** ROSE POV **

We were standing in Hell. I had thought that the Bois Jacques was Hell, but I had been wrong. This God-forsaken cage filled with corpses and near-corpses that sat just outside of Landsberg, which we had been praising as a comparative paradise only a day earlier, was without question the closest thing to Hell that I had ever, or will ever, see.

My stomach churned as I walked through the camp, looking into the faces of those men. They hugged us and kissed our cheeks. They wept in our arms. They were so broken, but they looked at us with such hope. It was an amazing, heart-wrenching feeling. Those of us from Easy would catch each other's gazes through the smoke still drifting upward from huts that had been burned, and it seemed that a silent understanding and connectedness was drifting through the entire camp. We were as united as we had ever been, for with all that we had seen in this war, nothing compared to this and we knew that there would be no words to describe it once we went home.

When at last it came time for us to return to our barracks, General Taylor had declared martial law and we felt some solace in the knowledge that the people who had ignored the existence of this place for so long would be getting a firsthand experience in the horror that man was capable of. We felt dirty. Disgusted. Exhausted. We were conflicted. We felt relieved to be leaving, and guilty for feeling relieved. We were moving on to supervise the cleanup in Thalem, but I think a part of all of us would stay in the confines of those barbed wire fences.

I sat in the back of the rumbling truck as we left the camp, surrounded by men who were as shocked into silence as I was. Deep down I knew that we were all feeling the same thing, but Bull had somehow wound up in a different truck, and in that moment I felt very small and very alone. All I really wanted was to scrub the smell of the camp from my skin and curl up in a bunk, wrapped in the arms of the one person who always made me feel safe.

At last the trucks jerked to a stop, emotionally wrung-out paratroopers stumbling from the backs of them and, without hesitation, toward the showers. Uniforms were dumped into piles as we stood, expressionless, under the streams of water. As they always did, the guys had blocked off a small area of the showers when we arrived so that I could have some small measure of privacy, and I stood behind that flap of canvas and finally let the tears come. I had a feeling that I wasn't the only one. Tears were much easier to hide when your face was already wet from the shower.

I sobbed and scrubbed until I heard the rustling of canvas behind me.

** BULL POV **

Things had gone far beyond sideways today. One minute, we'd been out on a patrol and teasing O'Keefe about how jumpy he was. The next, I'd been kneeling beside a barbed wire fence with a churning stomach, wet eyes, and a sense of dread unlike anything I had felt in the war. With the flurry of activity as we secured the camp and attempted to care for the prisoners, I hadn't seen Rose more than in passing since the rest of the Company had arrived, and after looking in the faces of those men and hearing about the existence of a women's camp, all I really wanted was to wrap her in my arms.

I was standing under the shower in my boxers, lathering the soap in my hands, when I saw her walk into the small shower area that had been set aside for her. I didn't think twice. The men around me were too dazed to notice as I slipped behind the canvas curtain, but as the flap closed, she looked over her shoulder at me. Instead of surprise, I saw relief. She'd been crying, but when she saw me, she began to sob even harder and I moved immediately to wrap my arms around her. She leaned back into my chest and I pressed a kiss to the top of her head.

"You okay, Rosie baby?"

She took a shuddering breath.

"Yeah. Yeah, I am now. Are you?"

"I'm okay now. I was just worried about you. I know today was hard. I felt bad that I couldn't be beside you more."

"I feel so disgusting, Bull. I can't get that smell off of me."

"I know, sweetheart. Here, let me help."

I lathered the soap in my hands and massaged it into her shoulders and back, feeling the tension leave her muscles as she relaxed into me. Now was not the time to notice how her body, firm from training and combat, still felt soft beneath my touch. My fingers moved up and she leaned back, exposing her slender neck so that I couldn't resist the urge to pull her back into me, hugging her from behind and letting my lips brush along the skin there.

I wanted desperately for her to be okay. The last couple of weeks had been trying for her at best. Nobody else in the company knew about her and Winters. Although she did a fantastic job of hiding it from everyone else, I knew that she'd been heartbroken by how things had played out between them. She had been operating under the hope that they were just putting aside mutual feelings until the war was over, but he had essentially eliminated that hope with their conversation in Hagueneau. She told me that it felt like she'd been hallucinating in the moments they'd shared, seeing feelings that weren't really there. She felt dismissed.

Ultimately, though, she was handling things very well. She had freely confided in me about anything and everything since we'd spent that long night together in a barn in Holland. I'd watched her become more confident since then and, in the weeks since their conversation, I'd heard her distress over the newly-minted Major begin to fade. The previous night, before the hell of the camp, we had stayed up late as we often did, whispering to each other like children up past our bedtime. She had told me that, for the first time in a while, she was content. Content with the situation we were in. Content with the way things had happened between her and Winters.

"But most of all," she had said, snuggling deeper into my arms, "I'm content with this right here."

I worried that all of that might be undone by the experience of the day. I'd resolved never to push her, and I didn't want to start now, but it was hard to fight the instinct to kiss her and tell her that everything would be okay. My lips pressed against her neck and I wrapped her tightly in my arms as I tried to convey comfort to her. She seemed to sense my concern and turned in my arms, taking the soap from me and rubbing the suds across my chest.

"I'm gonna be okay. We are gonna be okay," she tried to reassure me.

Her hands ran across my chest as mine had across her back, trying to cleanse away the sweat and grime of the camp. I swallowed hard, that electricity, which was becoming all too familiar, crackling between us. I was sure that she could feel my heart pounding as I slid my palms over her hands and held them to my lips, but she intertwined her fingers with mine and looked up at me with the absolute trust of two people who had been through the worst the world could throw at them and survived it together. In that moment, I truly felt like we might be the only two people left on the planet.

Without any thought to the consequences, I placed her arms around my neck and slipped my hands to her hips, pulling her bare body against my half-clothed form. I could feel a heart pounding again, but this time I wasn't sure whether it was hers or mine. Was I really about to risk everything? The words came out before I could stop them.

"I'm terrified that I'm about to ruin our friendship, but Rosalie, I've never in my life wanted to kiss a woman as badly as I want to kiss you right now."

She shook her head at me.

"Denver, there is nothing on this planet that could ruin our friendship."

My voice sounded husky, almost unrecognizable to my own ears as I asked, "You sure about that?"

Her hands were in my hair as she lifted herself onto her tiptoes, and she managed only one phrase before I crashed my lips to hers.

"Only one way to find out."