that mystically recognizes these reproductive treasures; the woman in these stories is naturally just thrilled to have attracted such a rare beast as a unicorn. After all, says the Male Gaze, looking smugly upon its fantasy version of itself, who wouldn't be?