Chapter Text
These days of dust which we've known
Will blow away with this new sun
30 September 1943, Aldbourne
“I don’t remember.”
“How’s that even possible?”
“I guess it wasn’t a big deal.”
“Everyone remembers their first time. How old were you, anyway?”
“Mm. I’m gonna say thirteen.”
“Are you telling me that your folks didn’t have a car until ’31? All farmers had one.”
“For the last time, Nix, we’re not farmers. We’ve never been farmers.”
“Still.”
“We didn’t need one.”
“What does needing have to do with anything?”
“Everything, when you don’t have the money.”
Nix scoffed. He shook his cigarette in the ashtray sitting on his lap. “All right, spare me the sad tune. What about driving? First time driving.”
“Practice drive or on my own?”
“I don’t know, either. Both.”
Dick wriggled his sock-clad feet. He was lying on his cot, legs crossed at the ankles. Nix was sitting by his side on Mrs. Barnes’ hand-knit rug.
“First time on my own, I went on a grocery run.”
Nix snorted. “I’m on the edge of my seat.”
“It was nice,” Dick replied, nudging the back of Nix’s head with his knee. “I paid for the gas with money from my first wage.”
There was a quiet pride to Dick’s voice, the memory of a past accomplishment making him sound almost nostalgic.
“Before driving back I stopped for ice cream. It wasn’t on my way, so I didn’t tell anyone. It was good.”
“You rascal,” Nix smirked, looking over his shoulder. Dick was smiling. Nix turned around, taking a puff off his cigarette.
“Mine was in France. We spent a summer in Côte d’Azur in—mm, ’34 or ’35. Friend of mine stole his father’s Bugatti and we went driving around the countryside. You would’ve liked it. All small towns and fields. Cattle everywhere.”
“It does sound pretty,” Dick said, smile transferring nicely to his voice.
“Until we got lost and out of gas and out of money, and they had to send someone to pick us up. Stanhope was not thrilled.”
“Did you get in trouble?”
“Oh yeah,” Nix chuckled. “Big time. I didn’t see my friend for the rest of the summer. Father decided that he was a bad influence.”
“Little did he know.”
“Mm.” Nix bent his neck backwards, nape resting lightly on Dick’s thigh. He took another puff, exhaling slowly up towards the ceiling. “I guess Father thought he liked me a little too much.”
Dick’s thigh flexed under his head, a contraction and a slow release. “And did he?”
Nix shrugged. “Who can tell with the French? They’re too busy kissing you half the time anyway,” he declared breezily.
Dick was silent after that, and Nix quickly ran the conversation over in his mind, searching for an unwitting offense. Having found none, he risked a glance to his right. Dick didn’t look offended—pensive, rather.
“What is it?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Nothing, he’d said, the little tease.
“Come on.”
Dick’s smile was downright flirtatious now. “I’m just seeing it. Poor kid steals his dad’s car to impress his handsome friend, and all the while said friend just sits there blabbering of—I don’t know, I’m guessing motors and booze. Tragic.”
A glint in his eyes promised, Believe me, Lewis, I’ve seen it all, and not for the first time Nix found himself thinking, Who the hell is this person I’m mixing with, and, How have I never noticed before, and, What else is in there that I’ve never noticed.
He turned around properly now, putting down the ashtray on the floor and killing his cigarette stub in it.
“Flattering won’t get you anywhere,” he warned, a blatant lie, since his ego could feed on a compliment from Dick Winters for weeks.
“That’s all right. I’m quite happy where I am right now,” Dick said, managing to sound matter-of-fact and warm at the same time.
“Come on, another one,” he said next, steering Nix back to their original conversation. “Hit me.”
Nix thought for a second. “First time on a plane?”
“Like you don't know the answer? Now you’re trying to get smacked,” Dick smiled.
“Hey, no need to be so touchy. First movie? There’s a movie theater in Lancaster, right?”
“There is. That’d be Tom Sawyer,” Dick answered. “It was good. I liked Huck Finn.”
“I know that one,” Nix said, his mind conjuring the black-and-white image of a lanky rascal with a mop of dark hair. His sister’s nanny had taken Blanche and he’d tagged along, because at the time he still followed her everywhere like a lovesick puppy. He didn’t remember much about the plot, but he did remember the enormous box of popcorn they’d all shared. Céleste’s fingertips had been soft and covered in a fine layer of salt.
“He died in that car crash, didn’t he?”
“Who, Huckleberry Finn?”
“Yeah. A few years back. Fell off a cliff or something.”
“Oh,” Dick said. “I didn’t know that.” He looked genuinely sad to hear it, almost as if he’d known him personally. “I haven’t been to many pictures after that.”
“I have,” Nix said. He patted himself for another cigarette, only to find that he was fresh out. In truth what he was aching for was a sip of something, cigarettes working as a mere detente, but he’d refilled his flask under Dick’s eyes that very morning—it came from his footlocker, after all—and he didn’t want to do it again on the same day. Plus he’d promised Harry he’d join him at the pub after Mrs. Barnes’ evening tea, and that was just about—he glanced at his watch—damn, not for another twenty minutes.
Dick pointed at the two unopened cartons sitting on the bookshelf, and Nix got on his feet with a deep groan because after a long while on Mrs. Barnes’ extremely soft, extremely hand-knit rug his body felt like a collection of rusty parts. But by the time he’d got there he realised that he didn’t want a smoke, after all, and walked back stretching his arms. This time he went straight to the cot. Dick bent his legs to make room and Nix sat with his back to the wall, the spartan bed dipping heavily under their combined weight.
“What was I saying?”
“Movies.”
“Ah, yeah. That’s where you took girls when the parents were a little—anxious. It reassured them, God knows why. The two of you alone in a dark room.”
“Yeah, I never figured that one out myself.”
Nix frowned with mild surprise, to which Dick reacted by getting a little bit of color to his cheeks. It was interesting, the list of things that could or could not make him blush. On the ‘yes’ pile: dirty sex talk, dating girls. On the ‘no’ pile: full nudity, sucking Nix’s cock.
He didn’t have it all down yet.
“I’ve taken girls out, Nix,” Dick said, and of course once he’d said it it was obvious. Dick Winters, eighteen or nineteen years old, hair parted with a ruler, hands calloused by honest work, en route to a college degree, or a successful business, or both; saintly, solid, marriable. He would have had flocks of respectable girls pining to be taken out, flocks of respectable parents eager to push their daughters into his arms.
Not a single problem with that.
“And?” Nix couldn’t stop himself from asking.
“And what?”
“I mean—” He struggled, making an empty gesture with his hand. He was curious, but turn-the-other-cheek notwithstanding, Dick could be very touchy. “Just wondering. Did you like it?”
