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When you are granted your next furlough, I would rather you not return to your father and I. Perhaps when the fighting is over and done with, but not now.
Gerard pulls his hand from his pocket and presses it to his stomach, right against his belt that’s been digging painfully into his freshly-packed GSW for the last however many hours. He’s shaky on his legs and the back of his neck feels clammy, and all he wants to do is crawl somewhere dark and quiet and get this damn uniform off — darker and quieter than that boat was, anyhow.
The letter in his pocket, the one he’s read enough times since receiving it through the army’s mail service he could recite it in his sleep, led Gerard to believe he’d be stepping foot back in Jersey with no one there to greet him, and he’s accepted that fact, so he’s taken aback when a familiar face emerges from the crowd of soldiers being whisked away by their wives and families.
Gerard tightens his grip on the handle of his footlocker, swallowing around his impossibly dry throat, and heads towards Jamia.
She’s wearing a polka-dotted dress that does wonders for her figure and her black hair is pinned up beneath a dainty little hat and Gerard doesn’t think he’s been so relieved to see the woman whose fiancé he’d last kissed less than a day ago.
When he gets near, heart beating out a tune against his rib cage that Benny Goodman would have trouble conducting, she lifts a hand covered in a lacy white glove to shield her eyes from the late June sun and says, “Welcome home, soldier. You look like Hell warmed over.”
Despite it all, Gerard finds himself cracking a smile. He sets his footlocker down. “I was fine when I boarded, but I guess twelve hours on a boat isn’t the best place for a guy who’s been recently — shot.”
He has to look away when the word gets caught behind his Adam’s apple, and like it’s sentient, the wound in his gut gives a throb beneath his belt, and he has to dig the heel of his palm into it.
When he looks back at Jamia, her teeth are digging into her bottom lip, painted red to match her dress, and he says lightly, “Ain’t you a vision.”
She lets out an exasperated breath and grabs his footlocker, and luckily whatever she was biting her lip at has passed from her mind for now. “My mother thought I should look respectable,” she says. “Come on, the smell of the docks is killing me.”
She starts walking, the weight of Gerard’s trunk throwing her off balance slightly, and he follows after her at a slower pace. “You’ve never been respectable a day in your life,” he retorts, and the way he’s already fallen back into their easy banter despite not having seen each other for nearly a year and a half makes him feel less like roadkill and more like — well, something almost like himself.
“That’s what I tried to tell her, but she still insisted on me wearing this stinkin’ dress.”
Jamia stops at a pale yellow coupé with its top down parked out by the road and heaves Gerard’s footlocker into the backseat. He pauses, eyebrow raised at the sight of the mint convertible, and says, “Since when do you own a car?”
Jamia rounds the front and pulls open the driver’s side door. “Since Uncle Sam got all my boys by the ear and my parents decided it’s not safe for a gal like me to walk places on my own.”
He sighs, and he swears the letter in his pocket starts to feel a little hot. He tightens his fingers around his belt, feeling and probably looking like an old cowboy holding onto his buckle.
“I know you’d … probably rather be welcoming Frank home. Than me.”
Jamia is toe-to-toe with him suddenly, and her sweet perfume engulfs him as much as the hands she has on either side of his burning face. “Didn’t you hear what I said?” she says gently yet fiercely. “You’re all my boys.”
Gerard stares down at her Mary Jane’s, not saying anything. He’s not sure he could, not with her steady hands on him, grounding him. Making him realize all at once how desperately he’s missed home. With his brothers with him at the front, and his parents occupied by their own efforts, he thought he had all he needed, but now that he’s back, he realizes he was wrong.
She takes her hands away and he’s unmoored again. “Between you and me, though, I’m glad you’re home first. Frank’s fine over there. He’s in his element, you know?” Gerard knows; they’ve all joked that Frank came out of the womb ready to fight for a just cause. “And Ray has a job to do. But … ,” The words get stoppered up in Jamia’s throat, and he finally looks up at her face to find her eyes brimming with tears. She scrunches her nose up so she doesn’t cry, because Jamia Nestor has always been a girl of steel. “But you and — and Mikey, you’re not made for war. No offense.”
Gerard scrunches his nose up too, even though he came out of the womb a crybaby and never grew out of it. “None taken.”
She reaches between them and starts smoothing her hands nervously over his coat, fiddling with his buttons and pins and the medal he’d gotten for throwing himself in front of a sniper. She won’t meet Gerard’s eye, and that’s never a good sign. He’s about to suggest they get in the car and get away from here when a sob escapes her painted mouth and she throws her arms around his sore, stiff neck.
“Thank God you’re home,” she cries into his shoulder.
Gerard holds the back of her head and she holds his and they cry quietly together while New Jersey bustles around them like an old, noisy friend.
Sometimes he forgets that Mikey wasn’t just his little brother.
The moment comes to an end when Gerard can’t stand to be on his feet any longer. Jamia presses a kiss to his ear, wipes black mascara on the back of her white glove, and grins big and wide when they pull apart. And despite how fragile the smile is, he knows she won’t cry over any of this again. Gerard can’t say the same for himself; it’s been nearly a fortnight since they stormed the beaches of Normandy and he’s lost count of how many times he’s broken down.
When they’re driving away in the yellow coupé, the wind blowing Gerard’s hair out of what’s left of its feeble Brylcreem hold, he leans over and all but shouts, “Do you think I could stay with you? At least for a little while?”
He’s spent long enough sleeping alone in the hospital, too used to sharing tents and being part of a dogpile in the foxholes — and nothing sounds worse than being alone right now.
Jamia isn’t one to judge, but the look she gives him over her sunglasses is one of utter confusion. “Didn’t your mother tell you? Your place had to be given up ‘cause of the housing shortage. You’ll be staying with me longer than a little while.”
Well. His mother only sent him the one letter since Mikey died and she didn’t mention that. In fact, she didn’t say much outside of Don’t come home. Gerard pinches the bridge of his nose. He’d sent his parents three whole pages of writing, all of which sounded nothing short of a diary entry, and all he got in return was a single measly paragraph that broke his heart more than it’s already been broken.
So, no, he had no idea him and his brother’s apartment no longer belonged to them. But he’s partly relieved, because going back there, surrounded by all their things, sounds worse than being alone.
Jamia continues, “When I found out, I packed up all your stuff and brought it back to the house. Mikey’s is with your parents.”
Gerard practically melts into the seat in relief. Jamia is an angel if he’s ever met one, and he almost did, lying on that table in that tiny French cottage. “Thank you.”
She takes his hand. “Nothing to thank me for, champ. Putting you up is the least I could do. And besides, it’ll be nice to cook for someone other than myself again.”
