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beingheldby-you · 7 years

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won’t let it go down (’til we torch it ourselves)

He’s dreaming.

He has to be because there is no way she’s just casually sipping a martini at the one hotel bar he decides to go to, on a night where he specifically needed to get some serious alone brooding time.

“Who even hangs out at a hotel bar?” He thinks to himself.

But the answer is glaringly obvious; people who stay at hotels hang out at hotel bars. And Addison Fitzgerald is staying at the hotel because, well, because she bloody well can.

Niall Horan on the other hand, is there because, well, he’s not sure why exactly.

It’s almost as if his pulse knows when she’s in a room before his head does. It speeds up, jumps and delights towards her, racing out of his heart and veins and very being, al over her like an invisible bloody mess.

Catching a glimpse of her, just a glimpse, and his throat has apparently decided to walk out of its usual job scope of bodily function; his skin is cold and the world suddenly feels a stranger place. His shoes are too tight, his shirt it too big, and it feels like he’s in school all over again, walking into class a newcomer.

The uppity lounge is surprisingly crowded but she stands out from the other faces, as she always does, conspicuously discernable. Always always so bright that she could probably direct ships in the dark. She’s not quite aconite like before, but something more subtle, leaving a trail of violet in her movements.

And Niall could already feel every inch of her presence inexplicably imposing on him like moonlight grazing over exposed skin.

The memories creep over him like ghost fingertips; her hands on his, dancing in delight, her fingers on the back of his neck, and his heart constantly fluttering in its offbeat rhythm in his throat.

He contemplates pushing and shoving his way out of there, possibly making a small scene, before he realises that he had no reason to leave at all. Apart from cowardice, that is.

It’s a terrible thought, selfish even maybe, but he just wanted to invade the places that she paints and writes from. A place that was just hers and untouched by anyone else, alone.

Especially on this night.

“Bardot?”

Her voice rings out, cutting through the clutter, and all blood rushes from his head to his fingertips and toes in an automatic fight or flight response.

Niall takes the moment of complete lack of brain-limb cooperation to remind himself that cowardice is always always the most viable option. But she’s making her way over with a dainty drink balanced in her hand and it becomes entirely too late for flight.

“So fight it is,” he thinks to himself.

Niall feels something twist in his stomach when she looks at him the way she is, but doesn’t quite know how to react to it. She stops short in front of him, about three feet worth of unsteady breathing, erratic heartbeats, and awkward wild eyes eating up the sight of one another, raising a quizzical brow.

“Thought I’d find you here, Red,” he says wry smile, without thought or any regard of its possible repercussions.

“Did you now, Dr. Horan?”

He lets out a delicate chuckle, the tension between the two of them palpable.

The moment sits between them uneasily.

And then, she smiles and he thinks that if she asked him to sacrifice his left lung right then, he would have gladly offered it.

“Come on, then,” she says, the silkiness of her voice and the unanswered question lingering like an expensive bottle of Vodka.

She grabs him by the wrist easily, maneuvering them both towards the bar with ease. She always did have that going for her; the slow deliberate manner of which she articulated and conducted herself was so smooth that you don’t quite taste the subtle quiet danger in its distilled notes. The type that lulls you into a sense of security that doesn’t quite exist.

Once seated, she signals to the bartender for two more martinis.

The barkeep complies and starts on the drinks right away. Because Addison Fitzgerald will get what Addison Fitzgerald wants. And as they launch into the pleasantries of old friends getting reaquainted, he decides that she’s exactly like Vodka. The kind where you don’t feel the burn until it’s too late and the fire is blooming through your chest and spreading to every inch of your body.

This is incredible reckless, he thinks to himself.

Evidently, the words slip out of his mouth too because she’s turning around and looking at his like she’s the cat who got the bowl of cream and it’s as though all his trepidation evaporates.

You can’t plan for everything, she smirks, sometimes it’s good to be reckless.

His entire life had seemed full of the things that are too big for him. He’s wearing all these shoes he can’t possibly fit and all these prospects are whizzing by him and he’s just there. Absentmindedly drowning.

A waiter slips by with a tray of champagnes and she lifts two glasses easily, one for her and one for him.

They chink their tall chutes of bubbly and he reluctantly takes a giddy sip, almost as it to toast their sneaking into a private party at the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. Although he’s not quite sure how unplanned the whole affair is; she had the forethought to buy a one way ticket to his dorm in Stanford and two tickets to New York with a fitted suit for him in tow, after all. It seems highly unlikely that she had not known that there would be a private function that they would not be allowed into without a bit of craftiness and a whole lot of on-the-fly lying.

But seeing her there in that dress, the whole ordeal is a red and gold mess in his mind. One minute she’s flailing alone in the intricate red dress she has on, hardly coalesced into the crowd of black gowns and black ties and barely making sense of her own lie, and the next he’s right there next to her selling the same story.

By some stroke of dumb luck, they’re let past the velvet ropes and she’s beaming so vibrantly that she’s everywhere. Seeping in through him and the layers of the suit she brought for him like rain covered clothes, sticking to his skin.

He expects for museums to be boring and hazy, but the colours are so bright that it looks like someone has just cut a glow stick in half and poured them everywhere. She is practically aglow as they weave between people and she points out certain works and talks and talks and talks about them for hours on end. But she’s kissing him between sips of champagne and shaking hands with people who introduce themselves and he feels like an overflowing sink.

She’s laughing and he’s laughing, and they are pretending to be descendants of some Dutch painter and married, and she’s kissing his laughter and it tastes better than anything in his twenty years of living.

In the entire scope of the universe, he is hardly important. That’s how he feels when she’s talking to him. The thing, whatever it is between them, hardly matters at all in the grand scale of things and he takes comfort in that. Because that makes the fact that so many of their firsts are intertwined, irrelevant.

The fact that he is hers completely and utterly, is only a peripheral matter.

Because she’s smart, and funny, and full of wit. Because he can see himself without her, just that it feels like something’s a little... off. Like his body is suddenly missing the important proteins that keep cells bonded together.

When he was thirteen and developed a crush for the first girl that he’s paired with for assignment and she barely bats an eyelid his way, he had yet to proper discover girls quite yet. He didn’t yet understand the softness of their touch and the harshness of their swelling hearts. But about just over a decade down the road, he’s like to think that he knows the one in front of him pretty well.

Even though about half of the decade was spent half a world from one another.

“So why haven’t you been painting?” Niall questions just as they are finishing up martini number five.

The crowd has dispersed somewhat, he can actually hear the soft tinkling of lounge music from somewhere, and he’s pretty sure he’s slurring. But he’s sick of the pretense. He’s sick of his heart and his head and his whole self and he really wants a little honesty. None of that pleasant small talk and exchanging little tidbits of their life.

“I have been painting,” she sits bolt upright, some kind of utter annoyance spelled across her features.

“No. You haven’t.”

“I send you those postcards.”

Often, he lays awake at night thinking about the said postcards. Handpainted on the front and handwritten on the back about everything and nothing.

The very postcards he never returns to sender but never responds to either.

He thinks about all the scenarios where that fateful day in the museum could have played out differently. If it had been raining and he didn’t get a chance to walk right out and leave so easily. If she had planned for their museum trip to be a Tuesday instead of Thursday. If he was a blue whale and could not understand the concept of human speech.