“It was all right,” Dick answered easily, but didn’t venture to add further details. There was the lightest frown between his eyebrows, like he was conjuring up a faded memory or a puzzling thought.
“Not awkward?”
“Of course it was awkward, Nix. They were girls,” Dick replied with a thin smile.
Nix scoffed. “You know what I mean.”
“I know what you’re not asking, yes.”
Nix looked up at the roof of the room, which was in dire need of some anti-mold treatment and a fresh coat of paint. From downstairs they could hear Mrs. Barnes wash the dishes and Mr. Barnes’s radio play a popular tune in the sitting room.
He looked down to find Dick’s long feet sitting on the bed close to his thigh, though not quite touching it, wrapped in the tan regulation socks.
“Summer of ’36. There was this rather forward girl who waited tables at a brasserie in Montparnasse.” He flashed up a glance at Dick’s face. “And I didn’t know anything, right? I thought that I was supposed to court her. You know, bring her flowers. Which I did. A lot of them. Kind of a waste. Should’ve stuck to the cash.”
“She didn’t—”
“She did. She did present the bill at the end,” Nix said, remembering the absurd, horrible realization that had dawned on seventeen-year-old Lewis at that point. And then he laughed heartily, because twenty-five-year-old Nix found it funny and somewhat deserved, his doe-eyed innocence being rewarded by the inevitable heartbreak—and besides, he would never believe in romance as much as he had back then, before everything had happened.
“Nix,” Dick shushed him, nudging his thigh with a foot. There was no more water running downstairs, and either the radio had been turned off or it had reached a break in the programming. Nix’s laughter might as well have been the only sound in the house, though really it was both of them laughing now.
“In hindsight, you know what they say. Better leave it to the professionals,” Nix sniffed.
“I’m sure you were well taken care of,” Dick agreed with a smile.
His foot was still touching Nix’s thigh, as if forgotten there, and Nix gave in to an impulse and put his hand on it. Dick didn’t resist, but his eyes shot up to the door, slowly descending on Nix’s face with a curious, wary look. The look said that Nix could not be trusted—which was true, he couldn’t, not with Dick and a bed in close proximity. To think that it hadn’t always been like that baffled him.
“The stairs creak,” Nix said, dragging his thumb on the instep of Dick’s foot, heel to toe.
Dick produced a small, pleased sigh and didn’t try to move, which was a sign of—something. Not lust, they’d dealt with that for the day. Softness, perhaps. Dick could be a little sappy at times, which is not to say that he would do something sappy, or God forbid un-Winters-like, but his basic Winters-ness would be wrapped in a softer padding, rough edges and all, like china in a box.
Emboldened by the small victory, Nix pushed his fingers under the hem of Dick’s trousers leg and rubbed Dick’s ankle for a second. It was by far the strangest form of intimacy they’d experienced to date.
“It’s your turn,” he said at length.
“What?” Dick asked.
“Your first time.”
“Rather not.”
Nix looked up. Dick wasn’t blushing, but he looked embarrassed all the same.
“Come on,” Nix said, taking his hand off. “Can’t be worse than a French whore with a hundred red roses on her table.”
“You did like her.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Dick let out a little air through his nose. Nix wasn’t normally one to force a confidence—if he wanted to know something, there were more subtle ways than headbutting a closed door—but he felt that left to his own devices, Dick would die stoically holding his past to his chest like a secret diary, and they could not have that, could they. Some days, days like this, Nix felt an urge to open him up and lay every little bit bare for inspection.
“Technically it’s still my birthday,” he dropped.
“You got your gift already,” Dick retorted. Which was true, and partly the reason why Nix was here now, not drinking and not smoking in Dick’s adoptive childhood bedroom, instead of out with Harry and the others, celebrating.
“Is there a rule against double gifts in the Winters household?”
“Not a rule, but we knew not to ask.”
Definitely, Nix wouldn’t have liked growing up in the Winters household.
“Well, I’m never one to brag.” Dick scoffed at that, but Nix plowed on, “but if you think you’re gonna shock me, you’re in for a disappointment.”
“It’s not shocking. It’s not much of a story either. I’m just—I’m not proud of it.”
So it wasn’t embarrassment, then. Nix thought long and hard and could not for the life of him remember the last time he’d seen Dick ashamed. Incensed, chagrined, humiliated even; never ashamed. The man didn’t do shame, no small feat when you’ve got a list of don’t’s as long as Florida.
“It can’t be that bad. I mean, if the fella was into it, and you were into it, then…”
Dick looked at him strangely, like he’d said something extremely stupid or extremely out of character, or both.
“Don’t give me that look. I’m trying to be modern here.”
Dick shook his head. “Just leave it.”
“All right, but I’ll have you know that confession is the cleansing of the soul.”
“I’m not a Catholic.”
“So? Neither am I.”
“Nix—”
“All right, all right.”
He patted Dick’s knee, and since he felt at least a little guilty for overstepping some unspoken boundaries he left his hand there, a meager peace offering.
Dick didn’t react right away, but eventually his left hand moved up and came to rest high on his thigh, fingertips pressing lightly on Nix’s pinkie.
They did hear the steps coming up from the foot of the stairs, and maybe it was Nix’s dry imagination going rampant, but it felt like Dick left his hand where it was for a few more seconds than was strictly advisable.
Needless to say, nothing untoward graced the long-sighted eyes of Mrs. Barnes, God bless her heart, when she finally knocked, timidly opened the door and asked:
“Lieutenant Winters, Lieutenant Nixon, would you like to come down and have a spot of tea?”
6 June 1944, Sainte-Marie-du-Mont
Nix had never ridden a tank before. He’d climbed on vehicles during joint training with the Armored divisions and been inside the hull a few times, but those occasions had been few and far apart, and Nix’s time with the steel beasts more akin to a guided tour than a real interaction.
He’d definitely never ridden shotgun by the barrel, rifle in hand, while his tank triumphantly rolled into a liberated town. It was a first, and it felt good.
This particular M4 Sherman had been shooting for the whole night at Utah Beach, and even though the gun barrel was not smoking anymore, it still smelled of gunpowder, oil, dust, and something else that might be just in Nix’s mind: victory.
There were three men on the right-hand side of the road. Nix recognized Strayer immediately by the blond hair, and his heart leapt pleasantly when he realized that the man next to him was Dick. Even with the helmet on, he told him apart easily by the lanky frame and the distinct set of his shoulders. And God, that felt better than invading Europe, better than his childish pride at playing conqueror on a tank. There you are, he wanted to say. Here’s your gift for staying alive.
