At the Edge of Summer (30 page)

The last framed drawing was of a man seated shirtless on a bed, one trouser leg rolled up. A wooden leg rested lengthwise across his lap. He held it loosely, watchfully, reverently, but he looked out through a thick tangle of hair with eyes warm and appreciative.

“I don't know your subjects, but I know how it feels to be on the other side of your sketch pad.” I dipped my head. “For a moment, you made them feel whole.”

She touched her cheek, as though holding in a blush. “Is that how you felt sitting across from me in the studio?”

That's how I'd felt that very first time she sketched me, under the chestnut tree. I nodded.

“It's my job,” she said, and twisted the scarf in her hands.

“These days, I frighten small children.” I tried for a smile. “It was nice to sit and not frighten anyone for an afternoon.”

She took a step forward. “Do you think your face bothers me?”

“It should.”

“It doesn't.” She reached out, her hand smelling warm like clay, and unhooked my mask.

I tried to catch it, to put it back on, but it slid off. “Please, no,” I said, and closed my eyes. I heard a soft clink as she set it down.

And then I felt her lips on mine.

I allowed myself half a second. Half a second when the world was all right, and then I pulled back. “No. No, no, no.” I opened my eyes. She was right there, so close her exhales brushed across my neck. So close she couldn't help but see the wreck of my face. “Please.”

She moved forward, half a step, and dropped an index finger on my lips. “You didn't ask what I was doing all of these years.” Through her glove, her finger was warm. “So I'll tell you.”

From outside the window, the bell at Bonne-Nouvelle rang out three, but I stayed still in the middle of the room.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who taught me to see the world through the eyes of an artist.” She drew her finger straight down to my chin. “A face is circles and angles, shadows and light, bones and muscle, tension and desire.” She traced up the right side of my face. “The line of a jaw?” And down the left. “Beauty.”

“I don't—”

She stopped my words again with that soft finger. “I'm not done telling you my story.” She gave a little smile and her hand trailed down to my shirt, damp from my bath. “Even after that boy left my life and, far away, grew into a soldier, I remembered what he taught me. I searched for beauty, through Morocco, through Algeria, through Mauritania, through Glasgow, through Paris. I haunted the halls of Fairbridge and the School of Art, I wandered the winding streets of the Latin Quarter, seeking those truths in lines and shapes that the artist-boy taught me to look for all those years before.”

As she talked, she slowly drew out the buttons of my shirt until it hung loose and open. I shrank back into my shirt, but she slipped her hand, so warm in that glove, onto my chest. I swallowed.

“I've thought about that boy. I've wondered what he looked like, grown up. I've tried to picture those brown eyes I remember watching me under the chestnut tree. The sound of his voice, the one time he accidently asked if I'd stay forever, that sound was just beyond my imagination. I knew, if I ever met him again, that he'd be taller. Stronger. More comfortable in his own skin.” With both hands under my shirt, she slid it from my shoulders. “I found that.”

I caught the shirt before it fell from my left shoulder. “But I'm not.” And suddenly felt barer for the admission.

“Luc, you are.” She eased my hand and the shirt away. “The first time you walked through that studio door, you met my eye. You dared me to think of you any less.”

I followed her gaze to my shoulder, that knotted, crooked mess that, thankfully, kept me from the army. The shoulder that still ached when it rained and when I tried to hold up a brush for more than a few minutes. The shoulder that Mabel had tried her best to massage into usability. Clare covered it with her palm.

I flinched, but she didn't move her hand.

“How did it happen?” was all she asked.

I sucked in a breath. “Trying to prove something that doesn't seem to matter anymore. Trying to win.” I closed my eyes. “Could you…could you take your glove off?”

She did. “Luc, what are you afraid of?”

“This.”

And she kissed me again. This time I didn't stop her.

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.”

E
ven 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.

I pressed myself against his back and wrapped my arms around him. “Tell me.” He leaned back into me. “Tell me about Michel.”

Cognac pooled at the edge of the table. “Clare, I…”

I kissed the hollow between his shoulder blades.

He shivered.

“Here.” I brought the blanket from the bed.

He drank a whole mug of cognac before he coughed and cleared his throat. “Michel Chaffre. Bastard was the best friend I've ever had. Never had a bad word to say about anyone. Never thought of himself.”

I remembered the boy who'd given over his weekends to cheer a friendless Scottish girl. “A good man.”

“The best. But he…” He leaned heavily against the table. “Damn him.”

I moved the empty mugs to the washstand and refilled them. The cognac was cheap and smelled like paint thinner.

“Clare, he killed Chaffre.”

I took a sip from my mug. It burned. “Who did?”

“Stefan Bauer.”

He spat the name. I lit another candle.

“Chaffre was guarding the cellar where the prisoners were. He let me in—he shouldn't have, but he trusted me.” He turned to face me, eyes dark and deep. “Bauer took my bayonet, attacked me, left me for dead on that cellar floor and…” He swallowed, reached for the cognac, swallowed again. “And he killed Chaffre.”

I knew this wasn't the only night he'd spent drinking in the half-dark. All these months, he'd been punishing himself for someone else's crime. He was punishing himself for trusting Stefan Bauer.

I'd spent too many years doing the same. Telling myself that I'd been stupid and weak and that I'd let myself be led into that brothel bedroom, into a situation I might not have gotten out of. I spent more time blaming myself than the one really at fault. I understood. So I said, “It's not your fault.” I said, “Bauer betrayed you.” I knew something about that.

“No.” He slid down the wall to the floor. “I betrayed Chaffre.” Beneath the blanket, he shuddered. “Clare, he killed Chaffre with my own bayonet.”

“Bauer betrayed you,” I said again, because I didn't know what else to say. I knelt and took his hands. “You didn't give that bayonet to him. You didn't tell him to kill your friend.”

“But he did.” He stared at the floor, that haunted look again in his eyes. “And all because I was weak enough to think that an enemy might…might still be my friend.”

This was it. Not his cheek, not his shoulder, not his lack of a job. This right here was the reason he kept his distance, why he refused to be close to anyone. Why he'd take temporary comfort when he could, but shy away from anything that could make him feel.

“But you understand all of that, don't you?” he said. He pulled his hands back and crumpled them in his lap. “You understand…him.” His gaze was penetrating. “That night, in the cellar…he told me what he did to you.”

I bit my lip. I didn't know how to answer.

He spoke in a rush. “Believe me, Clare, if I'd known then that he'd hurt you, I—”

“He didn't hurt me.” I said it quickly, to wipe the anguish from his face. “Though he…tried, he didn't touch me.”

His eyes went to my hand, where I still had a thin pink scar from that hat pin. “Ah.” He caught it in his and turned it over. “And to think I once thought you were the one who needed protecting.” He brushed a kiss onto the scar. “Clare Ross, you're stronger than I could ever be.”