Instead, he finds himself avoiding her eye and taking way too long to verbalise his responses even though she is right there in front of him.

He sighs, hazily considering changing the topic before the words slip out before he could catch them, “I meant for your show, Red, it’s been four years, what happened to going big? Your first big gallery show?”

She shrugs, eyes devoid of any real emotion or answers, “I got busy.”

“With martinis at Dukes and planning charity galas?”

He doesn’t mean it the way it comes out, but she’s stumped at his words.

He doesn’t say anything further because her fingers are now running around the rim of the martini glass and his heart is clogging his throat.

The conversations run drier than their martinis and when she speaks again, breaking the ice once more, it’s not some sort of a monumental thing.

“You know I used to love coming here.”

“Yeah?” He says, filling in the gaps unnecessarily.

“I think you might have just ruined it for me,” she raises the martini glass to her lips, downing the remnants of the liquid in one graceful gulp.

Before he could stop himself, he asks, “How?”

He braces himself for the comeuppance. He knows how wildly, ridiculously fun she finds it, being sarcastic. And he’s accustomed to the quick quips. The witty repartee and the threats of I-will-remove-your-tongue-with-a-butter-knife-and-leave-it-in-your-mother’s-letterbox.

But for a moment, for that moment, her guard is down and she’s being bridge-burningly, disarmingly honest.

“By being here,” she says pointedly.

She says nothing and everything, and he feels like he already knows what she means by the three simple words.

“I think we’ve had quite enough of this,” he says, sliding the martini glass away from her reach. The glint in her eyes is distracting him far too much. The wiring in his head, he’s sure at this point, is similar to blown fuses.

His brain is completely overrun and overwired.

He can never concentrate when he’s around her.

He never could, really.

Everything is sweet and heady and too much for his weak weak heart.

Niall cannot be in the same room as her anymore. He also can’t be away from her for more than ten minutes. It makes the nights she spends in his room, his and Harry’s, absolute hell.

He bends over his notes and tries to concentrate while she in on his bed, sprawled on what was meant to be his space, with his guitar laying flat on her stomach as she plucks at random notes and says almost anything and everything that comes into her head.

Her voice in his head is cracking fissures into his spine.

Something bothering you, Bardot? She asks.

It’s become somewhat of a thing, she sneaks into their shared room and the boys pretend to be annoyed by it. She takes up far too much space in the already small space where he does his homework on the tiny desk.

Often, she ends up hovering over him and correcting his work because he’s apparently a monumentally crap scholarship student. But it’s hardly weird as fuck like Zayn says it is.

It’s just how they are.

But this particular night, he feels like the walls are closing in on him and the words on his coursework are rearranging before his very eyes too fast for him to catch let alone focus on.

Her question still hangs in the air unanswered like a thick fog rolling in from the horror pictures. Her fingers hit a low and mellow note on his guitar, months of fiddling with the thing without instruction has taught her a thing or two about plucking the right strings, and all he wants is to feel is her hands on his stretched paper thin skin.

He wants to say yes. Yes, Red, you’re bothering me. I’m trying to finish this coursework and not get my scholarship retracted but all I can think about is the fact that I want to be alive in every room that you are alive in for the rest of my life.

But he doesn’t say anything. Just shakes his head and goes back to his coursework.

Harry snorts and offhanded says something about sexual tension and Niall thinks he might have to kill his roommate now.

It’s probably more of a Buridan’s Ass situation, she muses aloud, deflecting Harry’s comment.

Buridan’s Ass, she repeats again into the silence that covers them as though it would make more sense the second time around. You know, a starving donkey put between two stacks of hay at an equal distance would probably starve himself in indecision?

And at once he’s taken aback by just how amazing this specimen in his bed is.

He is in love with a fourteen year old who can’t play the guitar but throws in quips about 14th century French philosophers into daily conversation like it’s nothing.

This new bit of information, however, is met with confounding astonishment from Harry even though she’s technically his friend first and the only reason why she feels so comfortable coming over and invading their space almost on the daily; Seriously Dee, there is something wrong with you, you know that?

She laughs it off and Niall wants her to stop, because it feels like he’s about to implode.

His finger and toes grow cold and he’s afraid because she’s right there within reach. Her eyes are boring holes into his back and he knows that what he wants is something he cannot have.

And he’s terrified because his heart is one step beyond broken, it’s missing, and he’s pretty sure she has it.

You’re a fuckface, Styles, she says instead, still laughing.

Her voice tinkering into the dead of night between just them three, and he wants her stop. Because he would bathe in that sound forever, drown in it like a bee drowning in honey, if he could.

He helps her find the keys in her little tiny clutch which is weirder than it sounds because he would never have thought she'd be one to carry clutches. But then again, he never pictured her as one who stays at hotels because she can, sipping martinis alone by the car either.

As she dumps out the surprising amount of content in the bag to find her room key, her phone lights up as it hits the ground. Half a dozen messages take over the mass spectrum that is her phone screen, lying ignored, as she goes straight for the keycard and inserts it into the slot triumphantly, dashing into the room soon after to take her shoes off.

He doesn’t mean to, really, but he inadvertently sees messages from group chats he’s not in. And individual messages from Poppy and Harry and even Zayn.

Niall passes the phone and her lipstick and her wallet and a small bottle of Channel back to her and even half drunk she knows that he knows and it’s weird and awkward and uncomfortable that he’s in her room all of the sudden.

He misses being a part of that. And it’s not that he wants to be in the exact same circles and the exact same group chats, talking about the exact same things.

He just misses her.

He misses her and it’s awful because it’s his own doing and he has his own friends and his own life, but the worst part of it all is that he would give it all up.

He would give it all up to have her back.

Not the her now, but the her before he left her in the museum alone. Her when they were fifteen and unsure, when they were sixteen and wading into unchartered territory, when they were seventeen and it was all bright and light and lovely. Even when they were eighteen and she goes off to France and it got... difficult. More difficult than before anyway.

The door shuts behind him with a thud, some kind of finality weighing down on them and anchoring him to reality.

The silence that follows clings to the air, thick and suffocating.

Silence.

And then.

“I was clearing your shit out,” she says loudly. Too loudly.

He’s confused with the silent rage burning below the surface of her voice.

“I was clearing your shit out, pissed off my arse, tossing them into a box when Poppy came over and asked me what I was doing and I coughed blood into her face because I’d come to California to see you and flown us both out to New York and—”

He starts to say something but she’s still going on, pacing around the room with her heels in one hand, waving them them as she spoke unsteadily. “I turn around for one second in the Met. One. Second.”

She pauses, almost for the dramatic effect tossing her shoes aside and swiping a cigarette pack he han’t noticed off the tea table in one dramatic move, “And you were just gone.”

“I know,” he says, lump in his throat back again and catching himself looking at the champagne coloured drapes and the possibly antique lamps and how his shoebox of an apartment also has off white curtains for an entirely different reason. Opposite sides to the same coin.

Always always on opposite ends.

She slides the doors to the balcony open before her hands deftly light a cigarette.

“You didn’t even leave a note or a text or an email,” she prods on at the never ending hole chewing away at his gut.

“I know.”