Gerard closes his eyes. So far, it’s damn good to be home.
It’s nearing noon when Jamia pulls into the driveway of her and Frank’s house, and it seems bigger than Gerard remembers. It’s only one story, with a basement and two small rooms, but it looks like paradise from where he’s sitting, where he’s been. Like an oasis after being in the desert for the last two years. But he’s terrified to go in.
“Hey,” Jamia says from the stoop to the side door, his footlocker in one hand and her other on her waist. “You comin’, slugger?”
Gerard gets out of the car, feeling like a fool instead of a soldier — a hero, as Schechter kept calling him when he was drugged out of his gourd in the hospital. He feels like he’s wearing some ridiculous costume.
He knew when he got the draft that he was going somewhere he wasn’t meant to be, and despite his brothers at his side, he’d felt out of place the whole time they were training and the whole time they were at the front, but he never expected to feel out of place in a place he knows so well. Is this how his father felt when he came home from the first war? Like he was a stranger all of a sudden?
Jamia waves him in when he finally gets up the nerve to go up the stone steps, and the kitchen he walks into is just the sort of cool and quiet he’s been yearning for. But the feeling of being out of place gets worse when he sees how clean the kitchen is; the floor is shiny and smells like bleach, and there isn’t a dirty dish in the sink. Gerard is hyper-aware of the dirt under his nails and the old socks hiding in his boots. He feels like a stain. He hopes he isn’t tracking mud in.
“You believe this?” Jamia says. She’s leaning an arm on one of the kitchen chairs. The table is covered in casserole dishes and pie tins. His footlocker is nowhere to be found and he wonders when she left the room. “And here I was looking forward to cooking for you.”
“What is all this?” he asks, looking over the buffet he hadn’t noticed.
She blows out a breath and flicks her hand. “The town gets wind of a soldier heading stateside and they think they’ve got to empty their pantries for him. Plus, you know how popular Mikey is.” A painful pause. “Was.”
Gerard tugs at his belt.
“Let’s get out of these ludicrous clothes, huh? I know you won’t mind if I sit around without a brassiere on. Come on.”
Gerard smiles faintly and follows her down the hallway into the bedroom. His footlocker is there waiting for him on the bed, and he notices the standing mirror behind it is covered in photographs of Frank. The sight warms him a little; the trip from Europe to the States is the longest Gerard has been away from him since they got put in the same company, so he’s starting to miss him. But he’s also embarrassed, to be standing in the bedroom Frank shares with his wife-to-be, and Gerard swears for a split second he can taste him on his tongue.
Jamia catches him staring at the mirror and laughs. “Don’t mind my shrine, Frank set it up before he shipped out. I don’t like him that much.”
She starts pulling her dress off and he turns away, but not before catching a glimpse of pale skin that makes him swallow.
He’s known Jamia for years, so why is he now feeling bashful around her? Did the war change him that much? Isolated him from women that much? Or is it because he’s been harboring these queer feelings for Frank for what feels like their whole lives and finally got the chance to do something about it and Jamia has no earthly idea? He knows what Frank told him, about how she knows things like that happen, but he’s never met a girl who was fine with her fella fooling around with other fellas, war be damned. It just doesn’t seem right.
(And it also sounds too good to be true.)
Gerard must’ve really gotten his priorities scrambled when he got himself shot, because he watched his only brother die just a couple weeks ago and here he is worrying about relationships.
Holding his breath, Gerard takes his belt and coat off, listening to Jamia change behind him and trying his best not to peep at her reflection in the mirror. After his coat comes his nice button down and tie, and under that is his undershirt, with a large stain that’s rust-colored around the edges he was expecting. He’s oozed through his dressing, and the skin around the bandages when he peels the undershirt off is warm and red, his belly swollen where he was shot. He sighs at the sight and sits down heavily at the foot of the bed.
“Frank told me you were all healed up!” Jamia crows, coming over in a crewneck and shorts. She’s taken her hat off and pulled her dark hair into a more casual-looking ponytail. She looks like the girl next door he remembers, the one who was writing them all letters at the front doused in her familiar perfume. She looks like home.
Gerard leans back on his elbows and fights the urge to lay back completely and just fall asleep right here. “Frank had his own bullethole to worry about.” Not to mention a nose that was very much broken, thanks to him.
Jamia stands over him with her hands on her hips, and Gerard feels exposed in the worst way. He knows how he looks to her, with his ribs showing through his skin and the hollows in his cheeks. She’s as curvy as ever, if not a little more so than he remembers — shapely and healthy-looking. When he catches his own eye in the mirror, the contrast between them is laughable.
“I feel like a — puzzle piece that’s been chewed on by the family dog,” he says suddenly. He thought he’d gotten all of his bitterness out when he was traipsing around London with a bottle of champagne, settled on a sort of resignation that’s left him bone-tired, but apparently not. All he had to do was come home.
Jamia, not a single ounce of shame in her body, unbuttons Gerard’s pants and starts sliding them down his legs. “Even busted puzzle pieces belong,” she tells him as she undresses him. “With a little TLC and accommodation from the pieces around it, it can still fit.”
Gerard lets himself be pulled to his feet once he’s in his skivvies and says, “That was … uncharacteristically profound.”
Whether it’s from the pressure of his belt and heavy coat being taken away or how fast he stood up, his entire middle seizes up painfully when he’s standing and he finds himself doubling over into Jamia’s arms. She catches him and presses her face into his hair.
“You’re lucky I did that stint with the Red Cross at the beginning of the war. C’mon, the medicine cabinet could put Johnson & Johnson to shame.”
She walks him to the bathroom across the hall, and when she sits him down on the closed toilet, he gets the strangest sense of déjà vu, and feels, for a split second, like he’s back at that nice hotel in London the weekend after the invasion. It doesn’t help the guilt that’s making it hard to look Jamia in the eye.
She peels the soiled dressing off his wound, and they both make a noise at the sight beneath it. Jamia busies herself with getting ointments and bandages from the cabinet over the sink, and it makes Gerard smile, just a bit. He would’ve smiled when Frank was cleaning him up too, flashbacks from when they were all young and reckless flashing through his mind like a vignette, but he didn’t have a lick of strength left in him then.
Here he is now, in a nice little house with a picket fence and a mailbox out front in a decent town like Fair Lawn, and a beautiful woman is patching him up. It’s heartbreakingly domestic, and something he wasn’t expecting to ever experience, both because of him getting drafted and because of the hold Frank has on his heart.
“Were you also looking forward to coddling someone?” he asks Jamia when she’s dabbing something sticky and translucent over his stitches.
