Archive of Our Own

“God, God, what do I do / after all this survival?”
— Traci Brimhall, from “Vive, Vive,”

The road to the house is flanked on the left by a seasonal puddle caked in red clay mud and to the right, the humble remains of a wood post fence that limps about fifty yards on the slope of a small hill and then collapses in to a beam in the ground at a forty-five degree angle. A mailbox is haphazardly attached to the first post, drooping toward the gravel as though it foretells the state of the house a quarter mile beyond. The picture painted in the letters from his sister Ann did adequate justice to the dilapidation of the property, but she didn't put in to words the beautiful sun pattern lace created by the canopy of the large tree in the front yard, or the welcoming stretch of the large porch creating a space just large enough to take a meal in the crook of the L-shaped design, or the curve of the hill behind the house like the setting of a painting with thick ropey vines tumbling from an overgrown plot of honeysuckle bushes. Ann did mention the idea of potential, however, and Dick closes his eyes as he stands under the tree, sees the shadows formed by the leaves move across the red behind his eyelids, and agrees with her.

The end of winter has caved in the far side of the porch and the beams can be seen sagging under the ghost of snow from weeks and months ago. Even now, there is less of a bite to the chill in the air but the threat of a new fall hangs over the weekend this far up north, and sweat that had clung to Dick's skin from his morning run is quickly turning tacky and cool.

There is no sale sign visible, but the screen door sways in the stuttering breeze; he reaches out to jiggle the door knob to the front door, stooping slightly to peer in to the window. Colorless light falls through the hallway and a slice of the kitchen can be seen in the right corner of the floor plan, next to the back door. Pushing the door gently with his knuckles, Dick stands in the front entryway of the farmhouse, a dining room to his right and bowed, weathered stairs to his left, and looking down at the scuffed hardwood running planks in front of him, he closes his eyes.

The floor creaks, somewhere in the invisible space of some other room, and Dick moves, tilts slightly and then turns on his heel as though he had intruded upon a private scene and meant to retreat, apologizing with his hands up.

‘You would be appalled at the amount of work it needs,' he writes to Nixon that evening, twisting his pen in his grip as though one side of the barrel were more comfortable than the other. ‘I wonder who left this behind. I wonder if there were intentions to return.’ Before turning off the light, he folds the letter over several times, then slides it in to the top drawer of the desk in his childhood bedroom under thicker stacks - his discharge papers, folded newspaper pages with half-filled crosswords, other letters awaiting postage and yet more Dick had begun with no intention of sending.

Dick runs in the cool early morning, in his thin PT shirt and sweatpants, to the chagrin of his mother as evidenced by her small frown when he steps through the back door of the kitchen, and the too-hot cup of coffee she sets down in front of him to warm him. The grass is frosted as though dipped in light blue icing, and the sun rises lazily after he does. The sound of his breathing and the beat of his shoes on the pavement is rhythmic in a comforting way. It's during one of these early runs that he sees the Model T sitting at an angle in the front yard of a home several miles away, the windows fogged and the handwritten "for sale" sign wilting in the mist.

He slows, shaking out his hands at his sides and clenching and unclenching his fingers, and steps in to the grass to inspect it closer. It looks in good condition, though nothing like a pickup he had imagined looking at in several weeks. He looks at the house further up from the car, and then steps back to continue running.

Later that day, after another steaming mug of coffee and two slices of toast from his silent mother, and a lukewarm shower to chase the chill from his bones, Dick puts on his jacket and boots and walks back to the house, taking his time, hands deep in his pockets. He takes the approach to the front door in slow, loping steps in case anyone is watching through a window, and knocks a soft beat on the door frame.

A woman only a few years older than Edith Winters appears, wet hands wrapped tight in the fabric of her apron. She doesn't look particularly soft, aging in the same way that his mother is, weathered and resolute, and she surveys him with very little reserve.

"How can I help you?"

Dick raises a hand in peace. "Hello, ma'am, I'm Richard Winters. I hope this isn't a bad time, I happened to see your vehicle for sale and wanted to let you know that I'm interested in it."

The sizing up is more obvious as she takes him in from head to toe, then steps out from behind the screen door.

"I know that name, Winters. You go to church around here?"

"Yes, ma'am, though I haven't been able to attend in a few years." She stops twisting her hands to dry them in her apron at that, and it's as though her considering has been found in his favor. She nods, curtly, and puts her hands on her hips.

"Helen Renfro. Let me get the keys, and I'll let you take a look at it." Helen leads him out across the yard to the Ford, and holds out the key. "I'll let you inspect what you'd like. I won't pretend to care about the inner workings, just as long as a car runs, I'm happy with it."

Dick smiles as he steps forward to unlock the door, and leans in to survey the interior. It looks clean, kept in good condition with pride for a vehicle going on ten years old.

"You've kept it well-maintained," he says, finding the latch and pulling on the hood until it comes forward and he can see the engine.

"It's not been driven regularly for a few years, it was my husband's." Helen clears her throat quickly, sharply, though her tone doesn't change even as Dick looks up. "Died in the Kasserine Pass, in '43."

Dick bows his head to her briefly, wants to offer some condolence beyond that, but something of the writing of endless letter upon letter, thanking mothers and fathers and wives like Helen for the service of their men, steals it from him like being hit in the gut, or jumping voluntarily from a plane. Helen nods back, and Dick is painfully grateful that the sentiment is enough.

"I jumped on Normandy," he offers, as some sort of brutal understanding, a cat leaving a dead beetle on the floor before your feet for approval. He clears his throat to shake the moment loose, and ducks his head back behind the hood of the car, before he says something that he has found himself unable to say to anyone else since he arrived in port in New York with the last dregs of dismissed men.

He looks at the engine without really seeing it, places his hands on the cold metal and gets grease on his fingers and doesn't bother inspecting it closely, too concerned with keeping his breathing even. After long enough, he stands and smears the gooey brown of oil across the thighs of his jeans. "I'd like to buy it from you, if you'd sell to me."

Helen looks at him again, and tosses a dark blue handkerchief from the pocket of her apron at him. "I've been told by a few not to give it away. Hundred bucks, I think, would do me."

Dick shakes his head before she's even done speaking, sure that she's mistaken. "That's too low, ma'am, really."

"Helen."

"Three at least, Miss Renfro."

"You're really bad at negotiating, Richard Winters."

Dick tilts his head slightly, his mouth working. "That would well and true be giving it away."

Helen settles her hands on her hips again, and Dick can hear the scoff, even if she doesn't let it out loud.

"A hundred dollars is a hundred more than I had yesterday, and besides, it's blocking my view of the road." At that, Dick does laugh out loud, a surprise machine gun sputter, and the corner of Helen's mouth twitches up in what Dick figures is as close to a smile as he'll get from her. "Walt would've liked you. You seem like a good boy."

He shakes his head again, more at Helen than a protest of the sale price this time. She shakes a hand out at him loosely. "Take it up to the bank to get the cash, get a feel for it."

"That's very trusting of you."

"I know where your kin go on Sunday, I have a feeling you'll come back."

Dick smiles again.

Several weeks later, Ann hoists a box against her hip in the front hall of their parents' house, full of things that spark no recognition of ownership - books, flatware, and plates stacked neatly between the folds of a simple linen tablecloth. He pulls a face at the contents as he walks past, nose scrunched up, and Ann stifles a laugh with an unseemly snort; Dick smiles. Edith Winters slips another coffee mug in over Ann's skinny arm, and when Dick looks at her, she looks suitably chagrined.

"I don't need much, mom. I'll be fine." Feeling uncomfortable, he turns and puts a hand on her elbow. "I promise."

"You'll have to get a telephone wired first, I'm sure there's a party line out there somewhere. If there's anything you need, you'll let us know." There's a high note to the end of her sentence, like she's asking, and Dick wants to mention that he knows the way in to town and had sent every month's pay back to them and they had done well by him to put it all in a bank account that he now has access to, but something about dismissing his mother in any way, even gently and necessary, doesn't sit right by him, so he nods and leans down to press his lips against her cheek.

"I'll come by every few days until I've got a phone. Then you can have all my minutes, I promise."

Edith waves her hand in dismissal as Ann pops up from the passenger side of the Ford a few feet away, standing on the running board and holding on to the door for leverage.

"Are you ever getting in the car, or am I going to have to forage for lunch in the glove compartment?"

"I wouldn't trust anything you found in there, the car's a '36."

Ann bounces on the running board again just a bit before swooping back inside, and Dick steps away from his mother, giving her a small grin as he does so. "I'll have Ann back by dinner, unless you'd like a bit of a break from her." Dick ducks out of the way as Ann swings for him halfheartedly and only catches air, and the look on Edith's face makes his chest ache for a brief moment.

The property is only a half hour away, through the scattered edges of Lancaster and past soft tilled fields that fill the cabin of the car with the heavy wet scent of earth and grass and the sweet edge of cold air. Ann speaks as he drives, hands pressed under her thighs to keep them warm, her voice lilting and lovely and Dick watches her as he drives, still unused to the way years weigh more on youth than adulthood. She had knocking knees and long limbs like his when he left for the last time to Camp Mackall in North Carolina - not that they had disappeared in the meantime, but she looks like a young woman, sitting in his car, talking about college applications like his crisis of time wasn't happening simultaneously.

The distance from home is very nearly intentional, though he'll deny it to his last breath. His father had sent him folded up listings of farms, notes about all of them in his letters, making special mention of plots of land sold by families they knew in the area and why they were selling - he was brief, when the family had lost someone in the war.

Truthfully, Dick isn't sure he can take the adjustment period while shopping at the same grocery store, attending the same church he grew up in. He came back, and everyone wants to know how he's doing, how his family is, how's he getting along? He isn't funny enough or witty enough, or patriotic, or morose, or optimistic enough for people, to have a quick response, and he wants to ask, how should I act? How should returning from war show on the face or in the shoulders of a man? Surely no one would ask him how he was doing if he replied that way.

He and Ann stop for lunch before the center of town bleeds in to more fields and farm land, and to pick up a few supplies to last Dick his first few days; candles, both matches and a lighter, beans and bread and potted meat.