“You just packed up your things and left.”

“I know!” Niall snaps, jolting out of his long-concealed guilty man stupor for the first time, “I had just moved my entire life to a new country and was knee deep into a med degree, I was too tired to figure out what you being there meant.”

“Well, it should have meant that you wanted to spend some time with me,” she snaps right back, going for the jugular.

Her eyes soften and she looks over, gently, like he’s delicate and breakable, easily startled, “You left. You put yourself first and you left, so you don’t get to come back and poke holes into the life that I built without you just because you feel like it.”

She is staring at him, and it’s only then it dawns how goddamn awful the whole thing must feel from her point of view.

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“Well, that’s what it feels like.”

“I’m sorry.”

She stares, like she is about to say something, and then she just takes a long drag of her cigarette and sits. So he sits too. And they talk, and they don’t, and then they talk some more, sitting there for hours.

He’s there, all there. And no one knows better than he does how good it feels to whispering a secret aloud to scorch the ground before you.

Even if it’s just for yourself to hear.

She’s talking about doubt. And how she doubts everything now, because she’s stuck in this moment of just before. The moment just before your brush hits the canvas where anything is possible. She doubts every stroke and every move and the canvas is more daunting than freeing, so she just stopped painting.

He feels as though his brain is melting through his teeth as she looks at him, because she’s looking at him the way she’s always looked at him and that is all that there is.

He wants to say something but Niall had never been good with words the way she is. They come tumbling right out of him, spilling carelessly from his mouth before it hits the ground running, far too late for take backs. And he knows for a fact that if he’s going to try to explain to her why he ran from the museum or how when she looks at him it feels like she’s the earth’s gravity and he is the moon, it’d probably all come out wrong.

He can’t explain how his life has been split into two parts, before her and after her.

Because how could she understand? How can he explain to her that there are no small moments in his head, only things that give him shots of joy that course through his veins. That everything since her has been metaphors and bits of poetry he can’t memorise and swirling technicolour he can’t catch.

How can he begin to explain to her that all he ever wanted is her? Just her. Only her. That he had known on some level that she wanted him, but he wanted her more. But he waited then until she saw it too and then it’s like the stars fell straight into his mouth and down his stomach. He is so filled with her light that he spends most nights lying awake thinking about all the ways it could work.

And how hard he wishes that it would be enough.

It wasn’t then, but maybe it can be now.

She’s looking at him with those damned eyes and if he is dead right now, he knows he would come back for her. He would swallow the dirt and walk across the ocean to where she is. So when she leans in to catch his lips with hers, he drinks it in reverently as though he lived and breathed for it.

Despite knowing that in less than twelve hours, she’s set to marry someone else, he kisses her back, their bodies pressing impossibly closer and closer and closer together.

Because the feelings are there even if the courage isn’t.

He grabs her by the waist before she can fall.

They plan something stupid and reckless and childish and the boys are off celebrating. Poppy has disappeared halfway through the night and although the prank goes off without a hitch and without a single way of being traced back to them, Niall momentarily wonders how she can stand to be friends with them all.

Because it has to be more than just a shared childhood that bonds them.

But she is swaying in the dark in his room to some unseen music, and he catches her just as she is about to topple over.

It’s just the two of them. He can’t seem to remember a time where it’s just them both. Because the boys would always be there, crawling out and popping up from wherever they’ve been hiding like termites from woodwork at every opportunity.

But suddenly, they’re alone. They’ve been all drinking from the flask he has in his coat pocket all night but suddenly it’s just them and her hand is on his collar and he’s sure there isn’t much or any thought behind her movements, except the feeling of his heartbeat against his ribs and her hair curling across his throat spins the room on its axis.

Her hand sitting between them like some kind of a smoke screen from a really bad magic show.

Tension hung in the air like old curtains, all thick and heavy and swallowing. Their proximity far too intoxicating to be uncomfortable.

And then time came to a complete impenetrable halt.

Lips moving deftly over his, Niall’s head erupts into a series of volcanic reactions and an unrestrained hazy, burning heat.

He distantly feels himself kissing back, what with the alcohol running through his veins, but that was about the extent of his brain’s involvement. Conveniently shut off for the moment, he melts into the touch of the soft girl in his hands, every brush of skin eliciting some kind of other physical response.

Niall’s thoughts were swimming, the burning feeling of her touch, taste, scent of her. But common sense was teetering on the edge, waiting for the opportunity to jump in.

He pulls back, Red, how drunk are you on a scale of one to ten?

She blinks.

What’s a ten?

Of course, he thinks to himself.

He wraps her arm around his neck and carry her towards her room, lugging the surprisingly docile for a drunk girl across four hallways and a flight of stairs, wondering how she makes this journey almost every night without getting caught.

Propping her against her headboard, her roommate surprisingly still missing since she disappeared earlier in the night, her eyes trail him across the room as he moves things nearer to her bed like the bin for throwing up and water for hydration. He pulls her blanket up and ignore her steady gaze as she slurs, sounding all sloppy and tired.

Are you going to stay?

He freezes momentarily but she shifts on the single bed and he lies down next to her because... well, because.

And it’s like he’s ten years old again, poking inside three point power socket because he’s trying to stuff a two point plug in there, except he can’t feel the electric jolt. He’s holding onto the fork which he’s using as the third pin and he feels nothing.

Everything is muted the way the entire world seemed to have stopped when their lips touched.

He’s doing a stupid thing again, he knows on some level that it’s a stupid thing, like stabbing a three point power socket with metal cutlery. It feels odd that as a child he would do dangerous things without noticing. And odder yet that as an almost adult, he would dive head first into danger without a second thought.

If she is trapped in a painting she can never paint then he will lie, sneak and steal into art halls to be by her side, wandering around in empty hallways until he can find her.

Control is an illusion.

And he surrenders to it, an able bodied servant.

#dff #one shot / request #autumn fic exchange #niall horan #niall horan fanfiction

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beingheldby-you · 7 years

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one million invisible lines

He’s eleven.

His uniform is pristine, his nails are clean, and his head full of hair curls upon itself, sticking to him like an unwelcome shadow.

He’s been enrolled in four schools in three different countries by the time he’s in Year 7 but this time, this time, Harry Styles is promised will be the last.

He doesn’t believe it.

Because both his parents are in love with a thrill. The thrill of discovering an idea and starting over. The thrill of building a company from scratch and then selling it and moving on to the next idea, the next country, the next market, the next big thing.

He can’t complain, really. He’s a byproduct of two wanderers who made their fortune by constantly starting over. The incessant stop and start’s have given him a sense of independence. It drilled into him a long form of adaptability. A passion for adventure. A burning desire to paint the sky whatever colour he feels like, whenever he feels like.

But the insurmountable need to regularly start over does eventually exhaust the psyche. He develops what his therapist calls “abandonment issues,” mourning his own exit every time his parents pack them up to the next big venture. It’s not classically the leave-ee who bemoans the separation, but there he is, at the age of eleven, sure that he will never find a place to call home.

But this time is different, they promise.

“This time we’re building something that’s just ours.”

He smiles and nods and doesn’t protest as he waves goodbye to his parents at a six digit per term tuition fee preparatory boarding school.

Alone in his room, he listens to the silence he’s left in.