“Going my way?” he called instead, trying hard not to show the full extent of his relief, and Dick smiled in response, a domino of tired wrinkles spreading upwards from his mouth to his eyes. Nix helped him up and Dick sat himself comfortably on the plate next to him, slinging one arm over the gun barrel and the other around Nix’s shoulders. It started as a friendly pat, but Dick didn’t move the arm afterwards, and Nix didn’t ask him to. Dick was smiling fully now, looking red-eyed and almost inebriated, like he’d spent the last thirty-six hours in a club rather than on the battlefield. Nix couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen him smile like that.
“It’s not my Caddy, but it’ll do,” Nix declared, shouting to be heard over the rumble of the engine and the clanking sound of the rolling tracks. He proudly patted the steel casing of the tank.
“I hope we got more than twenty-six of these in the country,” Dick replied, and Nix grinned widely.
“Damn right. Christ, Dick, you gotta see Utah Beach, it’s—” he started, before realizing what he was saying. “In hindsight, better not.”
Dick winced with sympathy. “That bad?”
“It’s not pretty, no.”
The M4 rolled on steadily after its companion, mashing the blood-red mud under its tracks.
“You know, I’ve never ridden a tank before,” Nix said conversationally.
“Me neither.”
“Day of firsts, uh?”
“What?” Dick asked over the noise.
“Day of firsts!”
“I guess so,” Dick replied, looking at Nix with that earnest, appraising gaze of his, the one that made Nix feel like his skin had turned see-through.
“Here,” Dick said, signalling to the driver through the visor. The tank commander emerged from the hatch, and Dick gave him instructions on where to fire. He and Nix jumped down as the two M4s strode forward, locked into a firing position, took aim with a slow rotation of the turret, and unhurriedly dropped a shower of rapid-fire shots on the German positions across the meadow of Brécourt Manor.
They covered their ears while the machine guns swept the treeline, sending branches and dust flying all over. After hearing so much of the enemy’s artillery battering down on their men, Nix found almost a poetic justice in the terrifying noise headed the other way, dead on a distant target that wasn’t one of their own. He turned to Dick with a grin on his mouth, already a half-formed joke on his tongue, but Dick wasn’t smiling.
“I’ll go check on Speirs,” Dick said, throwing the rifle over his shoulder. “Tell Strayer that the causeway is clear, will you.”
“You got it.”
Strayer had claimed the ground floor of the town’s post office as battalion headquarters. After a few hours of work on a copy of Dick’s map, Nix reported to the colonel that they had the area from Sainte-Marie-du-Mont to Carentan mapped for Kraut artillery down to the last bullet, safely stored his notes away, and called it a day.
Easy had dug in just out of town, under the shadow of a tall hedgerow that offered protection from sight but did nothing to block out the continuous singing of the German machine guns from across the field. Nix looked for Dick there first, but they told him that he hadn’t shown up yet. Backtracking to the Great War monument, Nix eventually saw a skinny, red-headed silhouette wander off towards the promenade that overlooked the causeway.
Nix was the bearer of good news: the map was a godsend, as proven by the intel officer up at Division almost creaming his pants when Nix had given it to him. He thought the joke would at least be worth a smile, but Dick was distracted, too preoccupied with processing the events of the day. Nix couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t a task that he intended to undertake sober, not any time in the near future at least. He’d bottle it up for now, leave it for an easier day, and even then he’d probably smooth the edge with as much booze as he could safely pour into his body.
But Dick was not like him, and even supposing that he’d let Nix help, Nix wouldn’t have known how. He almost made the mistake of mentioning that Easy’s XO wasn’t responsible for the casualties of Able Company, but stopped himself right before the words left his mouth. Dick wouldn’t have forgiven him.
In the end he decided to leave him to his own devices and head back to the square. Before he’d gone too far he couldn’t help throwing one last backward glance over his shoulder.
Dick had taken off his helmet and knelt down next to an Army jeep at the end of the promenade. Far into the distance, over the causeways, not so far that they couldn’t make out the pillars of smoke surging from the burning buildings, eastern Normandy was aflame.
Nix didn’t pray anymore. He had given the whole faith business more than a fair try in his day, and soon found out that he liked things that made empirical sense, dots that he could connect. He wasn’t a man for mystical contemplation.
But if, after all, it turned out that God existed, Nix hoped that He wouldn’t be too put off by Dick’s minor slips and deny him whatever small mercies he was asking for.
They would need all the help they could get.
13 June 1944, Carentan
“What’s with the limp?”
Dick threw his musette bag on the bed and let himself fall heavily next to it. His body sunk in the saggy mattress like a knife through butter, and he let out a deep, throaty sigh that was a touch too polite to be called a groan, though it certainly didn’t lack the intention. Nix turned around in his chair to give the other man an appraising look.
Dick looked pale and dirty and exhausted, which didn’t worry Nix in the least. The open tongue of his left boot and the loose fold of his trouser leg, on the other hand, were alarmingly out of character for a guy who made a point of shaving and combing his hair even when he couldn’t shower.
Dick lied still with his arms along his body, eyes closed, chest softly moving up and down in long, measured breaths. Whatever reason had prompted him to drag himself all the way over to Nix’s billet, he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get to it.
“Dick?”
“Ricochet,” came Dick’s voice from the depths of the mattress.
“You had Doc take a look at it?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he say?”
Dick draped an arm over his eyes, seemingly to block out the light coming from the lamp on Nix’s desk. It was a girly thing, an abat-jour with a lilac shade Nix had repurposed from bed to desk lamp when studying the maps on the saggy mattress had started to give him a crick in the neck. He wondered where the real desk lamp was, as a darker circle on the sun-discolored surface of the table declared it missing. He suspected that the rather well-off French family he was billeted with had removed everything even of marginal value before giving up their daughter’s bedroom to the scary-looking Américain. The thought amused him, firstly because he didn’t fancy himself particularly scary and second because, if he wouldn’t put it past himself to pinch the occasional bottle of Merlot, modern electrical appliances weren’t high on his list of desiderata.
“Dick? What did Doc say?” Nix prodded, throwing a glance backwards.
“To stay off it.”
“How many miles ago was that?”
“Don’t know. Feels like I’ve been running in circles for the past two days.”
Nix rested his arm on the back of his chair, half-twisting his body to take in Dick’s slack frame.
“Don’t get me wrong, but why are you here?”
Dick pulled himself up slowly. “You’re the only battalion officer within three miles. Thought I might as well report to you.”
“Sure,” Nix said, ignoring the biting edge to Dick’s voice and the dreary sarcasm that made it sound like someone else’s. He wouldn’t deny Dick the right to a touch of Nixon-esque bitterness; he just hadn’t thought that it would come so soon.
“Nine wounded today. That’s eighteen since yesterday. Nineteen with Tab.”
Nix allowed himself a tiny smirk, but Dick didn’t seem in the mood to laugh about the stabbing of one of his men, as amusing as the ’bayonet incident’ might be in hindsight.
“The rest all right?”
