The Heart's War by Lucy Lambert Read Free Book Online

Dimly, I knew that I’d locked my legs around him, holding him buried all the way inside me as his body jerked in the throes of his ultimate pleasure.
    Simultaneously, we both relaxed, Jeff rolling off me and collapsing at my side. Our bodies trembled. My hand sought his, and our fingers intertwined. I stared up at the boards making up his ceiling without really seeing them.
    What had that been, at the end, that incredible concentration of sensations and pleasures?
    But I couldn’t think about that. Not then. It wasn’t the time for it.
    “Don’t go over. Tell the draft board you can’t. Please, Jeff, for me,” I said, not looking at him. If I looked, I would tear up. I could already feel my eyes moistening. Why did I have this urge to cry? I felt the exact opposite of sad. What reason was there for tears?  Had I really been that overwhelmed?
    He squeezed my hand. “I have to. I can’t back out of this.”
    A fat tear rolled down out of my eye, making its way towards my ear. Jeff intercepted it, wiping it away with the ball of his thumb.
    “You don’t have to. You can back out…”
    “I can’t, Ellie. I have to do this. I have to.”
     
    Chapter 5
     
    Sunday came and went so quickly that I hardly remembered the sermon the minister read at the service that day. I'd attended that day with mother, Marie, and Jeff. He'd dressed in the same suit as he'd worn to win me back on Saturday. It was a little dusty on the legs from all our walking, with an almost invisible wrinkle along one side under his arm from when I'd clung to him.
    No one seemed to notice, though. The older men patted Jeff on the back, offering him cigars. Many of the women cooed over him, touching his arm or standing close to whisper words of encouragement.
    While Jeff laughed and shook hands and generally basked in his sudden rise to fame, no one noticed the women sitting in the back row of pews. The church had twelve rows of the long, deep-stained benches. Hymnals (many in German) rested along sm all shelves along the back of each pew for the occupants of the people sitting behind it to use.
    I squinted to see into the shadows. It was Shelley Clarkson and another woman, older. Shelley had a black dress on, as well as a dark bonnet. Shelley had a sharp face, with a pointed nose that always reminded me of a bird's beak. Her lips were bloodless, and she had her hands clenched together into a tight ball on the backrest of the pew in front of her.
    The older woman had the same nose, and the beginnings of jowls. Shelley's mother, I'd have wagered. She rubbed her daughter's back as they both looked at Jeff.
    Had Shelley's brother been given such a send-off before he'd made his way on to the battlefields in Belgium?
    I looked back to Jeff. An old man I didn't recognize, a horseshoe shaped wisp of hair clinging tenaciously to his mottled scalp, shook his hand and said something I couldn't make out. Had that same men said similar words to Shelley's brother?
    I couldn't even remember her brother's name.
    ***
    We sat together on the small wicker chairs set up on Jeff's mother's porch, watching the sun go down on his final day as a civilian.
    "I have to leave at five tomorrow morning," he said, "The train for Quebec departs at quarter after."
    The train station was only about ten minutes or so down Victoria Street from his mother's home. The tracks passed about a block distant from my house. The early morning trains tried not to sound their horns, but the rumble of cars and the rattle of steel wheels on the track still woke me sometimes.
    "Training will be a few weeks, then it's off to Halifax and the Atlantic! I hope I get a berth on the Mauretania. It's faster than the Olympic."
    I nodded, looking down at his feet. I found myself wishing he'd board White Star's Olympic instead. It would take a bit longer to get over to England. A little extra time for the war to end before he got anywhere near the German guns and bombs and artillery.
    I also could fight off