He never wishes for friends when he starts a new term in a new school. Not since he’s learned that it only serves to make things more difficult when the inevitable happens. But he gets one anyway, in a form of a roommate; a boy with warm brown eyes and untamed hair not unlike his.

Like the sullen quiet of fog in winter, Liam stares at him as if waiting for permission.

He shrugs after a long minute, as though saying to himself that this new specimen will just have to do.

During their first day of classes, Liam points of the kids who are school royalty, because all schools have hierarchies, and the ones who rumour has it are actual royalty.

“The inbreeding makes it particularly easy to spot them,” he says. Harry laughs at his new companion’s subtle sarcasm, soft like the skin above the collarbone. Jagged but beautiful, like stained glass.

They go to their classes and read in their room. Occasionally Harry climbs to the roof and just lays in the meek England sun, counting the new ground secrets he’s discovered.

They will eventually prove useful; he knows it deep in his bones.

Life in conservative schooling establishments goes by in a blur, as they always do. But Harry notices him his first week, during breakfast, surrounded by a mish mash trio who all carry themselves with a same quiet grace.

His bright eyes and sheepish smile doesn’t reveal anything about him at all, and neither does the silent tempest in the eyes of those he surrounds himself with.

There’s something inexplicable about the boy.

They’re the old money people, Liam tells him. Coming from a long line of aristocrats and nobles who practically shit gold. And it’s perhaps the most accurate way to describe him since he’s the son of an oil tycoon; the new gold.

They get partnered during English by some odd coincidence and he learns that the boy with skin golden like the sun is all bravado and bullshit while Harry is all adrift and aerial, head in the clouds and barely present.

It's a cosmically fated connection; both different but just the same enough. Armed with a desperate frustrated attempt to prove themselves smart, whole periods of English became dedicated in debating Twain and Homer.

Zayn likes being the most obscure guy at the party, Harry realises, dropping random bits of dubious facts from books and passages that aren’t even part of the syllabus.

Their conversation soon shift to an array of subjects; from the latest Batman movies to whether or not they are in actual fact facing the possibility of an apocalypse. Zayn Malik, as Harry he learns with each passing English period, is as inexplicable as he is bizarre. Full of snark when you’re not looking and smoothed over by just enough charm when you are.

He never seems to take anything seriously either, each assignment and coursework an opportunity to prove just how smart he is.

As the year moves along, they rack up a number of detentions each, one upping each other with juvenile pranks. For their finals, he dares Harry to insert as many sex puns as possible into his verbal presentation on Shakespeare.

Harry takes him up on that in a gusto.

He’s not even sure if any of his puns and innuendo really mean anything to anyone at that point, but the entire class sits in their silent astonishment when he’s done.

And then, the one known as Louis laughs so hard he falls right out of his chair.

The substitute teacher, twitchy and crimson-faced, dismisses the class in a hurry before the period is even over and Harry moves towards the door with a triumphant glow on his face, while Zayn is waiting on his friends who are waiting on Louis, still laughing.

Harry could spot that recognisable smirk on his lips and amusement in his eyes from a mile away.

He walks out of that final English class sure that he would have to move to another school the coming year. Purely because it’s what he does; he leaves.

And he shuts off the world a little more everytime he does.

But at eleven, Harry Styles is realising that when you leave someone, they can leave you even more.

He’s twelve.

His parents keep their promise and he settles hesitantly into life in a preparatory boarding school.

The entire thing starts feeling weirdly normal. He sits with Liam for breakfast while he absent-mindedly seeks out the boy with hurricane eyes and the madman mind.

He watches as his part-time friend walk to his classes with those with whom he grew up with.

But Harry gets allocated a course alone with someone else in their little closed foursome.

They all have most of the same classes together really, but it’s foreign language and an elective and they’ve both apparently decided on French.

He raises a brow when Addison sits herself down next to him.

With a shrug she tells him that Zayn took the option to drop foreign language as he’s already multilingual, Louis chose German to impress his new neighbour Ada back at home, and Poppy followed suit because she’s spent pretty much all her summers in Berlin anyway and just wants an easy mark.

Harry chuckles.

“Liam’s taking German too,” he offers, “Because he loves everything automobile and he wants to possibly work with engines in the future and there really isn’t much that beats some fine German engineering.”

Addison arches a perfect brow at his spiel, “That’s forward planning right there.”

She takes out her textbooks as he watches, twelve kinds of awed at the ease and confidence of which she embodies.

She’s charm and chaos rolled into a minute frame.

And to be quite frank, Harry never quite had a clear read on Addison.

She’s old money too, according to Liam, as though it’s supposed to mean something.

But all he knows about is that she’s far too loud for someone so tiny, and that there’s a glimmer in her eyes that told tales of her crazy despite every attempt to appear like someone who is condescendingly rich and bored and blue blooded.

He can see in the way that she walks and talks; she has absolutely no desire to be prim and proper, and fit into the crusty upper class mould of London high society.

But a lifetime of hard conditioning of tradition and rules of propriety is hard to undo.

Harry’s sure it had taken her years to fully embody the face of pure disinterest, always unimpressed and not quite an open book. And she’s mastered perfectly the art of laughing in silence too.

“Just a matter of biting your lip and constricting your chest,” she says.

“You'll find it useful someday, trust me."

And he can’t understand it; why wouldn’t you laugh out loud if you wanted to?

“It’s the difference between us and them,” Liam tells him as they have their midnight talks when they both can’t sleep.

He doesn’t often think about that divide though; new money and old money. It makes him want to put his head through the nearest wall. But he wouldn’t do that, not when he’s deciding to grow his hair out.

So he just doesn’t dwell on it.

Harry debates Chaucer with Zayn in the library on Wednesdays, staying too late and talking too loud, and hangs out with Addison twice a week, partnering up for their scheduled class, absorbing orthology and memorising phonology.

And when they’re meant to be correcting each other’s grammar, she spells out profanities in every language known to man, face deadpan and devoid of emotion when he catches her doing it.

She’s smarter than she lets on, that he knows for a fact.

So he just crosses out the profanities and laughs.

It’s something, Harry thinks to himself, the settling in curb is not as steep as people make it out to be.

He’s thirteen.

He’s outgrown preparatory school and enters Wellesley College.

Except this time he’s not the one leaving, almost the entire school comes with him.

And by some stroke of coincidence or perhaps a divine joke, he gets roomed with a scholarship student.

He’s glad for it because it’s not him this time.

There are new faces and he’s now an old face; no longer invisible and no longer imposing. He sits with Liam, Louis, and Zayn for breakfast, Dee doodles more curse words into his homework during independent study periods, and Poppy giggles herself silly at his shitty jokes during dinner.

Harry, for all his bold self-made promises of not making permanent connections, begins to just sort of... fit into all of their lives.

Like they’ve been waiting for him this entire time.

His fists, writhed white from clenching so hard pushing the world away, start to relax.

And it shows.

He assures Niall that they don’t bite, that they’ve just all known each other longer.

Assures the Irish lad that that outside feeling goes away; because you eventually build your own inside jokes, your own personal relationships over time.

Like the way Addison’s become a permanent resident in their room, calling Niall all kinds of pop cultural blonde nicknames, listening to his Kings of Leon albums, and very occasionally condescendingly hover over them while they attempt to make a dent at their respective courseworks.

