The Nightingale

Isabelle started to roll over and gasped at the pain in her shoulder. Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself and eased slowly onto her side. She’d misjudged how close he was to her, how small the bed. They were lying like lovers; she on her side looking up at him; he on his back staring at the ceiling. “Vianne went to the border?”

“You were in a coffin in the back of the wagon. She wanted to make sure we crossed safely.” She heard a smile in his voice, or imagined she did. “She threatened to kill me if I didn’t take good care of you.”

“My sister said that?” she said, not quite believing it. But she hardly believed that Ga?tan was the kind of man who would lie to reunite sisters. In profile, his features were razor sharp, even by lamplight. He refused to look at her, and he was as close to the edge of the bed as he could be.

“She was afraid you’d die. We both were.”

He said it so softly she barely could hear. “It feels like old times,” she said cautiously, afraid to say the wrong thing. More afraid to say nothing at all. Who knew how many chances there would be in such uncertain times? “You and me alone in the dark. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Tours already feels like a lifetime ago,” she went on. “I was just a girl.”

He said nothing.

“Look at me, Ga?tan.”

“Go to sleep, Isabelle.”

“You know I will keep asking until you can’t stand it.”

He sighed and rolled onto his side.

“I think about you,” she said.

“Don’t.” His voice was rough.

“You kissed me,” she said. “It wasn’t a dream.”

“You can’t remember that.”

Isabelle felt something strange at his words, a breathless little flutter in her chest. “You want me as much as I want you,” she said.

He shook his head in denial, but it was the silence she heard; the acceleration of his breathing.

“You think I’m too young and too innocent and too impetuous. Too everything. I get it. People have always said that about me. I’m immature.”

“That’s not it.”

“But you’re wrong. Maybe you weren’t wrong two years ago. I did say I love you, which must have sounded insane.” She drew in a breath. “But it’s not insane now, Ga?tan. Maybe it’s the only sane thing in all of this. Love, I mean. We’ve seen buildings blown up in front of us and our friends are getting arrested and deported. God knows if we’ll ever see them again. I could die, Ga?tan,” she said quietly. “I’m not saying that in some schoolgirl-try-to-get-the-boy-to-kiss-me kind of way. It’s true and you know it. Either one of us could die tomorrow. And you know what I would regret?”

“What?”

“Us.”

“There can’t be an us, Iz. Not now. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you from the beginning.”

“If I promise to let it go, will you answer one question truthfully?”

“Just one?”

“One. And then I’ll go to sleep. I promise.”

He nodded.

“If we weren’t here—hiding in a safe house—if the world weren’t ripping itself apart, if this was just an ordinary day in an ordinary world, would you want there to be an us, Ga?tan?”

She saw how his face crumpled, how pain exposed his love.

“It doesn’t matter, don’t you see that?”

“It’s the only thing that matters, Ga?tan.” She saw love in his eyes. What did words matter after that?

She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life … or her love for the duration of this war … or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected.

And she would not let it go again.

“I knew it,” she said to herself, smiling. His breath skimmed against her lips, as intimate as any kiss. She leaned over him, her gaze on him, steady, honest, and turned off the lamp.

In the dark, she snuggled against him, burrowed deeper under the blankets. At first he lay stiffly against her, as if he were afraid even to touch her, but gradually, he relaxed. He rolled onto his back and started to snore. Sometime—she didn’t know when—she closed her eyes and reached out, placing a hand in the hollow of his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breathing. It was like resting her hand on the ocean in summer, when the tide was coming in.

Touching him, she fell asleep.

*