All things considered, Stürzelberg wasn't such a bad place to be posted out on the line. It was in Germany, which meant the men were getting excited about the prospect of jumping into Berlin, and although it was strange to be occupying a town still filled with German civilians, at least the buildings weren't bombed out.
The men secured lodgings for everyone upon arrival. Charlie didn't like the idea of them clearing a family out of their home but there was little she could do about it; they had been ordered to stay in Stürzelberg, and they couldn't very well set up a tent outside with how vulnerable that would make the nurses to potential attacks from men, German and American alike.
So, when Floyd showed Charlie and the others to their lodgings, she tried not to let her reluctance show on her face and, instead, tried to pretend gratitude. When she walked in, however, and saw a doll on the living room couch where the little girl who owned her had left her behind, she couldn't help her frown.
"What's the matter?" Floyd asked, catching the expression immediately. Charlie didn't know it, but his eyes had been glued to her from the moment he'd shown her the house, seeking her approval, and if he didn't get it he was more than ready to find somewhere else for her.
"Did you clear this one?" she asked, walking toward the couch and picking up the doll carefully.
"I helped," Floyd admitted.
Mabs, Autumn, and Boo exchanged glances before promptly heading upstairs to pick out bedrooms, leaving Charlie and Floyd alone.
"Do you know who this belongs to?" She showed the doll to him.
He relaxed as he realised her issue wasn't with the house but with its owners. "I'm sure she won't mind letting you look after it for a couple days," Floyd reasoned with a small smile.
This didn't make Charlie feel better. "I would mind," she told him. "If a bunch of soldiers broke into my house and forced me to leave, and I left my stuff behind because I was in such a hurry to get out, I would mind. Especially if I was little."
Floyd sighed and ran a hand down his face. "What do you want me to say, Charlie, huh? We had orders. I couldn't just say I didn't wanna do it, or say, 'Actually, I don't think we should do that because Charlie might not approve.'"
In silence, Charlie placed the doll back down on the couch and turned to head up the stairs.
Floyd sighed again. "Charlie," he called after her.
She didn't respond, or make any indication she'd even heard him. There was no point continuing the conversation if he wanted to be like that, and he clearly had other things he needed to deal with since he was being so snippy.
Charlie made it to the second step before Floyd placed a hand on her arm to halt her.
"Don't you have things to do?" she asked, turning back to him but remaining on the stairs. "You're first sergeant now, surely you have duties to attend to."
"I don't," Floyd said with a single shake of his head. "Will you come back down?"
"Why? You don't like it when I'm the same height as you?" Charlie quirked a brow and stepped up one stair higher. "Now I'm taller than you. I bet you like that a whole lot."
Floyd stifled a laugh. "You're being so childish right now, you know that?"
Charlie narrowed her eyes. "You're on thin ice, Floyd Talbert."
This time he let his laugh emerge freely. "You're particularly cranky this evening. Do you need me to tuck you into bed?"
"I need you to get off my back," she retorted.
He laughed again.
"Stop laughing!"
"You're so cute when you're angry, Freckles."
Charlie scowled, trying her best to work against the heat flooding her cheeks. "You can be so condescending at times," she said. "Do I need to remind you which of us is the higher rank? You should be calling me 'ma'am'."
Floyd grinned. "Oh, I can definitely call you 'ma'am'."
Staring back at him blankly, her cheeks bright red, Charlie replied simply, "If that's supposed to be sexual, I don't understand it," before she turned and started on her way back up the stairs.
In her wake, Floyd leaned against the wall and dropped his chin to his chest. He laughed silently to himself, then shook his head, and, though he knew he should be heading back to his own billet, he followed her up the stairs. He was desperate to talk to her more, or just listen to her talk, to watch her smile or even scowl for as long as he could before he had to miss her for the hours he'd be sleeping.
He found the door to the room she'd chosen easily, the only one left open, and smiled to himself as he approached it at the end of the hall. In spite of all her frowning and narrowing her eyes, she'd left her door open for him. The thought of it made his heart feel as warm as an oven in his chest.
"You're still here?" Charlie asked when he entered. She didn't turn around, instead focusing on trying to push her carpet bag under the bed.
"This isn't the room I wanted to put you in," was all he said in response to that.
"What do you mean?"
Floyd crossed the room and crouched on the opposite side of the bed, and he helped to ease the carpet bag beneath it by pulling it at the same time as she pushed. All the while he smiled to himself and elaborated, "When I picked this house for you I thought you'd pick the pink bedroom."
"The others picked first," Charlie explained with a shrug.
"Then I'll kick them out," he said, and would have meant it if she'd told him that's what she wanted him to do.
