If Charlie hadn't been coping well after Janovec's death, Webster had been coping terribly. Janovec had been his closest friend, after all. When she first sought Webster out, Charlie found him drunk out of his mind in a bar down the street from the hotel, and he'd been that way every night she'd sought him out since.
Though Charlie and Webster had never quite been friends, it was easier to share the burden of the death of a friend with someone else. Charlie wasn't sure whether she was doing much good in the way of helping Webster but, in his own way, he was helping her. And she thought it an awful shame that it had taken the death of a mutual friend for them to finally, properly talk.
It was entirely by accident that Charlie discovered talking about books made Webster, who she now knew as David, look a little more alive than he did otherwise. Charlie hadn't known they shared a love of literature in common until he had made a bitter reference to War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Since then, most of their conversations had been dominated by discussions about the books they had both read.
"Have you read War of the Worlds?" Charlie asked David as they sat in the bar down the street from the hotel. He'd been excused from weapons training on account of the fact he was in no fit state to shoot a gun, and had just been on the receiving end of a reprimand from Winters which was much harsher than her own had been just days previous. But Charlie knew talking about books would brighten him a little.
"No," David admitted. He was nursing a glass of water instead of liquor at Charlie's request. "I heard you ranting to Perconte about it back in Aldbourne, though."
A small smile tugged at the edges of Charlie's lips at the memory. "He misunderstood the ending," she said. Then she shook her head. "Well, actually, I'm not sure that's fair. He understood what happened but not why that was the way H.G. Wells chose to end the novel - or at least what I understand to be the reason. But he said he liked it otherwise."
"And how's it end?" David wondered.
Charlie smiled wryly. "I'll lend you it. You can find out for yourself."
David made a sound that was neither agreement nor disagreement but it was good enough for Charlie. But he didn't make to say anything else, just stared down into his glass of water with eyes a million miles away.
"I think," Charlie said after a pause wherein she fought to find something else to say, "I'd like to be a writer after the war."
"Yeah?" David asked, finally looking up from his glass.
Charlie nodded. "Novels. Or maybe short stories to start with. But I don't know what I'd write about yet."
David made a sweeping gesture to encompass the room around him. He gave a sharp, bitter laugh. "What about all this?"
Charlie laughed in reply. "No one would want to read about my exploits during the war. Besides, I don't think I could stomach having to relive everything to write it down. I'd write fiction," she decided. "Maybe romance. I think I might be good at poetry but I've never tried."
"Would you go to college?" David asked, humouring her.
"Maybe." She sighed. "I've already been to college for nursing but maybe I'd be able to convince my parents to let me go again, since they didn't actually have to pay last time." She tilted her head as she gazed back at David sitting across the table from her. "I think I heard some of the men saying you went to Harvard before all this. How was it?"
David snorted a dark laugh and shook his head, then turned his eyes on his water once more. "Well, I never finished," he said with a smile that was half smirk and half grimace.
"Well," Charlie answered him levelly, "I didn't ask whether you finished, I asked how it was."
"It was fine," replied Webster. He paused for a beat and then relented, looking back up at Charlie with a softer expression on his face, like he'd decided to let himself be vulnerable with her. "It was good, actually. I enjoyed it. I studied literature, so it suited me just fine."
"What was your favourite essay you ever wrote?" Charlie asked, resting her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. She figured her mother would forgive her bad manners since neither of them were actually eating anything.
David smiled to himself. "It was on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea," he said. "Jules Verne, if you've heard of him. He was a French writer in the 1870s."
"And it's about..?"
"It's about a French marine biologist who goes on an American expedition under the ocean to find a mysterious sea monster."
Charlie smiled and sat up straighter in her seat. "Sounds exciting. Do they find it?"
David gave her a grin. "I'll lend it to you," he said, throwing her own words back at her from earlier on in the conversation. "You can find out for yourself."
Charlie rolled her eyes jovially and agreed.
"Doesn't your reprimand end tomorrow?" David asked idly into the comfortable silence that followed.
Charlie sighed. "Yeah. I'll be back in the field hospital at 0900."
"You don't sound happy about that," he observed.
Charlie shrugged. "It's not that I'm not happy about it, it's just... I don't know." She sighed again. "I don't want to have to work on another patient. Now that I'm not doing it all the time, when I do have to do it it's... Well, I think seeing so much on my first day of combat experience desensitised me to all of it. Now, I'm remembering what it was like to not be that way."
