Sword and Shield | E. Lehnsherr

5. Kinds of Love

The past hurts. Ria knows this all too well.

For some, the past is a bee sting or an inconvenience that bothers them from time to time, but they can deal with it. Others can view the past as just that—the past. But to Ria, it is a breathing shadow clinging to her skin.

It follows her wherever she runs. Over the centuries, she has learned how to subdue her memories. Sometimes, when she surrounds herself with enough brightness or enough darkness, the shadows hide from her, but they always manage to return at the most inconvenient times.

Though her mind has long been shielded, Ria worries about Charles. Telepaths had hurt her before, and she knows Charles would never, but her memories are her own. Even the possibility of her shields slipping for even a moment when her mind is consumed with love makes her knees buckle.

Ria has lived long enough to know love. She heard once from a scholar that people experience a few kinds of love: eros love which every misguided child experiences—Ria's first was most damaging; the kind of love that grows with the couple; the safe love that comforts and swaddles; and the love that will always be dangerous.

Her first love had been innocent, the result of childhood innocence and naivety that blinded her to the dangers her love presented. It took decades to see past the facade and to understand the heartbreaking nature she voluntarily subjected herself to when she pledged herself away on a whim. That love is the reason she fears herself, what she is capable of.

Nerio was Ria's second love. She grew with him, and together, they became brave. Both were running, but they stopped for each other. Nerio had walked through the darkness with her and offered her a flame in the night. Ironic given what killed him.

Jacklyn Griffin was Ria's safe space. Through intense rain or blistering heat, both women had held each other close, grasping at each other for comfort. Though it was a dangerous time to love a woman, especially with tensions rising over Europe, Ria had never felt safer than when she held Jacklyn.

Ria has yet to find dangerous love, not that she would want to. She has fallen for danger before, plunged into its trap only to escape scathed with a bruised heart instead of a shattered one.

Perhaps what she feels now as she laughs along with everyone at dinner—perhaps this is what that scholar had seen in her future. Spending time with these mutants puts her closer to war, and war calls out to the being that created her. The being she races from like her life depends on it. Because her life does depend on it.

The mutants—her friends, she supposes—had been kind enough to avoid topics she spoke about earlier in the day and how she managed to finish dinner without running into any of them. They just tell stories of their lives as Ria continues serving her food. She had always been good at that, and it only makes her smile to hear their compliments.