Page 93 of Savannah Royals
Taking is easy. I would know.
Slowly, I kiss his hand again, right in the center of his palm. “You are an incredible person, Matthew,” I tell him. “To give so much of yourself and ask for so little in return.”
He sighs and looks away. “There are plenty of men out there who have given just as much, Kat. More, even. Men who have made the ultimate sacrifice for God and country. What I do now, it’s a pittance of penance for what I failed to do years ago.”
I roll onto my side, awareness heightened by the tension entering his body. “What on earth do you mean? Are you speaking of the war? There are more ways than one to serve your country, Matt. You’ve accomplished just as much good here as you could have done by enlisting in medical school.”
He takes a slow, deep breath. “I didn’t just turn down the offer at Vanderbilt, Kat.” He closes his eyes, and my heart stutters.
“What do you mean?”
His lids remain tightly shuttered. “When the Selective Service Act passed, I allowed my family to buy my name out of the draft…through unsavory channels. Ethan was already deployed on the Western Front, and my father didn’t want to risk losing a second son. He offered to buy my name out, and I accepted.”
“I see.” My gaze roves across the taut lines of his face.
Conscription began in 1917 and cast a shadowy pall across the entire nation. It was unprecedented, summoning men to war by lottery. I remember the day Abe went to Savannah City Hall to register, the dread brewing in my stomach. Tony is an immigrant, and Paul has been hidden since he was a child, erased by a “missing, presumed dead” tag filed by the orphanage years after his disappearance. Only Abe was at risk of the draft, and it was perhaps the biggest break of his life that his name wasn’t pulled. Many men, manyfamilies, weren’t so lucky.
I reach a gentle finger toward Matthew’s face, trying to smooth the lines burrowed there. “One selfish decision in a wholly unselfish life does not the measure of a man make, Matthew. Not in my eyes. You value life, including your own. There’s no shame in that.”
“There’s great shame, Kat.” His eyes spring open, blazing blue. “Shame I carry every day. That I must carry, for all the men who answered the call and didn’t return. Men whose lives, perhaps, I could have been there to save.”
I lay my head on his chest, pressing my cheek to his bare skin. “Your friend from Vanderbilt—I’ve forgotten his name, the one with whom you exchanged letters. Did he come home?”
“William?”
“Yes, William. Did he make it home?”
“No.”
It’s only one word, one single word, but the pain it represents is so great, a solitary tear falls from my eye to his skin.
“Hit by a stray shell.” His words rumble in his chest beneath my cheek. “While he was triaging wounded on the field.”
I allow the words to sink in. I breathe in slowly, then out. I wanted to know how Matthew became this way, and here it is. It wasn’t his first answer, but this is the one that matters. There will always be the story we tell the world and the story we live. It’s in the intersection of the two where the greatest truth lies.
“He was very selfless and very brave,” I murmur, turning to press a kiss into Matthew’s chest, right on the damp spot where my tear landed. “And so are you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Thesecondthefrontdoor shuts, he’s on me. His fingers unbutton my coat, and his lips ravage mine. My hands shoot to his hair. He drops my jacket to the floor of the foyer. I tear at his shirt, ripping it up and over his head.
We are animals. We are ferocious.
And we don’t make it far. Matthew makes love to me on the wood floor of his foyer, just out of reach of the front door. Later, we make it to his bedroom, but only by stumbling and fumbling the entire way. It’s been like this between us for the last week. A comet set on fire, streaking across the sky at a thousand miles per hour. Consumed by each other in every moment we can find.
When dusk falls, the cocoon breaks. It’s time for us to emerge into the real world. Matt is working at the hospital overnight, and unbeknownst to him, I have my own job with the Royals.
Ironically, the first time Matt notices my carefully selected lingerie is when I’m strapping myself back into it.
“This is nice,” he says, tracing the cups of the lace brassiere. “How did I miss this?”
“You were otherwise preoccupied,” I say with a laugh. “And to think, I picked it out special for you this morning.”
“I’m looking now.”
Once we’re presentable, we leave his apartment, hand in hand. Matt walks me to the streetcar stop, even though it’s in the opposite direction of his route to work.
“Which way are you boarding?” he asks. It seems an innocent question, but the Academy is one direction and the bayou another.