She smiles. “I never should’ve left the Red Cross, now all I’ve got is my own papercuts to bandage up.”
“You and Ray’ll have a lot to talk about when he gets back.”
After the ointment comes an oversized Band-Aid that Jamia adheres to his skin with careful pressure, and instead of a sulfa tablet he gets a regular painkiller that he swallows down with a cupful of water from the tap. She continues her coddling by helping him dress in an outfit he hasn’t seen since he shipped out, from the closet she shares with Frank, and feeds him food given to her by the neighbors until he feels like he’s fit to burst.
It’s when she’s washing their dishes at the sink and he’s chewing anxiously on a cinnamon-flavored toothpick at the table that he decides he just can’t keep his mouth shut anymore. The home cooking might have soothed his stomach, but his mind is racing worse than ever.
“Jamia, I’ve been in love with Frank since I was nineteen.”
He thinks it’s only fair she knows, considering she’s letting him stay with her and all. He’s never been good with guilt, that’s why he wrote his parents a three-page letter.
She doesn’t miss a beat when she says, “I’ve been in love with him since I was thirteen.” She throws a grin over her shoulder that makes him drop the toothpick. “Beat you there, champ.”
He stares at the back of her head while she finishes the dishes, and he has to get up and go into the bedroom because the casualness of the moment is almost as bad as if she accused him of adultery. He fishes his half-empty pack of crushed smokes from the bottom of his footlocker and puts a stick in his mouth, lighting up with his Zippo that he’d wanted to leave with Frank but Frank insisted he’d take home with him. He doesn’t even think to ask Jamia if it’s alright to smoke indoors, too used to lighting up anywhere and everywhere and whenever, and when he realizes what he’s doing, he opens a window, stubs the cigarette out on the sill, and throws it outside with a frustrated sigh.
“Frank loves you too, you know.”
Gerard turns on his heel, and there Jamia stands. “What?” he says on a smoky exhale.
She stays where she is, leaning up against the doorframe and absently picking at her nail polish while she looks at him with her soft eyes. “He’s loved you as long as he’s known you, I think. I’ve been saying he should tell you for years now, because we both had our suspicions about you.”
“He kissed me.” Gerard swallows. “When we were — After Mikey. And I kissed him back.”
The corners of her mouth quirk upwards, which, despite everything that’s been said, is still not how he was expecting her to react to this. “I know. He wrote to tell me all about it. I said back that it was about damn time.”
“And you’re … fine with it?” he asks her, his heart beating hard and hopeful against his sternum.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she shrugs. “I’ve had my flings, he has his, but we always come back to each other. Frank and I have always had a sort of … open relationship. We trust each other.”
He stares at her in something like wonder. “I’ve never met a girl like you before.”
Jamia pushes off the wall and comes over. She puts her arms around his neck. “And there won’t ever be another like me.”
She pulls him in for a hug, and, chin hooked over her shoulder, Gerard says quietly, “What if this isn’t just a fling for me?”
She pulls back and smiles like it’s the easiest thing in the world. “Then welcome to the family.”
And then she kisses the corner of his mouth and goes out as quick as she slipped in, leaving Gerard wondering what sort of fairy tale he stepped off that boat into.
Frank is in love with Gerard and Jamia, the woman he’s going to marry when he gets back, and Jamia is welcoming Gerard into — what? into their relationship with open arms? It’s blissful madness!
Gerard finds her straightening up the kitchen when he finally manages to go back out, and she looks like she hasn’t a care in the world, like the war isn’t even happening, but there's still some things he needs to get straight in his head.
“Why should Frank get the love of two people and not you?”
“I could say the same about you.”
“I just mean — is this fair? This — this arrangement?”
She turns around, her hands on her hips. “Gerard, this isn’t a business deal. We like each other too, don’t we? No one’s pulling the short straw here.”
She’s right, is the thing. He’s always been a little sweet on her, anyway. Who wouldn’t be? But she’s been Frank’s, and Frank’s been the one taking up the most room in his heart, so he never dared try anything on her. (Or anyone else, for that matter. That’s how dizzy he is for Frank.) But now here the three of them are, in some sort of mutual triangle, and ain’t life something?
“Yeah, you’re alright.”
She throws a dish towel at him, and he catches it with reflexes he never had before stepping foot in that boot camp in Trenton.
“So. Do you want to go see your folks today, or would you rather just wait for tomorrow?”
Gerard’s hand involuntarily clenches at his side, but the letter is still in the pocket of his uniform back in the bedroom. He keeps his voice steady when he says, “I’d rather wait a while. I don’t … think I can go home. Not there. Not yet.”
Gerard doesn’t remember much from that weekend after their shift on the beach before Frank kissed him, but he knows how adamant Frank was about him going home himself and no one else, but there are exceptions. There are always exceptions when it comes to war.
“I get that it’ll be hard, but you can’t avoid them the whole time.”
“The whole time when?”
Her eyebrows shoot down beneath her thick bangs. “At Mikey’s funeral.”
His stomach drops to his curled toes. “They haven’t buried him yet?”
“I said they should wait since you were coming home soon. Gerard, have you corresponded with your parents at all?”
His blood going up, Gerard storms back off towards the bedroom, his sore body complaining at the heavy tread of his bare feet on the hardwood floor. His uniform is laying haphazardly on the made bed, and he tears the letter from the pocket of his jacket.
One of the things that comforted him between sending out his sorry novel and now was the assumption that he wouldn’t have to attend the funeral, that he wouldn’t have to see his little brother get put in the ground. He thought all of that would be taken care of before he got back.
Jamia is at his side now, and he thrusts the crumpled letter at her.
(And after receiving this particular piece of correspondence, he didn’t think he’d be invited to the funeral anyway.)
He watches Jamia read over his mother’s small, cursive writing, and can follow along without even having to look at it;
Gerard,
We have received your letter. It came before the telegram from Western Union did. It did not save us any heartbreak though, as you wished in your writing. We would have prefered to hear the news from the Secretary of War, but instead we had to find out from our own firstborn that he’d let his only brother die at the hands of a dirty German when the only thing we’d asked of him was to keep him safe. Your long-winded letter was not a comfort, but a hindrance. You expressed regret and shame, but that does not justify what you have done and what you have taken from us. When you are granted your next furlough, I would rather you not return to your father and I. Perhaps when the fighting is over and done with, but not now. For now we need time to grieve the loss of our sons.
Sincerely,
Mother and Father
Jamia looks up at him, her knuckles white around the delicate piece of paper. “How could a mother write such awful things to her own son?”
He takes the letter from her and folds it up neatly, then tucks it back into the pocket of his uniform. “When he gets her other son killed, I guess,” he says. “She always liked Mikey better anyway.”
