I touched my lips in shock. “It’s all right.” To be honest I was more relieved that he was off the proprietor and didn’t have that flat furious expression anymore. My heart racketed away in my chest like I’d just run a race. I took a step, reaching for him. “It’s all right—”
He flinched. His eyes were horrified. “Jesus,” he said again, and took off at a shambling run away from me, from the café and its crowd of murmuring customers.
The proprietor was already rising with the aid of several waiters, woozy and angry, but I didn’t spare him a glance. I ran as fast as I could in the direction Finn had gone. He’d already gone past the auberge, slipping between buildings, and I saw him vanish into the garage behind. I followed, picking past the rows of Peugeots and Citroens to the long shape of the Lagonda. Finn was in the backseat, like he’d been that night in Roubaix when we talked at three in the morning. He sat head lowered and shoulders heaving, not seeing me until I wrenched the door open and slid in beside him.
His voice was muffled. “Go away.”
I took hold of his hand. “You’re hurt—” His fingers were bruised, skin split over the knuckles. I didn’t have a handkerchief, so I just touched the abraded skin gently.
He yanked away, raking his fingers through his hair. “I wish I’d beat that miserable shite’s skull into paste.”
“Then you’d be hauled away and locked in prison again.”
“I belong in prison.” He still sat hunched, fists caught through his own hair. “I hit you, Charlie.”
I touched my own lip, felt the skin unbroken. “You didn’t know it was me, Finn. As soon as you saw me, you stopped yourself from—”
“I still hit you.” He looked at me then, his eyes holes of guilt and anger. “You were just trying to stop me killing him, and I hit you. Why are you here, Charlie? Sitting in the dark with a bad man like me?”
“You’re not a bad man, Finn. You’re a goddamn wreck, but you’re not bad.”
“What do you know—”
“I know my brother wasn’t bad when he punched walls and screamed curses and panicked in crowds! He wasn’t bad, he was broken. So are you. So is Eve. So was I when I flailed my time away in school either crying in bed or sleeping with boys I didn’t like.” I stared at Finn, trying so hard to make him see. “What’s broken does not have to stay that way.”
I wanted so badly to help him. Take him between my hands and mend the cracks, like I’d failed to do for James. Like I’d even failed to do for my parents when they were grieving blindly for him.
“This is no place for you.” Finn’s voice was rough, clipped. I could see the angry tension coil through his shoulders again. “You should go home. Have your bairn, take up your life. Nothing good can come from hanging about with a pair of broken souls like Gardiner and me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I reached for his hand again.
He jerked away. “Don’t.”
“Why?” We’d sat shoulder to shoulder last night as we drank our whiskey; I’d laid my head in his lap and he’d stroked my hair, none of it with any discomfort. But now Finn prickled like a burr, and the space between us was alive with tension.
“Get out of the car, Charlie.”
“Why?” I challenged again. I’d be damned if I backed down now.
“Because in moods like this, it’s drink, fight, or screw.” He stared ahead into the shadows, words coming angry and even. “I did the first one last night, and the second twenty minutes ago. All I want right now is to tear that black dress off you.” He looked at me, and that glance seared me all over. “You really should get out of the car.”
If I left him now, he’d sit here all night with his guilt and his anger and a dead Gypsy girl. “Like it or not,” I said, echoing Eve’s words, “she’s dead and you’re alive. We’re both alive.” And I reached up, tangled my hands into his hair, and pulled his head down to mine.
Our mouths clashed brutally, never letting go even as he lifted me up so I straddled his lap. His cheeks were wet and so were mine. He was yanking down the shoulders of my black dress and I was tearing at his shirt buttons, pushing all the layers of clothes out of the way so it was skin against hot skin, neither of us caring if anyone walked by outside the Lagonda’s windows and saw us. On the road to Oradour-sur-Glane he had kissed me with exquisite tenderness, but now his mouth was rough as he devoured the soft skin between my breasts, lashes brushing my collarbone. I pressed my cheek against his hair, hands sliding down his lean chest to his belt, and for a moment he stopped, breathing in gulps, his big hands spanning my naked back. “Christ, Charlie,” he said not too distinctly. “This wasn’t how I was hoping to do this.”
Maybe it wasn’t roses and candlelight and romance. But this, here, now, was what we both needed. Last night had been numbness and pain and longing for oblivion—I couldn’t stay there or I’d drown. I wasn’t letting Finn drown either. I wasn’t letting him go, not like the others I’d failed and lost. “Stay with me,” I murmured against his lips, my breath coming as ragged as his. “Stay with me—” And we were tangled up along the leather seat, the important parts of my black dress all yanked out of the way, Finn’s shirt and belt on the floor.
This was normally when my mind slid away from what was happening. This was when I stopped trying to feel something and instead grew distant and disappointed that I felt nothing—that the easiest equation in the world, man plus woman, always added up to zero. Not this time. The heaving scramble of limbs across the seat and the sounds of squeaking leather and heavy breathing were the same as all the other times, but now I wasn’t drifting away. I was melting and burning and shaking with need. Finn was trembling too, braced above me, a shadow against more shadows, his hands tangled so tight through my hair that my scalp sparkled with pain, and his mouth drank the skin at my throat and my ears and my breasts as though he could devour me. I locked my arms and my thighs around him and clung as though I were trying to climb inside him, nails sinking deep into his back. We grappled, skin against sweating skin, and it still wasn’t close enough. I clawed at him, pulling him deeper, dimly hearing the sounds I was making as we clashed in desperate, furious rhythm. It was fast and rough and good, messy and sweaty and alive. His face was hard against mine at the final shudder that speared us both, and I felt a tear slide between our pressed cheeks.
I didn’t know which of us it had come from. But I didn’t care. It hadn’t come from grief, and that was enough.
CHAPTER 28
EVE
October 1915