#bralice

thought I'd do this

But Alice? Alice Rutherford, he would have burned into every inch of his skin, a lifelong tattoo, permanent and impossible to cover up. Alice Rutherford. The last girl. She was nineteen years old, a Red Cross nurse from Medford Massachusetts stationed in the Western theatre of war. Her older brother, Daniel, was a First Lieutenant in the United States Army, and her sister Betty also served as a Red Cross nurse in St. Mary's Hospital, London, England. Alice liked the Boston Red Sox, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, music music music music music, singing, dancing, smiling, and worrying. Her favorite movie was The Wizard of Oz, a film he had yet to see, and he half-wanted to never watch it unless he could watch it alongside her to witness her reactions, to watch her lips moving along in perfect time with the words, to feel the warmth of her leg, her arm, her body against his own. She was funny and smart and thought too much about things that didn't require too much thinking, she had a penchant for living in a reality separate from the rest of the world, and she was both damaged and untouched by war, somehow all at once. Alice was enough to make an already breathless Brandon lightheaded and dizzy, and he knew that couldn't be the drugs. He'd come to her with a heavy burden, and it felt so much lighter now that he'd met her. And they hadn't even known each other long enough for him to be able to say that, and yet he could think nothing else. She was a rock on which he could stand, a sea in which he could float. She was the one he'd always wanted to find, even when he hadn't known he was looking. She was so close, he could see every sunny shade in each flaxen strand of hair, could count every black eyelash, every golden freckle in her olive green eyes. So close that when he thought about brushing his lips against her, smoothing over the days she'd spent in Normandy, at the bedsides of dying men, so far away from home, smoothing over those days for himself, losing himself in her and her intoxicating breath, it was almost like he really did.