She makes an indignant noise and takes the letter out again. Before he can ask what she’s doing, she’s holding the edge of his Zippo to it. He snatches it away from her, but the flame eats the paper up too quickly to save it.
When the thing that’s been giving him almost as much grief as his brother’s death is reduced to ash that falls to the carpet like snow, he says harshly, “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Jamia goes to hang his uniform in the closet. “If I know you, Gerard Way, you’ve been torturing yourself with that horseshit since you got it.” Despite how calm her movements are, she sounds furious.
“I said everything she did in my own letter. My mother didn’t lie, Jamia, she just confirmed what I already know.”
When she looks at him again, her gaze is like granite. “She did lie, and so are you. I don’t have to have been on that beach to know what happened to Mikey wasn’t your fault. If your mother believes he died because of you, then she has another thing coming. No amount of grief turns you that evil.”
Gerard remembers what he’d said and did to Frank in that tavern in London and thinks it’s entirely possible. Grief can do strange things to people.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she says again, gentler. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault except that dirty German’s.”
He presses his naked toe into the ashes from the disintegrated letter, and he watches as it turns his skin black. “You sound like Frank.”
“Not sure if that’s a compliment or not.”
A laugh escapes his tight mouth, but it soon turns into a sob, and he’s left crying into his hands. He’s trembling all over, and he feels like a leaf in a thunderstorm, like he’ll never be still again until he snaps off his branch and is blown away. But then Jamia wraps him up in her sure hold, and his heart is soothed. He realizes all at once he never wants to leave the circle of her arms.
Frank was the one thing getting Gerard through the war, and now that he’s home, that burdensome honor has gone to Jamia. But like Frank, it seems more like an honor than a burden to her.
And he thinks maybe he could get used to this.
The funeral is early the next morning, and after a fitful sleep in Frank and Jamia’s (uncomfortable) marriage bed that was broken up by the usual nightmares and a breakfast he almost couldn’t hold down, the two of them dress in their Sunday best and head to the church Mikey’s service is being held at.
Ray’s wife, Christa, is the first to greet them, and she kisses them both on the cheek when they’re barely out of the car.
“You both look beautiful,” she says in her high, pretty voice. “There’s enough people in uniforms here already, it’s making me sad.”
Gerard is wearing a suit he thought he’d gotten rid of years ago but was waiting for him in Frank and Jamia’s closet, and he’s been embarrassed of the fact he’s not in his dress greens until now. He just couldn’t stand to put them back on, and he’s glad he’s not the only one to feel that way.
“It’s good to see you, Christa,” he says to her.
She clicks her tongue and kisses his cheek again. “You too. I just wish it wasn’t under these circumstances, you know?”
Gerard definitely knows.
He shakes enough hands and receives enough pats on the back and kisses on his cheeks to last him a lifetime. He sees family he hasn’t seen since he was a child, and friends of Mikey’s he never even knew existed, and by the time they all head up the hill to the plot his father had picked out for the two of them when they’d first gotten their orders, he’s exhausted.
His parents are standing in front of the large black casket set up on its stand like they’re presenting a pig at the county fair, and while his mother receives condolences from everyone Gerard has already seen, she doesn’t look like the woman who wrote the letter Jamia burned yesterday. She’s in her pearls and smartest dress, and his father is standing at her side leaning on his cane looking like he’s dealing with a bout of constipation, and Gerard is disgusted at the sight of them. He almost asks Jamia if they can leave — he’s sure Mikey wouldn’t mind.
“Do you want a minute alone?”
“No,” Gerard says immediately, setting his jaw.
Jamia leans into him. “I meant with Mikey.”
His heart jumps in his chest, and he swallows and nods. She goes to greet his parents, distracting them enough for him to squeeze in next to them and put a hand on the lid of the casket.
Despite the rough night, he was sure he’d be okay today, sure he got out all the blubbering he’s needed to get out over the last couple weeks, but his brother’s lifeless, ravaged body is right there beneath his hand, and he just can’t handle it. He falls over the casket much like how he fell over the mailbox when he’d sent that letter to his mother, and his dog tags, all three of them, slip out of his collar and clatter against the hard lacquer.
“You stupid bastard,” he cries. “I’m sorry I let you down, I’m so fucking sorry, Mikes, Jesus Christ.”
Hands around his waist pull him away, and he goes willingly, but between his heaving emotions and Jamia’s fingers digging a little too hard into his still-sensitive wound, he ends up vomiting bile into the grass not a foot away from the hole his brother’s going to call home.
He sees his parents watching him with a sort of detached disdain when he’s wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and Jamia walks him to the back row of folding chairs and past the hushed crowd. They sit down next to Christa, and she hands him a tin of Altoids and a handkerchief embroidered with Ray’s name with a sympathetic smile. He takes them gratefully.
Gerard feels himself fall into a sort of comatose state when the priest wanders over to perform the brief ceremony, but when Father is singing praises about Mikey’s accomplishments that only their company knows the unsavory details of and the noble sacrifice of his young life that helped liberate France, a car somewhere out in the distance backfires, and Gerard jolts in his seat like he just got shot all over again. For a very brief second the suits and dresses around him flash green and khaki.
He finds himself gripping his stomach with one hand and Jamia’s hand with the other, and while he’s trying to catch his breath, his mother turns around in her chair and looks over her sunglasses at them.
He doesn’t let go of Jamia’s hand, and eventually, when his mother looks forward again, Jamia slips her fingers between Gerard’s and squeezes. Unlike Frank’s hands, which are calloused and weather-beaten and feel as much like a shelter as their foxholes and tents, hers is soft, and strong, and makes him feel safe in an entirely different and welcomed way.
Mikey gets lowered into the ground, followed by holy water and roses and spadefuls of dirt (and splashes of liquor from those friends Gerard never met), and the mourning party returns to their cars to head to Mr. and Mrs. Way’s house for drinks and appetizers like this is just a college graduation party and not a funeral in the middle of a worldwide war. He again almost asks Jamia if they can blow the get-together off, but he figures he owes his appearance to the family members that don’t think him a monster changed by said war.
Stepping into his parents’ house is worse than stepping into Jamia and Frank’s, and he almost doesn’t make it over the threshold. While everyone is swallowing down wine and finger sandwiches and telling stories about Mikey like the last years of his life weren’t spent in the shit, all he sees is the notches in the doorframe to the living room that tracked their heights and the chip in the banister where Mikey crashed when he got his first pair of rollerskates and the stain on the hearth from when the two of them tried to paint each other’s nails with their mom’s polish, and it’s all too much.
