Page 24 of The Last Kiss

As he’d done tonight, he’d rather strip off his damp pyjama top, light a gasper, and sit at the window staring at the black silhouettes of the trees. Back when he was first home, when the war was still on, he’d sometimes heard the distant thunder of guns when the wind blew from the south. To hear them, to know what the men were suffering without him, had been a worse torture than his healing leg and almost enough to make him lose his mind.

But there was no such noise tonight, thank God. The guns had fallen silent almost half a year ago and the only sound that night was the patter of rain in the trees and the slowing beat of his heart.

He’d got used to the lack of sleep, had rather come to enjoy the night’s quiet hours before dawn slipped in and brought the world along in its wake. In the dark, he could think. He knocked ash off the end of his cigarette, watched the tip glow red as he took a long drag. There was plenty to think about tonight and, for a change, it wasn’t the past that preoccupied him but the present. Or, more specifically, West.

“Harry.”

He liked the way the name felt on his lips, liked the emotion it conjured — something like excitement, something like hope. Alien feelings, these last few years, where the horizon had been so unremittingly bleak. Realistically, he knew nothing could come of his feelings for Harry, but in the privacy of the dark he allowed himself to remember — the first kiss to his brow, the second to his lips, Harry’s voice breaking over his name as he’d held him to his chest, the strength of his embrace and the heat of his sorrow. And the knowledge that he’d mattered. He’d mattered to Harry West.

He dropped the remains of his cigarette out the window and lit another, the flare of the match dazzling. His mind wandered into imaginings, into dreams of being held by Harry again, of a different kiss, of what it might feel like to press his lips to Harry’s, to lay him down in the grass, to touch his chest, his hair, his shoulders. To make physical the affection forged in the fires of war.

Christ, what a thought.

Yet it wasn’t new. It had pulsed beneath the surface of his affection for as long as he could remember. But so what? His fate had been fixed from birth: a career in the city like his father, married to a suitable girl like his brother.

Suffocating.

Maybe he could have stomached it before the war, but everything was different now. He’d lived at the very boundaries of life, met death and diced with her himself, and discovered what it was to love. To really love. Not the pallid domestic duty that sloshed about his family home, but a fierce protective red raw love for the men he’d fought beside.

The thought of squeezing back into his stifling pre-war life stopped his breath in panic. In truth, the only time he breathed easily was with Harry, whom he loved with that same red raw ferocity — and whom he’d love with passion given the chance.

But he wouldn’t get that chance. The world forbade it.

“Fuck the world!” he shouted, and then laughed because it was ridiculous.

Thousands — hundreds of thousands of men dead, far more maimed — and none of it was enough to change a damned thing. What use was his own defiance next to that? He took an angry drag on his gasper, tapped his fingers against the windowsill because he couldn’t pace, and wondered whether the Bolsheviks didn’t have the right idea after all. Overthrow it all and start again.

His hands shook and he closed his eyes, took in another lungful of smoke and tried to calm down. Harry would tell him he was thinking too much.

Christ, he wished Harry was with him tonight.

With a stifled growl, he pushed away from the window, knocking into the table beside his bed and sending the lamp crashing to the floor. He froze, sucked in a breath, felt it ragged in his lungs, and prayed that no one came. He couldn’t bear their concern. Standing, one hand braced on the windowsill for balance, the only sound in the room was his harsh breathing and the rage beating like wings in his ears.

Outside, a breeze rustled the trees, catching the curtains and billowing them into the room, riffling Ash’s hair and cooling his bare skin with a brief patter of wind-blown rain. There was no other noise, no sound of footsteps in the corridor outside his room or on the creaky staircase. If anyone heard, they weren’t coming. At least they’d learned to stay away.

Then, a crunch of gravel outside. He turned and saw a face, pale in the light creeping over the horizon. It was John, the housekeeper’s son. Christ knew what Ash must look like, standing shirtless at the window. Half crazed, probably.

After a pause, the lad touched his forehead and Ash gave a stiff nod, unmoving until John walked away. Then he sat back down with a jolt, lit another cigarette, and waited for the dawn.

***

Morning arrived, dank and uninspiring. A low mist hung over everything, pierced only by the distant drone of the Southampton foghorn.

“You hear Mr Ashleigh last night?” John said as he slouched around the stables with the broom.

Harry stopped in the middle of mucking out, leaning on his spade. “What do you mean?”

“Shouting and making a racket. Like he used to when he first come back.” John’s lip curled, though he kept his eyes on the floor as he gave it a desultory sweep. “Nightmares, mum said. Like a baby.”

A flare of concern, then anger, tightened Harry’s hand into a throttle hold around the neck of his spade. “Be glad you can’t imagine his nightmares, lad.”

John snorted. “My brother, Pete, he never had no nightmares. And he saw a man’s head blown clear off his shoulders. Went rolling like a football, he said.”

Then Pete’s a bloody liar, Harry thought sourly. What he said out loud was, “So what? We’re all different.”

John shrugged and didn’t answer, carried on his half-hearted sweeping. Boyd had pressed him into the task and the boy was making his discontent plain in the utterly shit job he was doing. Ignoring him, Harry got back to his own work, although he was distracted now. He wasn’t surprised that Ash suffered from nightmares. He’d always had several layers of skin fewer than the rest of them, always thought too much, always felt too much. And he wasn’t happy, that was for sure, plagued as he was by this new bristling anger he directed at the unchanging world. Harry shoved his spade into the muck, scraped it along the flagstones with a rasp of metal, feeling irritable and helpless. He’d give a lot to be able to comfort Ash through his nightmares.

“He was half bloody naked, too,” John said with a smirk. “Just standing there at the window, bold as brass.”

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