BEFORE

I would dial the numbers

Just to listen to your breath

And I would stand inside my hell

And hold the hand of death

You don't know how far I'd go

To ease this precious ache

And you don't know how much I'd give

Or how much I can take

"Come To My Window"

Melissa Ethridge

July 12, 1947

Worcester, Massachusetts

At first, Chuck thought he was dreaming. A soft pitter patter, almost like a scratching rodent…had he heard it or imagined it? In bed, he rolled over, kicking off the twisted sheet that added to the summer swelter the ceiling fan did nothing to remedy. The only light was from the moon, shining its silver beams through the windows and casting amorphous shadows.

Everything was still.

He flopped back down on his pillow and rolled onto his side.

Fully awake now, he was certain he heard it again. Maybe a branch against the window-glass. Except, awareness made the sound clearer. Tapping on his window, deliberate. He shifted his eyes, seeing one of the shadows on the carpet in his room wavering, and erratically, not the normal sway of the leaves in the breeze.

He sat up again.

"Chuck!"

A loud whisper…was that possible? But it was Sarah's voice. No matter the tone or the volume, he would know her voice anywhere, hear it anywhere.

He swung his legs from the mattress onto the floor and stood. Creeping slowly, certain to avoid any squeaky floorboards, he made his way to the window. It was partly open for the breeze, the screen in place. He leaned against the windowsill and looked down. Outside, clinging to the trellis in her pajamas, was Sarah.

She looked frustrated. How long had she been there, waiting for him to wake up?

He pressed the sliding latches and opened the screen, pushing it up its track slowly, preventing any squeaking or scratching the motion would create. When the window was wide open, he leaned over the windowsill, bent at the waist, and reached down for her. His height gave him an advantage, a firm anchor against his bedroom wall and also sufficient stretch to firmly grip her by her wrist.

She was strong enough to push herself upward, only needing his grip for balance and the final heave through the window. She was ready to dive head first onto the carpet, but Chuck feared she might wake Gertrude and Casey. Instead, he quickly shifted his grip from her wrist to around her waist, in effect carrying her through the window in his arms. Holding her like that, in her thin nightclothes, was disorienting and awkward. The night was suddenly much warmer.

He set her down, then took a step back from her. "What are you doing?" he whispered. "How did you get here? Dressed like that? What if someone saw you–"

"Relax, Chuck," Sarah whispered in reply. Her face was completely hidden in the shadows, but he heard the smile in her voice. She had pressed her index finger over his mouth. "No one saw me, I promise." She advanced from the window. "My coat is outside on the grass. It was easier to climb without it."

"You didn't walk, did you?" he asked. On foot, it was an impossibly long distance from Jack's house to his.

"I did, but from Carina's house, not my house. I'm supposed to be having a sleepover there," she explained.

"So you left to come…here?" he asked, confused.

She huffed, spinning and sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. "She just…needed…an hour. That's what she said. Her…boyfriend…snuck in her house like I just snuck in yours."

Chuck's stomach contracted at her words, instantly nervous and uncomfortable. "Why did she invite you over if she planned on…you know…" He couldn't finish the words, feeling his cheeks burning in the dark.

"I'm her cover, apparently," Sarah grumbled quietly, shame in her voice.

He crouched down and sat beside her, making a conscious effort to not let his body touch hers anywhere, not her legs or her arms. In the middle of the night, clandestinely in his room, in their pajamas, skin to skin contact seemed wrong to him, regardless of any intention. Legally, he was an adult, and she was still a child. However bizarre that notion was when he thought of how they were with each other, what they were to each other.

"Is it still Kenny?" Chuck asked, trying for a conversational tone. When he had returned in May from California, Carina's male companion's name was Kenny. Two months was a long time for her to be with one guy, though, as Chuck had noted in his letters to Sarah.

"She broke up with Kenny last Friday," Sarah explained.

Today was Wednesday. She was already…with someone else?

"Kyle, that's who's there. I don't know his last name. You might know him. He's a senior. He was on the football team." She seemed to be adding more modifiers, in hopes he would figure out who she meant. He would have been a junior while Chuck was a senior, so they could have crossed paths. However, the athletes as a group were not people he regularly associated with. She shrugged at his silence.