Not long after arriving he has to get away, and the urge carries him up the creaky, familiar staircase, down the hallway lined with family photographs, and into the room him and Mikey used to share before it became just Mikey’s when Gerard moved out at eighteen.
It’s been used as storage for the last five-odd years, but it’s even more packed than he remembers it being; fresh boxes not covered in dust and cobwebs sit on the old bed, and the closet stands open stuffed full of Mikey’s clothes. The books that were on his brother’s side of the bookshelf at their apartment are piled in the bay window, music records spill out of a milk crate on the floor, comic books, drawings with tape on their corners, knickknacks he forgot they owned stand out from the things they grew out of and the things their parents grew tired of looking at. His and Mikey’s entire lives are right here in this tiny room. This is the exact reason why he was dreading going back to their apartment.
Feeling like he has lead attached to his wingtip shoes, Gerard picks a box at random and trudges towards it, and finds it full of loose photographs, ones they had thrown in every working drawer at the apartment. He shoves his hand in like the man who called his number in the draft lottery, and pulls out a 5x8 he remembers posing for like it was yesterday.
By yesterday he means 1932, and pose is a bit of a stretch as they didn’t know the picture was being taken until they got the film developed. It was when Gerard got his first job selling cameras, and the one this picture was taken with was given to him as payment for his first week of work. They were showing Ray the camera, who had a real taste for photography even at fifteen, and taking pictures of everything around town — fire hydrants, storefronts, girls they thought were pretty. Eventually they met up with Frank at the corner drugstore, and him and Ray fought over the camera until one of them accidentally pressed the shutter button. The picture they got is the one in Gerard’s hands now, and it’s blurry and off-center and shows him and Mikey sitting at the counter of the drugstore laughing at their friends with a tall egg cream waiting to be sucked down between them.
In the photograph Gerard’s cheeks are round with the baby fat he’d only lost because of the war, and Mikey’s specs are slimmer than the ones he was most likely buried in, and he’s crying before he realizes it.
The floor groans behind him but he doesn’t stifle himself, having learned in the army that self-consciousness is a luxury those in battle can’t afford. Thankfully, though, it’s only Jamia, and she rubs his back through his suit jacket in wide, comforting circles.
“You know I didn’t even get to say goodbye to him?” she says quietly, like they’re in a library or a shrine. “The day you lot left was so chaotic I didn’t get the chance. I figured it was fine because I’d see him when you won the war.”
Gerard drops the photograph face down into the box and wraps his arms around her.
“I miss him,” she goes on. “And Ray, and Frank. I miss Frank so much.”
Gerard presses his lips against her temple and Jamia presses her nose into his neck, and she inhales like she’s smelling a bouquet of flowers. The breath she lets out sounds like a sigh.
“You smell like him,” she whispers.
He tightens his hold. “You feel like him.”
And then they’re kissing.
Jamia kisses like Frank, like the person on the other end of her mouth is the only person in the world and they deserve her undivided and undying attention. And Gerard kisses her not the way he kissed Frank, in a desperate way, but the way he thinks Frank would kiss her; in a savory and worshipful way, because women deserve to be worshipped, even if it’s just with a kiss shared in a childhood bedroom.
Her lips are like her hands, like the sort of flowers you could trample beneath your boot and every time they’ll spring back up. He feels her jaw open beneath his fingers in her gentle devouring, her mouth hot and sweet. Beneath the waxy lipstick, the toothpaste she’d used that morning, the lime from her soda water, he swears she tastes like Frank, and he wonders if she’s thinking the same thing about him.
When she pulls back, mouth swollen and rubbed red beneath her smeared makeup, she says into his chin, “It’s like he’s here.” She looks up at him, and her eyes are fierce. “And so are you.”
And so is he.
There’s a creak on the stairs, and the two of them spring apart like he’s back in Europe sneaking around with Frank. An unfamiliar voice says, “I don’t think there’s a bathroom up here,” and another replies, “Yeah, let’s go back down.”
Gerard and Jamia look at each other and start to laugh.
When the flush in their cheeks fade away and their clothes are straightened and Gerard feels a little lighter than he has all morning, they head back downstairs, and Jamia pours him a glass of cheap wine and they stand out of the way.
His mother drifts into the room, his father trailing behind like a shadow or a tethered ghost, and the two of them come over. Not close enough to start a conversation with them, but close enough to start a conversation where they’ll hear it. The woman Gerard’s mother is talking to is her friend from church, a friend him and Mikey always liked, but now she won’t even look at him.
“You think they’re talking about us?” Jamia asks, loud enough the two women glance over.
His mother says to her friend in a stage whisper, “That’s Jamia Nestor. She’s engaged to Frank Iero Jr.”
“Oh, I remember him,” says the friend. “I never liked that boy.”
“Mhm. The two of them have a house over in Fair Lawn.”
Jamia is snickering and Gerard is trying to get her to stop, but the moment his mother’s friend says, “They’re living together? Next thing you know they’ll be having a baby out of wedlock!”, she grows pale and hurries from the room.
Gerard puts his wine down and follows after her. She slips into the bathroom down the hall and shuts the door in his face.
“Jamia,” he says through the wood. “Are you okay?”
The only answer he gets is retching, and he waits with his back up against the wall for her to come out.
When the door opens and Jamia emerges ashen-faced, he holds out a hand and says, “I’m sure Mikey’ll be pleased to know at least two people tossed their guts at his funeral.”
Her dark eyebrows create a canyon above her eyes. “Can we leave?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
He pulls her by the hand through the large house, past the people who haven’t bothered to say anything to either of them since leaving the cemetery, and out into the fresh air.
They drive home in silence, they put on their pajamas in silence even though it’s only lunchtime — Jamia wearing a pair of Frank’s boxer shorts, of all things — they roll a couple cigarettes on the porch in silence, and Gerard doesn’t understand why Jamia was so affected over what his mother and her friend said, being the woman of steel that she is, until she says, “I’m pregnant.”
Gerard almost bites clean through his cigarette. Tobacco between his teeth and smoke pouring from his nose and mouth, he splutters, “What? How?”
She flicks ash carelessly at her feet and slumps a little lower in her chair, her legs stretching out so they just touch the railing at the edge of the cramped porch. “Well, Gerard, when a boy and a girl love each other very much — ”
He stubs the cigarette out in the ashtray, the whole thing collapsing beneath his fingers, and leans towards her over the arm of his chair. “No, I mean — when?”
She sighs. “Remember back in March when Frank busted his foot open on that rusty bullet casing and got sent home for the weekend because they thought he got tetanus?”
