He joined her, his back against the wall too, staring at Picasso, who was asleep in the chair before Jess’s typewriter, at Hemingway and his band of admirers, at Jennings slavering over a woman who was equally slavering over him and Jess saw in his desperation that Jennings was no longer the young boy who’d managed to injure himself everywhere except the battlefield; he was now a man with a bruised soul.

“You don’t have a drink,” she said to Dan.

“Is it helping?” he asked, nodding at the now empty glass in her hand.

“No.”

“Is any of it helping?” He gestured to the room.

She shook her head, then slipped her hand into his. She didn’t expect to find comfort there; knew that comfort was impossible but he squeezed her hand in return and didn’t take his eyes off her face. For the smallest fraction of time—a second split in two—they stood with hands clasped, eyes locked, the music scattering crotchets around them, the candles bathing their skin gold.

Then her other hand reached out to run one finger ever so lightly along the line of his jaw, to feel the stubble there, stubble she’d seen most days since she’d been in Europe, stubble she’d never really noticed because everything was about the war and the fighting and the dying. Nothing was ever about them. But this moment was. Two people, hearts flayed by the cruelties they’d seen, stopped in a moment of rare beauty.

He leaned down and whispered in her ear, his breath hot against her skin, “Can we ask them to leave?”

“Yes,” she said.

She clapped her hands and declared that the party was over, that they should all retire to the bar downstairs so she could get her beauty sleep. Nobody except Martha noticed that Dan didn’t leave with the rest of them.

Once the last person had gone and the door was shut, Jess and Dan remained where they were, backs against the wall, hands no longer joined because she’d had to let go of him to kiss everyone goodbye. The candles flickered in the breeze wafting in from the balcony, then Dan turned to her.

This time, it was his finger that reached out and traced a line down her neck, over her right collarbone and then her left. She could hear the sound of her breath, anything but calm now, and saw the pulse in his throat beat faster.

She stepped closer, the air between them alight with everything that hadn’t happened since they’d last stood this close together in a ballroom, when he’d told her, with the touch of his thumb, that he wanted her.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” she said. “Don’t you feel a need to make the pictures stop, just for an hour or two?”

“Yes,” he said too, cupping her cheeks and drawing her in.

And Jess at last kissed Dan.

They kissed and they kissed, his hands sliding up her back, hers wrapped around his neck. After a long and luxurious time in which they both reveled in the sensation of finally doing what they’d wanted to do in the ballroom at Lieu de Rêves, Dan moved his lips to her throat, tasting the skin with the tip of his tongue, kissing the hollow between her collarbones, then the sharp points of her shoulders and she could feel the apologies and regrets over everything that hadn’t been his fault but that he wished her never to have seen—and him too—over the past two years press into her skin. Her arms tightened.