Loving Pride

The Art Of Love

Lydia Thorne dreamt of a ball of her own. She dreamt of the Colonel asking her for a dance, and she dreamt of him pressing soft flirtatious kisses on her face the entire night. The women who'd get to dance with him were lucky, she thought.

Only if he had taken her.

Thomas came into his father's study then and informed his mother that he was going to bed. Since she was busy mopping the floor, she promised to come after she had finished her chores. But she was never given a chance to finish them.

Around 10 at night, she heard familiar, tough footsteps that came into the study, pausing to find her. "Whisky," the Colonel demanded while settling on the couch. Lydia hurriedly poured him a glass and interrupted him with her palm on his chest as soon as she spotted the holes in his shirt.

"Were you shot?"

The Colonel saw how worried her eyes were and how sinfully she loved him.

"Yes, sit."

He pulled her onto his lap, startling Lydia Thorne with his sudden affection. He took off his coat, and Lydia saw the multiple holes in the Colonel's shirt. To her relief, she saw the bulletproof vest under the white fabric. The Colonel took it all off and continued cradling her on his lap.

"This is why balls are such a chore," he told her while caressing her cheek. Lydia seized the moment and kissed his face multiple times before wrapping her arms around the man's neck in a tight hug. She didn't have words to express herself—they always bubbled up in her throat and died right there. Her voice, strangled with emotion, wouldn't come out anymore.

Colonel Marquez Agaria didn't waste time. He lifted her in his arms and placed her on the warm wooden floor beside the fireplace before he made love to her like a true man. It was a miracle, Lydia thought, that she had recovered the man from six years ago. And the miracle was brought about by love and war.

As they lay in each other's embrace, the Colonel wanted to know the things he had told her adolescent self in that prison cell, and Lydia narrated the memories that were so familiar to her, as though they had happened yesterday.

Colonel Marquez Agaria had been captured the night before he met Lydia Thorne. His execution was an unavoidable fate, thus he drank whisky in the cell to his heart's content. The prison guards had been generous enough to grant that wish of his. When Lydia had entered his cell, looking timid and childlike, he realized that she was the last woman he'd ever be with.

During his entire life as a colonel, Marquez Agaria had forgotten how to love. But with the frail girl before him, he wanted to give her everything in his heart. Everything. All his secrets, all his passions.

Lydia was fascinated by the extent of love the Colonel could offer. She never felt an ounce of fear like what her sisters had described. Staying wrapped in the Colonel's arms inside that prison cell, she felt safer than she had ever felt in her whole life. If possible, she would have stayed there with him forever.

In the midst of every fond caress and kiss, the Colonel told her his tale. He had been brought up by a mother who worked as a whore. To save him from the impurity of her life, she sent him to a faraway convent, where he learned the Bible in order to be a priest. It was a sad occupation, he thought, because he could only hear the sins and self-pity of those who considered him next to God. That was when the war began, and nothing but death and sorrow engulfed all lands. He felt like a fool preaching peace in the middle of death—hence, he thought to fight.

That was the birth of Colonel Marquez Agaria. He never preached peace from that day on because it reminded him of the Bible and God. It reminded him of his past, which he considered the most monotonous and disturbing phase of his life. Hence, he turned into a fighter, but in the supposed last moments of his life, he became Lydia's lover.

"I thought I didn't know how to love," the Colonel whispered while kissing her shoulder.

"Everybody knows how to love. It's the first thing a baby learns. You were simply hiding the art from yourself, Colonel," she smiled at him.