“Yeah, they’re billeted in houses around town. The locals didn’t make much of a fuss. And many were empty in the first place.”
“They’re warming up to us,” Nix agreed.
“Are they treating you well?” Dick asked, taking a look around himself.
Nix shrugged. “They stay out of the way. I chatted with the lady some. She reminds me of my mother.”
“In what way?”
“Stuck-up bitch.”
“Nix,” Dick reprimanded him, necessarily, but he was fighting down a smile. “It’s a nice place you got here,” he observed, letting his eyes wander over the pastel-colored wallpaper, the ornate writing desk and padded chair Nix was sitting on, the flowery coverlet dressing the bed. A general overabundance of softer colors and floral details gave the room a childish look, though Nix had, on occasion, been admitted into grown-up ladies’ bedrooms with a similar flair. “Very—romantic.”
“Yeah, right? I think it suits me,” Nix grinned.
Dick’s eyes finished their round and slowly focused back on Nix’s face. “Battalion headquarters are pretty nice too,” he said, but Nix scoffed.
“What would I do in Angoville-au-Plain?” he replied, the French nasal vowels rolling pleasantly on the back of his tongue. “Barely any nightlife. Can’t compare with Carentan, the gem of Normandy.”
“That what they call it?”
“This godforsaken shithole?”
That got a chuckle out of him. Nix pocketed it, pleased, even as it was short-lived. A ghost of a smile lingered on Dick’s lips for a second longer, then quickly dried up.
“They pulled out,” Dick said in a quiet voice, right hand clenching and unclenching into a fist. “Dog and Fox. Left us there under the fire.”
“Yeah.” Nix had followed the counterattack at a distance, the officer keeping his cool by necessity while the man inside struggled with outrage and a cold, sticky fear that just wouldn’t relent. Through his binoculars he’d seen Dick’s helmet peek above the hedgerow and then Dick’s whole body stand within range of the machine guns, the silver bar that marked him a First Lieutenant glinting attractively on his collar. “Keep firing, keep firing,” he’d been shouting, the words inaudible but the intention clear. Nix had gritted his teeth over and over, chewing emptily until his jaw had started to hurt.
“Easy did great.”
“We had our orders,” Dick replied, shunning the compliment. “You can’t just leave, can you.” He shook his head. “Nine wounded. I wonder—”
“Don’t,” Nix stopped him. “And if it’s any consolation, Mulvey’s head is gonna roll. Strayer lost his shit today. Haven’t seen him this pissed since his London mistress gave him the sack.”
“Demoted?” Dick asked, frowning.
“Off to Division.”
Dick nodded, as if accepting that the punishment was commensurate to the fault. Which was funny, really, as there weren’t many who wouldn’t have given their right arm for that balcony seat on the war that was division headquarters. Not Dick, though; and neither the now-former CO of Fox Company.
Dick bent over his wounded leg, wincing as he undid the loose strings of his boot and carefully pulled it off. The cut had bled through the bandage. Dick took off the sock and untied the gauze, carefully starting to unravel it. When he got to the inner layer, the one that had soaked up the blood and was now glued to the wound, he took a deep breath and grabbed one side of it with the opposite hand, as if he intended to rip it off like a band-aid.
“Jesus, not like that. Let me,” Nix said quickly, moving over to the edge of the bed. “Scoot up,” he commanded, stealing the bandage from Dick’s hand and gesturing for him to crawl up the bed. Then he grabbed Dick’s foot and pulled it on his lap.
“Thanks,” Dick sighed with obvious relief, leaning back on his hands.
“Why didn’t you ask a medic to change your dressing?” Nix asked, pulling very gently at the edges of the bloody clot to see if it gave.
“It’s just a scratch. I can manage.”
“Not with those farmer’s hands, you can’t,” Nix snorted, peeling the gauze away bit by bit until he met a stronger resistance at the very center of the wound. “Give me the canteen,” Nix said, pointing at the nightstand.
“I’ve got sulfa in my bag,” Dick tried to object, looking skeptical, but Nix rolled his eyes.
“It’s water. I’m not disinfecting you with whiskey, you savage.”
Once it was wetted down, the gauze gave up more easily, and after a few careful tugs Dick’s wound was out in the open. It was mostly clean and not too deep, Nix noticed with relief, but it looked like it had been poked at, and he suspected it hurt like hell.
Nix reached for Dick’s musette bag and took the sulfa powder out of the first-aid kit, then he sprinkled a generous amount on the cut, which was a little roughed-up after tearing off the bandage. Dick sucked in a breath and tensed up when the disinfectant touched the exposed bits. “There, there,” Nix coddled him. “You’re doing great, son.”
Dick sighed again, very softly this time, and bent his arms backwards, allowing his weight to rest more comfortably on his elbows. “If I didn’t know you, I’d say you’re enjoying this.”
“Sure I am. Your smelly foot is a dream.”
“Excuse me if I haven’t had time to shower. Been a little busy trying to stay alive.”
“With mediocre results, it seems.”
Nix took a fresh roll of gauze from the kit and started dressing the wound the way they’d been taught in training, with the first end sticking out under the first round of bandage.
“That was just stupid,” Dick admitted, voice turning sour. “I was standing there in plain sight like a fool.”
“Was it earlier today?”
“Yesterday, in town.”
Nix tried hard not to think of a hundred different outcomes for that scene, not to play them out in his mind in some idiotic game of what-if’s. Most of them did not end with a minor leg wound.
“Remember that time Sobel had to play casualty for the medics’ training?” he said instead, because that was a much better line of conversation than considering his friend slaughtered like cattle in the middle of the road.
“Oh yes,” Dick smiled, in that covert way he had of smiling when he found something amusing that he knew he should not.
“Jesus, how long was the cut? Inch, two inches—?”
“They called it an appendectomy,” Dick supplied, making a more valiant effort at suppressing his smile. “That could’ve gone all sorts of wrong.”
“It didn’t, though,” Nix replied lightly. “No harm done. Okay, some harm done. But you gotta admit, it makes for a great story.”
“It does. Better than my ankle, at least.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You might be limping on a Purple Heart here.”
Dick made a face, like the prospect of being awarded a medal for the wound was only slightly less painful than getting it in the first place. The face and the idea were so quintessentially Wintersian that Nix felt immediately at home, and better than he’d felt in a week.
He tugged gently at the newly tied knot and hummed with satisfaction at a job well done. “There you go,” he said, patting Dick’s knee. “Good as new.”
“Thank you, Lew.”
Dick put his foot down and flexed the ankle around, trying out the resistance of the bandage. Happy with the result, he reached for his boot and carefully slipped it back on.
“You should let it rest,” Nix said with a sideways glance. “Get your weight off it for a while.”
