Page 22 of The Last Kiss

For a moment, Dalton looked horrified, then he laughed with such a brittle bark that Sable startled and Harry had to soothe her. “Dear God, I hope I don’t sound like that — old bean.”

“Only a little.” Harry grinned at him. “It gets worse when you’ve had a drink, to be honest.”

“And my mother complains at the course language I’ve picked up.” His smile was as brittle as his laugh. “As if that’s the w-worst thing I brought back from Flanders.”

“The worst thing,” Harry said, seriously, “would be the bloody lice. I hope you ain’t given them to your mother.”

“Ha! She’d disown me.” He gave a shivery wiggle. “I’m itching just thinking about the blighters.”

The Oak, when it emerged from the trees, was a quaint old thatched pub. White-painted plaster and black-framed windows peered past flowering window boxes toward a pretty village green where a few wild ponies grazed. Harry could hear the trickle of a stream and saw a flash of water on the green — the village pond, complete with ducks no doubt. “Blimey,” he murmured, “you really did grow up in a fairy-tale.”

Dalton smiled, but the tension was back as he glanced around. “That’s what it seems like now, doesn’t it? A fairy-tale. D-doesn’t feel real anymore.”

“But what does?” Sometimes, Harry doubted anything would feel real after the intensity of the war. What joy or pain could ever compare?

He walked Sable toward the stables at the back of the pub, where a young lad shuffled out to meet them. Harry dismounted and handed him Sable’s reins, then turned to watch Dalton bringing Bella to a halt. He glanced around the small stable yard and hesitated, shifting his weight from left to right and back again, clearly considering his dismount. Whichever way he did it, there’d be a lot of weight on his bad leg.

“Probably best to lead with your left,” Harry suggested. “I’ll help — take your weight on the way down.”

A sigh, more of frustration than anything else. “Yes, alright.” Dalton patted Bella’s neck — “Sorry about this, old girl” — and swung his bad leg over and down. Harry caught him at the waist, taking his weight as he descended so he didn’t land with a jolt. It was as close as they’d been since that embrace when Harry first arrived. He could smell Dalton’s woodsy fragrance, could feel the edge of his ribs, the flex of his waist and the jut of his hips as Harry’s hands shifted lower to steady him. Harry held him there, balancing him while he extricated his right leg from the stirrup, the vulnerable nape of his neck bent forward, so close Harry could feel the warmth of his skin.

Hell, but suddenly he wanted it — everything he’d denied for the last four years. Wanted to pull Dalton back against his chest, wanted to slip his arms around him and hold him, wanted to put his lips to that exposed skin and —

Dalton listed back. Just slightly, but a definite pressure, a transfer of weight as if he’d deliberately leaned into Harry for the space between two thoughts. And then he was upright and stroking Bella’s neck and Harry was stepping back, heart hammering and mind leaping as he dropped his arms. What was that? Whatwasthat?

“Damn it,” Dalton said unsteadily. “I left my cane in the stables.”

It took a moment for Harry to marshal his thoughts well enough to answer. “Uh, do you need it? The pub’s right here.”

Dalton turned, a flush of pink tinting his pale cheekbones. “Might I borrow your shoulder?” He flashed that devastating shy smile of his. “We can sit at the bench there, outside, if that’s alright?”

With a nod, Harry turned so Dalton could put a hand on his shoulder as they crossed the yard to the front of the pub. His fingers gripped tight, digging into the muscle of Harry’s shoulder, and he had to resist the urge to slip an arm around Dalton’s waist to take more of his weight. He could feel how Dalton limped, the weight he didn’t put on his injured leg, and felt a hot pulse of frustration that he couldn’t be of more help. “Thank you,” Dalton said when they reached the bench, sitting with a sigh of relief.

In the direct sunlight, the tired circles under his eyes were more pronounced and Harry couldn’t help reaching out to touch his shoulder. “Guinness?”

“Yes.” Dalton smiled. “Just the thing.” He ferreted in his pocket in search of change, but Harry waved him off.

“My shout.”

When he emerged from the pub a few minutes later, two halves of Guinness in hand, he found Dalton gazing out over the sleepy green. Or perhaps he was elsewhere because his focus was distant and he started when Harry’s shadow fell over him. “There you go,” Harry said, handing over his stout and joining him on the bench, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder. For a while, they were silent. The ponies grazed, heads down and peaceful, and the handful of houses that surround the green looked pretty as a postcard in the spring sunshine.

“Sometimes I think this is what it might have looked like in the salient — before,” Dalton said. “And I imagine — What if it had been here, the fighting, you know?”

“Would never have been here.”

“Yes, but it washereto the people of Ypres, wasn’t it? Their here. They — I think they understand war better on the continent than people do here, don’t you? They must do.”

Harry took a sip of his Guinness, smooth and bitter in his throat. “You suppose that’s a good thing, do you, that women and children know war like we do?”

“Maybe.”

Harry turned to look at him, eyebrows raised. “How d’you work that out, then?”

“Because then they wouldn’t think that this is what it was all about — ‘this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this b-b-bloody England.’”

Harry sighed, leaning back on the bench to better see Dalton’s profile: pale, tense, unhappy. His heart pinched at the sight. “You’ve got a bad case of the blue devils, ain’t you?”

“It all just feels so bloody p-pointless sometimes.”

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