Like the way Zayn starts calling him Haz and it catches on.

And the way Zayn starts calling Addison Dee and it catches on too.

But he speaks her name differently.

He can’t really explain it, but it’s softer. Gentler. As though his tongue whispers her name like a prayer and his hands long cradle drops of her like water in the shower.

He asks him about it after they successfully steal the Provost’s confiscated whiskey stash.

(It involved, in no particular order:

A fork, two stolen pairs of shoes, three really good hair ties, and a willing Liam and Louis who are bribed into their silent roles by the promise of a share in the spoils.)

“I dunno, really,” Zayn says.

The two of them sit on the ground and drink until they can’t see straight, lying flat on the ground and looking at the stars, whiskey draining into their blood and across their veins.

He starts mumbling off about how everything wouldn’t matter one day anyway, because they’d be long gone; their footprints won’t perpetually stain the tiles of Wellesley hallways no matter how hard they try, and the names they’ve given each other won’t be written down into history books.

“It all just doesn’t matter,” he says.

And it’s like Harry’s been sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool all his life.

The world, as he knows it, full of clouded water.

And he’s just now breaking the surface into a new dimension of living. He almost hopes that Zayn’s words will swallow him whole. He wants to be swallowed whole and spat out something new.

Harry doesn’t know what it all means though, but in that moment, he swears that he could live off that feeling forever; alcohol running through his veins and best mate by his side, drunkedly contemplating mortality.

It’s as though someone had just tapped him on the shoulder and sucker punched him in the face.

And he’s not quite sure what his life is anymore.

He’s fourteen.

He’s grown three inches over summer and his hair is long enough to cover his ears now. He feels like his heart has grown three sizes bigger too and he’s sitting at the edge of the window that he’s managed to wedge open on the highest floor of the library.

Everything looks so small, even though he’s the one who’s young and uncomprehending.

He looks at their little study group; Niall with his attempts to make sense of Louis’ work, Liam explaining something or another to Poppy, and Dee and Zayn just sort of bickering and laughing into their hands about nothing at all.

Zayn somehow always comes out of their study group a little worse for wear, coursework not quite done and eyes a little too glazed over, as though he’s been staring at the sun too long.

And it’s all just... normal.

They’ve all kind of just jumped right into it, finding a surrogate family with one another with their real families on the sidelines kind of a little bit like, as Zayn calls it, “a pile of flaming horse shit.”

Money, as nice as it is to have, doesn’t really do much to protect or shield them from anything.

Harry closes his eyes, soaking in the sun’s feeble rays and feeling the soft hush of the greeneries.

“You’re going to get us expelled,” Niall complains, rolling his eyes.

“Life isn’t all about the rules, Horan.”

“Except physics is and gravity is real even if you don’t believe in it,” Dee comments lazily, eyes not leaving the book she’s reading.

“Addison Fitzgerald, is that concern in your voice?”

Harry climbs off the window opening and pulls out the chair next to her a little too hard on purpose, scraping it’s legs against the floor.

She doesn’t so much as flinch.

“I’m just not interested in looking after Zayn at your funeral,” she tears her eyes away from the passage she’s engrossed in, “But I’m sure you'll leave a sizeable enough inheritance for your poor widow to not be all that distraught.”

She shoots her patented wry smile his way.

“A bloke can only wish,” Zayn quips dreamily, expression frozen in an exaggerated seriousness.

Harry laughs, but a feeling he doesn’t quite recognise blooms through his chest.

He’s fifteen.

He has a lower voice now and his limbs have grown some more. Which help, considering that they’re running as fast as their legs can carry them.

They stop to catch their breath, both boys laughing raucously.

He sees Zayn’s outline, shaking in a combination of nerves, fatigue, and laughter. It’s a sight that could start wars and burn whole cities to the ground, he thinks.

“D’you think it’ll work?”

Zayn’s voice anchors him to the present.

“Don’t see how it won’t,” Harry says.

It’s the annual school ball, frumpy soirees with little to look forward to apart from silly dresses and frivolous tuxedos. And it’s about to get a lot more interesting. Not pig’s blood and false nominations interesting obviously. But what they've done is beyond petty meanness.

They’ve set up a mini explosive to ensure plausible deniability thanks to Liam’s expertise, which would burn down a line of gunpowder courtesy of Niall’s chemistry wits, leading to copious amounts of firecrackers obtained by Louis’ wily charms.

Basking in their genius, Harry sits himself on an upturned bucket, waiting on the rest of their group to return from their tasks.

He and Zayn had just broken into the Provost’s office and shifted some paper around, to throw him off, diverting the suspicion of what they were actually planning.

The watch that sits on his wrist says it’s three seventeen when Niall and Poppy emerge at the rendezvous point, triumphant and positively buzzing with adrenaline.

Liam and Louis return shortly after, Dee conspicuously missing.

“McKinney was... out late,” Louis chokes out as he takes a puff of a cigarette he barely manages to light referring to the newly hired discipline master.

Realisation dawns on them as Niall asks what they were all thinking.

“Where’s Dee?”

“We got separated,” Liam says.

“She’s not back yet?”

Concern etches across all their faces simultaneously.

Harry doesn’t worry though; he’s seen her feign contrition to appease many a time. If there’s anyone who could talk herself out of being found with firecrackers and gunpowder on school grounds, it’d be her surely.

But Zayn is not as convinced, pacing up and down, face so pale that white doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Even in the dark, they could see it.

They could all see it.

“If something’s happened with the firecrackers or the gunpowder—”

“We’d have heard it,” Niall cuts him off simply.

There’s logic to his words after all, gunpowder and fireworks are barely inconspicuous things.

“She’s fine,” he says, repeating it over and over again, as though a magical talisman.

After another fifteen minutes of their hairs all standing on end, fidgety and jumpy, Louis suggests that they all go to bed, “If she’s been caught, she’d be sent back to her room, yeah?”

But Zayn is beyond sleep.

“We agreed to meet back here, I’m not leaving ‘til she gets back.”

His voice is raspier than that time he drank an entire bottle of absinthe because Liam says it would kill him.

Everyone stays. Poppy falls asleep on Louis' shoulder, Liam smokes enough cigarettes to tranquilise a horse, and Niall paces around aimlessly and uncomfortably, his first official foray with mayhem. Scholarship students are, after all, not afforded the same rule bending luxury the same way the other students are.

Zayn’s paranoia covers them like a blanket, thick and suffocating. Every sigh and glance at his watch stretches the tension in the room even more, as though waiting for an inevitable implosion.

She appears an hour later and he glows like a lightbulb.

He all but runs into her and envelopes her, burying his head into her neck.

Harry looks away, feeling the tiniest hint of annoyance at the sight, the oxygen that’s finally rushing back into his lungs from a breath he didn’t know he’s holding burns of something he doesn’t quite comprehend. It feels like something private, like he's intruding into something he’s not meant to see.

Niall apparently shares the same sentiment, finding his shoes interacting with the dirt on the ground of the cramped gardening shed suddenly very amusing.

The raw relief that visibly settles into Zayn’s bones spread to every corner of their little hideout.

But Harry’s heart thunders in his chest and he can’t see anything but the dark outline of their embrace.