Ann coos her admiration for the house as they come around the curve that reveals it nestled in to the land, whispers in a conspiratorial manner that this was her favorite of the ones that her and their father had looked at together in the months before Dick's homecoming. Once out of the car, Ann twists small blooms off the honeysuckle bushes out back, pulls the stem just so until beads of sweet liquid pool at the end of each flower, and then licks it off with a small smile. Dick doesn't immediately call her back to the car to help him finish unloading boxes; her presence is at their mother's urging, and he has to suppress a smile watching her jump up the stairs to the porch and press herself to the banister to see the landscape beyond the house.

The sun is edging the horizon out front when Dick returns from taking Ann back home, and he stands still in the foyer once more with his hands deep in his pockets, fingers pressed tight against the teeth of the key; if he turns his body far enough at this point, he can look in to three separate rooms, and down the hall through the back door, and upstairs. He inhales deeply, lungs stinging with the chill of evening settling in, and closes his eyes. He is of half a mind to lay down on the floor in front of the door, like a watchful guard dog - he's so damn tired, all the time - but instead starts in to the kitchen, where Ann had set down the shopping bags from town. Dick digs out packs of white candles, scentless and long-stemmed, and then tugs open several smaller boxes until he finds saucer plates to set each on. He places a row of smaller tea lights on the mantle in the front room, striking a match and lighting each one slowly, making sure the wick takes.

In the dim light, Dick separates boxes in to different stacks until he finds one with blankets, sheets, and the soft, perfectly misshapen pillow from his bed. Several feet from the window - a great, large window that runs from knee height up past the top of his head, that Ann had deemed "a divine Christmas tree window" - he forms a little nest of linens, then sits with his back against the wall beside the window, legs splayed and crossed at the ankles.

He feels at a loss, suddenly. He's not sure it's a feeling he's given clout in quite a while, but now, he's alone with the soft whistle of wind through the cracks of the window behind him and the slow orange flicker of candles on the mantle. There are things to do, lists of things that he's scribbled on the back of an envelope with a short pencil and pinned to the wall where the phone will go, and he's set himself up for weeks and months of steady work, but the feeling is a larger gulf than that.

Dick looks at the boxes pushed to the outer perimeter of the room and reaches for the nearest, tugging the overlapping flaps until he can get his arm inside. The contents of his desk are inside this one, and he rumbles around until he comes up with a pen, paper, and a hard surface (his high school yearbook) to write on.

DEAR LEWIS,

As I am writing this, it is my first night in the farmhouse. You would not believe the amount of work to be done, but I enjoy a challenge. I think it’s been abandoned for several years, but had been neglected for longer before that by its residents.

I worked in a hardware store for a few years to put myself through college, and while I have a lot of knowledge about a dozen small things, I'm not sure I have enough knowledge about large things to help with renovations, but I look forward to learning. Working with my hands will be the sort of distraction I need now.

I hope your return to New Jersey was as seamless as you did not believe it would be. It must be nice to have something to return to, and a clear idea of what to do.

The house is just outside Lancaster and the lights of the city are visible on a clear night, but it feels as isolated and quiet as Belgium at some moments. I realize I am waiting for the sound of mortars and gunfire that will not come, and that the country is really this quiet. It will take some getting used to.

The first order of business is getting a phone line installed so my mother doesn't worry herself to death. Europe vs. the Pennsylvanian countryside.

Your friend,
R. WINTERS

Dick sets aside the letter and stretches both his legs out from the a-frame shape he had pulled them in to write, grimaces as his knees crack and pop, and then pushes himself to his feet. He takes the letter in to the kitchen and sets it beside his list of things to do in the morning, and adds a trip to the post office to the bottom of it. He crawls in to the nest of bedding after blowing out the candles one by one and taking the last one to the windowsill above him. He can still hear the wind as it plays with the flame, and it's the quietest a night has been in a long time.

Dick wakes just slightly after dawn and revels in the ability to lay still in silence the way he has done every possible morning since the end of his war. After dressing and splashing his face with cold water from a full bucket set in the kitchen sink, he stretches his arms, pulls on his boots, and starts assessing the house. He had explored the upper floor with the mortgage officer from the bank weeks ago in a perfunctory walk through, but he takes his time now, gliding his hand across the banister of the stairs and rubbing the flaked paint of the door jams as he enters and exits each room.

He forms another list.

As his weight shifts across creaking floorboards and he pries open the window of the largest of the three bedrooms, he tries to picture himself living in the space. The impossible idea of furniture occupying it, the echoing beats of his footsteps and breathing that would be dampened by rugs and blankets and curtains once furnished. It's difficult. Dick leans out the window slightly, his breath a puff of white, and looks at the property from a different angle. He can almost see through the large oak tree to where the drive connects with the main road, and his drooping mailbox, and the aborted fence that he needs to add to one of his lists.

He takes stock of the house, and feels a tenderness towards it that is slightly embarrassing - he wants to apologize for finding it wanting, for planning to change it, as though the wood of the floors under his feet were heaving sighs every time he moves across it and finds another thing that needs repair.

He shakes his head, as though the physical motion would clear the thought, and pulls on his coat to drive in to town as the sun crests the hill beyond the main road.

The first day is spent grappling with a plan and finding a place to begin. He stops at a diner to eat toast and eggs and black coffee, and drops off the letter before he can think of placing it with the others in the bottom of a box with no envelope and no stamp. When he mentions having purchased the "old Herschel house" at the hardware, the man behind the country's entire face changes, light and excited. Drawn to full height, he would come neck and neck with Dick, but age has pressed its hand against his shoulders to curve his spine, and he stoops slightly as he holds a hand out to shake.

"Abraham Meier. That's a great place, I knew the family. Needs someone to take care of it. You got a wife, kids?"

"No, sir. Richard Winters. Truthfully, I've just gotten home myself. It's only me up there."

Abraham considers Dick, his chin raising up slightly as he takes him in. "Military?"

"Yes sir. Army."

"Welcome home, then."

"Thank you sir."

Dick argues against a discount, but Abraham pushes back in the spirit of assisting, in some small way, to restore the house to its former glory. 'Glory' seems too grand an idea for Dick, but he concedes graciously and leaves with the carbon copy of an order for the basic materials he imagines he'll need first: lumber in various widths and lengths, gallons of paint in neutral shades with brushes and tins, tarps and plastic sheets and disposable rags.

"Besides," Abraham says, "fixing up that house? You're about to keep me in business through 'til summer, so consider the discount a thank you."

Dick huffs, the start of a laugh.

Dick's first week is spent walking the property, measuring, re-measuring, and firming his lists of tasks, supplies, and a general timeline - he would like the house to be in shape by the end of March, at least, and then smaller tasks can be left for the later spring months. Abraham Meier starts to expect him near daily, and greets him as though he has known Dick since he was a small boy. The library in Lancaster has several books on repair and renovation, but Dick decides to leave the major ones - the roof, the plumbing, the electric - to the professionals.

"It wouldn't do for you to live through all of that just to die in a fire because you started messing where you ought not be messing," his mother says in an even, matter-of-fact tone over dinner Sunday afternoon, and Ann snorts. "That Caldwell boy a couple of years behind of you, he does electrical work. I'll call on his mother after church Wednesday." It's said with a finality that Dick knows not to argue with, and he smiles. Being home, even in doses as small as borrowing tools from his father or dinner every few days, feels uneasy still. Dick's found he's not been much of a conversationalist as of late; in the war, he was separated by rank from his men, and then after, exhausted by the momentous task of reconstructing the same villages and cities that had been his job to destroy. At home, he finds now he's separated in everyone's memories from the person he used to be before he left, and the difficulty of reconciling himself with that feels constricting. Part of him wants to be that person again, if only for them and no other reason, but now he doesn't recall the soft fat of his personality that war trimmed down.

His father claps him on the shoulder before sitting down to listen to the radio for the evening, and his mother hugs him, rubbing her hand in large strokes across his back for a few seconds too long to be casual. Ann shoves a bundle of mail addressed to him in his hands before hugging him as well, and he promises, again, to be back within a few days.

"I forgot to mention, Bell's sending a man out next week to put in a line," he tells his mother before he leaves, and she smiles.

"Good. You let me know, we can be your first call."

In the car, Dick turns on the headlights so they slice through the fog of the evening, and tilts the stack of mail toward the light of the house. In the middle of several letters, and a flier from the church, folded in with a packet from a local college about continuing education after the war, there's a return address of Nixon, New Jersey. He pulls the letter to the front of the stack to study Lewis' sharp, precise lettering. New Jersey isn't too far, but Lewis must have written back immediately for it to've arrived as quickly as it had, and sat on the table in the hall at his parents' for a few days, waiting on Dick to visit. He sets the stack across the seat without opening the letter, and starts the ignition.

He spends an entire morning on the roof of the house, surveying the bald spots of missing shingles and testing the give of the structure, and sits several feet from the edge where he's placed the ladder with a sandwich and a thermos of coffee at noon, and tugs Lewis's letter out of his coat pocket. They had written during the autumn and winter after Lew had returned to New Jersey and Dick remained in Austria, perfunctory correspondence with little content, but as light and quick as their conversation would have been in person - Dick's letters were censored several times before posted, and Lew had written, "I'm glad to hear that you're ___________ _____ ________, Col. Sink hasn't gotten back to me on that" with large swathes of hand-drawn black ink lines, mimicking the censorship, that made Dick laugh.

Dick slides a finger under the corner and tugs it open, tucking the corner of the envelope under his thigh so it doesn't get caught up in the breeze.

DICK -

I'm worried for the state of any house you put hammer and nail to, all those instructional books in the library are at least fifty years old at this point. Keep me up to date. I'll even help you out, paint swatches are a forte of mine, and just about the only input Kathy let me have on any home renovation in the Nixon household.

Stanhope kept my office dusted and aired out for me, and even gave me a few days after the homecoming parade to recoup. You should've come home with the first wave, it was like rolling in to the Netherlands but with less orange banners and shaved women in the streets - the party didn't go on long enough for that. The house was packed up and vacated before I even put the key in the lock, but I think Kitty should've kept the place. It's too big for one man and his restlessness. I'm debating a small apartment or townhouse, or - hey, I know a fellow with a farmhouse who probably has a few rooms to spare.