Finally, Charlie laughed, and his heartbeat spiked. Something curled tight inside him like the string of a bow ready to release its arrow.
I love you, he wanted to say, as he wanted to so often these days. I love you and I think you know it. Sometimes I even think you might love me back.
But then he remembered Paris. How he'd thought he would die if he didn't get to kiss her. How he'd felt happier on that night they'd spent together, looking around a bookshop and then walking home, than he'd ever felt in his entire life. How she made everything more fun - honestly, a bookshop? His brothers would pass out laughing if they could have seen him - and more beautiful. And how even just looking at her filled him with the sense that he was exactly where he was supposed to be in life, that he had fulfilled every purpose he had, because what greater purpose could there possibly be than just to look at her? To admire her? And how could he have ever put a foot wrong if he'd managed to end up being the person she gave a rose to?
That night, he'd felt like every question he'd ever had about the world, himself, life, had been answered. He'd felt... bathed in sunlight. Like every one of the deepest dreams of his soul had come true.
He recalled how he'd ached to tell her. To kiss her. To hold her.
But she'd pulled away. And the pain of his longing had been so powerful, so terrible, he'd thought he would collapse. That pain had yet to fade.
"You won't kick them out," Charlie said, pulling him back to the present moment. "I don't want you to, anyway."
"Then I won't."
"Good."
He watched, still kneeling on the floor by the bed, as she rose to her feet and took a look around the room. It clearly belonged to a teenage girl, less frilly than the pink one he'd thought she would like, more mature. The walls were white, the curtains drawn across the window in preparation for the night, also white, but spattered with red flowers. There were photographs in frames on the two nightstands on either side of the bed and a lot of them were of a young man, sometimes in a soldiers' uniform and sometimes not. He could have been the girl's brother, or cousin, or just a friend, but Floyd didn't think so. Not with so many pictures. Not with a whole nightstand dedicated to him.
When Floyd looked back at Charlie he found her looking at the pictures, too.
"It's so easy to forget they're real people," she whispered, her eyes stuck on the young man's military portrait. "I wonder if..."
He knew what she wondered without her having to say it because he'd been wondering it too. Was the young man still alive? Or was this shrine of pictures a desperate lunge at not forgetting, at ensuring he always held the first position in at least one person's heart?
"Where are you staying?" Charlie asked, turning back to Floyd abruptly.
"Uh." He couldn't get his thoughts in order for a moment in the wake of the change in conversation, but after a moment he managed to form an answer. "Just across the street."
"So far away," she mumbled.
His heart squeezed.
"With who?" she asked.
"Chuck, Shifty, Lieb, Babe, and Malark."
"That's a lot of bedrooms," she remarked quietly.
"Chuck, Shifty, and Babe are in the living room," he explained.
Charlie nodded.
It's a double bed, he wanted to say. In my room. It's a double bed and we can share, or I can sleep on the floor. As long as I'm close by. As long as I can listen to you breathing.
"I got the master bedroom," was what he said. Because he didn't want to make her uncomfortable, and he didn't want to ask for things he knew she didn't want to give him.
She didn't love him. He knew it, had known it ever since Paris and, if he was being honest with himself, before then, too. But sometimes she looked at him, or said things to him, or he heard her say things about him, and he was poked by a traitorous gasp of hope.
But then she'd close herself off to him. The warmth in her eyes would fade, as though she'd just realised she was looking at him in a way she shouldn't, and she'd clear her throat and change the subject. And there would be that ache again, the pain of longing rushing back in to push out that terrible, terrible hope.
"I wish you could stay here," Charlie whispered, her eyes falling closed.
Floyd couldn't even begin to guess what was going on inside her head.
"I will," he said, maybe too quickly. "If you want." He made a conscious effort to pitch his voice louder than the crackling whisper he'd been speaking in. "I'll sleep on the floor, if you want me to stay."
Charlie shook her head. When she opened her eyes he saw that she had closed herself off to him again in that way of hers, where she hurt him so much without even trying, without even realising she was doing it. "You can't," she said with a shake of her head. "We'd both be in so much trouble if anyone found out."
"We'd say I fell asleep by accident," he said, desperate for her to agree and let him stay, or agree to go over to his billet and sleep there. Anywhere. As long as they were together, he'd go anywhere.
"We'd still be in trouble," she reasoned. She was blushing hard enough that he knew, instinctively, that she regretted saying anything.
Sometimes he hated knowing her so well.
"Who would be mad at you?" he asked, pushing himself to his feet and slowly rounding the bed towards her. "You're a first lieutenant. You outrank all of the officers."
"Not Speirs," she said.
Floyd shook his head, dismissing the idea. "Speirs wouldn't say anything. Mabs wouldn't let him."
