Mercifully, Charlie didn't wake up with a hangover the following day. What she did wake up with, however, was very sore hands and knees. She didn't remember getting home or going to bed all that well but she remembered tripping on her way out of the dance clear as day. She could only thank God that Floyd had been the only one to see it, otherwise she'd surely be much more embarrassed than she was.
Charlie found Autumn in the kitchen and smiled guiltily as she held out her hands to her, displaying the dried scabs and dirt she'd unfortunately not washed off before bed. Autumn laughed and wordlessly retrieved the first aid kit from one of the kitchen drawers, then sat Charlie down and began to clean not only her hands but her knees as well, which were looking a little worse for wear.
"You fell over again?" Autumn asked as she wiped down Charlie's palms.
Sighing, Charlie nodded.
Autumn snickered but, to her credit, didn't push for more information on the event.
"Did you have a good time with Don last night?" Charlie asked. She only winced a little when Autumn started to clean the cuts on her knees.
Autumn smiled at the memory. "Yeah, I did. He was fun."
"Do you like him?"
Autumn laughed under her breath. "I'm not looking to get involved with anyone at the moment," she said prosaically.
"Because we'll have to save their lives once we get deployed?"
Autumn smiled, shook her head, then pulled a face. "I guess that's part of it. The other part is I'm just not interested."
"That's a good way to be, I think," Charlie replied. "It's all very stressful, this romance business."
"You don't seem to be doing too badly," Autumn pointed out.
"Well, if it appears that way then I'm glad, but I'm actually a walking disaster."
"You don't like Chuck?" Autumn seemed genuinely surprised. Her eyebrows pinched together as she looked up from her work on Charlie's left knee.
Now it was Charlie's turn to pull a face. She really did feel bad about it, but she had to admit it now that she'd been asked. "I like him, but I don't like him, you know?" She tapped her fingers against the arms of the chair she sat in, taking her mind off of the sting of the antiseptic on her knee. "The corsage was so sweet of him but... well, when I went outside for some fresh air I didn't miss him at all, and I'm quite certain he didn't miss me either. I think he's handsome and kind but I don't think we're a good match."
Autumn smiled knowingly as she moved on to the other knee. "Still stuck on Eugene Roe, huh?"
Charlie blushed. "I still haven't spoken to him more than once. It's all I can manage to do to watch him discreetly from the other side of the room."
"Discreetly," Autumn repeated, nodding with faux-seriousness. "Yes, that's certainly what you were. Discreet."
"Autumn," Charlie groaned. "Please don't give me anything else to be embarrassed about from last night."
"Getting drunk is nothing to be embarrassed about," Autumn said, uncharacteristically serious. "We were at a dance where they were serving alcohol and the entire purpose of the night was to have fun. And you did. Where's the harm in that?"
Charlie smiled a small smile and looked down at Autumn with lighter posture. "I think," she confessed quietly, "I needed to hear that."
"Glad to be of service."
Mabs and Violet joined them just after Autumn finished applying the final sticking plaster to Charlie's cuts.
"How ya doin', Charlie darlin'?" Mabs asked. She all but threw herself down in the chair opposite Charlie's at the table, looking like she hadn't slept a wink.
"I'm okay," Charlie replied. "I don't have a hangover or anything. And Autumn cleaned up my cuts for me." She shot a smile in Autumn's direction as she declared this, who gave her a mock salute before turning to replace the first aid kit in the drawer she'd gotten it from. "How was your night?"
Mabel gave a mixture of a grimace and a grin, and how that was possible Charlie had no clear idea. "Eventful."
"How come you weren't with Floyd when I went outside?"
Mabel heaved a sigh. "He seemed to think because he was my date he had some sorta claim over me." She rolled her eyes and stared at the ceiling. "I was just remindin' him I've got options."
Charlie frowned. "Mabs..."
"What?"
Charlie exchanged a look with Violet as she slid into another chair at the table. Violet shrugged and Charlie sighed. Autumn was busy preparing breakfast so she knew she'd have to say this without any sort of immediate backup. "He really likes you, Mabs." Her voice was gentle but sad, her eyebrows drawn together as she tried to appeal to Mabs' sympathy. For whatever reason, Mabs seemed to have buckets of it when it came to the girls and so very little when it came to the boys.