Truthfully, I'm not really needed here as much as anyone would have you believe, but maybe that's easier than being forced back into it. Doesn't it feel like there should've been a decompression chamber along the way? Another few weeks in England for us to wake up to the rain and drink with the locals and slough through the constant mud. That would've been alright, I think, instead of this. Austria felt too much like a dream that I would gladly go on dreaming. Did it feel like that to you, or was I too drunk? I'm getting pretty sick of being thanked for my service by people who don't know that I never even fired my gun. What would they think if they knew the best gift I'd ever received was first pick of the SS wine cellar?

When they finally bring electricity and telephones to eastern Penn., give me a call.

Yours,
LEW

Dick folds the letter carefully after staring at it for a few minutes, tucking it back in the envelope and then deep in his pocket as he takes to the ladder to meet the pickup truck jangling its way down the driveway. Tom Caldwell steps out when the vehicle comes to a stop, and he greets Dick with the smile and handshake of someone with whom you were vaguely acquainted for a long time, a long time ago.

"I thought our mothers weren't going to talk until after church," Dick says as he opens the front door and gestures for Tom to step inside.

"I think she called over this morning, and I had a few hours free anyway. Hey, nothing too much for an old pal." Tom always had a way of getting along easily wherever he went, Dick recalls, polite and nice and always ready to make small talk. Edith Winters would say, the boy never met a stranger he didn't know.

"I apreciate it all the same. I know nothing about electrical work - not that I know much about the rest, but." Dick settles his hands behind his back, at ease, then quickly drops them to his sides, then curls them in his pockets. His knuckles brush against Lew's letter.

"Hey, don't worry about it. It's great, you know, coming back, settling down." Tom gestures over his shoulder with his thumb, and Dick dips his head in permission for him to wander the house in inspection. "You got a wife and kids? This place would be great for children, tons of room to run around. My son would love it."

Dick follows Tom at a slower pace, watching him shine a small flashlight behind the jagged housing of an outlet, pulling wires carefully with two fingers to look at the bright colored caps on the end. "No, just me. I thought - " He pauses, too close to admitting some greater truth about his motivations, but Tom seems to be paying the bare amount of attention, having found the breaker box in a hall closet under the stairs. "I just thought some peace and quiet would be nice, after. After everything."

To his credit, Tom stops and looks over at Dick, eyes nervous and his mouth pulling to the side as though he wants to bite his lip, to chew the words out of the air and back in to his throat. "Hey, I understand, I mean. Not really, I tried joining up, but I got 4F and -"

Dick raises his hand and shakes his head, suddenly wanting nothing than to be back on the roof, alone, kicking over the ladder so no one could follow him. "No, it's not like that. A man has to have somewhere to live, is all." Tom looks gracious for the out, and turns his full attention back to the breaker.

"I should be able to fit you in around this other place I'm doing soon, it's a new construction so there's a lot of hurry up and wait for everyone else to be done so you can get in there, you know?"

"I'll leave you to it, you can come and go as you like. I'm in no great hurry."

Tom works in piecemeal chunks of time, never letting himself inside without Dick's permission, sitting in the cab of his truck and reading until Dick returns if he isn't home. Freezing rain the next weekend slows progress, either by lethargy or practicality of protecting dry work, and Dick curses while marking leaks on the ground with crosses of tape and then placing buckets and pans on top of each. The next day, he asks after Abraham for a roofer to repair the gaps in the plywood under the shingles.

He attempts to write a reply to Lewis again and again, offering platitudes at first and then condolences, and then confessions. Nothing feels right, and instead of balling the paper up and tossing it at another corner of the room, he lays them neatly on top of each other, letter after abandoned letter. The next morning, he wakes to soft rain on the floor from where he had left the window open, and the side of his hand is stained with the bleeding ink from wet paper, the tea candle tin on the sill full of water.

The end of winter curls in to March a few weeks later, slow and muddy and damp. Tom steps back off the porch to look up at where Dick and Abraham Meier's son, David, stand on the roof, and proudly proclaims that the house is now fully wired. David claps politely, which makes Dick snort as he descends to meet Tom on the ground.

In the front room where Dick has taken up residence, he moves a smaller step ladder over to the center of the room and Tom hands him a swollen glass bulb to screw in to the fixture before he leaves to flip the switches of the breaker. A moment later, light flood the room, and Dick squints and looks down.

"Good job, Tom," he smiles, and Tom claps him on the shoulder with a mirrored grin. The rest of the afternoon leaves Dick with boxes of salvaged light fixtures that he carefully rinses in the sink, a screwdriver, and a cramp in his neck from the angle. He waves off both men's offer of dinner at their homes that they offer every evening, and turns on the porch light for them as they leave in the dusk, to which Tom laughs happily at the door of his truck.

Dick sets up the lineman from Bell coming out the following day, and he takes dinner on the front steps of the house at twilight. He spends time studying the landscape; it reminds him of Aldbourne, in the way that anything looks similar to a memory if one looks hard enough and lets the edges blur, but it gives him the same sense of calm that England did so he doesn't press himself too deeply to make a comparison.

The next day, the Bell serviceman spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the set up, the receiver, the shared line, and were Dick a less patient man he would have cut him off long ago, but he just nods politely and stays silent.

The man holds the receiver up and a series of long and short tones play to the air between them. "Okay, this is your ring code, that way you know when someone's ringing you - be polite, you know, don't answer a code that ain't yours." His short gruffness and accent reminds Dick of Joe Toye, and something about his tone makes Dick smile. Not-Joe Toye gives him a skeptical look, concerned that all of his information is going unheard.

"Try to keep it to ten minutes so the line doesn't stay hung up, and here - " Not-Toye holds the receiver up again, and another code plays " - this is the emergency ring code for you and your neighbors. In case there's a fire or something."

"I think I can manage from here, but I appreciate it." Dick smiles again but it's a perfunctory tightening of the lips pulling his face upward, and Not-Toye shrugs again.

"Thank you for choosing Bell, enjoy your services."

There's a card tape to the back of the cream colored telephone with Dick's number, and he pins a list to the sheet of torn paper next to it on the wall with his parents' and Lew's numbers printed neatly in his hand, and no one else. That night, he lifts the receiver to his ear and listens to the dial tone for a time, hangs it back on the cradle, then picks it up again before he finally dials.

"Hello?"

"Hey, mom." Then unnecessarily, "It's Dick."

"You're wired up now, is it? Richard, Dick's got his telephone now. I'm no longer concerned that he'll die alone over there."

Behind his mother, he can faintly hear his father say in a wry voice, "yes, Edith, now he can call you before he perishes." Dick laughs.

They talk about nothing for five minutes, silence on Dick's end for the majority of it until he realizes he's being rude and gives more than a three word response. He promises to come for dinner in the next few days and gives his love to Ann. The ringing of hanging up echoes harsh and loud throughout the quiet kitchen, and he smoothes the curled edge of his list of numbers with his thumb before picking it back up again.

Dick dials Lew's number and waits through the sounds of connection, through the ringing. It goes on for what feels like an age before he hangs up suddenly, feeling more foolish than he did with his non-start earlier, as though he had never used a telephone before. He putters around the kitchen restlessly, picking up and reorganizing the placement of glasses in the cabinet, and checking that the silverware is still bundled together in a box on the small wooden table his mother's church gave him to use, and moving the coffee canister from one end of the counter to the next. It wouldn't do to start putting dishes up when he plans to take down the cabinet doors and refinish them over the weekend, and after a few minutes he's angry at himself for his embarrassment. He pushes the coffee can back with light force, a harsh scraping sound, and dials Lewis' number again.

He picks up quickly.

"Hello?"

"Lew?"

There's a pause, and the swell of foolishness threatens to overwhelm Dick, before Lewis answers again.

"So they finally got electricity to Amish country." It's warm and fond, and now Dick feels dumb for an entirely different reason.

"Just got it hooked up. The phone, I mean. Electricity was last week."

"Wonders will never cease." If Dick closes his eyes, it's surely because he's tired. "Hey, you're not wasting your minutes on me, are you?"

"No, Lewis. It's not a waste."

"Well, good. Tell me about this house, then. You remind me of another holy carpenter I know."

Cradled against the wall, his shoulder turned in as though protecting the flame of a lighter from the wind, Dick tells Lewis about the beautiful hardwood floors he doesn't want to touch, the beautiful rickety bannister that he needs to, and the way the sun setting illuminates the front rooms as though they were on fire like Eindhoven. It feels like enough, not only to speak to Lewis but to speak at all now after so many months of silence with his parents, with Ann, with the clerk at the grocer, or the waitress at the diner in town, or the kindly women in his mother's quilting group who linger long after their meeting's end to speak with Dick and urge him to return to the church when he gets the chance.

When he glances at his watch on the inside of his wrist, Dick clears his throat. "I should probably go. I think they prefer a ten minute time limit here, and I'm well past that."

"Dick Winters, breaking a rule? I'm looking out the window for the locusts." Lewis pauses, and Dick can so perfectly hear his quiet inhale that he's sure he can't be the only one to have the receiver pressed so tight to his ear with white knuckles. "Hey, Dick?"

"Yeah?"

"You didn't swing by New Jersey."

"I'm." I wasn't sure if you meant it. It sounded like something you say, in war. It sounded nice. I wasn't sure if you still wanted me to. If I had, I wouldn't have wanted to leave. "I'm sorry."

"I meant it, is all. Night, Dick."

"Goodnight, Lew."

At the start of the day, Dick kicks open the screen door and props a large rock against it so he can hear the rumbling arrival of the delivery of shingles and cedarwood siding he ordered several weeks ago. In the corner of Dick's eye, or with his gaze unfocused, so much of the house looks like the aching ruins of the abandoned homes he was billeted in, bombed out and dusty and still standing by sheer determination. The walls are bare and smashed in, in some places, and there's wrinkled, muddy brown butcher's paper laid down and taped in to pathways through the downstairs as Dick takes down cabinet doors and stacks them in piles to be repaired and refinished. Rags are pressed against the floor under the sink to stem any more geysers of bilgewater that soak his shirt through to the skin. He glances up at the grinding sound of wheels from where he's curled under the kitchen sink with a flashlight between his teeth and a wrench in one hand, and curses when a quick burst of water catches him in the face.

