Come Back To Us - 19. Chapter 19

Another shift to George's POV   

As soon as she was allowed to get out of the hospital, George took Rosemary with him. He waited for the night to fall and sneaked out so they wouldn’t get caught.

Nobody could be trusted anymore in times of war. There was something about it that made people paranoid. Except your loved ones. He knew he could always count on them. They would always have his back.

He could go to the house of Margaret’s parents, but he decided to go to Emma’s pub where Paul had been staying for a while now. The constant bombings had made them closer. Mostly because Emma was afraid that any moment might have been their last moment together.

Even if a pub wasn’t supposed to be the best place to stay in for a child, Emma would be there to take care of her.

He banged on the door since it was closed, and he hadn’t got the key to open it. He just hoped he wouldn’t wake up the whole neighbourhood.

“But if they don’t wake up, what are we going to do?” The little girl asked him plainly.

“They will wake up,” he insisted on the ‘will’, because it was his best option so far. Even though he could still go and see his uncle and aunt, he was stubborn. They hadn’t come all the way there just to walk away.

It was already late, and the girl needed to sleep.

He avoided shouting but it became more and more difficult to keep his mouth shut as the seconds passed.

“Paul! Emma! Open the bloody door!”

He saw Rosemary rub her eyes with a tired hand.

“Bloody hell! Open it!!!”

After some more banging, he could hear the door being unlock soon enough to reveal Emma behind it. She rubbed her eyes as well.

“Georges…? What are you doing here at such a late hour? Has something happened?”

“Can we come in? Please.”

“Huh? We?”

She seemed just to notice now the little girl that was with him.

“Who is that little girl? Why is she with you?”

“I’ll explain later. Come on, it’s not summer yet.”

“Yeah, sure , sorry!”

She moved aside to let them in and locked the door afterwards.

He heard the stairs creaking with none other than Paul coming down.

“What the heck, George? What is that rumpus all about?”
They both stared at him and Rosemary, waiting for some kind of convincing explanation.

“I need your help. This is Rosemary. I need you to keep her here with you. Her parents died in the bombings. She has no one left. Please.”

How could they refuse after hearing that anyway?

“Oh, poor sweet child…” Emma looked horrified as she spoke. “Come here. You must be so tired. There’s a room waiting for you above.”

Emma approached her and grabbed her hand to lead her on the upper floor.

“But where will we sleep if she stays here? There’s only one bed,” Paul reminded her.

“But in times of war, we have to make do with what we have and stick together, remember?”

Paul gave him the look that said “keep your mouth shut”, but he could only congratulate himself for his witty comeback.

But his cocky attitude soon vanished anyway as he remembered the first time Paul and said those words to him. It was painful. Anything related to him was.

He bit his lower lip as he stayed still.

“Did you find her on the street?”

“No. She was at the hospital for a broken leg. But she didn’t want to go back to the orphanage.”

“What? Are you serious? Are you aware you have no legal rights to do what you did? It’s akin to kidnapping! You really wanna go to jail, don’t you? You dummy!”

“Hey! Don’t start admonishing me! Are you forgetting how you brought Karl to your parents’ house when he had nowhere to go with no one to help him!”

“But this is not quite the same situation! Karl is Danish, of course I wouldn’t leave him on the street on his own! He came from a foreign land!”

“But you didn’t know it when you found him! It wasn’t written on his face, was it?”

“But he was on the street! While that girl had a place to stay in! And you just took her with you without telling anybody about it of course! What do you think it is?”

“If she didn’t want to go back there, this could only mean this wasn’t a place for her.”

There was a short break as they didn’t look away from each other.

“Of course, no child will ever willingly stays at an orphanage. But they don’t have any other choice. Unless they find a family to adopt them. But one can’t just adopt a child like that! It takes time.”

He had never liked that concept of orphanages and adoptions. Children were not animals.

“We don’t have time for waiting. Now that she’s here, she’s going to stay, whether you like it or not.”

Then tension rose. George had never liked those kinds of arguments with the man he considered as a big brother, but he needed to stand his ground. For the girl’s well-being.

He just did what he thought was right. This couldn’t be considered as an offence. No one could blame him for having a heart.

After much thinking, he finally knew how it felt to care for someone else.

———————

The next evening, he came back to see Rosemary, but not with empty hands.

She was already in bed. Emma said she needed to go to sleep early.

She smiled at him as soon as she saw him.

“Hey,” he smiled back at her. “Look, what I’ve got for you.”

He showed her what he had been hiding behind his back, causing her smile to grow wider and brighter.

Before he got here, he went to pay a visit to his uncle and aunt, and his aunt’s parents. He told them about Rosemary and Margaret gave to him a stuffed rabbit one of her friends had made herself for all those orphan children. She had to be one hell of a handwork to make such a thing.

It was grey and without a flaw, its ears hanging down like a dog’s and its nose pink.

“Here you go.” He said as he handed it to her.

“He’s beautiful. Thank you!”

She stared at it as if it were the most wonderful thing in the world. He smiled, but it was a sad smile. At least, she would never suffer with a stuffed rabbit. They could always stay together. Even as an adult, people would probably find it cute for a girl to keep a memory of her childhood, especially when it was there during so tough and awful a time.

After staring at it for a while, she hugged it close to her chest.

His stomach dropped.

She cradled it from side to side as she closed her eyes. He looked away momentarily and dug his nails into the palm of his hand.

He didn’t know whether he should go or stay. He guessed it would be best if he left. He started walking away in utter silence.