"What?"
It was comical, the way her eyes widened and her head snapped towards him. Comical and so, so endearing he wanted to take a gentle hold of both sides of her face and kiss every inch of it.
But he didn't do that. He just laughed. "Come on, Freckles," he teased. "Don't tell me you don't know."
"Don't know what?"
"Mabs is your best friend!" he continued, grinning. "She didn't tell you?"
"Didn't tell me what?"
"That she's hooking up with Speirs," he said, as though this was obvious. Because it was. How hadn't she noticed the soft spot Speirs had for Mabs? How every pack of cigarettes he stole seemed to end up in her possession? How she'd complain one day about having broken her hairbrush and the next show off the shiny new hairbrush she'd gotten, one so fancy no enlisted man could have gotten ahold of it?
"Charlie," Floyd said, his smile growing even as his voice turned serious, "don't tell me you never noticed the way she's the only nurse he refers to by her name, instead of by her rank. Or the way she's suddenly so eager to be the one to deliver messages to the CO. Wouldn't that normally be your job?"
Charlie had always been the one to deliver files or messages or anything else that needed exchanging between the nurses and the company. He would know, because even if he wasn't specified in the list of people who needed to receive whatever it was she was delivering, she would come to him first anyway. And since Mabs had been the messenger... Well, he got his information from Speirs, and he liked that a whole lot less.
"Mabs and Speirs?" Charlie whispered under her breath, searching his face for a sign he was joking.
Floyd laughed. "She doesn't tell you?"
"Not often," Charlie said. "Not about men."
"Why?"
"We just don't speak about it."
So Mabs didn't know about how they'd almost kissed in Paris. That explained why he was still in possession of both of his balls, at least.
"Well," Floyd said levelly. "Surprise."
With a jovial roll of her eyes, Charlie nudged him gently with her elbow.
"Winters might reprimand us, then," she said, getting back to the matter at hand.
"Dick wouldn't," Floyd replied immediately. He'd want to, but if Floyd explained it to him then he'd keep quiet.
"Then Nixon," Charlie persisted.
"How would Nixon find out?" Floyd shot back.
As though she was too tired to keep arguing, Charlie deflated. Her shoulders hunched and her head fell forward, and her arms hung limply by her sides. "Then stay," she said, her voice directed at the floor. "And leave before everyone else wakes up."
There was nothing Floyd could do to hide his wide smile. He couldn't even manage to keep it out of his voice. "You can't see how guilty that would make me look?" he asked, grinning like an idiot.
"What do you mean?" she questioned, lifting her head.
"It would look like we'd hooked up."
"Or you and one of the others."
"But all of the others," he said, leaning in close like he was sharing a secret, "are taken."
The light died in her eyes.
His veins filled with ice cold dread before he even knew what he was regretting. In an instant he wanted to shove every word he'd said tonight back inside his big mouth, just erase all of them in his desperation to get her to smile again.
Come back to me, he thought, and wanted more than ever to wrap his arms around her and tell her everything. How he loved her. Adored her. Worshipped her. How he would have given up every single day of the rest of his life if it meant he got to spend just this one night with her.
"And that's why you want to stay with me," she said simply, voice flat. She said it like she had always known there was going to be a catch, like there had to be, and his heart cracked clean down the middle.
"No," he said, shaking his head avidly. "No, Charlie, no, that's not what I'm saying."
"This was a terrible idea," she said, shaking her head, too. And in that German girl's bedroom they were like a pair of bobbleheads on someone's car dashboard, shaking their heads like they had bugs in their hair.
"Charlie -" Floyd tried to reach her.
"No, it's fine," she rushed to talk over him. "This would have been a terrible idea." She gave a strange, almost manic laugh. "We would have been in so much trouble. I might have been demoted. You might have been demoted." Her own words made her recoil from him. "Stupid," she started to mumble to herself. "Stupid, stupid, stupid. All of this was so stupid."
"Charlie," he said. It was the only word he had left in him to say.
"I'll see you tomorrow," she told him, forcing herself to meet his eyes.
Ask to stay one more time, she begged him inside her head, and hoped he'd be able to read the plea in her eyes. If you ask me one more time I'll say yes.
Floyd sighed and turned his eyes on the red flowers on the white curtains. "I'll see you tomorrow, Charlie."
***
A/N:
happy boxing day to all of my fellow brits, and simply happy holidays to everyone else!! 2 chapters to mark the occasion, since i felt bad about the downer which was yesterday's. and thank you for all of your votes and comments, they really do make my day. it's always a little bit of a shock to me to read a comment and realise that people actually do read my silly little stories, and i'm very very grateful. all the love <3