Page 37 of The Pianist's Wife
Maxi eventually pulled away from her and stared down into her eyes. ‘As much as I’d like to stay in this room for the next two hours, may I take you out for an early dinner?’ he asked. ‘We can be very respectable and pretend we are cousins seeing each other while I’m home on leave.’
‘Cousins?’ she asked, grinning back at him.
‘It’s all I could come up with,’ he replied, stepping into her and kissing her again.
‘Cousins it is then,’ she murmured, trying to ignore the little knot of worry inside that told her she needed to be careful.
Later that night, after a lovely dinner at the hotel, Amira sat up in bed, in her nightdress and with the covers pulled up high, and watched as Maxi slowly undressed.
‘You haven’t told me what happened to your arm,’ she said.
Maxi took off his sling and left it on the chair, before sitting to take off his boots. He looked exhausted.
‘You have no idea what a luxury it is to take my boots off to sleep,’ he said. ‘At one point, I don’t think I’d taken my socks and boots off for two weeks.’
‘You’ve been sleeping—’
‘Wherever we could lay our heads,’ he said, his fingers fumbling over the laces.
She wanted to go to him and help, but she could see that he was frustrated and she didn’t want to make it worse.
‘Your arm . . .’ she said again.
He cleared his throat and unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke, and it wasn’t until he was sitting there in his undershirt that she saw the true extent of his injuries. He had a scar that ran across one shoulder and disappeared beneath the cotton, and on his arm there were criss-crosses that were a dark pink and looked almost as if they’d been drawn there.
Amira pushed the covers back and got out of bed, slowly going over to him. She lowered herself to his knee, sitting across his lap as she traced her fingertips over first the scarring on his shoulder, and then his arm.
‘Does this hurt?’ she asked.
‘No.’ His voice was gravelly, and she couldn’t tell if it was from pain or because their skin was touching and it was something he hadn’t felt in such a long time.
‘How about this?’
This time he groaned and caught her wrist in his hand. ‘It doesn’t hurt anymore, but when it happened...’
She tucked closer to him as he let go of her, looping her arms around his neck and nestling her head into his collarbone.
‘One minute I was talking to two of the other men in my unit, and the next they were lying on the ground and all I could feel was that my skin was on fire, as if someone had shot a burning hot arrow into me.’
‘You were shot?’ she asked.
He nodded. ‘There was an explosion, and parts of the shrapnel lodged into my skin. And as I stood there trying to get my bearings, looking for my men, I was shot in the shoulder.’
‘Which is why I didn’t hear from you for so long,’ she murmured. ‘Why you were reported missing.’
‘I dropped to the ground and looked around, feeling everywhere for them, but it wasn’t until it was too late that I realised what had happened,’ Maxi said. ‘They were gone. All of them were gone.’
She held on to him even tighter as his shoulders trembled.
‘I was one of the only men left, there were just a few of us staggering around, and we fired in retaliation for as long as we could before retreating,’ he said. ‘But I haven’t slept properly since, I keep seeing them and remembering what happened, knowing that when I go back...’
Tears formed in her eyes and his body stilled, as if he’d stopped breathing. But eventually he cleared his throat again and found his voice.
‘When I go back I’ll be with a new unit, and I have to keep going as if I didn’t lose all the men I knew. One unit sustains losses and they fall back, and another unit moves in so there are fresh troops. It’s just a never-ending rotation of men stepping forward and dying, or at least that’s what it feels like out there.’
‘I wish there was something I could do,’ she said, stroking his hair and pressing kisses to his face.
‘When I came home and found out that you were married, I wished that I’d just died that day, because you were all I was coming home to,’ Maxi said. ‘But now, I’m starting to think about all those men who went on leave and didn’t come back at all.’
