Rissa ’s Reviews > The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy > Status Update

If I'm to be happy, it's with you.
This time, she had told him a fairy tale in only eight words.

“I love you. I would have loved you in defiance of your rejection, and I will love you, in spite of any of your objections. I had no heart to give, until you, and now it has passed to your keeping—and it’s yours—it’s yours—and it will be yours, whether you want it or not.”

She clutched his hands in her shaking ones. "For so long my hands have been defined by my abilities, my tācn, my Cost. But they've been empty—so empty. Hands should have other hands to hold. I want them to be yours."

"You almost lost your life. I'm not worth that."
"You don't get to decide what you're worth to me."

"Can you hate someone for what they are, but love them for what they could be?"

He was vivid, scarred, imperfect, beautiful, far too in love with her. And she, frightened, knew that she was far too in love with him. Her heart harassed her, pulled her from logic to a known suffering; he was a Fyren; there was no future here; the future could be nothing but pain.

But she felt in that moment that even if they went their separate ways, in him there would always be a bit of her now, and in her a bit of him. One couldn't touch hearts unchanged.

She had cured him of one thing and afflicted him with another.
He kissed her smile. And he knew sadness then, because this was the end, because he was who he was and she was who she was. This was the inevitable goodbye. They were already standing in a memory.

A Haelan and a Fyren walked into a pub. It was the start of a joke.
That the Fyren was a bit in love with the Haelan was the punch line, probably.

“I don’t either of us is destined for an ordinary sort of love.”