"You can set everything out front and I'll move it in later," he calls out as he pushes himself off the floor and grabs his button-up, dragging it across his face and down his neck as he walks toward the front of the house. He stops short at the front door as he watches Lewis Nixon jerking a suitcase from the back seat of a taxi cab - the fee for which Dick can hardly imagine, as he's sure it came from Lancaster. He looks away as Lewis pays.

"No hug, no yelling, no tears? I schlepped all the way out here and I don't even get a stoic tear down the cheek." Lew stands back as the taxi turns around in the mud pit Dick has come to call his front yard, and then holds his arms out slightly, as though presenting himself. "Thought you could use a hand."

Dick's face slowly cracks in to a smile, confused, and he moves to shake out the button-up balled in one fist and tug it across the thin t-shirt he had been working in. "What - you're serious? What about Nixon Nitration?"

"It wasn't going to be any fun without you, Dick, you know that." With finality, as though it were that easy.

Dick considers Lewis, standing on the first step to the porch, shoulders hunched in his thick camel coat, surveying the last month of Dick's work with interest, and his smile spreads like the breaking of the sun behind the clouds.

"How good are you with a hammer?"

Dick gestures for Lew to come inside through the propped front door ("Country living really is different - I can't imagine the horrors waiting to happen to an unlocked door in New York City") and fights the urge to raise his own shoulders around his ears, less against the weather like Lew had, and more as a defense. He wants to explain away the state of the house, even as he's aware it's a work in progress over the course of the past two months. He stops moving for a moment, and watches Lew surveying the front room. He doesn't look as polished as Dick had pictured him in his mind's eye, his hair as long as it had been in Europe, and soft from lack of holding gel, strands of it falling out of place, and his mouth is a blotchy red in the same way it goes when he's been drinking - indeed, body half-twisted to survey the progress of the hallway, Lew pulls his flask from its warm home against his chest with a lazy loose hand, and takes a drink.

"It's good to see you, Lew," Dick says, softly, the sentiment pushing through every witty, collected remark he wants to make, and getting at the meat of it.

"Hell, Dick, don't look at me like that." It jostles him out of the action, body jerking forward slightly and Dick reaches out for Lew suddenly, grabbing him around the shoulders and pulling until they both meet in the space between their bodies. They've both put back on the weight lost that had hollowed out their frames underneath their thick wool jackets, but it is better feeling it than seeing it, pressed close. Dick feels like inspecting Lew the way Roe had done to every man he worried injured, turning his face over in his hands and tilting his jaw up slightly, but Dick only lets his hands twist and twitch against Lew's coat. It seems to take Lew a moment to melt in to it, but he shuffles forward ever so slightly until their arms twist and turn and Lew's hand is against the back of Dick's skull. He doesn't cradle so much as press, like a child trying to keep a dog in place for a moment.

One or both of them clears their throat, not interjectingly but an accidental reflex, though they're unaware who does so first, and it breaks the moment open, unwinds their arms until they're just standing closer than before but still apart.

"Don't reckon you have any food in the kitchen, seeing as you've just turned the lights on."

Dick grins with only a small, apologetic edge. "There's a diner in town, they're familiar with me."

"They're doing good samaritan work, keeping you fed. C'mon, maybe I shouldn't have let that cab go so soon."

"I have a car, Nix."

"What, that? I thought that was an antique."

Dick drives in to town with Lewis in the passenger seat, body angled across the bench toward the driver's side. Lew, to his credit, only cracks at the Ford two more times before admitting it looks okay. At the diner, he orders for the both of them ("Two ham melts and fries, and a water for my puritan friend over here") and Dick watches him openly, as though redefining the image of Lew from his memories, adding and taking away lines and shading in the darker spots. Lew watches back. When their waitress comes back with their food and a genuine smile, Lew leans over his plate and Dick asks, "Are you really going to stay around for a bit?"

"Yeah, I mean. If you'll have me." Lew looks hesitant, as though he only just now thought that his presence might not be welcome, that there wasn't just an invitation extended by assumption alone. Dick hates that look fast and passionately, and shakes his head with force.

"No, that's fine. I don't mind." Lewis melts back in to his seat, relaxing, and Dick mirrors the slump instinctively.

"What do you have left to do, anyway?"

Dick plays at consideration, his gaze tilted toward the ceiling. "Paint swatches are at the top of the list."

Lew grins wide. "I happen to know an expert at the matter." He brandishes his mug in the air, and Dick raises his own to clink the glass and ceramic together lightly.

After lunch Lewis follows him on foot to the hardware, the flaps of his coat flared out around his hands buried deep in his pockets, his head on a swivel to take in the shop fronts and buildings that make up downtown Lancaster.

"It's bigger than I imagined."

Dick doesn't take the obvious joke, hoping to disappoint Lewis. "You seemed to have an image of one traffic light and two intersecting streets and then a lot of cows, and I didn't have it in me to break your heart like that."

"You've broken it in a myriad of other ways, Dick." Dick looks over to where Lew is strolling to his left, one eyebrow raised. Lew smiles at him, and the cold air around them makes Dick's lungs tighten. Lewis seems not to've noticed. "I'll think of some ways you can make it up to me."

"Well, you let me know."

Abraham Meier is already coming out from around the counter when he sees Dick through the storefront window, raising his arms up in greeting.

"I was just about to send David over with some brass for those cabinets for you to look at, they came in this morning." Abraham claps Dick on the shoulder, and Dick smiles, small and fond.

"Lewis, this is Abraham Meier. His son is helping me with the roof."

"Since you have no clue what you're doing, that's very nice of him." Lew leans around Dick and offers his hand to shake. "Lew Nixon, sir."

Grasping Lew's hand, Abraham turns to Dick and looks at him over the top of his glasses. "Did you finally hire some extra help?"

"Lew would be the opposite of help, and purposefully so. We served together, he's in town visiting."

Abe nods thoughtfully and says nothing more, turning toward the counter and pulling out a small, battered box with the top flapped open. "Here, Henry Pickner pulled these out of a home in an estate sale this weekend, never even taken out of the plastic. Thought I'd let you get first look before I put ‘em up on the shelf."

Lew wanders down an aisle looking at the small odds and ends on the shelves, poking at screws and bolts and examining short samples of moulding trim. Dick remembers, for a moment, that Lewis had likely never really done much with his hands before, which makes the sentiment of coming to Lancaster to help Dick something puzzling, with no immediate explanation that Dick can come up with. He turns back to Abraham, and pulls a few handles and knobs out, tearing at the plastic to inspect them. Dark gray and brushed steel, they match the cool stain of the cabinets well enough, and he counts out enough for each door, plus several extras.

"How much do I owe you?"

Abraham waves a hand at Dick, shrugging. "Don't worry about it, Henry passed them along for free."

Dick is reminded of Helen and the car, and Abraham's first discount, and the uncomfortable feeling of being rewarded in some small way for something he would rather not be, something like pity. Following the feeling like a quick cresting wave is guilt, gnarled in his gut. He inhales sharply through his nose and forces another smile. "I'll take them, then. Thank you."

He leaves with the hardware in a brown paper bag that he crumples the top of, balled up in his fist, and breathes deeply like he was unable to in the store. Lewis turns back toward him from several steps away, brow furrowed in question.

"What's the matter?"

Dick isn't surprised that he didn't even have to say anything. "Do you remember what you said, in one of your letters? About - what people would think, if they knew what you did or didn't do, and if they'd continue to thank you for it if they did."

Lew tilts his head slightly, squinting his eyes against a sun that isn't shining in his eyes. "Yeah. I remember." Lew doesn't ask why Dick is mentioning it now and Dick imagines that as quiet as the store was, Lew heard everything even though he feigned distraction.

He chews at his words for a moment, then looks down at the paper bag in his hands. "I understand how that - I get it."

Lew considers Dick with the same squint to his eyes, the dark smudges under his eyes made deeper by the contortion, then looks away up the street. "Come on. I need to see what I'm working with, color palette wise." As Dick reaches him, Lew leans to the side and lets their shoulders brush and doesn't pull back for a several long seconds.

For the rest of the day, Dick doesn't get as much work done as he would like; Lew sits on top of the counter beside the sink while he works on the pipes, and is generally as unhelpful as Dick promised Abraham Meier he would be. Before the sun sets, they walk along the far edge of the property sectioned off by a long wire and wood fence that ends abruptly along the tree line. Lew turns once they hit the trees, and looks back on the barn and storage sheds, the house even further still, and sighs quietly, as though it were his own peace and quiet and not Dick's. Dick is struck by the pressing urge to give some of it to Lew, watching him again as he has been all day.

"It's not a bad idea," Lew says suddenly, the sun ate by the landscape and bleeding orange across the small valley. "Reminds me of the Netherlands. Before we got there."

Dick doesn't say anything; he doesn't feel the need to. So far, being home has been defined by a need to speak and an inability to, some greater urge to be understood. He thinks now that he's inadvertently deprived Lewis of that same satisfaction, and something in him burns shameful at the thought.

"Come on, it'll be cold soon."

Lew's nose wrinkles. "Nothing holds a torch to fucking Belgium. Hey, wouldn't it have been nice to have torches in Belgium?"

They eat cold cut sandwiches Dick keeps in the icebox sitting on the floor of the front room, side by side with their backs against the wall and their legs folded. Dick points at the ceiling where the plaster bows out, the tell-tale signs of the leaks he and David are attempting to stop, and shares his plans to reface the fireplace and the smooth river rock he's found to do so. Lewis listens and gives little nods and nudges of input, but for the most part, he's too busy watching Dick's face to follow the direction of his hands.

Dick shakes out more sheets and blankets for Lew and apologizes for making him sleep on the floor, and for his lack of real furniture. "You could have stayed at the hotel in town, if you'd known I didn't have a bed."

"You kidding? Chez Winters is the finest establishment in all of eastern Pennsylvania. It's a palace." Lew holds his arms out as if to say, behold this glory.

Dick tosses a pillow at Lew with slightly more force than necessary, and Lewis catches it against his chest with a laugh. "We stayed at an actual palace, remember."