"Is it scary?" David wondered.
Charlie rested her hands in her lap and watched them fiddling with each other. "Yeah," she admitted. "I've lost my last few."
She didn't need to mention Eugene Jackson by name for the atmosphere to shift. Both of them knew who she was talking about and recalled what had happened in the basement of that house in Haguenau. And both of them were recalling David's accusations that Charlie wasn't doing enough.
"Charlie, I'm sorry for what I said -" he started, but Charlie cut him off.
"No, it's alright," she said, offering him a tight smile. "I've had time to think about that night and I settled with it myself a while ago now that you didn't mean it. It was a stressful situation and you were just worried about your friend. You don't need to apologise."
David didn't look like he agreed. Still, he didn't protest.
Men in ODs started to trickle past the bar on their way from the rifle range back to the hotel, and Charlie knew training must have finished for the day. But David must have heard the muffled voices from beyond the bar's front windows for he turned in his seat to look and, when he turned back around, he raised a hand to wave her out of the door, a small smirk on his face.
"You come too," Charlie implored him as she gathered herself and rose to her feet.
David snorted under his breath. "No offence, Charlie, but third-wheeling you and your boyfriend isn't exactly my idea of a good time."
Charlie rolled her eyes. "No, you come back to the hotel too. Come spend time with your other friends. You must be sick of just speaking to me by now."
David looked back down into his drink, distant again all of a sudden.
"David," she called his name, and waited until he looked up at her to continue. "There's no reason for you to stay here alone," she told him. "So come back."
He paused, mulling over her words, and his eyes darted momentarily to the rows upon rows of liquor bottles behind the bar. A moment later, however, he dropped his eyes to his water and then tipped it down his throat. He rose to his feet with a sigh of defeat.
"You can go get that book for me," Charlie told him as they left the bar. "If you want I can run upstairs quickly to get yours, too."
David smiled just a little bit. "Yeah, I guess," he agreed.
Upon returning to the hotel, David went down into the basement where he was quartered and Charlie hurried up the stairs, and she quickly retrieved the copy of War of the Worlds she'd been keeping in her carpet bag since Aldbourne pre-D-Day. With the item in her possession, Charlie raced back down the stairs, calling an apology to the member of staff she made jump as she rounded a corner particularly fast, and then made her way to the basement, wherein she found David with a book in his hands, waiting to meet its new owner, in the midst of a conversation with Lieb.
"Here it is!" Charlie declared when she sensed a lull in the conversation. David turned and she held up the book to show him. "Happy reading," she said as she handed it over.
In exchange, David handed her his book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Lieb laughed. "You two are such fuckin' nerds."
Webster's eyes cut to him briefly. "Shut up, Lieb."
Charlie narrowed her eyes at Lieb. "Autumn reads sometimes too, you know."
"Yeah, sometimes," Lieb answered her. "She ain't in a fuckin' book club like you two."
"Aw, Lieb, are you jealous you weren't invited?" Charlie teased. "If you have any recommendations I'm sure we could make space."
Lieb rolled his eyes. "Why don't you go annoy Talbert, huh, Charlie? I'm sure he's around here somewhere."
Charlie searched the room for Floyd and her eyes fell upon him speaking to Chuck in the corner. They were laughing together and Charlie smiled as she watched them.
As though sensing her eyes on him, Floyd turned and caught her eye, and his smile grew tenfold. It pulled up on one side, that beautiful smile she loved so much, and suddenly she was wondering whether she'd ever seen him give that smile to anyone else.
Lifting her hand in a wave, Charlie laughed when Floyd winked, turned back to Chuck to say something, and then promptly made his way over to her.
Charlie bid David and Lieb farewell, ignoring their identical eye rolls, and turned to Floyd just as he slipped his arm around her waist. "Ready to go up?" he asked, briefly eyeing the book in her hands.
Charlie flashed him the cover and explained, "From Webster," and they turned to leave the basement just as Vest arrived with a new shipment of mail.
Vest left the nurses' mail until the end, and since Charlie was the only nurse currently present she took everyone's mail. On their way to their room, Charlie and Floyd dropped off mail to the relevant people - Autumn and Boo were both in their room and Don was in Henry's, so he took hers - before finally making it to the place they were currently calling home.
"I'm so tired," Floyd declared as he collapsed back on the bed. He held up his letter over his head, still in its envelope, and then sniffed it.
Charlie grinned. "Does it smell like home? Or like Vest?"