Gerard nods and says, “Yeah,” before realizing just what she’s saying. “Hold on, how did you know about that? Frank made us swear we wouldn’t tell you! I thought he wasn’t going to see you then.”
She looks him in the eye and points her cigarette at him. “First of all, women know everything, so remember that.” She takes a drag. “He called me up from the hospital and I snuck in to see him when he was laid up, and I was so PO’d at his stupidity I just had to have sex with him.”
“Is this your way of telling me to beat it?” Part of him says it as a joke, but another part, a louder part, is afraid this has all just been some elaborate mirage, like he was right and it really is too good to be true. Three people being in a relationship together is one thing, but two of those people having a baby? How could that possibly work?
Jamia chucks her cigarette over the railing into the bushes like she’s throwing a dart and says, “This is my way of asking if you’ll stay. If Frank doesn’t come back.”
“Frank is gonna come back.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Way,” she says in a hard voice. “I know as well as you do that this war takes. I lost my brother just like you did. I don’t care how much I think Frank’ll be fine.”
Gerard wrings his hands together tightly. He forgot about her brother, shot down over Africa in ‘41. He forgot all about the similar hurt she’s been carrying around with her all this time. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Come here.”
He goes over and gets on his knees between her legs. She guides his head to rest on her stomach and he wraps his fingers around the back of her chair.
“If we’re gonna do this,” she says shakily, hands in his hair, “if the two of us are gonna be together too, then I need to know that you’re okay with having a — a baby. If Frank gets himself killed over there.”
Despite his queerness, and how blinded Frank’s had him since they were teenagers, Gerard has always dreamt about having a wife and a family and a little house with a little white picket fence. And now here he has it all, quicker than he ever could have hoped for, and he doesn’t even have to resort to hiding his queerness or choosing to spend his life dating fellas and never being able to get married or have kids. Thanks to Jamia, he can have it all.
This isn’t too good to be true, it’s like a damn miracle.
“I can’t do this alone,” Jamia says.
Feeling like he’s been filled with helium, like the horror he was in and has seen was the mirage all along, Gerard presses his face into the soft fabric of her pajama shirt and says, “I’m all in.”
Jamia melts into her chair in relief, like that was just the thing she’d needed to hear to reach Nirvana, and she grabs him by the sides of his face and pulls him up for a kiss that’s the same sort of incredible as the one him and Frank shared in the bath.
Gerard is overcome suddenly, the last two years and two weeks and two hours all erupting from him at once, and he kisses down her throat until he reaches her shirt. From there he heads for the next closest spot of naked skin and pushes the boxer shorts up to attach his mouth to the lily-white skin of her thighs, as soft as the silk stockings she had to donate to the war effort. She grips his hair tight, her engagement ring scratching against his scalp, and tries to push his face into a place he’s already working his way to.
And it’s miraculous.
Gerard never thought being back in the safety and familiarity of home would be so hard.
All he’d wanted while they were praying to see another day when they didn’t think they’d make it through the night was to be right here where he is now, but the little things, the things he’d clung to, aren’t the way he remembers them.
He doesn’t want to feel out of place here anymore, not with Jamia’s promises shining on him like a beacon of hope, but he finds he just can’t sleep in her and Frank’s bed — nor on the couch — because it’s too soft for his liking, so he resorts to sleeping in a nest of blankets on the bedroom floor, but even that doesn’t stop the nightmares from coming. And not only that, but can’t take showers because he finds them too anxiety-inducing when he can’t hear anything over the hailstorm of water, and worse yet, half the time he eats he can barely keep it down because it’s either too much food or it’s just too rich for his war-whittled stomach.
The first time Jamia puts the fan on for them while they’re listening to the radio sends him into a panic because the cold on his skin reminds him of all their winters in the forest and how Ray almost lost a toe to frostbite last year, and he can’t help Jamia with the grocery shopping because the supermarket is louder than the shower and thrice as crowded. He’s home, but he feels like he’s experiencing it behind a movie screen with a war reel playing over it. He feels like everything but the woman he’s playing house with has been ruined for him, tainted, and it’s almost as devastating as when he saw Mikey fall.
Gerard told Frank that weekend that he can never go home, and maybe there was some truth in it after all. Frank told him he was going home a hundred percent himself, but he feels as if he left at least forty-five percent behind.
Gerard brings this up to Jamia one night about ten days after he stepped off the boat. He’d just woken up from a nightmare, the one he has the most where he’s in Ray’s place and Mikey dies beneath his hands, and he’s smoking his last cigarette he’d brought back with him from the front when he realizes it’s all just too much to keep to himself.
Staring at his empty footlocker beneath the bed and flicking the lid of his beaten Zippo open and shut, he says, “I feel like I brought the war home with me.”
His voice sounds impossibly loud in the heavy darkness of the bedroom, and it feels like it swells the longer Jamia takes to answer him. Finally she peeks her head over the side of the bed, her long black hair curtaining around her pale moon of a face.
“Hate to break it to you, but the war’s been home. You know when I had my last day at the factory before I started living off Frank’s army pay, my floor matron called me a ‘soldier on the home front’?”
Gerard blows smoke towards the ceiling and closes his eyes. He can feel sweat cooling in all his crevices. “I don’t wanna be ignorant, but I just want to wash my hands and be rid of it all. All the bad parts, at least.” He flicks his Zippo open and shut again, the sharp, familiar snick of the lid one of the only good things he brought back with him. “I was over there for so long that it’s all I know now. I forget how to be a normal fella.”
His lighter and smoke are both plucked from his hands, and he opens his eyes to find Jamia gone from his line of sight. When she reappears, sitting up in the bed now, she hands him a lit lady cigarette, one of those kinds that are long and thin and not strong enough.
“Good thing you’ve never been a normal fella,” she says with a smile that shines in the dark.
He sticks the fresh cigarette between his lips, so much sturdier than the ones he was smoking overseas and the hand-rolled ones the government keeps pushing them to make themselves, and smiles back. “How do you always know just what to say?”
She shrugs, and she looks like the Ghost Of What Could Be. “I’ve got the gift of gab.”
He falls asleep holding her hand over the edge of the bed.
Where Frank was the thing getting him through the war, Jamia is the thing getting him through the after, and she’s doing a damn good job.
The first thing she does the next morning after a lighter breakfast is pack up Gerard’s uniform and Zippo and even his empty cigarette pack into his footlocker, everything physical he brought back with him aside from the dog tags he wears around his neck, and shoves it onto an empty shelf in the linen closet. She tells him they’re all there whenever he wants to see them, to feel them, to remind himself he didn’t dream up the war, but for now — out of sight, out of mind.