"You call that Jerry dump a palace? I call it a flea bag motel." Lew tosses out a blanket on the floor only a foot away from Dick's own nest, then folds flat sheets in half, stacked together until they resemble a mattress pad. He lays back with his feet crossed at the ankle and his arms behind his head, the picture of casual comfort. Dick watches him from above, and only turns away when Lew raises an eyebrow at him, lips quirked. Dick grabs several tea lights from the mantle and sets them on the window sill, touching each wick with a lit match. Lew observes the small ritual, makes no comment about the burning candles despite the house having electricity now, and his eyes follow Dick turning off the lights, unfastening his watch and setting it on the window, and then finally laying down beside him.

The room is cast in silence and a soft glow, absent even the rhythmic ticking of a clock seeing as Dick doesn't own one yet. The nights, admittedly, have been almost too quiet, and the smallest of sounds - the creaking of a house inhaling and exhaling, the shifting of branches in the wind, a particularly brazen owl outside - wake Dick as though he were still anticipating attack.

They don't speak, as though their silence were a direct order, and instead the sounds of shifting and shuffling and fabric being tugged fills the room in the absence of words. Dick turns on his side toward Lew, arm curled under his head and fist clenched in his pillow, and Lew stays on his back with his arms folded over his stomach.

"I'm sorry I didn't come."

The sound of Lew's breathing changes in the air as he rolls over, facing away, and Dick holds every muscle in his body still, as though he were waiting out the sound of footsteps cracking through the forest, as though he could navigate the moment through sheer willpower. Lew sighs so softly, and Dick feels his chest ache.

"It wasn't going to be any good without you. You know that."

He doesn't have to ask what it is Lew’s talking about. More than just New Jersey, or working for his father, or even the job itself.

"I thought it was just something you say."

"You tell the other kids at sleep-away camp that you'll write, even though you probably won't, you don't - " In the dark, Lew inhales, ragged. Dick closes his eyes to the moonlight through the window that falls like another blanket across Lew's shoulders, and waits. "I wasn't just saying it. I wanted you there." Except it sounds like, I wanted you.

Dick doesn't have anything to say to that, nothing quite as open and raw as the admission that he can relinquish, and feels lacking for it, so he focuses on evening out his breathing, still watching Lewis' back in the light from the window. After too much time has passed, and the air in the room burns his lungs, Dick gives in and falls asleep.

He wakes so soon after that it feels like simply opening his eyes, colorless gray morning light expanding in to the room. Dick rolls on to his back and looks up at the ceiling, tracing over the chalk x's he and David Meier had marked, the swollen bellies of water leaks in the plaster, then looks over at Lew's sleeping shoulders. Boldness grips him in the moment between inhaling and exhaling and he slides across the floor between them, his blanket rucked up beneath his body, and reaches out toward Lew's shoulder. Lew had gone to sleep in a thick deep blue sweater, and it feels warmer than anything exposed to the morning air ought to as Dick lays his hand across it. Lew doesn't wake immediately, and Dick curls his hand over so his forearm rests against Lew's upper arm, elbow to elbow. Slow and thick like syrup, Lew's body comes to life before his eyes open; his muscles like a slow ripple, and the motion presses his back closer to Dick's shoulder.

It feels like pure instinct that, when examined, should have been actively fought against, like how he had trained himself to jump from airplanes or to run toward the sound of gunfire. Dick watches Lew turn toward him over his shoulder, and chokes against a sudden flare of fondness and warmth that rivaled sharing a grave in the ground in the dead of winter, the only bright spot of heat for a hundred miles and a thousand trees.

Lew shifts and twists so he's facing Dick, both of them taking up the opposite corners of his beaten pillow, and they don't speak. Any number of words wouldn't necessarily ruin the tension of the air between them, but would bring an end to something, some nameless and shapeless something born in the mist and fog of the morning, so they don't say anything. If Dick moved forward just an inch, their noses would touch, and it would be only a matter of leaning in for their lips to do the same - and that, that is something new that feels as old as breathing. The same senseless instinct that goes unexamined.

Lew's mouth twitches to the side, his eyes focused just slightly below Dick's own, to the lavender and pale blue bruises of interrupted sleep, and his hand raises from where it's balled against his hip as thought to touch the thin skin, only to rest on the pillow between them. Eventually the need to move, to begin the day, makes Dick's skin itch. He pushes against the floor, raised up on one extended arm and leaning over Lew, who follows the motion and rolls on to his back, and then Dick drops the few inches between them to touch their foreheads together. He can hear a soft inhale - though if it belongs to himself or to Lewis, he's not sure, and then he presses their lips together as sweet and chaste as anything.

When he pulls back, Lew follows, his head rising from the pillow as though on a string, and he manages to look fond and annoyed at the same time. Dick is nearly certain that his own face is just simply fond.

"Come on. Get up, let's go get breakfast at the diner."

"Not that I entirely disapprove of your methods of waking a guy up, but I hope that means coffee."

As simple as the clicking notches of a combination lock catching and then opening, Dick sits up and thinks, oh, right.

In the car, dressed in the same heavy blue sweater he slept in and jeans, Lewis doesn't tilt his entire body toward Dick as he had done the day before, but instead his hand lays on the bench seat between them, fingers stretched to Dick like vines reaching toward the sun, and when he doesn't need to shift gears, Dick slides his own fingers between Lew's.

David and Dick finish repairing the roof the following week, their boots leaving a map of muddy footprints on the shingles from the continuous rain. Lew stands in the yard where they can see him and applauds as they descend the ladder one by one, passing their tools down, Lew dodging the shingle Dick tosses at him like a frisbee. Dick loads the boxes of extra plywood and shingles in the back of David's truck as David and Lew discuss the finer points of the Schwartzwalder kirschtorte that Mrs. Meier had promised to send home with Dick the next time he visited the hardware.

Lew had spent the week stripping the paint off the cabinet doors on the front porch, then replacing and repairing splintered wood along door jams and baseboards - then complaining, to Dick's amusement, about his knees and back through the drain holes of the sinks Dick was under, replacing sections of copper pipes in the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms.

"Civilian life has made you soft," Dick says mildly as he tosses his pillow in place that night, their blankets now combined on the floor to make something the approximate shape and size of a mattress.

Lew lays down on the floor, grabbing Dick's pillow and tucking it under his head, then turns on his side so he can watch Dick's routine of blowing out the candles on the mantle and turning off the lamp sitting alone in the corner of the room on the floor. "The Army could sense this, that's why they made me an intelligence officer."

"Aside from telling me classified military secrets as soon as you found out about them, you were a good intelligence officer."

"It's all us soft Ivy League boys were good for." Lew pauses, then his face wrinkles. "And there was a ton of stuff I never told you about."

"Like?" Dick joins Lew on the floor, reaching across his body and taking Lew's pillow, abandoning any effort to recover his own.

"Can't say. It's highly classified." Lew jerks his pillow out from under Dick’s head, who only retaliates by scooting closer so they share Dick’s pillow together.

Since the early morning days before, they hadn't kissed, though not for lack of wanting. Lacing their fingers together on the cold leather seat of the car; walking back from repairing the fence along the drive, so close that their shoulder knock together, their knuckles brushing; sitting at the diner later than most other patrons, alone in the back corner, extending their legs so their feet press together and Lew moving so their knees touch while drinking his coffee and pointedly not looking at Dick. It felt like every moment bristled with static electricity, and they were both avoiding the shock. More than the not kissing again, they haven't discussed anything at all, too far past the point of no return like a second conversation with someone whose name you've forgotten and now can never ask after. It doesn't feel like navigating through some unspoken minefield, though - they lay down, side by side, and wake with their limbs entwined, with no necessity of the action like the sharing of body heat to ensure that bitter cold doesn't prevent the waking - but rather it feels like driving aimlessly on a slow Sunday afternoon, no sure destination in sight and no demand for it.

Dick spends the next morning repairing the bannister, replacing spindly poles with sturdier ones and pressing against them with some force to ensure he's securing them properly. Lew comes in through the front door, already mid-sentence.

" - for the kitchen, I guess, although Mrs. Meier insists that baby puke green is ‘in' and I didn't have the heart to tell her how wrong that is. There's something about kids, their puke is fluorescent no matter what they eat. Anyway, I thought blue would be better." Lew is juggling five small metal cans of paint samples, the color inside smeared across the lid, and he sets them down on the tread of the stairs higher up so Dick can glance down and give his approval. The look on Lew's face is so seriously contemplative of the color of the walls that Dick is winded by a fondness for him, and he tampers the face-splitting grin that threatens to betray him.

"I like the blue. I don't care much, truthfully, but I like the blue. I was just planning on painting everything white."

Lew scoffs and picks up the cans of eggshell white he had picked out, as though the lack of thought put in to it by someone else meant it was now tarnished. "What would you have done before me, had I not been trained so well."

Dick pretends to consider the question. "Probably painted the walls white."

"Or you would have listened to Florence Meier and painted the kitchen nuclear olive green."

Dick sets his hammer down on the stairs and walks down them slowly, hand on the railing to test its newly imparted durability, and stops when he's a few inches taller than Lewis to take the can of paint from him and set it back down. Enmeshed with the same slow surety of movement, he lays both hands on the sides of Lew's face and stoops down to kiss him. More awake than the other morning, Lew reacts immediately as though he were being touched with the frayed end of a live wire; he moves to the same step Dick is on, holding on to Dick's shoulders as though to bring him closer if he decided to break away before Lew wanted him to. Dick twists one hand in to the thick, slightly overgrown hair at the base of Lew's head and settles the other on his hip, and Lew presses him back against the bannister until Dick stops, tries to pull his mouth back enough to speak and fails to put more than a centimeter's distance between them.

"I'm not sure I want to test my handiwork at the moment," he says, taking a step forward to put Lewis' back to the wall, and Lew laughs breathlessly. Dick has always felt too tall, too long, with just a bit too much limb than he knows what to do with, but now all it does is aid him in caging Lew against the wall, placing small kisses along the shadow of Lew's unshaven jaw and cheek.

"If I were a betting man," Lew tilts his head up, to the side, to give Dick more room to work, "which I am, I wouldn't have put money on you making the first move. Twice."

Dick stops immediately, stepping back; Lew draws forward again, the same way he did the other morning, as though he were tethered to Dick. "Should I - do we need to talk about it, this?"