Mabs scoffed and looked away. "No, he doesn't."
Charlie scrunched up her face. "Yes, he does."
"Just 'cause he thinks I'm pretty don't mean he wants to be my boyfriend."
Charlie threw her arms up in confusion as much as frustration. "Then what does it mean?" She leaned forward over the table, trying to catch Mabs' attention and get her to look back at her.
Mabs huffed and finally did look back across the table at Charlie. "It means he wants to get me into bed." Whatever reaction Charlie had to that made her sigh, now more patient and less irritable. "Look, Charlie, I know he's your friend and all but he's still a man."
"But he got you flowers," Charlie mumbled, looking down at her hands on the table. She'd known Floyd was a ladies' man but she'd thought it was different with Mabs. Why had he sought her out and tried so hard to win Mabs over if all he wanted out of her was sex?
"'Cause he wanted to sweeten me up." Mabs at least looked sympathetic as she gazed back at Charlie.
Charlie had to look away, feeling silly for being seen as so naïve by her best friend. Instead, she turned first to Violet and then to Autumn, who was still working on breakfast but glanced up briefly when she must have felt eyes on her.
Charlie had always known she was the youngest of the group, but never had she felt more out of her depth in all of this than in that moment. All of them were looking at her like their poor, foolish little sister who was coming to realise for the first time that the world wasn't all sunshine and roses, whether they knew it or not. Charlie could only imagine how stupid they all thought she was.
It wasn't a big deal, sure, but it felt like one. If not because it forced Charlie to realise how little she understood about the world then because it changed the way she saw Floyd, who she'd just started considering a real, proper friend.
Charlie left the table before Autumn had even served breakfast, claiming she had some errands to run even knowing that none of them would believe her. When she stepped out of the front door into the late morning she found the sky grey and overcast, the threat of rain hanging heavy in the clouds. She made her way quickly to the bus stop, keeping her head down and avoiding greeting anyone just in case she ran into any of the paratroopers, who she most certainly didn't feel like speaking to at the moment.
The bus arrived a mere minute after she got there, and when she got to the hospital it was quiet but not empty.
Whilst it was true that none of them on her ward were working today, some of the nurses on the other wards were, so the doors were all unlocked. Some of the girls she passed had even been at the dance the previous night - she recognised some of the Dog Company nurses on her way - though their CO had clearly not been as uncharacteristically merciful as Lieutenant Maddox had been with them.
The ward was empty when Charlie pushed through the door, all of the beds pristine and the floors shining after she'd had to make sure everything was cleaned thoroughly before leaving the day before. Charlie removed her jacket and laid it on the bed closest to the door before heading over to the cabinet they kept their bandages in. She withdrew the notebook and pencil they kept in the cabinet along with them and began to take inventory of their number, even though they'd not had to use any since the last time inventory had been taken. But it was a welcome distraction; it gave her mind something to focus on that wasn't how utterly stupid she felt, and how humiliated by extension.
By the time she was finished with the bandages, Charlie still didn't feel like she'd calmed down enough, so she moved onto the morphine. Then the sulfa. Then the medical equipment. When she left the hospital it was mid-afternoon and the sky was even more overcast than it had been when she'd arrived. It was the darkest she'd ever seen the sky at this time of day, a foreboding charcoal grey blocking out the sunlight and casting the world in shade.
It started to rain when Charlie was waiting for the bus, lightly at first and then heavier. She waited there for forty-five minutes before she decided that no bus was coming, and that was when the thunder started.
With no choice left but to walk if she wanted to get home this side of midnight, Charlie began traipsing her way back to Aldbourne. She was already soaked through, her uniform plastered to her skin, so the rain didn't bother her anymore. The gaps between each rumbling of thunder were long enough that she figured she didn't have to worry about getting stuck in a storm just yet.
The weather continued to worsen the closer she got to Aldbourne. The wind threw the rain right into her face so that she had to squint as she walked into it, the droplets stinging her cheeks as they slapped her over and over again. The clouds overhead darkened with every step closer and the clapping of the thunder was coming more and more often. Charlie shot frequent glances at the fields to either side of her, wondering when it would be wise to either find a farmhouse to seek refuge in or flatten herself to the ground.
When the first flash of lightning lit up the sky, she ran.