The more he witnessed now that he had returned, the more he realized how wild Carina had been this past year. He had feared it, learning snippets about it in Sarah's letters. Chuck found it troubling, both for Carina and Sarah. At 15, Carina already had a reputation that probably could never be repaired unless she moved away. Chuck's efforts to protect Sarah's reputation would have been for naught if guilt by association persisted.

Chuck had tried to befriend Carina, from when they had met, when she was a small girl. There were many similarities between the two, Sarah and Carina, he noted as they had grown. It made sense of why the girls had stayed friends, despite the variety of complaints Chuck had heard from Sarah through the years about Carina. Sarah's dead mother and Carina's absent father also bound them. However, Sarah had gravitated towards him and the Caseys for comfort, not really to Carina. Carina had sought her absent father in the arms of other men, with no example from her mother to temper her recklessness. In fact, her mother's example made it all worse.

If anyone had seen Sarah climbing the trellis into his room, Sarah could very easily be lumped into that category…the town slut, as he heard Casey grumbling to Gertrude about Roxanne. The time Chuck and Sarah were able to spend together, now that they were older, had been altered for that reason. Gone were the days of hours alone in the woods together. They were left with the public park, or days in Chuck's house with Gertrude or Casey in the same room. Jack was not a reliable chaperone, his own unfitness not even known to him, for it was Gertrude who had told Chuck he should only see Sarah at their house, not Jack's. People would talk, she had said, because they would know how lax Jack's discipline was.

He had been home from California for over two months, and this moment, inappropriate as it was, was the first time they had been alone together in all that time.

"Do you ever…you know, try to tell her…she needs to…you know… calm down?" Chuck asked.

Sarah shook her head, her hair brushing against his bare arm, tickling him. "She just tells me I don't understand. I'm too young, too innocent…whatever that means."

"You're the same age as her," he countered. "And you're supposed to be innocent at 14."

"I know," she answered. Sarah was silent for a long time. Her voice again when she spoke startled him. "She…doesn't have a single person in the world who really loves her. She has her mother…but still no family. Like an orphan."

He agreed with that assessment, puncturing as it was to admit. The three of them, Chuck, Sarah, and Carina were each their own kind of orphan. Chuck had felt that way after losing his parents and sister, but he had been granted the gift of the Caseys…and later, of Sarah. He hoped that she felt that way about him, finding him a year after her mother's death had left her alone…in her father's care. As much as Chuck had tried to help Carina, in the end, she had refused the friendship he had offered. Whether it was out of jealousy or something else, he didn't know. To him, it was a tragedy, maybe not so drastic as his personal tragedies, but still a genuine tragedy. Whoever Carina could have become had been permanently changed, lost.

His greatest fear was that Carina would take Sarah down with her, whenever the final fall would happen.

"She told me she just…likes…you know, having sex," Sarah said, forcing out the words, like she was hesitant and needed the courage to say them. "But I know that's not the reason. She wants them to love her, but at the same time, she lies to herself, tells herself she just wants…that." She didn't repeat the word.

He couldn't shake the awkward feeling he had, despite how easy she was to talk to, even about embarrassing things like this. "I tried to convince her that she was worth more than that. But all she heard, from everywhere else, was the exact opposite," he sighed.

"She'd punch you if she thought you felt sorry for her, you know that, right?" Sarah reminded him. "She hates pity most."

He nodded, not sure if she could see the movement in the dark.

"She thinks it's weird that I haven't ever gone out with a boy," Sarah added.

He felt his stomach churn, not wanting the conversation to go this way. "Has anyone asked you?" he asked, internally kicking himself. He couldn't stop the words before they came out. He wanted to know, so badly, but he also didn't…equally badly.

"Bryce Larkin," Sarah told him. "His mother was friends with my mother…and his dad and my dad know each other from work. He asked me to a dance…but I got sick, and I never told him yes or no…and I missed it anyway."

Chuck knew of Bryce, but did not necessarily know him. Bryce was what the girls he knew would call dashing…ridiculously handsome. He had bright blue eyes, a movie star smile, and a personality similar to Jack's, but more sincere, if that was possible. Her twisted answer left him unsettled. Had she been considering going with him, but her pleurisy interrupted her plans?

"What about you?" she asked. She sounded like she would have if someone else told her to ask him. She was changing the subject expertly, a lesson she seemed to have learned from her father.