He is too undone and too put-together to do anything but retreat, standing up in a flummox and tripping on the edge of something or another.

A watering can? A shovel?

The loud clanging startles everyone and the pair jump apart.

“Haz?”

Zayn’s voice comes out softly, a small push, restrained, tinged with worry and concern.

He shakes his head, running his hands through his hair because he’s about to fucking explode.

“Let’s get out of here before we all get into even more trouble for four o'clock in the morning,” he says nervously, hiding the inexplicable anxiety with a nervous laugh.

It’s abrupt, and it’s sudden. His hands clench avariciously at the bits of madness that has seeped into his consciousness.

But he walks out of the gardener’s shed and he doesn’t turn back.

He’s sixteen.

And it occurs to Harry that he is very much in trouble.

His eyes are heavy from the champers, flickering tiredly to the boy across from him on the balcony.

Zayn’s voice hoarse and gravelly from the tobacco.

“I’m so fuckin’ in love with her.”

Trouble, indeed.

“Then ask her out again.”

Harry’s voice has gotten lower too, but it has nothing to do with the cigarettes. Or even the copious amounts of champagne he’s had through the course of the night.

“What, just like that?”

Harry shrugs, unsure of how Zayn can be sort of seeing one of their best friends one moment, and then just as suddenly as it began, not really sure what happened to it the next.

“It’s really not that difficult.”

And besides, if you don’t then Niall might, he thinks.

But he doesn’t say it out loud.

They continue smoking their cigarettes; Harry not elaborating and Zayn unquestioning.

He mind cooks up half a dozen ways for his best mates to sort out their relationship status, or more accurately, their current lack thereof of one. But he reins himself in before his limbs moves them towards inevitable storm.

It’s not going to be one of those nights, he thinks to himself.

Especially not after Dee’s very colourful threats still ring clearly in his mind from the last time he meddled, “Lock me in a closet again and I will slice your knees off and feed you the stew I’ll make of your bone and cartilage.”

Harry doesn’t even laugh. Because he knows if anyone can get away with slicing his knees off, it’d be her. And Zayn wouldn’t even do anything about it.

Heck, he’d probably even slice his own knees off and place them in a pot for her if it’d save her the trouble of doing it herself.

A stab of something punches him in the gut.

He remembers Liam telling him that it’s complicated.

“Just don’t stick your head in it again,” he says.

But it’s not complicated, not really. Harry knows complicated, as a matter of fact, he’s good with complicated.

Complicated is when your parents barely see each other because they’re so busy chasing a dream. Complicated is when their guilt is so strong that they throw mounds of money at you and let you run off with your friends for summer vacation. Complicated is when your sister, freshly graduated, aspires to build an app that’ll become the next big thing to prove herself worthy of said absentee parents’ time and affection.

Wanting or not wanting to snog the living daylights out of someone while leaving all your friends completely in suspense is decidedly not complicated.

Dee’s head pokes out onto the balcony, as if on cue, Zayn's eyes are slightly droopy and mouth loosely grasping at an uncontainable smile.

“Lou is completely smashed, he’s about to cut right through the ice sculpture on the front yard.”

Zayn’s eyes light up, whether at the words or the bearer of those words is as good as anyone’s guess.

“How?”

“How do you think?” She giggles, her entire body swaying, brows arched as though that’s the most ridiculous inquiry ever.

“Dee, you are bloody brilliant,” Zayn drops his cigarette and stubs it out before dashing off with her.

Harry catches his own reflection on the sliding glass doors and decides he might just need another cigarette before he rejoins his friends and the rest of the civilisation inside. Those who just stood around, glasses in their hands, alcohol in their system, basking in their wealth, and physical belongings.

They comment on the tapestries, and expensive china, and pristine furniture. As though an un-lived in house is something to be boasted of.

He is so lost in his own thoughts that he isn’t even aware of someone opening the doors and stepping outside. It isn’t until he hears her heels clicking against the marbled floors that he realises he isn’t alone anymore.

“You came out here to escape too?”

Her wavy black hair blows a bit in the wind, making her tuck a few strands of it behind her ear.

Her movements are graceful and poised and he thinks she must be another one of the bored pin up princesses dragged to these do’s.

The silence sits between them, thick and deafening.

And so he whips out the cigarette box and pops another stick into his mouth before igniting his lighter, gazing at the flickering flame for a moment before touching it to the white tip, crumbling it to ash and burning it bright orange.

“You smoke.”

It’s not a question as much as it is a statement. And her voice, though laced with boredom, isn’t quite the tone he expects. Different from when he firsts makes her presence known, the one that’s refined and rich with a pleasantness that’s dipped in something golden.

She sounds a little more edged the second time around, more daring, as though she had seen something that had her comfortable enough to let loose.

“It would seem so, yeah,” he raises his head to blow out a cloud of smoke.

Not the best small talk, but he’s really not in the mood.

In one fluid movement, she takes the cigarette from his fingers with ease, raising it to her lips for a lengthy drag.

It shouldn’t surprise him really, in all his time in Wellesley, he’s seen Dee outdrink and outsmoke the boys in their form, himself included.

It’s always the most unexpected ones that holds the most surprises.

But her boldness does startle him, and he’s too stunned to do or say anything about this stranger adeptly stealing cigarettes from his fingers.

She blows a thin line of smoke before her gaze returns squarely onto his.

A challenge of sorts; I won’t tell if you don’t.

Her eyes are bright and suddenly they’re both laughing.

“Victoria,” she offers.

“Harry,” he responds.

She’s twenty. She’s a fashion student who’s dropped out of college, the youngest after four boys in her family. A rebel from birth, she says, always starting things before she knows how she’ll finish them, all gut feeling and instinct and a natural compulsion to just do things without a thought of consequence.

Victoria reminds him of someone. Someone he can’t quite place. Someone who he dreams of. Whose name and voice and manner is just at the tip of his tongue.

The cigarette burns out and they smoke another.

And another, and another, and another.

His resolve and self-preservation that tonight won’t be “one of those nights” breaks in half.

He catches himself staring at her.

And when she does too, she asks, unabashed, “And what do you think you’re staring at?”

“You,” he says simply.

She iridescent and lustrous, like a glowstick.

In one swiftly elegant move, she moves towards him again, fisting her hands in the front of his shirt

She tastes sweet, like honey and champagne. His hands grip her waistline, hauling her hips against his as he bites her lower lip.

A moan rips from the back of her throat and he whispers her name against her skin.

Harry knows that this is finally it, the infamous summer fling that Poppy talks about when she returned from her previous summer vacation, tanned from travel. He’s knows what it’s meant to mean and what happens. There are hookups and there are break ups and you just ebb and flow into it.

But he can’t help it.

He finds himself falling for girl with the dark hair and the luminous eyes.

“Come to Tuscany with me?” Harry asks, out of breath and still seeing stars.

“What, now?”

“Yeah.”

She nods her acceptance with a giggle and they take off then and there.

He texts Zayn to prove a point;

It’s really not that difficult.

He’s seventeen.

He stands upright and proud in a vintage suit that doesn't fit him quite perfect and he’s scared. Harry is more afraid he’s ever been, mostly because he can’t for the life of him understand how he’s ended up in a church with happy wedding bells ringing and rose petals on the ground to steal a bride.