Floyd grimaced. "Vest."
"Mine too," Charlie said, though she was only joking. Her envelope just smelled like cheap paper which had passed through too many hands.
She sat on the bed beside Floyd and tore open her envelope. While she read the letter inside - from her parents, of course - she wasn't aware she was making any sort of expression until Floyd brushed a gentle finger over the crease between her eyebrows to get her to relax them.
"What's it say?" he asked quietly, tilting his head as he studied the side of her face.
Charlie gave him a small smile lacking any true happiness. "You can read it, if you want."
She handed the letter over and he took it warily, as if waiting for her to change her mind, but she wasn't going to; she wouldn't have offered if there was anything in it she didn't want him to see. Besides, she trusted him with everything; there wasn't a single thing she didn't tell him and he knew her better than anyone else ever had. She had nothing to hide, not from him.
While Floyd read her letter, Charlie flipped through her new book, scanning some of the pages, before placing it on the nightstand beneath the copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls she was still working her way through. Afterwards she went to the bathroom, and after that she brushed her hair, and by the time she had finished doing all of those things Floyd had finally finished reading the letter.
"Do your parents know about..." he began. He trailed off, searching for what he wanted to say. "Me," he finished eventually. "Do they know about us?"
Charlie chewed on her bottom lip. "No."
He sighed and lifted the letter up to draw her attention to it. "Makes sense," he said.
"Are you upset with me?" Charlie asked quietly, crossing her arms over her chest.
Floyd looked at her for a long while, his eyes softening with every second that passed. "No," he replied at length. "I didn't expect you to tell them."
"Did you tell your parents about me?"
He gave a rueful smile. "Kind of," he confessed. "They know you're my best friend. I never told them explicitly that I like you a little more than that but my mom hinted at it in her last letter, so I'm sure she knows. But I never told her we're together now."
Charlie came to sit beside Floyd on the bed. "Do you think they'd like me?" she wondered quietly. "Your family?"
He laughed. "Oh, yeah." With a shake of his head he continued, "My mom'll be obsessed with you."
Charlie brightened. "Really?"
He laughed again, fondly. "Smart, loyal, kind, well-mannered?" he said. "She'll think you're an angel. And," he continued, looping his arms around her waist and pulling her to him, "she'd be right."
Charlie smiled and buried her face in her shoulder as Floyd sat her in his lap, holding onto her hips so he could look at her. And, in spite of what was written in the letter from her mother, she couldn't imagine living a life in any other way than this. What had her life been before she'd known and loved Floyd? She'd been in blissful ignorance before of what it was like to live without him, but could she ever do it again?
Watching him as he sat there, grinning at her with his eyes lit up like Christmas lights, she thought she'd rather never get married at all than marry someone who wasn't Floyd. There was no way she was ever going to love someone as much as she loved him. And she knew it with so much certainty she could no longer find it within herself to entertain a life spent chained to a rich man who didn't love her, and who she didn't love, just to please her parents.
If things didn't work out with Floyd, she would go without. She would not walk down an aisle in a pretty white dress unless it was towards him.
"Floyd," Charlie said quietly, lifting her head from her shoulder and smiling softly. She took the letter from his hands and dropped it, letting it flutter to the floor, and shifted closer to him in his lap. Her legs uncurled themselves to rest on either side of him and her arms moved to drape over his shoulders, her hands resting lightly on the back of his neck. "There's no one in the entire world I love more than you," she told him, all sincerity.
Floyd smiled. "There never has been and never will be someone I love more than you."
Charlie laughed. "No, I'm not complimenting you," she said fondly, shaking her head. "I'm trying to tell you something."
His eyebrows furrowed but he was still smiling. "What is it?"
She blushed, fumbling for words. "Well," she began tentatively, "I've never loved anyone like I love you, and I know I'll never love anyone like this again. So..."
He smiled, catching on. "You don't need to be embarrassed in front of me, Charlie," he told her gently, lifting a hand to brush back a lock of her hair. "I see every side of you, and I love all of them."
She leaned in close, blushing furiously, and confessed, "I don't know how to tell you what I want to say."
He gave her a gentle, reassuring kiss on the forehead. "Just say it," he said softly.
So, with cheeks aflame and butterflies wreaking havoc in her stomach, Charlie drew in a deep breath and leaped into the unknown. "I want you to have all of me. Every single inch. And I want to have all of you."
He smiled impossibly wide.
"Do you want that too?"