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"Kitty—Kitty, I have to go—"
"The train can wait a minute. War will still be there in a few goddamn minutes."
Harry had never heard Kitty Grogan curse before, and, considering he had never seen her really cry either, the day had been nothing but a bunch of dizzying firsts. First kiss on the cheek from his father, first trip off to war, first real kind of terror he's ever experienced. He'd once broken his nose and it'd bled until he'd gone dizzy and the world all fuzzy and starry. And he'd definitely had his share of stupid Friday night fights—and Saturday and Sunday and all the weekdays—but it was nothing like shipping off for war. Kitty wouldn't be there to chastise him for counting too slowly after pulling a grenade pin, to yank him down by his sleeve when he stood up too high on the field and caught a grazer, to remind him to move around and keep off a case of trench foot.
When he'd announced he was joining the Airborne, she'd immediately kissed him and glowed with pride, glowed so bright he'd been unable to see the deep, quiet worry beneath. When he'd asked if she'd wait for him, she'd shoved him by the shoulder and scoffed and laughed all at once. "Of course I will! You big buffoon!" she'd said, before wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling him down on top of her. And he'd laughed because no one had ever used 'big' to describe him.
Once, they'd been walking back home after a movie and she'd tried to stroll along the curb in her favorite pumps, one hand in Harry's for balance. She'd lost her footing and accidentally twisted her ankle when her shoe nearly fell into the sewer drain. Kitty had hissed, winced, and whimpered a little (only in Harry's ear though, when asked to try moving it), but didn't cry. She was far too tenacious to cry. "It would ruin my makeup, too," she'd added, when Harry had asked later that night on his sofa, her swollen ankle in his lap and a cloth full of ice pressed on top.
"I thought it was strange you didn't get done up in front of all the soldiers," Harry murmured, when he kissed her quickly again on the platform, wrapped his olive drab arms tight around her waist.
Kitty's hair, normally curled beautifully up on her head, lay flat over her shoulders. Her hazel eyes were greening against the redness and little streaks of tears beneath them. She wiped them with the back of her hand. Would have smeared her mascara if she'd worn any, would have turned muddy on all those watery lashes. The other hand remained firmly gripped at Harry's back. "I've already got mine. Someone else can have all rest," she said, and her exhausted, worried laugh among the din of tearful goodbyes struck to the bone. "Just don't loan mine out to some French pretty with fresh croissants."
Harry chuckled and stroked her unkempt hair back. He felt handsome for having such a pretty girl crying over him, already bereft for the breasts pressed against his chest he'd be so far away for so long, and terrible he was doing any of it to both of them. "Croissants are for goddamn frogs, Kitty."
So. This is really it.
Harry must have said it out loud, or at least thought it loud enough for her to catch—he was almost too worried to think straight himself—because she pressed another hot bundle of kisses to his face. Luckily, the pouty red lipstick at been left at home as well. Didn't need any more ammunition for the boys on the crowded train ride ahead. "Yeah, honey, it is," she said. "Promise me you won't do anything too stupid."
He cracked a grin. "My mother said that to me on my first day of school, you know," he said, and immediately they both broke into nervous laughter together. He'd tried to go home at lunch and gotten lost instead, circling a three-block radius for an hour before his kindergarten teacher recovered him. Kitty had heard it so many times by now she could recite it.
But he would do something stupid (he would, he would huddle close to a fire with Dick in a "dell" as Nixon said with such strange suspicion of the word, and his leg would scream, scream, scream so loud it would pour out his mouth, so loud it would catch like a Bastogne cold, Dick would scream, scream, scream for Doc, and Nix would be making some horrible, humorless attempt at jokes about waking the dead while they waited for morphine and) it was just a matter of time. He was sure. Terrible things happened in war.
"I won't. Cross my heart—"
"No, don't swear, 'Hope to die,' Harry," Kitty said, smacking him on the shoulder as rebuke. "That's asking for trouble. Swear to the Lord you won't go asking for a fight?"
Harry smiled gently and pulled her close again, just so he could feel how alive she was right now, alive with him, and see if he could imprint it. He didn't know how long he was going to be away from home, and he'd already begun to miss her when he'd gotten up to get dressed and left that oven-warm bed. "I won't."
She pulled away from the embrace to stand tall—two inches taller than him, even after leaving her pumps and curlers at home—and look at him fiercely. "Swear it, Harry Welsh. Swear you're gonna come back home. To me. Because, so help me, I'll marry you if I gotta marry a box of medals and a helmet."
She already had him, he was tempted to say. But the train was going to leave soon, and there was nothing a man could say to anyone in war that was as concrete as a bullet, so Harry kissed her one last time—as carefully and wildly as he had on their first date after ice cream—and she wrapped her arms around his neck, nearly knocking the cap off his head in her hurry to plant one last one. Kitty Grogan rarely liked to swear, but instead let her tongue commit the (worried, loving, aroused) obscenity for her, and what the boys couldn't see for her down hair obscuring is what left Harry breathless at parting. She covered his face and ears with more last precious contact, and the hand that came to rest on his shoulder blade momentarily slip down to his ass and gave a squeeze. "Try not to miss me too much, honey," she said, and smiled against his cheek. Someone let off a wolf whistle, but it was quickly swallowed up by the train's final call. Harry groaned.
"Christ, Kitty—make it hard on a guy…"
"Don't you tempt me," she said, poking him in the chest.
She laughed one more time, and when the train and Harry had gone, she didn't let herself join that crying crowd of lovers and family. Harry loved her too much to give her reason to cry again during this war, she knew. He'd come back, or he'd have Hell to pay for when she finally caught up with him.
Kitty now burns like a coal in his pocket, where her image is burnt onto a piece of paper, and he's a little warmer for it. The heat begins mildly at first. There are things to occupy him—training, learning the orders, Sobel, new friends, naps on the train, and jumps—and there's no real cold. D-Day, there's white-hot terror that comes ripping out of the dark, and Kitty's memory sits almost cold in the pit of his stomach in comparison. She feels so far away, but he won't let thoughts of separation damper him.
Always planning, always keeping his eyes peeled for wedding gifts. Constantly formulating stories, a precise description of his time at war for Kitty and the kids they'll have. With the Bastogne cold, she's a blistering reminder in his pocket, a homemade pinup with her legs and shapely waist wrapped up in a red dress. She's home, she's a beacon. As it gets colder, he holds tighter, prays more, shoots straighter.
And when it's summer again, and he's home, Harry can't for the life of him remember just how he could have ever described the thing he'd just done, and she doesn't care. She catches him up in her arms, and she in his, and immediately he feels her heat fill him to cold little crevices he never knew of. Things will never be the same—as if the embrace at the train station, the war, or the wounds could ever be undone—but Kitty will try to help put them right.
And her first measure is a welcome-home dinner with piping hot, handmade croissants.