Free Everything and More by Jacqueline Briskin

said, kissing his shoulder, which was damp with sweat.
    He jerked awake. For a moment he stared blankly at her, his dark, tormented eyes still seeing his nightmare; then he focused on her and buried his face between her breasts.
    “Bad dream,” he muttered, rubbing his cheeks dry, leaving red marks on her sensitive skin. He kissed the small dark mole just above her navel.
    “Nifty spot for a beauty mark,” he said in a normal voice. “Not that you need one.” He lifted up on his elbow, staring at the small, exquisitely lush body.
    “Linc, okay?”
    “When I’m with you,” he said, “all’s right with the world.”
    He embraced her with tenderness, adoration, yet these delicate qualities did not preclude the blazingly vital electricity between them that had, from that first fateful Friday, canceled out any shame or guilt on her part. She had graduated since then from a carnal ignoramus to an eager acolyte and then to an equal partner. Together they moved with tremulous languor, and his breath against her ear made her think of waves reverberating forever against the shore, receding and lapping, and all at once that involuntary, incomprehensible stillness preceding orgasm was upon her and she held her breath, attending the moment before she was borne away. “Oh, Linc, Linc, Linc, I love you, love you . . .” And they both sped swiftly, artlessly into the great sea of life and love.
    When their breathing quieted, he twisted off his ring. Heavy, hand-hammered silver formed his initials. “You wear old ALF for a while.”
    She looked into his eyes, trying to gauge his meaning. He had never hinted at going steady or being engaged. So why a ring? All at once, like an evil needle piercing her, she recalled her mother’s words:
Men use the war as an excuse to take advantage of girls.
Linc was so very honorable. Was his conscience rubbing him, did he need to throw her a sop, payment for her virginity? Yet he surely knew that her body collaborated freely and joyously with his.
    He fitted the warm silver on each of her fingers. It even slipped off her thumb. “Guess you’ll have to put it on a chain.” His throaty warmth belied his teasing tone. “In
intime
moments, what a clangor with my dogtags.”
    She kept looking at him.
    “Oh, Marylin, those beautiful eyes, those beautiful sea-colored eyes. Listen, I’m giving you something of mine. Is that so odd?”
    “What does it mean?”
    “That you’re gentle, wonderful, soothing, and so beautiful that it’s not quite believable. That I’m out of my head about you. Marylin, what does a ring usually mean?”
    She gripped the silver in her palm. Here, finally, was the admission of love, the symbol that she had longed for, and her soul should have been soaring on hosannas, yet a sadness that had to do with the brevity of time ached in her throat—
how much longer until he sails?
—and she had to cough before she said, “I love you so much, Linc.”
    “It’s binding on my part,” he said. “Not yours.”
    “Always.”
    “No, I mean it. You’re free to look around for some equally devastating Beverly High graduate.”
    “I’ll love you forever,” she said. “I belong to you.”
    “For the time being, this is between us.”
    Again that odd secrecy. Why? “Yes.”
    He smiled at her.
    She began to cry. “Darling, I can’t bear not knowing how long we have.”
    He pulled away. “The general time frame is until death do us part, right?”
    Death.
 . . . She shivered. “You know what I mean.”
    “I always have trouble reconciling how tenacious you are with that gentleness.”
    There was a shrill buzzing. It was the red Westclox alarm that they always set for 11:45 in case they fell asleep.
    “There’s your answer,” he said, pressing down the stem.
    *   *   *
    The following Tuesday, just as she and Roy (who had graduated from Horace Mann and would start at Beverly in January) came in from school, the telephone began to ring.
    Marylin ran to