Lew's throat works up and down, swallowing before he speaks. His mouth is red and splotchy, the same way it gets when he drinks too much, and Dick keeps glancing down at it. His flask hasn’t been seen in days. "I didn't think so. Do you think so?" Lew's voice cracks a little, and he moves back in to the orbit of Dick's personal space. "I'm pretty okay with how this is going."

Dick closes his eyes, and thinks of slicing through the calm waters of a lake in Austria, the chill and the shock, the way he shivered then and the way he does now. He thinks of New Jersey, and coming home alone to a dock in New York, and of a cab pulling up to the end of his driveway and dumping Lewis Nixon in to his front yard. Thinks of the way he's not sure Lewis has ever said anything just to say it, at least not to him, not to Dick.

"Yeah. I'm pretty alright with it too." And crowds Lewis back against the wall, leaning down to kiss him again.

That afternoon, Dick measures and re-measures for wooden counters in the kitchen, to replace the cheap formica with jagged, torn metal corners that he keeps snagging his shirt on. And then he measures again.

(Lew laughs at him, and Dick glances up, annoyed.

"Have you ever heard of measure twice, cut once?"

Lew shrugs, but holds up the small pad Dick was writing on. "All your numbers are different every time."

Dick snatches it back and flips to a new page. "You're not being very helpful."

"I am essential to the renovation.")

Dick walks from the kitchen to the front door, where the slabs of wood sit leaning against the house, unprimed and unstained, long stretches of soft blonde wood. He strides past them and sits on the swing, waiting until the creaking and groaning subsides before rocking it slowly back and forth a few inches. Lew follows him, sitting nearby on the railing beside one of the thick white support columns, leaning his shoulder against it.

"I think my father's going to help with the counters this weekend, it's more his wheelhouse. And I've got the supplies to replace the stairs in the cellar where the wood is worn away on the tread." Dick looks up to the underside of the porch roof, where the sheathing was freshly replaced and waiting to be painted, the sharp ends of nails running parallel in a long line to the thick wooden beams of the structure. Lew watches Dick, follows his gaze up and back down, and doesn't look away when Dick looks over at him.

"What else? What after?" Lew asks.

Dick feels a protective swell of defensiveness for the house, even though he knows how irrational it is. Then, he thinks, that maybe Lewis doesn't mean what else is on the list of things to be done.

"You mean - "

"After you're done with it." Lew looks away, now, out to the field to the left, overgrown with weeds, the poorly tilled frozen soil barely visible. "Are you gonna live here?"

Dicks frowns; what other reason would someone have, to buy a house and the land along with it, and not intend to work it?

Once, in Austria, he had spoken it aloud softly to Lewis, sitting on outdoor lounge chairs at the observatory, so high up in the Alps with fine mist gathering in the evening that they could nearly pretend that the ground and the village below had completely fallen away. Lew had not yet mentioned New Jersey, wouldn't, for another few days, but after was on the minds or tongues of every man there, whether after meant home or the Pacific theater or staying behind in Europe with the monumental task of rebuilding. Men had slips of paper and pens on the table beside their steins, trying to tally up points. ("Hey, Doc, how many points do you think getting shot in the ass counts for?" "I don't know, but if they're going for ass shots, all of Easy has got first class tickets back to the States.")

Lew was starting a glistening collection of bottles beside him, a small number of them contributed by Speirs and Harry earlier in the afternoon, and he's slumped down, hands crossed over his stomach like he's fighting the sleep of a well-fed man. Like a lazy cat he watches Dick, who had brought his paperwork out in the protective fold of a leather portfolio in his lap (Harry had cried, "Who does paperwork on V-E Day, holy hell, Winters!" as he left to shower more dry men in popped champagne), and licks his lips before he speaks.

"Have we talked about it?"

Dick doesn't look up, still writing, but he does cant his head to the side, toward Lewis. "Talked about what?"

"What you're gonna do. What I'm gonna do." Lew laughs, a little, bubbly and only slightly hysterical. "I know what I'm gonna do. But I don't think we've ever talked about it - do you think talking about it would have jinxed it?" Some men spoke of after the war like it was the only thing getting them though it; others avoided speaking about it like they would be shot down by God himself if they were to mention the hope of survival.

Dick sets his paperwork on the stone floor below him, turning to plant his feet and rest his elbows on his knees, fingers laced. “The night after we jumped, I prayed," he levels a look at Lew, as if daring him to say anything, but Lew only straightens, watching Dick intently, "and I told myself that the only way to get through it was day by day. It wouldn't work, otherwise, to never be present because I was thinking about the trip home. But I told myself that if I did get through all of this, I'd find some land and - " Dick swallows, mouth suddenly dry, aware of how precious this secret seemed, that Lewis was the first person he was telling this to. "I'd live in peace and quiet. For the rest of my life. If I made it through the war with my life."

Lew clears his throat, and looks at the decanter in his hand before setting it down as though he had suddenly lost the taste for it. It hangs between them, as close to speaking death as they'd ever gotten with each other, even with the small pink mark on Lewis' forehead and the bullet hole in his helmet, a plane where only three out of twenty two men survived the jump. Dick looks at Lewis and thinks how, after long enough, he could mourn these men in his own quiet and quick way but he had to move on, they had to keep going. He looks at Lew, and thinks how devastating it would have been to lose him.

Dick's boots scrape against the porch before he plants his feet firmer, stopping the perpetual sway of the swing. Lew is still looking at him - always looking, waiting for an answer or a reaction or a revelation, patient - and Dick looks back at the roof that's just been patched, to the railing that he's repaired with his own hands, finally dragging his eyes up to Lew's.

He wants to ask how much thinking Lewis has been doing since he got home, how much of the future he has planned out when everyone seems to be demanding it of them. Not rude, or demanding, but genuinely curious. Like the war, day by day seemed to be the safest way for Dick to take things, only just now reaching out in to weeks and months like a man in the dark feeling tentatively for the wall, for the lights.

"I don't know. Truthfully, I hadn't gotten that far."

The sun is still out but setting behind low hanging clouds in the distance, the light dim and diffused. It casts long shadows of their legs stretched from edge to edge of the porch, exaggerates the modest wood work of the rail. Dick stretches his foot out and watches a giant step across the front of the house.

Lew hooks his feet through the rungs and sits back so far Dick thinks he intends to fall in to the bushes below, but puts his palms down on the railing and leans out past the roofline to look at the sky directly above them. Something about the lines of his arm, the slope of his shoulders, looks like patience, or maybe just waiting. Dick suddenly feels on uneven footing, thinking of the press of his mouth against Lew's neck earlier that afternoon, wanting to stand now and crowd in to his space and do it again. It's about the only thing he's sure he does want, even-matched against his base creature comforts like eating and sleeping.

“You still thinking in days? Today and tomorrow, not much further out than that?” Lew doesn’t sound like he needs an answer; Dick knows he doesn’t have to offer one. “I talk to a few of the guys, make sure they’re getting settled. Kind of like a telephone tree, they talk to each other, you know, it gets around. It’s not just us. You get home, you’re so used to sitting around and fucking waiting - for gunfire, for shells, for orders, for movement, all the damn waiting we did. You do it for long enough, you’re always on edge. You get used to the feeling. Waiting for something that’s not gonna come.” Lew slides a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shakes one out and taps it against the pack a few times to settle the tobacco, then lights it, flame shielded by his hand. Dick tenses for a brief second at the bright cherry burn before relaxing. Pennsylvania, not Normandy. Lew holds the smoke in his lungs for an impossibly long minute before exhaling away from Dick. “If you weren’t waiting for orders, you were waiting to get hurt, or die.” His next inhale is sharper than just a drag from his cigarette.

Dick shakes his head, though he agrees with the sentiment. It’s that, but it’s not just that. “We were some of the most highly trained men in the Army. The things we learned to do, the things we were told to do and the things we taught ourselves to do, to survive…” Dick trails off, watches Nix swimming in a cloud of smoke, edges fading in and out of focus in the dark. “How does all of that translate to life now? It feels like we’re supposed to know more, be better, because we survived. But I don’t.”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to translate. I don’t think I’d want it to, I don’t know what that would mean for us.”

Dick can look to life back home in the States and see all of the scar tissue from the wound of the war, angry pearl white marks on the landscape and the recommissioned factories for weapons production and the women and children left behind and those that didn’t return and those that did. “What do we do with it then?” At this, Lew looks at Dick with his cigarette pinched between two fingers and his thumb, raised to his mouth but forgotten. “Where do we put it?”

“What, you think we’re gonna put all of this down like turning in our service weapons, get a receipt slip, and walk away? We don’t get to put it down.” Lew sounds bitter, angry, and maybe that’s where they diverge - Dick feels a certain amount of unyielding resignation, the inevitability of it as unmoving as a mountain. However different they feel about it, though, neither of them seems to share a swelling sense of pride about their service, their skills.

Dick stands, slow and aching, and crosses the distance between him and Lew. He pulls the cigarette out of Lew’s fingers and stubs it out with a slow, deliberate grind on the side of the post, and tosses the butt in to the bushes below. Lew schools his face into comical disbelief at the blatant littering of Dick’s own front yard, but the look is quickly extinguished when Dick rests his hands on the sides of his face, holding him in place, Dick’s body pressed between his legs. Dick tilts Lew’s face from side to side minutely like Doc did to men whose hearing had been temporarily blown out by explosions, tracking the shadows crawling across his eyes and pressing his fingers in to the hollows of his cheeks. Low and measured, as though afraid to scare Dick, Lew exhales. His breath stinks of cigarette smoke but Dick kisses him anyway.

“That looks like the most needlessly tedious task I’ve seen you do yet.”

Dick scrapes putty over the back of another small rectangular white tile and gently presses it in to place along the row he’s been working on crouched in the bathtub upstairs, applying enough gentle pressure to make sure it’s level with the rest. He ignores Lew, who is sitting on the closed seat of the toilet beside him, handing him the tiles.

“How do you think every bathroom gets tiled?” He holds out one hand expectantly.

“I don’t know, but you’ve got...” Lew eyes the stacks in the box on the floor between his feet, trying to do the quick math. “A lot of tiles here.”

“It’ll look good when I’m finished.”