Of all the absurdly ridiculous and vapid plans he’s executed in his life, this would probably rank highest.

But he can’t think of that. Not when he has a clear blueprint to follow;

Find the bride, steal the bride, ride off into the sunset.

He somehow manages to escape notice, blending in with the crowd before snaking into the back room.

Find the bride -- check.

She is a vision of perfection.

The sight of her triggers how her lips taste like honey and champagne that first night they met. How she giggles against his lips as his hands wander.

But now she’s dressed in white, in a little chapel off of London, ready to be wed.

They tell him to fuck it; screw the invitation, don’t put yourself through the pain of seeing your dream girl from that perfect summer. And definitely, definitely, do not help her become a runaway bride.

But Harry is a romantic, he always has been.

So when Zayn shows up at his room with a tux in hand, he succumbs.

They break about thirteen school rules getting out of Wellesley in the middle of a school day, and about twenty one traffic laws to get to the church just in the nick of time.

And seeing her, he realises that he needs this. She needs this.

Whether or not she chooses him, there has to be some kind of a conclusion. A resolution. One doesn’t spend a romantic month in Tuscany with someone just to marry someone else without so much as an explanation.

And so there he is.

The silence that sits between them is palpable; lingering and loud.

“You’re not supposed to be back here,” she finally says.

“You’re not supposed to run off with some bloke for the summer and then spend the year writing him emails to suddenly tell him you were engaged the entire time.”

The sight of her, doe eyed and clad in white, is the proverbial last straw cracking under the pressure. It shatters, something beautiful, collapsing the massive, heaping pile of bullshit he's kept in for the last couple of months.

“I sent you an invite because I can’t do this,” she blurts out.

Harry briefly wonders if it’ll still be considered stealing a bride if she walks out willingly with you, “You’ve been writing me in hopes of breaking your engagement?”

She laughs, devoid of any real humour.

“The term break an engagement implies that I’ve changed my mind at some point between saying yes and going out to the bachelorette party,” she declares, voice cold and jarred, moving around the room restless and anxious.

“I can’t do this,” she says impulsively, “I just can’t.”

Her eyes are brimming with tears about to spill over and it’s wrong, and sick, and so, so... wrong.

“Then don’t.”

He pleads so gently, he’s not sure if the words had really been breathed to life.

It is an odd feeling, Harry thinks, to be so sure of what he’s doing, “Come with me.”

She stares at him, wordless.

It’s the longest pause he’s ever lived through.

But then she kicks off her Jimmy Choo’s and they make a run for it.

Zayn is waiting just outside with the engine running, ready to go at a drop of a hat.

He drives off before the car doors are even shut proper and they ride into the sunset together, Zayn piloting their getaway vehicle.

Harry looks to the girl in next to him, and he cannot believe himself. He is about to sit for his A levels in a year and he has no clue what he’ll major in after or if he’ll even be accepted to college.

But he knows he wants her, that he wants this.

If it’s a choice between Victoria and her voice and hair and her smile and her laugh and her everything, or knowing the future, he’d pick her. Every time.

He wants to hear her talk and laugh and smile, more than he wants certainty.

And he can’t remember ever being happier.

He’s eighteen.

He has bigger problems than a bar brawl, yet there he is.

They’re faced with their A levels soon and the whole form is at the local watering hole that they often sneak out to, planning their graduating prank dubbed Project Vanity.

It happens too fast. But then again, doesn’t it always. One minute Harry’s in a conversation with Liam about colleges when out of the corner of his eye, he sees Niall throw his arm over Dee and he’s about to mention in passing that there might be something going on between Niall and Dee, when the next, he’s tapped on the shoulder and literally sucker punched.

He doesn’t even know how it happens, but Zayn is by his side quicker than anything he’s ever seen move.

As though it’s nothing more than a split second decision.

Harry turns to confront this assault head on, ready to defend himself or talk himself out of whatever mess he’s probably created to deserve it. But one look at the heaving chest and snarled lip and Harry just knows that he doesn’t have a good defense.

Or even any defense to speak of, really.

He stole a bride a year ago and now it’s time for penance. It’s fight or flight. And Harry has never been one to shy away from a challenge before, even if he’s not much of a fighter.

His jaw is still throbbing from that first punch hurled his way but his fingers unclench themselves and he’s ready to be beaten a bloody mess when a fist on his right swings.

It hits its mark with a terrifying angry crack.

The sound of flesh on flesh is the most satisfying thing he hears all day.

“Fuck,” Zayn sputters, shaking his hand out as every head in the dingy bar turns toward the scuffle.

And then all hell breaks loose; bottles are thrown, punches land, and bruises form.

Sweat and bone and bloody messes.

A particularly strong swing hits him square at the back of the head and he remembers nothing else. Only the steady throbbing ache reverberating through his skull and deep into every recess of his brain as he comes to with Zayn’s face looming into view, cut lip and all.

He’s nineteen.

And he’s lying on the couch, unmoving, in his pajamas.

Fresh out of school, he moves into the an apartment within walking distance if college. By some stroke of luck, he’s been accepted into London School of Economics.

No one is more surprised than him.

Harry suspects his dad may have a thing or two to do about it.

“We just don’t want you to make the same mistakes we did,” the older Mr Styles says.

“You need a degree to be taken seriously.”

He doesn’t complain.

Instead he lets his parents pay for tuition and rent and amenities. Victoria moves in and blogs from home. The housekeeper comes twice a week. They plan their weekends around what scenic backdrops they can head to for her to take her out pictures.

Life is good.

Until it’s not.

And he’s just there on his couch, wasting away.

There’s a sizeable amount that fills in the apartment; furniture, knick knacks from their travels, decor, food. But it just feels stripped somehow. Bare. Hollow. Like he’s lying in the middle of a home he doesn't recognise.

I’m sorry, she said, shaking her head. Her bags already packed and sitting just around the corner.

“I just... I can’t do this.”

The same words she had said when she ran out of that church with him.

The same words that left what’s unsaid lingering between them, eating away at his skull like the hum of pain that burrowed into his brain when the man she left at the altar socked him in the face.

It feels like a lifetime ago.

His phone rings.

And rings, and rings, and rings.

He looks at the caller ID and doesn’t pick up, content wallowing in self pity.

His front door swings open, and Harry doesn’t even bother to look.

“She left,” he chokes out.

In her absence, even his voice no longer feels his. And it feels wrong, unnatural, to even dare acknowledge her absence. It’s as though someone had ripped a hole right out of his heart.

“Jesus,” Zayn says, waltzing in without knocking.

“Fuck mate, have you even showered in the last two days?”

His best friend has about all the subtlety of a bus.

He doesn’t go to school for two weeks and his mates take turns checking up on him.

Niall, who is waist deep in a med degree on top of working two jobs to afford said med degree brings beer, Louis gives the housekeeper instructions to work around his designated wallow space for the day, Liam calls every other day from Germany to nag him about personal hygiene, Zayn practically moves in, and Poppy comes by with new lamps and drapes and sheets to rid him of everything she’s ever touched.

Even Dee flies back between classes to tell him to cut it the fuck out as she makes him omelets.