And then, after he confides in her over his anxieties, she takes him shopping at one of the local five-and-dimes, smaller and quieter than the A&P, and as he picks out things they need and even a few they don’t from the shelves, he feels like a productive member of society for the first time since getting back, and he could cry at the simplicity of it.
Later that evening, while they’re eating dinner and listening to a comedy hour on the wireless, Gerard’s stitches start irritating him, and Jamia ushers him into a cool bath while their dishes are soaking in the sink. The radio gets turned off and the door to the bathroom stays open so Gerard can hear the hum of the Frigidaire and the neighbor’s dog and know everything’s a-okay.
She gets on her knees on the tiled bathroom floor and rolls her sleeves over her elbows. Again, that sense of déjà vu comes back to him, one of the only clear things in his mind from that weekend in London. Jamia dips her hands into the shallow water and plucks his stitches out carefully with a pair of tweezers. It’s more uncomfortable than painful, the feeling of his skin being tugged around strange, and it’s a bittersweet relief when they’re out.
“Well, that’s the last of my souvenirs.”
“That was one I had to get rid of, sorry.” Jamia balances herself on the edge of the tub and tugs on his dog tags. “Maybe you’ll have a scar to keep.”
As much as he wants to leave the war behind, this bullethole was the last thing he felt he had from Mikey, as stupid as it may sound. But he has his tags, and he has his memories, so he doesn’t bring this up to Jamia.
She trails her fingers down his chest, then pokes at his stomach. “Let me know when I can start feeding you more. I need to fatten you up so we match. I told you I wasn’t gonna do this alone, Gerry.”
He catches her hand before she can take it away and kisses her wet knuckles. She looks like she could melt right through the floor, and for a split second he hates Frank for leaving her here all alone.
“Am I the first one you told?”
“What, that I’m in the family way?” He nods and she sighs. “Yeah. I was starting to worry about what I was gonna do before Frank wrote to tell me you were coming home.”
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“What would be the point? It’s not like they’d discharge him just ‘cause his sweetheart was having his baby. Plenty of my girlfriends went through the whole thing alone. Some of their husbands didn’t even meet their kids until they were walking.”
“Would you have told your folks? If I hadn’t been — if I didn’t come home when I did?”
She uses her other hand to brush his hair off his forehead. He can see from where he’s sitting the sheen of sweat in the hollow of her collarbones, making her look like she’s sparkling. “Probably, but then Frank and I would be losing out on a lot of money. Families don’t like to support girls who get pregnant before they’re married, you heard what your mother’s friend said at the funeral.”
“I did,” he nods. “I guess if there’s one thing the army did right, it was sending me home when they did.”
“It sure was lucky.”
Yet another thing to thank his brother for, he supposes, but Mikey’s not the only person in need of some thanks.
“How could I thank you?” he asks her. “For everything you’ve done for me, Jamia.”
“Just be here.” She kisses him sweetly on the mouth, and Gerard, still holding her hand, pulls her into the tub with him.
Water floods the bathroom floor and Jamia’s soaked and her clothes are clinging to her body and they laugh and laugh and laugh.
And just like that, things are good again.
Jamia washes Gerard’s hair for him and irons his shirts for him and changes the station on the radio when the news gets too heavy. They take walks around the neighborhood and borrow books from the library and go to the movies for double and triple features. They drink warm milk in the middle of the night if he can’t get back to sleep after a nightmare, and smoke together in silence when Gerard feels like he can’t speak without vomiting up the war. And it’s good. He starts to regain some of himself again, percent by percent.
Jamia waits on him hand and foot, but not in a subservient, good little wife way (which is, frankly, her biggest nightmare), but like someone who’s missed having another person to take care of, someone who’s afraid of losing her boys again. She’s patient with him, and stern with him like a mother, and doesn’t treat him like a man cracked by a war he never wanted to fight in but just like the man she grew up with. He feels married to her.
Slowly but surely, Gerard acclimates. And slowly but surely, he falls in love with Jamia the same way he fell in love with Frank.
“Do you think it’s possible to love two people?” he asks her one morning while they’re still in bed.
It’s the Fourth of July, almost a month since Mikey died, and they decided to be a little lazy today, for the holiday’s sake. The bed they’re in is Gerard’s nest of blankets on the floor, and they’re squeezed in side-by-side on their backs between the dresser and the actual bed. Jamia decided to sleep with him here about a week ago despite Gerard’s arguments that it’ll be hell on her back, but sometimes she’s as stubborn as a mule.
Jamia throws her leg over his, her skin sticky from the heat even though it’s still early, and says, “I’d be concerned if you didn’t love more than one person.”
He pushes her leg away playfully. He’s not looking forward to today, with the parades and the firecrackers that are sure to fray his still-sensitive nerves, but right here, right now, all he’s focusing on is the hum of the Frigidaire and the birdsong outside the window above their heads.
“I mean in love.”
She takes a moment to answer, and when she does, it’s soft. “Sure. I think it’s possible for anyone, they just have to open their hearts and their minds up a little more.”
She turns her head on her pillow to look at him. Her lips are still sleep-swollen and there’s makeup smudged beneath her tired eyes and Gerard is in love with her.
“There’s a hell of a lot of people to fall in love with out there.”
Gerard props himself up on his elbow and snakes his hand up Jamia’s sleep shirt, past the small swell of her stomach. He cups her naked breast and leans down to kiss her mouth, tasting her heady morning breath and loving every second of it, and then sticks his hand up through the neck of her shirt to cradle her jaw.
“Did you and Frank make love?” she breathes, eyes fluttering closed.
The casualness of the question, the fact she asked him out loud and blatantly, gives him a thrill and he kisses her again. “No. We risked enough necking like we did.”
Jamia rubs her cheek against the patchy two-day stubble spreading across his jaw. “Well, when you do, he likes to be touched like this.”
And then she grabs him in a way that makes him see fireworks that are better than any ones that’ll light up the sky tonight.
Frank’s first letter since Gerard got sent home comes in when they’re drinking unsweetened iced tea on the front stoop later that day. They’re watching a bunch of the neighborhood kids play jacks in the street, yelling encouragements to each other when they’re not tackling one another into the pavement, and they don’t notice the postman until he’s practically at the bottom of the steps.
Jamia sucks in a sharp breath when she sees him, and Gerard feels like he’s going to faint until the man smiles brightly, tips his hat, and says, “Nothing from Western Union, don’t you worry. Just some bills!”
The stack of mail he hands Jamia really is just bills, except for the small envelope at the bottom with Frank’s name on the front. She tears it open, letting all the other mail scatter on the ground from her lap, and unfolds a piece of paper that’s riddled with tiny rectangular holes.
