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A stiff prick, especially your stiff prick, you prick, he thought, has no conscience.

He walked quietly across the room, picked up his zipper bag, and took it into the bathroom, carefully and as quietly as possible closing the door after him. He took out a change of underwear and laid it on the sink. Then he adjusted the shower so that it was as cold as he could stand it, pulled the curtain in place, and climbed into the bathtub.

She’s liable to hear the shower, he thought. It sounds like the inside of a bass drum, and she’s more than likely going to hear it and wake up.

Charity Hoche had in fact been awake when he first stirred. She didn’t want to stir then though; it was too nice the way she was. She’d experienced before a man’s hand cradling her naked breast and a man’s naked body warm against hers, and these had always been, she was willing to admit, rather pleasant. But this was somehow different. She didn’t know how, but it was.

She remembered what she had said to Sarah the night before. Was it possible that she was telling the truth, in vino veritas, that this was something special to her? That Doug Douglass was not just one more terribly exciting young man?

She forced herself to breathe slowly, regularly, as if she were still asleep, and then she felt the bed rise as he left it. She waited until she heard the shower, then she rolled onto her back, twisted out of bed, and stumbled over to look at her face in the vanity mirror. Her eyes were puffed, and her hair was mussed, and she cupped her hand in front of her mouth in a futile effort to smell her own breath.

She combed her hair as well as she could with her hands and pushed her swollen eyes with the balls of her fingers. Then she returned to the bed, straightened the mussed sheets, puffed up the pillows, arranged them against the headboard, and stepped back in, propping herself against the pillows, wondering if she should modestly pull the blanket up under her chin.

She decided there was no point in trying to pretend that her body was still some sort of secret to him. This was not the first whack he’d had at it.

And he also knows, she thought bitterly, that I pass it around like can-apés.

When he came out of the bathroom in his underwear, he did not look pleased to see her awake and half sitting up in bed. He was going to sneak out of here, she thought.

“Good morning,” she said, and smiled at him.

“Good morning,” he replied, smiling uncomfortably. Then: “Ed came home last night.”

“I know,” Charity said. “I’ve got lipstick. We can letter scarlet A’s on our foreheads.”

“He is not going to think this is funny,” Douglass said.

“I’m sorry if you are now overwhelmed with morning-after remorse,” Charity said. “Should I jump out the window?”

“I was thinking of Sarah,” he said.

He really is. He is, in addition to everything else, a nice guy.

"She told me he wasn’t due until Tuesday,” Charity said. Then a thought of genuine importance hit her. “Are you going to be all right to fly?”

He nodded, and then he thought of something. “My God, my father.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t tell,” Charity heard herself say. She was sorry, but the crack had popped out on its own.

“Jesus,” he said impatiently.

“I spoke with him an hour ago,” Charity said. “He will be tied up—he’s at the base in Fairfax—until nine. He wanted to know if you could delay your departure until noon. I told him you could.”

He looked at her in surprise.

“You’re not taking off until about six,” Charity said. “There’s a front going through, and they will hold you until it does.”

“You know, then?”

“Well, you know, what the hell, why be in the OSS if you don’t get to know the secrets?”

“Is that why what happened last night happened?”

"What happened last night is standard V-Girl service,” Charity said. “Just the standard patriotic contribution to the morale of the boys in uniform.”

She wondered why she had said that, why she was acting as she was.

“I don’t understand you at all,” he said, almost sadly.