“It’s just the bathroom, who are you trying to impress? You don’t have to impress me, I’ll sleep with you anyway.” Dick glances up, leveling a look that he hopes is conveyed as unamused, and Lew smiles at him brilliantly. His chest thumps briefly with unrestrained fondness, and he looks back down at the putty scraper in his hand so he doesn’t lose the whole afternoon to Lew on the floor of the bathroom.

Lewis, as in all things Dick is sure he has attempted in life, is naturally quick to pick up on working with his hands, and seems to enjoy it. Dick finds himself pausing and watching, quietly, as Lew shows an attentive level of care to the task at hand, almost as though it were his own home he were mending. David Meier and Tom Caldwell move in and out over the weeks, loaning their own expertise to areas beyond Dick. They spend an entire day under the house, weak light filtering in through the lattice work surrounding the base of the porch, fixing a cracked foundation and loose joists, and refused to accept payment from Dick, but stay and eat the leftovers of a roasted chicken Edith had sent home with him a few days earlier.

“You wanna pay me back, just come to this barn raising my cousin’s having next month. He got hitched right before shipping off, so his wife put everything on hold until he came back.” Tom quickly glances sideways at Lew and Dick sitting on the lower steps of the front porch. “Thank God he did, you know, but now we’re all helping get them set up and all. I just hate the barns. There’s always a few guys who never pull their weight, you know, and the damn frame’s so heavy when only four of you are actually putting in the muscle.”

David picks a piece of chicken off his sandwich laid out on his handkerchief on his knee, and rolls his eyes. “My mom’s side’s Quaker, seems like I go to one of those things every other week. The food’s good, but the gossip is awful.”

Lew is smirking down at his lap, some crack about Dick being a Quaker, Dick is sure, and without looking Dick nudges him with his shoulder, so quickly that it could be mistaken as an accident, but Lew coughs and chokes on chunks of his apple, concealing a laugh.

“Barn raisings, huh? In New Jersey we just have housewarmings and spend the whole party putting down the couple’s decorating choices in subtle patronizing ways.” Lew mimes raising a champagne flute, swaying forward with a flourish. “I wouldn’t have chosen such a color, Mildred, but it does suit your sense of style.”

Tom lowly whistles his appreciation of the underhandedness, and David laughs. “Like that exactly, just with more comments about the quality of the livestock.”

Later, sweeping the steps of the porch with a crooked wicker broom, Lew pauses and raises his head to look at Dick, twisting the large eye loop screws of the swing attached to the new, un-rusted chain he got from the hardware. “I mean, I knew barn raisings were still a thing but I didn’t know they were still a thing.”

Dick sighs, but his mouth tilts up at the corner - it might as well be an all-out smile for as much as he wants to be amused at Lew and his city way of looking at the countryside. “It’s a community thing. Sure, they could go to Sears Roebuck and get all the pieces in a box, but a lot of the older people like it, and it’s more of a tradition than a necessity.” Dick pauses. “And I haven’t really been to one, not since I was a kid and my grandma was still alive. She’d watch us before we were big enough to work on the farm, or when we were sick, and she liked to cook for the families.”

“That sounds nice,” Lew says, sounding entirely sincere.

“Do the Nixons have any family traditions?”

“Besides drinking?” Lew snorts. “We’d go to Paris during the summer, when I was a kid up until I was fifteen. It looked a lot nicer than when we were there. My parents had a place, in the 6th Arrondissement. I liked it.” Lew looks lost to the thought of France before war stripped it to the bones of stone and steel. Dick imagines it must be a hard memory to reconcile. He shakes his head after a moment. “That’s funny. Stanhope Nixon is all about tradition and legacy and family, but that’s the only real tradition I can think of. We didn’t really do much else together other than argue and bitch. Well, that’s not right. We did a lot together, we got dragged to things, Blanche and Fletcher and I.” Lew is still sweeping the steps in long, broad strokes that are completely unnecessary; the porch was clean ten minutes ago. “There were little things, like every birthday and Christmas Blanche would get a charm for her bracelet, Fletch and I would get cufflinks. The Rockefeller tree lighting and hot toddies every year. A lot of bridge commissionings, ribbon cutting things. I got a lot of practice in standing still and shutting up before the Army got ahold of me.”

Dick thinks of Christmas, for some reason, a holiday more deeply driven by tradition than anything else that comes to mind, and the things the Winters did every year, so rote it was probably etched in to his bones. Things he cherished, that he probably took for granted. Lew shakes the broom out in the direction of the yard, then sets it beside the door. “No hot toddies in the Winters household, huh.”

“No. But a lot more things we enjoyed.” Holding the door open for them to go inside, Dick walks closer behind Lew than necessary in lieu of grabbing for his fingers, crowding him and kissing his neck. “Do you want to go family dinner this Sunday?”

Lew blinks. “Don’t tell me I’m the first girl you’re taking home to meet your mother.”

Dick’s throat constricts, dry and painful, and his voice rasps when he finds it. “Not - just as a guest, in town, - ”

Lew turns toward Dick, narrowing the already short space between them, and holds Dick’s gaze with a ocean of understanding that Dick feels grateful and shameful to be washed in. “I know. I get it.” Dick does, then, lean in and touch his forehead to Lew’s with a quiet breath, closing his eyes as he does so. “It’s not necessarily a lie, to say I’m an old war buddy,” Lew continues. “It’s just not the whole truth. Right?”

Dick doesn’t know how to answer that. “No. You’re not the first person I’ve taken home.”

Lew’s surprised laugh is quickly smothered with a kiss.

That evening, Dick stands with his back pressed to the kitchen wall and the receiver held against his shoulder, both hands tucked deep in his pocket and Lewis sits on the end of the kitchen island jutted out toward Dick, drinking from his flask and pretending not to be too invested in the phone conversation with Edith Winters. Dick considers the flask as the phone rings, not the first time that he’s noted its lack of appearance over the past few weeks but reminded of its absence by its sudden reappearance.

“Hello, Winters residence!” Ann sounds like sunshine on the phone, and Dick smiles immediately.

“It’s me.”

“Dick! You skipped dinner last week, mom was about to march over there herself.” As in the nature of all good parents, knowing that their children have been in more serious scenarios away from them never seems to cross their mind when a lesser one occurs. Dick’s smile doesn’t fade. It’s not the first Sunday I’ve missed, he wants to say, but his sense of humor regarding war being the reason he’s missed three years worth of Sundays is more flippant than most.

“I’ll apologize as soon as you put her on the phone.”

Ann doesn’t bother pulling the receiver very far from her head before yelling that Dick is on the phone, and Dick winces. Lew snorts from his perch on the counter, picking through the newspaper lying there from several days ago, obviously paying less than his full attention to the sensational story of the Cobra Woman in California who died from a diamondback bite last week.

“Hello, Dick. Good to know you’re at least well enough to pick up the phone now, I was sure you’d been seriously incapacitated and needed the rest, so I didn’t want to bother you.” Edith is wry but doesn’t sound serious, and Dick ducks his head down to look at his feet.

“I’m sorry, mom. Lewis, a friend of mine from the Army, came to town without notice - “ at this, Lew shrugs and kicks a leg out at Dick, not connecting and not concerned about it, “ - so. I’m sorry.” The small kernel of guilt over having caused his mother anything less than overwhelming joy still burns in his chest. “I wanted to ask if it was alright I brought him over this weekend. He was…” Dick clears his throat, sure that anything he says would be inadequate to describe what Lewis Nixon is to him. “He’s a good friend.”

“I’d consider that we raised you poorly if you didn’t invite him over. Lewis, you said?”

“Yes ma’am, Lewis Nixon.”

“Well, tell Lewis he’s more than welcome. I’d ask after the house, but Nettie Settlemeyer complains more than anyone about going over on the minutes, and I’d rather not have to listen to her after church this week. Again.” Her voice is close and warm when she speaks again, and Dick sighs. “I love you, Dick. Be careful. I’ll see you this weekend.”

“I love you too. Tell Dad I say hello.” He holds the phone still to his shoulder for a moment after she disconnects, and Lew watches him over the top of a half folded newspaper page drooping in his hands.

Dick looks at him, suddenly, and hangs the receiver back up. “You can use the phone, you know. If you need to call anyone.”

Lew wrinkles his nose and shakes his head. “I’m fine. No one’s worried about where I’m at.” When Dick looks at him with shrew concern, Lew laughs. “Well hell, Dick, here’s better than anywhere I’ve been for the past few years. I’ll send them a postcard.”

Dick considers Lewis sitting on his counter, his own back still pressed against the wall. “How long can you be gone? From Nixon Nitration.”

“As long as I want.”

“Lew.”

“Dick.”

Dick pushes away from the wall but still stands with his hands in his pockets, one eyebrow raised in the same way it would while waiting for one of his men to elaborate. He could wait out any mood, and had often done so with Lewis. This would be no different.

“I’m non-essential personnel.”

“You’re in upper management. You are the upper management.”

Lew folds the paper in to a smaller form with jerky motions, the sound sharp and loud in the empty kitchen. “Dick, really. They don’t need me. I’m only on the payroll because my name’s on the damn building. I don’t want to go back, not yet. Not without you.” Lew looks away, like the admission takes more to let go of than he expected. Dick isn’t sure why; it’s no less than any other confession he’d made, about his world and Dick’s place in it, and just like the others, it pulls at a knot in the pit of Dick’s stomach, tightening and loosening at the same time.

“Do you want me to go back to New Jersey with you?” It feels like a stupid question, because of course, of course Lew did. He offered so over a year ago, both of them on a shore blinded by potential and an Austrian lake glittering in the sun.

“You’re asking me that, standing in the kitchen of the house you just bought.”

Dick shrugs both of his shoulders high toward his ears, and they don’t go all the way back down. “Besides that.”

“Besides that? I don’t know.” Lew’s shoulders mimic Dick’s, hunched and raised like a man bracing for a hit. “I don’t know, Dick. Hell, I hadn’t thought about it much beyond you.” The words land in the space between them, and Lew looks down, twisting the cap of his flask on its hinge to avoid looking at Dick, so he doesn’t see Dick moving until he’s right in front of him.

