She checked her watch again, as she pictured him on the tarmac at Brize Norton, then made a decision, took a deep breath and pressed 'send'. She quickly turned her phone off; she didn't expect a reply but she didn't want to sit there watching out for one either.

He stood, stern faced and composed for the official photograph and then felt the phone in his pocket vibrate against his thigh.

"Come home safe and don't threaten to lob anyone out of the plane. M xx"

He smiled, then gave a little chuckle and composed a reply, stopped, thought about what he'd just written, read it again, hesitated, then deleted it, he couldn't send that, he wasn't anywhere near sure how she'd feel about it if he did.

-OG-

"Happy Birthday"

Molly smiled sweetly at the scruffy looking bloke with long hair tied back in a straggly pony tail and an earring who'd just put a drink in front of her and tried desperately hard to remember what the fuck his name was. It was Jake or Joseph or something like that and he'd been invited by Ronnie to the party in the pub and Molly couldn't work out whether he was supposed to be there for her or whether Ronnie really was as desperate as she'd said, but if he was supposed to be hers, then it wasn't going to be his lucky night. She'd been drinking for hours and knew she was going to regret it big time in the morning, but it didn't seem to matter how much alcohol she poured down her neck or how pissed she got, she couldn't stop thinking about what he might be doing and wondering if he'd thought about her at all today, thought about it being her birthday.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, course, 'ere Ron, what is his bleeding name again?"

Molly nodded her head and indicated the scruffy supplier of drinks who was standing and smiling at them, fortunately just out of earshot.

"Jed" Ronnie said then hesitated slightly "Or Jeff or something like that"

"Nearly right then, I thought he was maybe Jake" Molly thought for a second and began to laugh "Or John"

"Are you pissed?"

"Not pissed enough to be that desperate"

"No, neither am I"

They looked at one another, then at the unfortunate Josh who was still standing there watching them with an expectant half-smile on his face, a smile that was fading rapidly as he watched them start to cackle with laughter.

"You're not sitting here worrying about bloody lover boy are you?"

"Don't know what you're talking about"

"No, course you don't"

For a moment she had considered carrying on pretending that she didn't know what or who Ronnie was talking about, but she knew she was probably too pissed to carry it off and anyway this was Ronnie, who sometimes resembled a bloody mind reader. She knew that she was beginning to be pissed enough to be feeling sorry for herself and should either stop drinking or have another large one. He had been gone for three days and hadn't replied to her text and it already felt like a lifetime and she badly wanted to stop the feelings that she'd had most of the day when the kids had done a little tea party for her and everyone had given her cards and little presents, except Nan who'd given her some lovely underwear which was almost certainly nicked. She was thoroughly fed up with being 24 years old and still sleeping in the bottom bunk in a room festooned with fairy lights or on a small hard single bed in her mate's spare room in Camden and she wanted to stop all these feelings of 'might have been' and 'should have been' that kept popping up in her brain.

Lying in Ronnie's single bed after the party in the pub and wishing the room would stop swinging round, Mollie started to cry. She cried because it was six years exactly since the night of her eighteenth when she'd got drunk and puked outside an Army Recruitment Office, and nothing in her life had changed. She cried because she was 24 and back living at home, she cried because there was no-one in the bed with her to put their arms round her and hold her, she cried because he hadn't answered her text and had been gone three days and she cried because she was completely wasted and knew she was going to feel like shit in the morning.

-OG-

It was just after midnight in Syria, which meant it was ten o'clock in the UK and that she would still be in the pub for at least another hour or so if that's she was celebrating her birthday, and he was pretty sure that it would be. He'd just written the same text message as the one he'd written when he was at Brize, with the addition of 'Happy Birthday', when there was a burst of gunfire outside and a whole lot of confused sounding shouting, and then more shots. Once he'd sorted out the over anxious and over imaginative squaddies who were on night patrol, and reassured them that they were seeing things but that they'd have been in even deeper shit if they'd ignored what they thought they'd seen and it was a real insurgency, he went back to the miserable, lonely and very basic quarters he'd been allocated, picked up his phone and re-read the message he'd written, thought about it for a few minutes, then telling himself not to be so bloody ridiculous, deleted it.

-OG-

"YOU'RE FUCKING LATE, Molls, why the FUCK are you so LATE?"

"Sorry Ron, got held up at College, I'm here now, sorry"

"Why the fuck isn't your fucking phone working? I tried calling you and I weren't the only one"

"Out of credit and out of money, the cash point will eat my card if I try and get any more, sorry" She pulled a contrite face "Who else wanted me?"

"Who do you think?"

"Haven't got a bleeding clue" She lied at the same time as crossing her fingers, the three months had been up for several days now, something she had been aware of even though she was no longer constantly checking the calendar and counting the days.

