I forgot that my bed was unmade, that my carpet was threadbare, that my window was cracked and streaked with grime. I forgot Paris, Bauer, the letters unsent to Maman. I forgot Chaffre and every soldier I ever shot. I forgot that I was a man broken. In her kiss, I remembered. Every sweating dream of her, every restless sketch of her fifteen-year-old face, every crossed-fingered wish.
“You have to see.” She took my shirt the rest of the way off.
I let her. “See what?”
She put her lips to my shoulder, then my cheek, then my mouth. “How beautiful you are to me.”
She showed me. She pushed me back onto the unmade bed, dropped her own clothes on the threadbare carpet, and, with sunlight streaking through the cracked window, we made love. Later, as I fell asleep with her warm in my arms, she murmured, “I always did like summer.”
Even in lovemaking, Luc was shy, tentative, apologetic. As I slipped off his clothing, as I kissed him down into the bed, he kept murmuring excuses and warnings. “You don’t really want to do this,” and “Clare, I’m too broken,” and “I’m sorry, I should’ve made the bed.” Nonsense that I ignored.
I just kept touching his hair, his face, his body, his everything, until he stopped protesting and a kind of wonder crept into his eyes. “My Luc,” I whispered into the side of his neck, into his knotted shoulder. His arms tightened around me and held me safe against the world. I’d found him again.
The light slanted lower through the windows, but he didn’t talk, didn’t let go until the room grew dark. We dipped in and out of contented sleep. In the corner, something rustled within a covered birdcage. He stood to find a light, and as he did, said, “Don’t leave?” I wasn’t sure if he meant at the moment or forever.
I shook my head. “I won’t.”
He lit candles, fat candles stuck in cracked holders all over the room.
“No electric light?” I asked.
He shook his head, but I saw the bulb on the ceiling. He pulled a linen towel from the washstand and over his shoulders.
I thought I understood. “You don’t have to light them, if you don’t want.”
Wrapped in his thin towel, he sat on a wooden chair, his knees tight together. “It’s fine.” He swallowed. “I don’t mind.”
“You do. You’re as nervous as a duck.”
He cracked a smile. “Ducks aren’t nervous.”
“Have you been in a brasserie lately? French ducks are.” I propped myself up on my elbows, the sheet sliding down to my waist
“So are French rabbits.”
“Luc, come back over here.”
And he did.
It wasn’t until after the second time that he let me uncover his shoulders and look at him, really look at him, in the candlelight. I couldn’t see him blush in the dim.
“I suppose my dreams of the Championnat de France are well and truly past now,” he said ruefully. “I can barely hold up a paintbrush, much less a tennis racket.”
“How did it happen?” I asked, running a finger up the side of his arm. He tensed, then curled the arm around me. At least he could still do that.
He sucked in a breath. He seemed to be considering. “Do you remember me talking about Stefan Bauer?”
I felt icy cold. “You played tennis with him.” I let my hair swing loose over my face. “You used to write to me who was winning.”
“In the end, he did.” He closed his eyes. “Bauer was in a group of German prisoners being held near our camp.”
“Good,” I couldn’t help but say.
He passed a hand over his eyelids. “You were right about him, you know.” I took his hand, but he didn’t open his eyes. “I let myself get too close,” he said. “Even though you warned me, I still trusted him.” A shudder ran the length of his body.
“You couldn’t—”
“I deserved to be attacked.”
“Look at me.” His eyes were dark in the candlelight. I spoke to him and to myself eight years ago. “You didn’t deserve anything.”
He shook his head. I’d had eight years to convince myself. He’d had a fraction of that. “He was a prisoner,” he repeated. “Bauer manipulated me, like he always did on the court. I had a weapon with me and I just…let myself get too close.”
I touched the line of scar along his shoulder. “Knife?”
“Bayonet. And across my face.” He hesitated and put a finger to his jaw. “And a hobnailed boot.”
I pulled the blanket up, over us both. “Luc,” I asked softly. “Who is Michel?”
Beneath me, he tensed. “Why do you ask?”
“While you were sleeping, you said his name.”
He rolled from under me. “I never called him Michel.”
I followed him across the little room, to where he fussed with a gas ring and a coffeepot, to where he gave up and filled two mugs with cognac instead, to where he fell against the table and tipped one over before even taking a sip.