“You sound like Roe.” He checked his watch, and Nix did too, out of reflex. It was well past zero-two-hundred. Nix was still fully awake and with a couple of hours to spare, but he admittedly had a weirder sleep cycle than most. “Gotta get back to Harry.”
“Knowing him, he’s snoring already.” Nix tipped his chin at the bed. “Stay here.”
Dick turned his head to look where Nix had pointed, as if he might have missed it the first time. It was a single bed with a single pillow. There were tiny pink roses printed on the pillowcase.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said quietly.
“Why not?” Nix replied, piqued by Dick’s rejection.
Dick’s face took on the same sheepish, apologetic expression he’d donned when he’d given Nix the Talk.
“What?” Nix pressed, a snarky edge making its way into his voice—a sign of weakness, he knew, and one that Dick would recognize, but he couldn’t stop himself. “You fear for your honor?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“No, it’s fine. Quite right. You let your guard down, who knows the things I might do.”
“Nix, come on,” Dick replied softly, touching his arm. “Don’t put words in my mouth.”
Nix bit the inside of his cheek despondently, but for all his claiming that Nix had misunderstood, Dick didn’t elaborate further. He didn’t move his hand either, and after a little while he gave Nix’s arm a gentle squeeze that for some reason made it all worse.
As if Nix had offered anything, he thought bitterly. As if he was going to pine behind a closed door like a dog.
“Well then,” Nix said, shaking himself back into action. He walked to the desk, collected the holster with his sidearm tucked inside and strapped it on with the casual efficiency of everyday practice. He hung his binoculars around his neck and grabbed his field jacket from the back of the chair, though it was rather warm outside. He patted the inner pocket for his hip flask and the cigarettes. Reassured that all was where it should be, he looked back up at Dick. “You can stay or leave. I’m going out.”
“Where to?”
“Recon. I’m gonna go take a look at those hedgerows.”
“Alone?”
Nix smirked. Dick’s concern was genuine, and sound too, but the motherly quality of the question made Nix feel like shrugging it off was the only possible reaction. Of course he’d go alone; he worked better alone. And besides, after a hell of a day he wouldn’t wake up a dead-tired private to play escort any more than Dick would wake up a medic to change his dressing.
“You coming?” Nix asked, and Dick nodded, gingerly getting on his feet. He transferred some weight onto his injured ankle, lips pressed tight, and steadied himself.
Out in the street, the air was still warm and humid. Nix took a deep breath and caught a whiff of gunpowder in the wind. Far in the south-west, over the newly established front, German machine guns reactivated as if on cue, dropping a perfunctory hail of bullets on the line.
Nix headed in that direction, and Dick followed with the kind of soft, controlled limp that Nix imagined would come back to him in his old age, when arthritis or the old wound—at that point barely a thin, hairless blemish on the skin—woke up to bother him. He followed the idea in his mind, pictured a grey head with a dash of white at the temples, a higher hairline and proper wrinkles. He would be one of those lean, athletic gentlemen who ran ten miles every day well into their sixties and climbed on the roof to fix a loose tile, with clean nails and an immaculate shave. He’d be a pillar of the community, head of the parish council or something such, a beloved sage who’d seen the war and knew all there was to know. The girls of his youth, now mothers and grandmothers, would sigh with regret at his passage, only to later come over to exchange cake and a chat for whatever small favor was social currency in rural Pennsylvania: a summer job for their youngest, a helping hand for their bedridden husband. Even kids wouldn’t dare to sneak in and steal Mr. Winters’ apples; he’d probably just give them out to anyone who asked politely enough. And he would have someone, Nix figured, a farmer’s wife with Dutch blond hair and a pretty nose that burned and peeled under the sun, or—
His train of thought stopped abruptly. Dick was regarding him with a quizzical look, and Nix realized that he’d been staring. Averting his eyes, he patted himself for the cigarettes.
“What is it?” Dick asked.
“Thinking of retirement,” Nix mumbled around the filter. “I just got this idea of buying a house on the sea and going sailing on weekends.”
“Early retirement?”
“As early as possible, bien sûr.”
They kept on. Dick’s limp had been incorporated in a steady, if a little slow pace and didn’t look so pronounced anymore.
“Never been much of a seaman,” Dick confessed. “Can’t see the appeal.”
“It’s fine,” Nix replied, knocked sideways by a pain in the pit of his stomach he attributed to the chow, though part of him knew that he was just fooling himself, and poorly so at that. “I wasn’t going to take you.”
11 July 1944, English Channel
Nix was by no means an anxious man nor an easily scared one, but he could at least understand—if not partly share—the men’s apprehension in getting on the LST that would take them back to England.
Tank landing ships were slow and clunky: fat, easy targets with a belly full of men. One had been sunk by a torpedo three days into the invasion; another hit by a mine at Utah Beach while the 506th sweated outside Carentan. To top it off, it hadn’t been that long since the 101st had crossed the Atlantic on another troop ship, men packed like sardines in the hull, officers slightly better off in the stuffy, smelly cabins. It was only half a joke that the paratroops would rather take off on a plane headed to the line than on a ship sailing away from it.
This didn’t stop the men, after the initial reluctance, from enjoying the welcome change of scenery. The weather was hot in the morning, mild in the evening, and the general mood was such that nobody would care to enforce the nominal curfew that wanted everyone back in their berths by twenty-one-hundred.
“Sobel would turn in his grave,” Nix commented, checking out the couples and triplets of raucous troopers hanging above deck. A group of four from D Company had somehow gotten their hands on an illicit bucket of ice cream and were sitting in plain sight with the loot, digging in in turns with the one spoon. Navy and Army officers alike came and went, eyeing the scene with disapproving looks, but nobody bothered telling them off.
“He’s still alive,” Dick pointed out.
“Don’t I know,” Nix replied. “Bumped into him every single time I went up to regiment. Took all the joy out of it.”
“The joy of going up to regiment?”
“They had warm showers,” Nix sniffed, pushing his Ray-Bans up the bridge of his nose.
Dick hummed a vaguely condescending sound. He looked queasy from the boat but better than he had for a while, thanks to a few days of rest and Easy being pulled off the line. He looked like he’d managed to sleep for longer than half an hour on end and for more than one night in a row, slumber finally undisturbed by the roar of the German machine guns.
Sleeping in Carentan had been a joke, a wish. Nix could sleep through an earthquake, but in Carentan sleep had started eluding him, chased off by the erratic patterns of Kraut artillery going on and off at intervals. It was on purpose, Nix knew that, a simple harassing strategy to keep the enemy on their toes—though he had to wonder if it didn’t vex the German men as much as it did theirs—but knowing it hadn’t helped one bit. He had tossed and turned for hours in his ridiculous girl’s bed with the pink roses and the frilly metalwork, finally solving the problem by giving up night sleep altogether. It had worked surprisingly well, all things considered.