“Can you read me a story?”

He froze in his tracks as he heard her innocent and delicate voice.

He had never done that before. He turned back around to face her.

“But I haven’t got any book to read to you…”

“Yes, you have. Here, take this one.”

He turned around again to see Emma handing him a book.

“Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. My father used to read it to me when I was a child. I loved it! He got so much tired to read it over and over again, so I learnt to read it on my own!”

He looked into her soft eyes.

“And it has a rabbit in it,” she added as she winked at him and then glanced at Rosemary with that warm smile of hers.

“Yeah!” Rosemary cheered as she put her arms up, the rabbit resting peacefully on her lap.

He looked at Emma again and then at the book. And then at Emma again.

“You can do it.”

“No. She wants you to do it. Not me.”

But he was still skeptical.

“It’s not that complicated, you’ll see.”

He looked back and froth from her eyes to the book as she was patiently waiting for him to take it. After a long moment of hesitation, he finally did. Her smile widened before she walked away to go downstairs.

He stared at the cove of the book for a while before he looked at Rosemary. She needed it. To escape reality for a while to go into a better world. At least a world that could never be worse than theirs. He needed to preserve what was left of her innocence.

He came near her and sat on the edge of the bed. He opened the book and flipped to the first page. He cleared his throat before he started reading.

“Chapter I. Down the Rabbit-Hole.” Hey glanced up at Rosemary who looked quite eager to hear the story. “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice “without pictures or conversations?”

Learning about a precise subject, maybe? Which wasn’t the most exciting thing in the world of course.

He kept reading for long enough to forget how much time passed. And as he was about to start reading the seventh chapter, he noticed how Rosemary was fast asleep, still holding her rabbit close to her chest.

He closed the book and put it down on the bedside table that was on her right. He watched her sleep peacefully. He had a lump in his throat.

He remembered watching Karl sleep in the moonlight or early sunlight. Or Nathan before him.

Stop it. I don’t love him and he doesn’t love me. End of story. And Nathan is a ghost.

“Looks like she’s grown fond of you.”

He turned around only to see Paul leaning on the doorframe, hands in his pockets, a smug look plastered on his face. He must have been observing him all along. He glanced back at the girl.

“I don’t know why she would though. I just did my job as a medicine student and brought that rabbit to her because Margaret thought she’d love it.”

The smirk on his face only showed that he wasn’t believing him.

“You’ve done more than that by taking her here. It means you care.”

Why shouldn’t he?

He looked into his eyes for any hidden kind of innuendo, but there was something more in his eyes that he didn’t want to look into.

“I’m not a heartless monster.”

“I’ve never said you were.”

Silence filled the room, and he wished some words could remain unspoken. He looked away from his cousin and glanced from time to time at the toddler.

“You’d make a good father.”

He clenched his fist that was resting on the bed. The kind of thing he didn’t want to hear.

“I don’t wanna be a father.”

“You still. got plenty of time ahead of you to change your mind.”

“You’re sounding more and more like your mother. Beware. Getting older will only make it worse.”

Paul gave him that “beware” look that could only make him smirk.

“We should rather talk about your becoming a father. Is Emma pregnant already? I’m sure Rosemary would love to have a baby to take care of.”

He felt it was going to be hard to have the last word…

“No, we should rather talk about you and Karl.”

He clenched both his jaw and fist.

“There’s nothing to say about it.”

“You mean about us?”

“There’s never been an us. Never will.”

It was silent again. If he could punch it, he would. It was unbearable.

“You still don’t feel guilty for letting him go into this hell?”

Shut. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

His gritted his teeth.

“You know, it’s not too late. You-”

“Will you shut your bloody mouth up?! You didn’t approve of our relationship, so why are you bugging me about him?! If he has to die, at least he’ll die like a man!!!”

As soon as he stopped shouting, the silence was broken by low whines.

He froze.

“Well done.”

“It’s your fault!”

“Stop shouting.”

He turned his head to look at the little girl who looked scared out of her wits.

“I’m…I’m sorry.”

He didn’t know what to do now. He didn’t dare take her into his arms to comfort her. Feared he might just make thing even worse.

“I’ll never approve of this relationship, whatever it is there’s between you two. But my father and mother don’t seem to mind. So that’s enough for me.”

He couldn’t unclench his jaw. Rosemary shouldn’t know about that. Would she even understand?

“You’re only having a bad dream. Just go back to sleep. This is. Not real. This kind of George only exists in your dreams,” he said it with enough threatening in his voice so he would look credible. Otherwise it would be ridiculous for him to even try.

“If I am dreaming, it means I’m already sleeping…” she uttered shyly.

“If you fall back asleep in your dream, the dream will stop, and will let you have a good night’s sleep. So close your eyes. And the noise will fade.”

She blinked at him with quizzical eyes. “Quick. Or else it will never leave you alone. It’ll turn into an endless nightmare. Is that what you want?”

She closed her eyes in the blink of an eye and laid back into a good sleeping position as he stood up from the bed just as swiftly.

And then he left the room without another word drone more loo at Paul. He didn’t even try to hold him back.

That’s absolute nonsense, he couldn’t hep thinking as h want down the stairs.

It may have been enough for Paul. But this wasn’t enough for him. He would never love him.

He was only obsessed because of a lack of self-love and self-esteem.

Hey! I hope you're all doing well on these beautiful spring days
Sorry for the long wait... lot of stuff has been going on....
Take care and have a good day/evening/night ❤️