Hands still in his pockets, Dick doesn’t move to touch Lew, but instead watches his hands until they stop moving. “I don’t think I can let you be the only thing for me there. It can’t be just you.” Dick tries to will Lewis to understand his intent so he doesn’t have to explain, but Lew glances up with his brow wrinkled and Dick is afraid he has to muddle through further sentiment. “That would be too much pressure. For both of us. To be the only thing for each other.” Dick shakes his head, not nearly as eloquent as he needs to be. He’s saved by Lew’s huffing.

“It’s like you don’t listen to a thing I say. It doesn’t matter if it’s New Jersey, or, or here, or China, for Christ’s sake. It matters that it’s you.” Lew pushes against Dick’s chest and he sways on his feet, back and then further forward than he was, leaning in to Lewis’ space. “Stay here. Come to New Jersey with me. I don’t care. Just say something so I don’t look like a damn fool.”

Dick reaches out, instead, and cradles the back of Lew’s head in both of his hands so he can press their foreheads together. This close, curled in, he can hear the jagged edges of Lew’s breathing, and the hitch in his breath when Dick kisses him again, like he never truly expects it. He drops the flask on the counter beside him and his fingers curl up around Dick’s wrists to keep his hands in place, spreading his knees so he can bring Dick closer. Dick thinks maybe one day he’ll have to reassess his newfound habit of avoiding words by kissing Lewis, but Lewis doesn’t seem to mind at the moment, groaning low in the back of his throat and the sound punches the air from Dick’s lungs. He crowds Lew back so he has to brace himself with one hand out against the counter behind him, chest to chest, with their hands still tangled and curled by Lew’s ear.

“You’re changing the subject,” Lew mutters against his lips, with nothing but the best kind of heat behind it, and when he pushes forward, Dick can feel Lew’s cock hard against his stomach. His throat closes tight at the thought. He plants his feet and leans in to the counter so he can feel Lew grind against him, and rests his forehead on Lew’s shoulder, a quick, breathless laugh wrung from him.

“Not changing the subject, just having a different conversation.”

Lew grumbles, and Dick is sure that his eyes roll as well, but he keeps his head on Lew’s shoulder so he can see the muscles jump under his shirt as he brushes his hand gently over Lew’s cock through his jeans. He presses harder with his palm and Lew groans again, louder this time, his hips scooting forward against the counter to bring him closer to Dick.

“You don’t have to - “ Lew starts, but Dick cuts him off by turning his head and kissing him again, letting go of Lew’s neck to work open the zipper of Lew’s jeans far enough to get his hand inside. The angle is awkward with Dick’s wrist bent to the side, and Lew’s still wearing boxers underneath, but the discomfort is worth the breathless sound he wrings from Lewis when he strokes along the length of him, ember hot and twitching under his fingers. Lew lifts his hips so he can get his jeans down his thighs, the fabric strained, but it’s enough room for Dick to pull him out of his boxers, and Lewis hisses “Christ” so sweetly that Dick doesn’t even admonish him.

It’s a different angle from when he brings himself off, and it takes a few unsteady strokes to get a good rhythm started until Lew pulls his hand away - Dick is about to ask if he’s doing something wrong, then Lewis licks Dick’s palm and across his fingers before guiding him back to his cock. Dick feels like someone’s lit him on fire, as quick to ignite as rice paper. Dick grunts and stops, clenching his teeth as he feels his own cock twitch. He inhales sharply with his eyes closed, trying to control himself before he comes embarassingly soon. He wraps his hand around Lew’s cock again and Lew bucks up so hard that his mouth knocks in to Dick’s and their teeth clash together.

“Shit, ow, I’m sorry - “

“No, it’s fine - “

Lew laughs, and it would be a fuller, deeper sound if he weren’t so out of breath, panting in to Dick’s mouth, pushing his hips up again and again to meet the steady pulling of Dick’s hand. “Jesus Christ, Dick, you’ll win every argument if you - ah - if you just put your fucking hands on me.”

Dick smiles, closing his eyes, and when he leans in to Lew again he presses their lips together and stays there, mouth slightly open, feeling the quickening inhale as Lewis digs his nails in to Dick’s forearm and comes in the space between their bodies. He keeps stroking, languid and slow, until Lew pushes at his arm with a wince, overly sensitive and panting like he’s run three miles up and back down. He leans back on his arm outstretched to the counter behind them and Dick follows the motion, peppering kisses to the side of Lew’s jaw and rubbing his cock against Lew’s inner thigh so slowly that he’s not even sure it’s on purpose, but he couldn’t stop if he wanted to.

Lew sits up, Dick following the motion, and grabs Dick’s hips to unbutton his pants and drag them down just far enough. “You don’t have to - “ Dick starts, automatic denial, and Lewis laughs, loud and bright, as he wraps his hand around Dick, strokes once, and pushes off the countertop.

“We’re a little too far past polite, but God, do I love it,” Lew says, and it sounds like you, and he’s pushing Dick, stumbling, until he hits the back of the wall beside the phone. Lew tucks himself back in his boxers and slides to his knees, looking up at Dick from the ground. Dick is breathing deeply like he’s trying to calm himself but a pink flush curls around the back of his freckled neck, so warm and lovely that Lew smiles.

“You really don’t have to,” Dick chokes out, but his feet are sliding slightly, his stance widening, and Lew holds his cock still by the base, inches from his face.

“What kind of a guy is moments away from getting his dick sucked and still tries to turn it down, I ask you,” Lew mutters, and waits for no response as he takes Dick in to his mouth. Dick’s head hits the wall so hard the receiver jumps and clatters. His hand grasps at Lew’s head by his ear, digging and scratching so that Lew groans too, and it’s a wonderful feedback loop of sensation between them; Lew’s throat, vibrating around Dick, and Dick tugging on Lewis’ hair as though to push him away one second, and bring him closer the next. He doesn’t last very long, his thighs tense and his free hand forming a fist against the wall, pulling at Lew’s hair frantically to get him to pull back before he comes with a shout. The sound of Lew’s mouth leaving his cock is obscene, wet and loud in the quiet kitchen, and Dick twitches, curling over to hold Lew’s shoulders as he comes on his chest.

Lew stands and presses his body against Dick’s, both of them breathing heavily, heads tilted in toward each other on opposite shoulders. Dick feels overheated, like sleeping under a heavy blanket before a fever breaks, skin sticky and mouth dry, but he lets his lips drag over Lew’s cheek and they hold each other up, against the wall, for so long that he can’t even hear the kitchen clock ticking.

“I’ll never be able to lean against this wall again,” Dick finally says, and Lew laughs so suddenly he snorts, wrapping his arms around Dick’s waist like that’s going to be the only thing holding him up. They pant in to each others’ necks for a while, until the roaring in Dick’s ears subsides and he can finally hear the ticking of the clock again. Lew turns his head a bit further in to the space between Dick’s neck and his shoulder, sighing slowly, and with a slight turn of his own head, Dick can press his lips in to Lew’s hair, just above his ear. He does so, because he can.

“What if you kept the house, and the land?” Lew asks after another languid stretch of silence, their bodies righted a bit more, pressed closer together against the wall. “What if you always had it, in case...I don’t know, not that I want you to need, but you know. In case you need it.”

Dick leans his head back so it hits the wall with a small thud, just enough that he can see Lewis’ face.

“I mean it,” Lewis continues, “I’ve got the house in Nixon, you can keep this. All of this. And it’ll be here.”

Dick considers the kitchen, the fine layer of dust from renovation coating everything, the boxes of dishes his mother had donated, unprompted, with no concern for the fact that Dick had no need for a seven person set of plates and bowls and was more than content to eat out of an open can, most of the time. The idea of the peace he had held on to with white knuckles for so long, and how much nicer it all was, with Lewis there.

“I understand,” Lew says, smaller, quieter. “Hell, I’m not sure I’m entirely comfortable with the idea, being the only thing. I understand.”

Dick winds his arms around Lew’s body, still against his own, fisting his hands in the soft cotton of his shirt, knuckles white. “Okay. Yeah. The house’ll be here.”

It seemed foolish, then, to still insist on living day by day, when there was an expanse of time before the both of them, slow and liquid mornings and the endless stretch of evenings bathed in soft light after the setting sun had left the sky, and the width of the future feels so large that his lungs hurt, his chest tight, and Dick leans his forehead to Lew’s. He breathes in, steadying and fortifying, and kisses Lew again.

The fence along the top of the drive has been repaired with long posts, no longer cracked and splintering off in to chunks, the old, faded mailbox picked up off the ground and replaced with a sleek black box with the house number on the side. The line of the porch roof slopes slightly, now that there isn’t a sagging hole in the wood and shingles, torn open by the weight of fresh snow and frozen ice. The lace pattern of shadow the tree cuts on the yard is less harsh, green and gold by the light of the sun, and covers the porch in its shade, branches trimmed back and shaped neatly. The railing and columns of the porch are replaced with new wood stained as dark as fresh coffee, and the house is painted a soft slate blue. The flooring inside is new, polished blonde wood in wide planks that run the length of the house, and the bannister of the stairs inside match the railing outside. The windows have been replaced, no longer foggy and cracked, and light washes across the first floor of the house like a flash flood. At Ann’s behest, the honeysuckle bushes had been left to their own devices, sprawling down the hill behind the house and across the backyard.

The living room and dining room are furnished with pieces donated by the church the Winters attend, or things Abraham Meier found at estate sales that he insisted didn’t cost him a thing, though Dick knew he was lying. There was a beautiful bed frame in the largest bedroom, hand carved with long curves and small vines, rosettes on each corner, the kind of piece that belonged to a set that had surely been separated over the course of its life. The rest of the rooms were decorated sparsely, with the bare minimum of requirements, and each large piece had a thin white sheet cast over it as Dick prepared to leave it behind.

Lew tosses his suitcase in the back seat of the Ford with little care for the jostling of its contents, though making sure to avoid tossing it on top of Dick’s steamer trunk, and then looks back over his shoulder at Dick, at the farm. “Don’t worry. You’ll get sick of me after a while and now you’ve got somewhere to go.”

Dick resists grinning, reluctant to encourage to Lewis by doing so. He turns away to look at the house and his smile escapes his grasp. “We’ll be back. We’ve got time.”