Now, with the French coastline receding steadily behind the stern of the ship and the ocean wind blowing salty and fresh on their faces, it was almost too easy to pretend that it had all been some sort of elaborate dream, the kind with a labyrinthine plot that went round and round and didn’t resolve itself. You had to admit that, upon a closer look, some of it looked rather fantastical. That bit with twelve men taking down a battery of .88s? The stuff of fables.
“Any plans for your furlough?” Dick asked, interrupting his thoughts. The tone was careful enough that Nix could tell the other half-expected to be told off, which was new, since Nix had always been rather prodigal with information on his private life. But some things had changed since D-Day minus six, and maybe this—how careless they could afford to be with each other’s privacy—was one of them.
“Nothing much,” he answered, which was mostly a lie, but then again he didn’t feel like elaborating.
Dick nodded in mute acceptance. Nix had a feeling that there was more to this thread than small talk, but before he could prod, Dick turned his head to acknowledge Harry who was crossing the deck with the shuffling, unaccustomed step of the infantryman at sea. Perhaps aided by a drink or three, Nix thought, noticing the way Dick’s fingers discreetly moved the sleeve cuff away to check his watch. Though to be fair it was almost supper time already, and anyway nobody gave a damn if an officer allowed himself a little aperitivo, not even Dick, not today.
“I hate ships,” Harry declared once he was within earshot. He looked a little green around the gills.
“Hey, at least the weather’s nice,” Nix offered. “Remember day three on the troop ship? The storm?”
“I don’t want to,” Harry groaned, leaning with his elbows on the rail. He must have realized that he wasn’t doing himself any favors by looking down at the waves rolling under the keel, because he hastily turned around.
“I’m seeing things today. I could swear that an Army motorcycle and sidecar got aboard earlier, pushed by one of our men. More, I think it was?”
He threw Dick a glance that was a pure distillate of Welshy understatement, heavy-lidded and lazy, with just the right twinkle in his eye to give away that he knew exactly what this was all about.
“Cute,” Nix guffawed.
Dick pursed his lips. “That’s funny. I was standing at the door the whole time, checked every man in myself.”
“And you didn’t see a thing.”
“Not a thing,” Dick confirmed, with such a beautiful poker face that Nix wondered if Dick hadn’t been pulling his leg all along about being lousy at the game. Surely a face like that must be worth something at the gambling table.
“You know,” Nix said, letting his eyes wander again towards the happy quartet of misfits and their bucket of ice cream, “I heard that Sink’s putting Sobel up for a promotion.”
“Oh yeah?” Dick said, mouth now twitching with unmistakable humor. “What would that be?”
“Regimental S-4.”
Harry burst into laughter, and also Nix gave into a chuckle. Probably there were more amusing things to laugh about, but right now, in the middle of war, regimental supply officer Herbert Sobel hopelessly looking for the whereabouts of a stolen motorcycle seemed a pretty good one.
“Hell, Dick. This guy I gave up on a long time ago,” Harry wiggled a derisory thumb at Nix, (“Hey, hey!” Nix protested), “but you were supposed to be the serious one.”
“You got it backwards, Harry-boy,” Nix declared. Dick cast him a sideways glance and finally released the smile that had been tugging at the corners of his mouth, and even though Harry had initiated the conversation Nix felt that it was a private smile just for him. “I’m the only thing that holds Captain Winters back from a life of mischief.”
Dick’s smile froze a little but stayed in place, like there was some point to be made by keeping it on.
After K and D-rations and the pathetic excuse for a camp mess at Utah Beach, the hot food of the ship canteen was a dream. Nix ate with an appetite he’d almost forgotten he could feel, a gusto for food that was more than a simple biological need, and when the hunger started to be sated and the snobbish part of his brain started whispering that the food was really not that good, he silenced it like he would an impertinent brat and kept at it until his stomach was full.
Dick was eating his ice cream with uncharacteristic slowness, spoon grazing the compact surface of the cup from side to side in orderly lines like a lawnmower, drawing up soft, curled shavings. He took time between each spoonful and the next, ice cream melting on his tongue, savoring it with an utterly contented face much like the one Nix himself made with a mouth full of good wine.
Wine they got too, at least the officers, a decent Merlot that might not be worth an ecstatic face, but was definitely good enough for a second, a third, perhaps even a fourth glass, if you were keeping score, which he wasn’t but had a feeling maybe Dick was, judging from the way his gaze would fall into sharper focus when Nix’s hand reached for the neck of the bottle.
In the end Dick excused himself early, as was his wont, while Nix and Harry bunched together with three Navy officers headed to the wardroom, and seasickness notwithstanding, proceeded to get methodically smashed.
One of them, a fellow Jersey man with a tolerance for alcohol that only got more and more impressive as the night progressed, seemed to take a shine to Nix, probably out of their common love of strong liquor and common hatred for their home state. The guy seemed to constantly hover at the edge of Nix’s field of vision, a freshly shaven, soft-smiled presence with a soothing voice and drink-red lips. By the third toast Nix had started noticing things he wasn’t entirely sure he was supposed to, like the faint scent of cologne that seeped into his nostrils when the guy moved just so, and by the fifth drink more and more things were begging to be noticed: the overly familiar way the guy seemed to appropriate Nix’s personal space, all bumping shoulders and hips and careless brushes on the way to the bottle, or the pleasant splash of red that had started coloring his cheeks, making them look nice and ruddy. A few more toasts, and Nix caught himself thinking that the guy seemed a decent-looking fella, the sporty, educated, clean-faced kind, a less annoying type of jock.
One by one the other officers dispersed, and Harry, long under the table, mumbled that he needed to take a piss and never came back from the latrines, if he made it that far.
Nix wasn’t sure of the time and turning his wrist to check his watch felt like a Herculean task, but he knew for a fact that they were way past curfew, because nominal or not, the club was empty and slowly shutting down.
“Welsh got lost,” the guy said, treacherously refilling Nix’s whiskey glass. Nix made to protest, but it was the end of the bottle, and it seemed impolite to refuse.
“He’s passed out in the hallway,” he sentenced. “They’ll find him busy smooching a fire extinguisher and calling it ‘Kitty.’”
The guy sniggered. “He talks about her a lot, doesn’t he.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Is she pretty?”
Nix had seen some pictures, so he nodded and said: “Very,” but immediately regretted it. Even through his drunken daze, it felt unsavory to be talking about your buddy’s fiancée’s graces with a near stranger.
“What about yours?” the guy asked, reaching out to Nix’s left hand and turning it back up under the light, a funny gesture at that, like he wanted to ascertain that the thing glinting on Nix’s finger was in fact a wedding band.