A cold wet December afternoon and Molly had just arrived at the warehouse in Camden from Elephant and Castle, where her last lecture of the day had run over, making her very late, mainly because one of the keen bastards had asked loads of questions at the end of the lecture to show the lecturer just how bloody keen they were when everyone else was ready to sod off, it was Friday after all, and they were all looking daggers at the arsehole who was showing off and cutting into valuable drinking time. Molly was especially keen to get away, she was down to do a waitressing gig and was desperate for the money, it was almost Christmas and she was now continually spending money that she didn't have just to live, never mind Christmas, so that she kept expecting the bank to refuse her card. She daren't even try the ATM again in case it swallowed it because it had told her to piss off the last time she'd tried to get some cash.

Not only that, but her phone had run out of credit days ago which meant that she couldn't let Ronnie know that even though she was running late she was definitely going to show up, so that she was a bit scared in case Ronnie replaced her even though she'd never given her the slightest reason to suspect that she wouldn't show up in time for anything where she'd promised to work. At the end of the day, even though Ronnie was a really good friend, they were best mates, and even though Ronnie knew how poor she was and how much she needed the money, she had a business to run and needed the waitress cover at this party tonight.

The three months since Charles had gone to Syria had been uneventful, she'd restricted herself to watching one news broadcast a day, unless there was a report of casualties when she'd found it impossible to stop looking at the news app on her phone and had experienced one almost heart stopping moment of fear when they'd talked about a Captain getting killed, before she'd remembered that he was a Major now and not a Captain anymore, and had then felt very guilty for being so relieved that it wasn't him.

After a few weeks the raw edge of worry had started to heal over and her life had started to be much calmer and more controlled than it had been for those few weeks in the summer. She hadn't heard from him since he went and slowly she began to stop wanting or expecting to see a text or a message from him and to give up hope and accept that her life had gone back to normal, the way it used to be before he'd re-appeared. She'd been on a work experience with a section of the Think Ahead Project which was specialising in helping people with housing issues when they were already struggling with their mental health and knew now, without a shadow of a doubt, that this was totally right for her, she'd loved every minute of it.

There was three months left to go before she graduated and she was desperate to get a place on the project. She hoped that she'd done well enough when she was shadowing, her mentor had been very encouraging in his feedback, but, as always, it was in the lap of the gods, with her degree and whether there were vacancies and a whole lot of other variables, including funding, so she couldn't get her hopes up too much, too soon. At the moment even having a paid job seemed a lifetime away.

"Go on then, what you waiting for? Go and bloody phone him, use the office one but don't be long, we got to go in a minute and you're not changed yet"

-OG-

"James"

"Hello"

"Christ, at last, where the fuck have you been and where are you now?"

"Whatever happened to 'Hello Molly, how are you'?"

"Sorry, Hello, how are you? but where the fuck are you? I've been ringing you for days"

"I've got no credit on my phone, and I'm at Ronnie's because I'm working tonight"

"Shit, do you have to?"

"Yes I do, I need the money, I need to top up my phone and I'm totally skint, I'm a poor student, remember?"

"I'll top it up"

"No"

"Why not?"

"I'll do it later when I get paid"

"When can I see you? tomorrow?"

"I dunno, what for? I mean, what do you want to see me for? and where are you anyhow?"

"I'm in barracks, my flat's got tenants, so I need something to look forward to, to get me out of here, anyway, and I just want to see you. How about tomorrow evening, we could go out for a meal or a drink or something?"

"I could meet you for lunch, but its Saturday night and it's nearly Christmas, so I'm working again tomorrow night, and I need the money and now I've gotta go"

"Shit" He could hear Ronnie yelling at her telling her to hurry up and get changed because they were almost ready to leave "Same place as before? 1.00? Inside this time?"

"Okay"

"Molly, it's lovely to hear your voice"

"See you tomorrow"

Her face was wreathed in smiles as she changed so that Ronnie laughed and muttered something about needing someone to pass her a sick bag and could she please stop looking so bleeding pleased with herself because there was nothing more annoying than a smug smirk on someone else's gob.

-OG-

The freezing rain was almost horizontal from a dark and gloomy sky as it bounced off the tables and chairs on the terracing outside the Serpentine bar and there wasn't a soul walking along the tow path or anywhere near the lake as Charles sat and alternated between looking out at the rain pocked water and watching the entrance waiting for her. She stood and watched him for a minute, feeling the water drip off her soaking wet hair and run down her neck, he obviously hadn't realised that there was more than one entrance to the bar and restaurant and he was watching the wrong one. He was visibly nervous, drumming his fingers on the table and constantly checking his watch.