Charlie kept her head down as she sprinted through the rain, her feet slamming down hard on the dirt road and sending shockwaves up through her legs. Her breath came hard and wheezing, putting an ache in her chest and the back of her throat. Her cheeks and ears both stung with the cold and the slapping of the rain.
The storm reminded her starkly of the one that had raged outside her bedroom window on her last night back home. It seemed such a long time ago that she'd been tucked up in her childhood bed, watching the light dance around the cracks in her curtains and wondering what the future would entail.
She'd always loved thunderstorms. But she had to admit that they were not quite so nice when you were stuck outside in the middle of one.
At one point during her run Charlie had to slow to a fast walk, winded by exertion, but she quickly picked up speed again. The lightning strikes were either getting brighter or closer and she didn't much want to find out. Eventually, a barn rose up around a bend in the road and she pushed herself as hard as she could to reach it.
The door opened easily under her hands and she slammed it closed behind her. Leaning back against it, she pressed a hand to her chest and breathed hard. She squeezed her eyes shut as she tried to catch her breath.
"It's comin' down hard out there, huh?"
Charlie's eyes flew open and her back went ramrod straight. The skin on her shoulder blades itched where her sodden uniform jacket had rubbed up against a nail in the wood of the door but she paid it no mind. In front of her, she found what looked like an entire company of paratroopers staring back at her, their faces displaying a scale of reactions from shock to sympathy to joy.
The boy who had spoken, she found, was Don Hoobler. She managed to pick him out of the crowd when he stepped forward and unzipped his jacket, quickly slipping out of it and holding it out to her.
Charlie smiled shyly. "It'll get wet," she said, a final chance for him to change his mind before she took it.
A chorus of what must have been at least a dozen boys answered her, "You can have mine!" before Hoobs batted them away.
"Get outta here, ya feral bastards," he told them with good humour. "Here." He approached her and wrapped the jacket around her shoulders, pulling the edges of it together to keep her warm. "All better."
She smiled, her breaths still heaving. "Thank you."
"Ay, Charlie!" called someone on the other side of the barn. When he ambled into view with a wide grin clutched around a lit cigarette she recognised George Luz. "Where're the others?"
Charlie turned to George with a smile, though her stomach dropped just slightly thinking about the other nurses. "At home."
"Why ain't you?"
"I was at the hospital," she answered airily. She didn't have any intention of informing him, or any of the others for that matter, that she'd been working on one of her days off, reluctant to answer all of the questions that were sure to be thrown at her afterwards.
"Freckles!" greeted Floyd as he emerged from the gathering crowd.
Charlie's stomach dropped.
"What's the occasion?"
George all but cackled. "Gee, Floyd, I don't know. Maybe she stopped by for a tea party."
Floyd rolled his eyes and jostled George with a reluctant smile. Charlie avoided having to look at him or reply by slipping Don's jacket from her shoulders.
"I should be going," she said to no one in particular. She held out the jacket to Don, who she saw was frowning when she glanced up only briefly, before a chorus of protests cut off any of her further words.
"Aw, come on, Charlie, you just got here!" Don exclaimed. He tucked his hands behind his back to avoid having to reclaim his jacket.
"You can't go back outside in a storm," Floyd told her. He approached her with furrowed eyebrows.
"It's not that far to go..." She trailed off, avoiding his eyes.
"Come on, sweetheart, we don't bite!" called a voice from the crowd.
A few boys called their agreement with the sentiment but all it took was a sharp, "Shut up," from Floyd and they quietened down. The pressure of his eyes on her disappeared and she looked up to find him gesturing with his head for the other boys to return to their business. She turned away to avoid meeting his gaze when he looked back.
Charlie focused on a pile of helmets all lumped together in the corner. She wasn't quite sure why, but seeing those helmets made the war so much more real to her. Sure, the boys walked around in their ODs all day and wore their dress uniforms to go out at night, but before now she hadn't really seen them as soldiers. Now, she was startlingly aware of the fact that when she went overseas to start properly working as a nurse, it would be these boys she was stitching back together. It would be their organs she tried to shove back into their bodies, their blood she tried to stem.
When she finally met Floyd's eyes it was with reluctance but far less uncertainty. She may have felt silly for confusing his intentions with Mabs but he was still her friend, and she wouldn't take that for granted.