“Oh, she’s pretty,” Nix answered, looking down at the ring himself. His fingers were swollen from the alcohol, and the band looked viciously snug, like a noose around a neck. “Very pretty. A pretty, pretty whore.”
The crude obscenity of the word comforted him, as did the next gulp of whiskey. It felt good to call her names, he realized. He’d never let himself, not even in his mind. Perhaps he’d been wrong to deny himself for so long.
“Oh?” the guy said, hand retreating from Nix’s but lingering on the table in its vicinity. “Sorry to hear that.”
“It’s all right,” Nix frowned, finding his pleasure vaguely spoiled by the other’s sympathy. “You’re not married, are you? Good. Don’t. Way to ruin a perfectly good thing.”
“No,” the man said, voice dropping a little but turning firmer as it shed the easy, light-hearted tone it had donned so far. “I’m not the right sort.”
“Smart guy,” Nix pronounced him, touching his glass to the other’s before emptying it in one long swallow. The whiskey rolled down his throat with its usual sharp bite. Nix’s face got warm for a moment, cheeks hot as if he’d lain under the sun for too long.
The man’s eyes moved around the room, taking in the wardroom staff upturning the chairs on the tables to mop up the floor. Nix wondered idly why nobody was asking them to leave when they had so clearly outstayed their welcome, but then he remembered the Airborne patch on his sleeve and the leitmotif of the day: ‘Whatever you want, sir.’ He smirked.
“What’s funny?” the other man asked.
“War,” Nix replied. Because it was a little funny, wasn’t it. The Armed Forces, which upheld and guarded their own rules above everything, felt like cutting them slack for the sole reason that they’d been doing precisely what they’d been sent out to do, virtue is its own reward be damned. He thought of Dick and the motorcycle, and his smile grew. There was a good one-liner hidden in there somewhere; he needed to remember to look for it when he was sober.
“We’d better go,” the Navy guy said, and Nix almost replied that they didn’t have to do anything, not tonight, that Nix’s special immunity extended to his companion for as long as he said so.
“You feel like a nightcap?” the Navy man asked next, touching Nix’s elbow.
And sure, a nightcap sounded great, so Nix let himself be led through the narrow corridor and into the officers quarters.
The sailor unlocked a door marked with a small name tag (‘ENS Kelly, W.’) and let him in. The frugal comfort of the room reminded Nix of the troop ship, but he put the thought from his mind and focused instead on the back of the guy as he knelt down to open his footlocker, digging out a reddish, very promising bottle of liquor.
“What’s the W stand for?” Nix asked.
“William.”
“Say, William—”
“Bill,” the man corrected, throwing Nix a smile over his shoulder.
“Say, Bill, what do you do on this fine vessel?” He had a mild feeling that he might have been told already, but there was something disturbing to the quiet room, and he’d rather have the same conversation twice than an unfamiliar silence.
The man hung the lock back on its hook, standing up with the bottle in his hands like a trophy. “Communications. You’re intel, aren’t you?”
“I am,” Nix said, feeling like he was admitting to belonging to some elite club.
“You like it?”
“Yeah. I’m good at it.”
“I thought you’d be. You look the type.”
“What type?” Nix asked, frowning ever so slightly.
Bill Kelly made a gesture that meant that it was obvious, just by looking at Nix, what type of man he was. “The type who can keep a secret,” he answered with a straight face.
Nix chuckled. “Oh boy. You got no idea.”
The man gestured at the berth, which was neatly done with sharp corners that put OCS to mind. Nix wondered if the fold was six or seven inches long. He couldn’t tell by eye. He was sure that Dick could have.
“Sit down. It’s not the Ritz,” the man warned, with an easy smile which made Nix wondered if he hadn’t inadvertently thrown in some braggy remarks at some point during the night.
“Beats the crew room,” Nix assured him, and then, since he suspected it had sounded a little patronizing, “It’s good. Plenty of space. You lot got your own rooms.”
“Officer’s privilege,” Kelly declared, passing Nix two tumblers and unscrewing the bottle with a swift, steadfast grip that told Nix that the guy was definitely the more sober between them. They clinked their glasses and downed their first sip in silence.
“Aren’t you supposed to be on shift or something?” Nix asked, resting his weight back on his free hand.
“Not for another couple hours,” the other man answered, leaning closer, until his right knee knocked softly against Nix’s left. Nix caught a fresh whiff of cologne, mixed with a musky, more intimate note. “We’ve got time.”
“Uh-huh.” Nix took another sip and licked his lips. “Long as we don’t end up treading on a sea mine because you fell asleep at the radio.”
Kelly smiled. “We’re too far already. You know,” Kelly continued, his hand wrapping gently around Nix’s fingers to pry away his glass and deposit it on the nightstand, “normally I don’t take guys here. Thought I’d make an exception.”
“God, you know how to charm a girl,” Nix smirked, half-considering reaching out for the glass again, but something in the other’s look gave him pause. Only for a moment, though, because then Kelly placed a warm hand on Nix’s knee and stroked his inner thigh with a thumb, making the whole picture very clear.
Nix didn’t stop him. The man had been working hard for it, after all, and Nix might not have known right at the beginning, but he had been suspecting for some time now. At some point during the night it had become more about seeing how the guy would get to it than about figuring out what he wanted.
Kelly leaned in with no hurry at all and cupped Nix’s face in his hand. He had long blond lashes that gave his eyes a pleasing, feminine quality. His breath smelled like whiskey, and Nix was reminded of his father with a whiplash of sensory memory that was painful, and almost prompted him to pull his head back like a recalcitrant horse. He stopped himself, though. Kelly tilted his head and his mouth landed on Nix’s, pressing a gentle, confident kiss which slowly rolled into a second and a third one. The guy exhaled softly through his nose on Nix’s cheek, then his breath stopped for a moment as the guy’s tongue lapped briefly at Nix’s lower lip, asking for something, and Nix thought, What the hell, and opened his mouth to let himself be kissed properly. Kelly’s fingers curled around the back of his neck, half hanging, half holding him in place.
“What do you like?” Kelly asked, throwing him a quick glance before his lips trailed to Nix’s jaw, to his neck, to his left ear that, neglected for too long, immediately went aflame with sensation.
Nix felt strangely detached from the whole experience, like he could afford to look at it from a purely intellectual angle—alcohol notwithstanding—and read it like he would a new map. There was something funny to the scene when you contemplated it from thirty feet above your body: the stranger half in his lap, hanging onto his body like Nix was the world’s least reliable buoy, mouth latched to his earlobe with a hint of teeth that put to mind an aggressive tropical fish. At some point during the proceedings a soft warning signal had started going off in Nix’s head, louder and louder the more he tried to ignore it. And there was a mild queasiness too, the gentlest hint of seasickness, though Nix knew for sure that it had nothing to do with the booze or the sea.