Jamia puts it up to her face and laughs at Gerard through the holes. “Looks like someone forgot you’re not on duty anymore.”
He takes the letter carefully and scrunches his nose at it. He thinks about some poor guy working for V-mail hunched over Frank’s letter with a penknife trying to censor every other word and almost laughs too. “Hopefully he didn’t have anything important to say.”
“He never does.” Jamia knocks back the last few sips of her iced tea like she’s taking a shot, and the clatter of the ice against her teeth makes the muscles in Gerard's neck go tight. She knocks her shoulder into his. “What’s it say? Did he ice old Adolf yet?”
Gerard reads the short letter, then reads it again, but the only parts he can make sense of are:
My dearest Jamia and her handsome roommate,
We’re sweating like whores in church over here —— Schechter always was a bastard in this sort of heat —— I hate this goddamn food, I wish I was eating —— Tomorrow —— is headed out to —— to help —— My shoulder is all —— the stupid thing —— Ray can’t do anything about it —— Put a pot of coffee on for me, huh?
Love you both, Frankie
“We might need a codebreaker for this one,” Gerard tells her. “But it sounds like he’s alright.”
“That’s good,” Jamia snorts. “No word on when they’re coming back?”
“There might have been, but it’s been cut out.”
She starts collecting the rest of the mail off the walkway. “Well hopefully with his next letter he learns how to write in hieroglyphics so we get some decent information out of him. You don’t think the Nazis can read hieroglyphics, do you?”
The kids in the street start throwing poppers that sound like the sharp crack of a gun, and Gerard looks up fast enough to give himself whiplash.
And there’s Frank crossing the yard, right arm in a white sling and battered footlocker under the other. Gerard’s nerves don’t calm at the sight, instead his blood starts singing in his veins worse than any case of combat stress could cause.
Gerard drops the heavily-censored letter and stands like he’s on a wire. “I don’t think there’s gonna be a next letter.”
“Huh?” Jamia looks up at him and then over her shoulder, and she gasps louder than when she spotted the postman. She goes tearing across the front yard and practically leaps into Frank’s arms. She would’ve bowled them both over into the grass if she wasn’t in a delicate situation and he wasn’t in a sling, and instead settles on squeezing him to death. Gerard can hear Frank’s pained yet pleased groans from here.
Gerard can’t move. He’s paralyzed at the sight of them together. It’s almost disorienting, like seeing your wife and your mistress meet, but he knows it’s not like that. Crazy enough, he knows it’s not like that at all, and Frank proves it by stomping over in his nice dress shoes, Jamia trailing behind looking like a little girl on Christmas, dropping his trunk like it doesn’t mean a damn thing to him anymore, and pulling Gerard in for a hug by the back of the neck.
“God, you’ve got no idea how good it is to see you in civvies again,” he says, and his voice could cause a downfall.
Gerard hugs him tight as he can, the fruit salad of medals and other decorations on the front of his jacket digging into his chest. The kids in the street are making kissy faces at them, and Jamia looks like she’s going to cry. Even girls of steel have a limit.
He manages to not kiss Frank right here in broad daylight, but just barely. Throat feeling a little thick and heart like a barrage of painful gunfire against his chest, he says, “What the hell, Frank.”
Frank laughs. He’s paler than Gerard remembers, and his eyes are bruised, but he looks to be in good spirits. “What? Didn’t you get my letter?”
Jamia grabs his letter from the ground and waves it in his face. “You sent us Swiss cheese!”
Frank’s eyes widen at the paper and he sticks a finger through one of the holes. “Good timing on my part, then, I guess.”
Gerard and Jamia must get the same idea, because they both go in to hug him at the same time and nearly knock their heads together like the Three Stooges.
“We missed you so much, you stupid asshole,” Jamia says, kissing Frank on the mouth. “What the hell did you do to yourself now?”
Gerard grows warm at the way she said we, and reaches out to hook his pinky around Frank’s where the neighbor kids won’t see.
“Guess who got an infection,” Frank sing-songs.
Gerard tugs on his finger a little harder than he meant to. “You’re not septic, are you?”
Frank shakes his head. “Nah, the hole in my shoulder just decided Ray’s expertise wasn’t good enough, so they had to send me home. Can’t fight Jerry if you can’t even hold a gun, you know?”
“Huh,” Jamia says, glancing at Gerard and then pressing their hips together. There’s a twinkle in her eye. “Perfect timing, indeed.”
Gerard can’t fight back a smile, and it feels like the first genuine one since that night before the invasion when the four of them were getting drunk at that dance hall in England. “You sure missed a lot on the home front, Frankie,” he says.
“Well I can’t wait to get filled in — and filled up on some good chow.” Frank props his foot on his trunk. He already looks more relaxed than he has since they got sent to the front, and Gerard hopes being home starts off a little easier for Frank than it did him. “Hold still, I need to admire my two favorite people. The real thing sure beats those photographs I keep in my boots.”
Jamia threads her fingers through Gerard’s, and they let themselves be admired.
A small part of him — a frankly stupid part, no matter how small — was afraid Frank would come back and be the world’s biggest hypocrite when he saw Gerard with his fiancée, but the way he’s looking at the two of them proves him wrong yet again, and proves this is still no mirage. Frank has no fear of infidelity in his eyes, instead he’s looking at Jamia like she’s the sun and Gerard is the moon and his day couldn’t possibly happen without either of them.
“Seen enough?” Jamia asks, smiling her toothy smile. She looks like she can’t wait to get the two of them inside, and preferably in her bed. Gerard definitely wouldn’t object to that; there are so many things he wants to do with them, both sexual and not.
Frank kisses her and drags his thumb down the corner of Gerard’s mouth at the same time. It's like he already knows all they've talked over and all they’ve done together in his absence. “Never.”
Gerard takes up Frank’s trunk when he slides his foot off, and Jamia collects the mail that she dropped for the second time.
“You know, they’re saying the war should be over soon, what with how Overlord went,” Frank comments. So it was successful; despite what he’d previously thought, how much he didn’t give a damn in the wake of Mikey’s death, Gerard is pleased to hear it. “We should wait to have the wedding until then so Ray can come.”
Jamia catches Gerard’s eye. “We can’t wait too long or else it’ll be indecent.”
Frank laughs in confusion. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means we should go inside.”
He looks at Gerard, who just squeezes his thin arm through his uniform jacket. “We’ll tell you over some peach cobbler. Our girl made it this morning.”
Frank visibly brightens up over the way Gerard referred to Jamia, and the three of them squeeze through the front door together like they’re a bride and two grooms going over the threshold.
When the door shuts behind them, it feels like one opening.