The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

93: Pretending Not to Be Magnetic

"Alright," he said, hands up in mock surrender. "Protective," he mumbled.

"Thin fucking ice, Talbert," she warned.

"Noted," he replied.

"What else did you two get up to last night, anyway?" Lieb asked, lighting up a cigarette before wordlessly handing it to Autumn and then lighting one up for himself. "Whole house to yourselves for a couple hours, and with your reputation anyone might assume..."

Floyd scoffed his objection. "She wanted to show me her balcony -"

"Is that a euphemism?" Autumn asked, smirking.

"What's a euphemism?" This from Lieb.

Autumn turned to explain it to him and laughed loudly when he grinned.

"Yeah, Tab," Lieb said as they both turned back to him, "is that a euphemism?"

Floyd rolled his eyes. "You two need to be separated," he accused. "And no, it ain't a goddamn youth-ism or whatever."

"Euphemism."

"Whatever."

"So, after she showed you her balcony," Autumn said with a wink, just to make Lieb laugh (which it did), "what did you do then?"

"We went down to the kitchen and drank cognac."

"That's it?" Lieb asked, unenthused.

"That's it," Floyd confirmed. He didn't want to share the almost-kiss or the kiss on the cheek with them, not yet. He wanted to keep that for himself for a little while longer.

Charlie yawned and turned her head to rest her cheek on top of her knees. She closed her eyes - or pretended to, at least - so she could look through her eyelashes at Floyd and watch as he spoke with Autumn and Lieb.

"She's pretending to shut her eyes so she can look at him," George told Boo with a chuckle.

Boo laughed. "She thinks she's so sneaky."

Charlie was going to announce her departure soon, and maybe Floyd would follow after her. Maybe they'd get to sit on her balcony again, without all of the intoxication this time. Did he even remember her showing it to him?

She shut her eyes properly for a moment and stifled a yawn. It wasn't as much fun sitting with drunk people when you weren't also drunk, and all Don really wanted to talk about was Henry, anyway. When he was tipsy she seemed to be all that was on his mind.

"This one time," he was telling Charlie, "when we were kids, she dared me to ride my bike into a lake to see how far I could get before I fell in, and she must have known exactly what would happen, but I was such a stupid kid I had no idea. I actually thought I could ride a bike over water. How dumb is that?"

He laughed at himself and Charlie peeled her eyes open again to smile at him. "Not much has changed, then," she said.

He rolled his eyes. "Not much. But at least I didn't swim across the Falls."

Both of their smiles faded as he said it.

Charlie remembered sitting in a freezing cold foxhole in the Ardennes with Skip, Alex, and George while Skip told them about how he'd swum across Niagara Falls on a bet, much to the chagrin of his family, like it was yesterday. It still didn't feel real that he wasn't around anymore. At any given moment anyone could have come up to her, stranger or otherwise, and told her that he and Alex were both still alive and that everything had been a mistake, and Charlie would have believed them in a heartbeat.

She sighed quietly. "I miss them both so much.".

Don nodded. "Me too."

"Tomorrow," she said, "we'll have a drink for them. When I'm not hungover and you're not already well on your way to wasted. We'll drink the fanciest alcohol we can find and we'll dedicate it to them."

"Sounds like a plan," Don said, smiling softly. He reached over to ruffle Charlie's hair and she smiled.

"A plan, then," she agreed.

Floyd watched as Charlie grew sad and knew she and Malark were talking about Muck and Penkala. He ached to go over there and wrap her up in his arms, tell her about every good thing in the world and how all of them led back to her until she smiled again, and not in the sad way she was smiling now.

"Gonna go and talk to her?" Lieb asked, puffing on his cigarette even as it almost burnt out.

"About what?" Floyd turned back to him and Autumn.

Lieb shrugged. "You know her better than I do."

"Oh. Charlie," Frank began, leaning back in his chair to talk to her from the table behind hers. "I been meanin' to give this to you."

"What is it?" Charlie asked before accepting the book he passed her.

"I just finished it," Frank said, pointing at the cover before surrendering his grip on it. "Thought it was alright."

The book was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith and finally she had something new to read.

"Thanks, Frank," she said, turning in her seat to smile at him. "I've been looking for a new book."

Frank shrugged, pulling out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. "You've recommended me so many over the years, figured it was about time I returned the favour."

While 'over the years' wasn't entirely accurate, it struck Charlie for the first time that it had been over a year since she'd left home. It had been March when she'd arrived in Aldbourne, February when she'd last been home, and now it was May the following year. So much had changed in that year and three months. It felt more like three years, or even ten. But in wartime one year was the equivalent of ten, she supposed, and it was remarkable she'd survived everything she had.

"Mabs," she called, turning in her seat and not minding when her blanket fell halfway off her shoulder.

"Darlin'," Mabs called back, turning to face her, too.

"It's been over a year since we met," she said. And even though the same was true of all of the nurses and Toccoa veterans she'd met in Aldbourne, before there had ever been replacements, it felt important to tell Mabs. Her first best friend, now one of three, but always cherished as the first.

"Oh yeah," Mabs acknowledged with a wondrous smile on her face. "We missed our own anniversary."

"For shame," Charlie said, and Mabs laughed.

"For shame," she agreed.

Back then, when they'd first met, Charlie had helped Floyd charm Mabs into a date and Boo had been too shy to talk to any of the paratroopers. They'd lived in a quaint little house and gone to the pub as often as they could, and the most they'd had to worry about was which soldier they liked the most. Back then, Charlie had had the hugest crush on Eugene Roe, and she'd blushed every time a man so much as looked at her. And back then, Charlie had not liked Floyd Talbert at all.

If only that version of herself could see her now.

She'd lived through so much since then, survived so much since then. D-Day, Market Garden, the Island, Bastogne, Foy, Noville, Rachamps, Haguenau, Landsberg. The girl she'd been wouldn't have been able to fathom all she would see and do during the war, and, probably, the woman she was now still wouldn't be able to fathom all she'd see and do before it ended.

It made her heart feel both heavy and light to think back on everything that had happened in the space of a single year and three months. She'd known nothing of friendship when she'd come overseas, not really, and not really known anything of family, either. She'd certainly known nothing of love. She liked to think of herself as lucky to have learned about all those things in the ways she had, from the people she had, but had it been worth it to lose all of the people who'd had a hand in teaching along the way?

Charlie couldn't be sure.