He thought of Dick then—almost a lie, this, implying that he hadn’t been thinking about him for most of the night, and most of his waking time since—God, who could tell anymore. But in the sloshy mess that was his mind, the swamp where Dick and Kathy and Mikey lingered like ever present ghosts, waiting for a chance to step forward and remind him that he indeed was the worthless piece of shit he’d been pronounced not once, but twice already, in the middle of all that Dick came into sharp focus, a voluntary act of Nix’s brain shedding light on itself and saying, Here he is. Look at him, for God’s sake.
And he did.
“You got a rubber?” Nix blurted out, voice rough from the heartburn grating at the back of his throat.
Bill Kelly smiled.
Some time later, Nix stood in front of a door a little down the hallway, steadying himself with both hands against the frame like he was afraid of collapsing. The corridor was perfectly quiet, except for the omnipresent hum of the machines and the light vibration of the deck under his feet. There was a gentle swaying to it too, the kind of slow-paced rotation one might impart to a glass of freshly poured wine to let it breathe. Funny thought, that, since Nix rather felt like he was suffocating.
When he deemed himself steady enough on his feet, he knocked on the door. That was when all started moving.
At first Nix thought the movement was just in his head, an old trick of the booze coursing through his veins. He was, after all, nothing but decimated. But then he realized that there was more to it than his vanquished sense of balance, and the bow of the ship was in fact lifting up, and none too slowly at that: throwing a look at the far end of the corridor he could see the floor had already risen with a visible inclination. Above his head, a loose light bulb started swaying back and forth from its cord like a hanged man, casting its fluttering yellow light all around. Nix saw his own shadow grow and shrink, skating liquidly from wall to wall. The ship tilted slightly to the side and the light bulb took on a crazy spin. Things went still for a moment, the ship sitting askew on its starboard and pausing as if to take a breath, and Nix grabbed the handle of the cabin door with both hands and braced himself for the inevitable as the breath of the ship turned into a majestic, terrifying sigh that shook it from bow to stern and made everything quiver and quake like the inside of a shaker. The handle rattled forcefully between Nix’s sweaty palms but he grabbed and refused to let go until the ship shuddered and bucked its head forward like an unruly horse, dragging Nix down with it, poor rider that he was. The stern slammed down into position and Nix fell flat on his back, defeated and breathless.
“Nix, are you all right?”
Nix pulled himself up on one elbow, shame washing over him at the sight of Dick’s naked calves.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked, but as he spoke he realized that the vibration was picking up again, the ship was again starting to tilt upwards and sideways. “Oh, for fuck’s sake—”
“Come inside. C’mon,” Dick said, helping him to his feet and into the dark room. He steered Nix to the berth, gently but with purpose. The door closed behind, cutting off the only source of light in the room.
Nix sat up with his back against the wall and closed his eyes. He could feel it even sitting down, the quivering, though not as strongly. A second later Dick stumbled gracelessly next to him, making the cot creak noisily in protest. He smelled a little, a faint layer of sweat over clean skin, but Nix had never been put off by a little sweat. He let his head drop on Dick’s shoulder, breathing in unashamedly.
“Hey,” Dick said.
“Mm.”
“What happened to your sea legs?”
“Ha,” Nix chortled. “Yachts don’t do that.”
“Well, that explains.”
“They don’t,” Nix insisted, like it mattered for some reason. “You’ll see. I’ll take you.”
Dick looked down, his chin brushing the top of Nix’s head. “Will you now.”
“Yes, yes. Of course.”
It was nice, being close like that. He’d sat like that with his French friend, that one time. They’d parked the Bugatti by the side of the road, climbed a short fence and wandered off into the fields until they’d found a tree that cast a wide and dark shadow, just the thing to counter the summer heat. They didn’t have a picnic blanket, nor food—Julien hadn’t planned that far. All they had was a bottle of a fine red, or what they thought was a fine red, and no glasses either. They’d taken turns drinking from the bottle, long eager gulps quickly turning into slow, drowsy sips as the heat and the alcohol got the best of them. Nix’s head had turned very heavy at some point, and Julien hadn’t seemed to mind having his shoulder used for support.
The ship vibrated everywhere: in the bed, in the walls, even inside Nix’s head. He held his breath as the LST slammed into the sea, making their bodies bounce on the berth and smack into each other.
Dick exhaled forcefully. “This—goddamned ship,” he groaned, and damn if it wasn’t cute, the cussing, like a young boy saying poop. “I’ve been sick all night.”
Nix chuckled.
“It’s not funny,” Dick chastised him, sounding mildly affronted.
It was funny, of course. It was too good. Dick swearing? Christmas.
Nix felt a rush of affection gather in his stomach, the kind of fuzzy warmth that generally preluded a bad decision. He let his head slide lower on Dick’s chest and then he just sort of allowed his body to fall forward in a controlled motion, until the side of his face was resting in Dick’s lap, with his ear on the hem of Dick’s shorts and his cheek on the cool skin of his thigh.
“Nix—” Dick started, in that uncertain voice he used sometimes when he knew he had to resist but wasn’t going to do anything real about it. His hands hovered over Nix’s shoulders.
“Just for a minute,” Nix mumbled. Dick let out a sigh, and his hand resigned to landing softly on Nix’s back.
“It’s your fault,” Nix murmured.
“What is?”
“This. Me. I wasn’t like this before.”
He wasn’t like this when Julien had looked down on Nix’s face in his lap and beamed him an intoxicated smile. He’d said something, a few sweet French words whose meaning would be forever lost, and then he’d bent down to kiss Nix’s mouth.
Nix hadn’t kissed back, but he hadn’t smacked Julien in the face either, as he had distantly felt he should. Much like he would ten years later in a stranger’s room, he’d just let himself be kissed. Julien’s lips were soft and stained a pale shade of purple.
After they’d been carted away to their respective homes, Stanhope had thrown a tantrum. A sober one, so much more terrifying because of it. By the time Stanhope was done with him, Nix was in such a state that he would’ve done anything, anything in the world to make his father stop hating him. He’d tried lying already and it hadn’t worked. So he told the truth—all of it.
Part of Nix had been relieved to hear his father say that he would never, ever meet that boy again.
“I was normal,” he said now, curled up on the berth with his face pressed on Dick’s lap. “Before you came along.”
Dick was silent for a moment at that, and when he spoke he sounded a little out of breath.
“I’m sorry, Lew,” he murmured.
They endured in silence the next slamming of the ship, which was not as bad the third time around, though Nix heard Dick hiss when the back of his head bumped against the wall. After one last round of waltz, it all went quiet.
Had Nix been any more sober, he would have probably left, staggered down to his bunk in the crew’s quarters and slept the night away, or not.
As it was, he pretended to be asleep until he wasn’t pretending anymore.