She gave her soaking raincoat, with the deeply inadequate hood which fell down all the time, to the waiter to find somewhere to hang it so that it could drip and then took a deep breath and went and tapped him on the shoulder so that he jumped out of his skin, so fixed had been his attention on the other entrance door.

"God, where did you spring from?"

"Hello to you too, I came in through the bleeding door" She laughed "you was watching the wrong one"

"You look beautiful" He stood up and went to kiss her on her cheek.

"No I don't, I look like a bloody drowned rat, I'm going to the loo see if they've got one of them hot air dryer thingies, try and dry me hair a bit"

"I'll ask them if they've got a towel or something, and you still look beautiful even if you are a drowned rat"

"No, its okay, I'll manage, and thanks, I think"

He watched her walk back towards him across the half empty restaurant and couldn't control the huge smile that had spread across his face; she'd tied her wet hair back into a small curly ponytail, but there were damp tendrils of hair escaping and framing her face. She looked exactly the same as the Molly Dawes of his memory, and with her hair pulled back off her face like that she looked exactly the same as she had in Afghan, so that his stomach churned with the type of emotions he'd thought he didn't ever want to feel again.

"So, you look okay, still in one piece, I see. What was it like?"

"Pretty boring most of the time, bloody frightening sometimes and the food and accommodation were total shit"

"Business as usual then" They both laughed.

"Yup" he was still smiling "What about you, has everything been okay?"

"Yeah, well, apart from being skint of course, mind you that's nothing new"

They both looked down at the menus while flicking glances at each other and smiling awkwardly whenever they caught each other's eye, as Molly felt the adrenalin induced butterflies begin to flutter deep in her stomach. They ordered their lunch without really paying much attention to what they'd chosen, Molly wasn't even sure she'd be able to eat any of it, she wasn't at all hungry, her mouth went dry and her throat closed at the thought.

"Charles, can I ask you something?" There was something she wanted to, needed to, know, they'd talked about her last time they'd been here but not a word about him.

"Of course"

"What made you stay in? you know, after … everything"

He smiled ruefully at her "I think I told you once, the army was my whole life before I met you, and then it was my whole life again"

"I'm sorry"

"No, don't be, it made me have to get my shit together, to work really hard at getting fit and back to where I had to be to carry on, to prove to everyone, you know the doctors and the physios and so on, that they were wrong and I did it, and then there was all that bollocks with Smurf" He smiled at her again "I got that all wrong as well"

"Sorry"

"Stop saying you're sorry"

"Sorry" They both laughed again as he leaned across the table and took hold of her hand, kissing the back of her knuckles and went to say something as the waiter arrived forcing them to sit back to allow him to start fussing around with putting plates of food in front of them and unwrapping cutlery from napkins and putting drinks on the table and checking condiments, so that Molly wanted to tell him to please piss off. She pushed some of the food around on her plate and ate a tiny piece of a chip, chewing it and then washing it down with a mouthful of coke, she had decided against alcohol again. She tried to make a determined effort to eat some of the meal which she hoped he was paying for, the money she'd made working last night had paid to top up her phone and would clear a miniscule fraction of what she owed the bank, but her card would probably be refused and cut up in front of them if she tried to pay for anything with it.

She managed about a third of her meal before admitting defeat and put her cutlery side by side on the plate.

"Not hungry?" He nodded towards her plate.

"Sorry" She shook her head as she spoke, making him roll his eyes and then raise his eyebrows to the ceiling as he laughed.

"For fuck's sake, stop saying that you're sorry"

"Sorry"

He laughed again and shook his head, then looked around the room at the white twinkling fairy lights and the four huge Christmas trees, one in each corner of the room, all decked out with silver baubles and white lights, then looked at her and smiled.

"I'd forgotten it was nearly Christmas when we were in Syria, you know how you lose track in these places, are you staying at home?"

"Yeah, you? going home to Bath?"

He nodded as they both remembered the day at Camp Bastion when he'd invited her to spend Christmas in Bath with him, and what had happened immediately afterwards and what a catalyst that had been in the chain of events that had led them to be here today. They both realised just what a long time ago it all was and how much water had passed under the bridge since then. He took a deep breath and took hold of her hand again, abandoning his own meal half eaten.

"When we were here that day in the summer, I thought, no I was completely bloody convinced, that you and I could just sit out there on that terrace with a drink and have a nice 'ex-colleagues getting together and catching up' sort of chat, I was so fucking smug … and so completely wrong, wasn't I?" He didn't wait for an answer before going on "By the time we'd walked across the park and I'd kissed you goodbye I knew that I was either still in love with you from the first time round, or that I'd fallen in love with you all over again"

"I don't understand"

"What?"

"You just said you knew you still loved me….so you went home and asked Miranda to marry you"

-OG-

Author's notes: Thank you for all your lovely comments, hope you enjoy this.