"Too busy with school, Sarah," he said, hating that he was lying, or at least stretching the truth. He was busy with school, sometimes in class over nine hours a day and working an additional two or three, then staying up until the early morning doing his homework. But he forced that busyness, knowing without it, there were girls like Jill in the mailroom…Hannah in the library…Jessica in his study group. The thought of saying a name of anyone female to Sarah felt like betrayal, the feeling inexplicable but persistent.

"Gertrude is always worried about how…liberal…it is in California. Not like it is here. Almost everything is co-ed," Sarah quoted to him. It was anything he hadn't heard from Gertrude, a constant lament in his visit home.

"The dorms aren't. Common area only until nine, and no one after lights out," he told her.

"No one sneaks in?" she asked. Why was she so insistent on hearing about this?

"I'm sure they do, but no one I've ever seen," he said, wishing she would stop.

"Aren't you curious?" she asked, tilting her face closer to see him in the dark.

"About what?" he asked, intentionally playing dumb.

"Sex," she said, lowering the pitch in her voice though she was already whispering.

"Jesus, Sarah," he wheezed, his face flaming hot. He choked on nothing, burying his face in his elbow to avoid being overheard.

"Come on, Chuck, this is me," Sarah said plainly. "You're 18. My father said 18 year old boys have a one-track mind."

"I… think…that's normal. Hormones or whatever. Teenagers in general," he replied, nervous, realizing he was quoting Gertrude, when she had tried to talk to him about what she called "the birds and the bees" before Casey had intervened.

He couldn't begin to repeat what Casey had told him in Sarah's company, however. It had been a soldier's version of the speech, raw and unfiltered.

"But it's supposed to be when you're married," Chuck added, hearing Gertrude's voice.

"My mother didn't wait," Sara argued, bitterly. Like it was her mother's job to resist an advance, the sin hers alone.

"But she loved your dad," Chuck defended. "It's about what's in your heart, that's what Gertrude always says." Something connected in his mind as he was crafting his words, clicking like it hadn't before. "There is a huge difference between people like Carina and people like your mother, Sarah."

Her breath was ragged in the quiet. He had struck a nerve. It was part of his almost sixth sense when it came to Sarah. "And the fact that you might think about it…doesn't make you like either one of them."

She seemed to be contemplating what he said. If she believed him, or even considered what he said, he didn't know.

"I'm going to be the oldest girl in the ninth grade next fall," she complained. It seemed like a change of subject again, but he knew it was related to her previous topic.

"Sarah, you don't live your life according to what anyone else thinks, other peoples' expectations. Don't start now, because you're afraid you won't fit in. Anyone worth your time will accept you…just the way you are," he swore, surprised by the passion in his voice.

"Did you feel like that in California?" she asked gently. "Like you belonged with those people?"

I belong with you. He bit down, keeping the words from spilling out. The awkward tension…those words would make it worse. But they were true. He had found a sympathetic group, better than he ever had in high school, now that he was in college. But it all paled in comparison to being here, at home, with her. She was his home.

"I hate thinking of you…alone…so far away from us," she added, her whisper almost inaudible. "I wanted to know that you had friends. That you were happy."

Happiness, as he had understood, came in gradients, not all or nothing. Relative to everything else. He could be happy in California, laughing with Michael and his other friends. But the happiest day in California was worse than a dismal day in Massachusetts. The only thing that could make a day in Massachusetts truly dismal was the absence of Sarah. Happiness, however many ways he could define it, focused on Sarah, like she was the only chromatic color in a black and white world.

"It's hard to be…happy…when I think you're sad," he admitted.

Very close to his ear, she whispered, "I'm only sad when you're sad. Just be happy. Don't be afraid to be happy."

He felt her kiss his cheek, deliberate, feeling more than a sisterly kiss, but still, just a kiss on his cheek. Her lips lingered, her breath soft on his skin.

She moved like a tigress in the dark, hoisting herself onto the windowsill in the blink of an eye. Before he could even protest, she flipped herself out the window and down to the trellis below. Like an acrobat, she moved with lithe grace all the way down to the ground. He watched the dark figure of her don the jacket she had left on the ground.

He couldn't call out; he could only watch her go.

She never looked back. And the next time he saw her, when they were with everyone else like always now, she pretended like it had never happened. Like he had dreamed of her midnight visit…and her wish that he be happy, even away from her, without her.

He doubted that was possible, but he would try, because she had asked it of him.

A/N: Thanks to Zettel for pre reading.