“At least they’re not made of your knees,” she says.

His head and heart and body feels too tired filling up the Victoria sized hole within to even smile.

Dimly, he thinks to himself that it’s a divorce of sorts. That Victoria should be getting at least half custody of their friends. Like the way Poppy had to alternate between Berlin and London from ages ten to eighteen, and the way Louis has double Christmases, and birthdays, and everything in between.

His friends are as much her friends by now, aren’t they?

After all, didn’t Niall, who’s living on campus in Imperial College, have a standing brunch date with Victoria where he helps her take those hashtag outfit of the day things?

And didn’t Louis use to pop by with those infernal films she used to like so much and spend entire mornings talking about old pictures?

He's sure that Poppy flew out with Victoria on at least three different fashion weeks, jabbering away about autumn colours and vintage resurgence.

Zayn’s even road tripped with her and Dee around France before he started reading law in Oxford, didn’t he?

Surely, they should be making up excuses as to why they won’t be round the apartment much and sneak out to see her at the coffee shop every now and then.

He confronts Zayn about it while he’s on the couch, Graham Norton reruns playing on the telly.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says cracking open two beers and handing one over to Harry, “We’d pick you over anyone anytime.”

And it’s the first in fourteen days that he feels any closer to being whole again.

He’s twenty.

He’s taking a sabbatical from college.

Because, “Drop out of college and you can expect all your shares at Styles Enterprises rescinded.”

The threats sound petty and trivial, but Harry is sure that the older Styles is dead serious. A man doesn’t run a multi-billion pound tech corporation without the ability to make good on his threats.

And he’s sure he won’t survive based on his mother’s mercy alone.

So he’s just “taking a term off.”

He moves his life to Spain and spends whole days devoted to a neverending summer siesta. He has the local pizzeria’s number memorised and he has a standing reservation at the quaint little tapas and vino place around the corner of his hotel.

“Alright, it’s been long enough.”

The curtains are drawn open eight days into his little self-seeking vacation.

“If you’re going to grab life by the balls, Haz, at least do it right.”

Zayn’s voice floats into his head through the drunken afternoon nap fuzz, varying in volume and tone like a badly tuned radio.

He’s apparently taken the semester off too.

They’re not broken, Zayn insists, maybe a little beaten, but it’s nothing that a good few weeks of life on the Spanish roads can’t fix.

So they rent a car and drive from city to city. Reading badly translated city guides they get from tourist attractions and plotting out their journey on the fly with Harry navigating from the front seat, eating chips and asking if he’s even reading the damned map right, bitching about Zayn’s terrible taste in music with all that grimy dubstep bass and dirty R&B.

He looks at Zayn and he’s alight during those days and nights, a mixture of crumpled cotton shirts, honey hued skin, and hair humbly adrift.

Zayn doesn’t say it, but Harry knows that he knows that the sudden trip directly coincides with the anniversary of Victoria leaving. He misses her, he misses her like the desert misses the rain and on the exact one year mark to the day that she walked out of their apartment, he gets so drunk that he’s just lying on the floor of their hotel room, staring at the ceiling and slurring his words.

“I was so fucking stupid,” he says, over and over.

“How could I possibly think that someone who gives her word that she’ll marry you, and then bails, could ever keep a promise?”

He is completely and utterly sloshed and his chest feels like a black hole.

“It was all a mistake, wasn’t it?” Harry slurs, beer spilling all over the carpet.

The room is spinning and his head is throbbing and he wasn’t to just power down and hibernate into the next century.

Zayn’s voice cuts through the clutter though, unforgiving and devoid of pity.

“No, it wasn’t.”

His best friend’s face is contorted into an expression he doesn’t recognise, “You loved her, that was real. And you still do, that’s still real.”

He goes on as-a-matter-of-factly, “People just leave sometimes, it’s just.. a thing that happens.”

Harry looks at his best mate, blurry and drunk. So, so drunk. Between the scent of tobacco and the misty haze of its smoke, he sees his best mate’s face and he thinks to himself that it’s the most glorious sight in the world.

He wants to reach out and examine his best friend in deep detail, touch him like a child greedily poring over a treasure map.

But his head pounds, his vision is sliding, and then he’s asleep; the world around him forgotten.

He wakes up with his head pounding and Poppy’s voice on speaker, “Dee’s dying.”

The dying person in question protests from the background, her voice cracking through the phone line like a whip, “FOR FUCK’S SAKE POPPY.”

“She’s in denial.”

Zayn doesn't even say a word and Harry, in his hungover daze, books two flights out to Paris from his phone as the two of them bicker on the line.

He wonders momentarily what it’s like to be loved so surely and confidently by him.

He wants to rip into Zayn’s chest and take his heart between his teeth to devour piece by piece, until there’s nothing left. He thinks that maybe, just maybe, that way he can have him to himself.

It’s a peptic ulcer, the doctor says, brought on by internalised stress.

“She’s got the stomach lining of a 60-year-old air traffic controller,” the man with the white coat chuckles.

Zayn is pale as a sheet as he refrains from throwing the doctor against the wall, “She’s an art history student in Sorbonne, what could she possibly got to be— You know what, I don’t even care. Just, for fuck’s sake—”

It takes both Harry and Poppy to drag him out for a smoke, the smartest course of action really, before Zayn punches out the men of the French private healthcare industry.

He calms down after exactly three cigarettes and the nurses let them into her room.

She’s resting, they say. But the doctors and the nurses know better than to use the words “visiting hours” with Zayn in the room.

They see it in his eyes that those words just don’t apply here.

He imagines them shaking their heads with a small smile curved on their lips.

“Ahh. Young love,” he pictures them saying.

Zayn falls asleep on the uncomfortable bedside chair, head lulling over awkwardly.

With a less than graceful yawn and eyes rimmed red, Poppy leaves and promises she’ll bring breakfast for them the next morning. A couple of croissants, some macaroons for them maybe, and coffee, she promises.

“Don’t bother with the cafeteria rubbish,” she says, “It’s absolute shite.”

Harry assumes that with Louis' obvious absence that the on-again-off-again pair are on an off stage in their relationship again. So he doesn't say anything.

He does wonder though if it's worst to feel like you've lost something you had or to never have had it at all while he kicks his heels up to make himself comfortable for the night. Or as comfortable as he can anyway, with his long limbs and overgrown hair smelling of travel sticking to his face in the single seater.

Moonlight is filtering in through the open window and the whole world is quiet, holding its breath.

Harry looks at his best mate snoozing in his combined fatigue of travel and worry, and his heart suddenly feels eleven times too big for his ribs. Perhaps the worst part about losing someone is if you never even had them to begin with, he thinks.

It’s almost sunrise when a voice distracts him from huffing and puffing, tossing and turning restlessly in the chair that just isn’t meant to be slept in.

“Your shit’s a mess, Styles.”

He lets go of a breath he didn’t know he’s holding in, shaking his leg that’s fallen asleep, “Says the one who’s hospitalised dealing with an art history degree.”

She rolls her eyes, “At least I’ve never missed a haircut appointment, seriously, can you even call that thing on your head, hair?”

“Nice to see you feeling better enough to nitpick at my appearance,” Harry chuckles softly, moving his chair closer to the bed, “Poppy says she came to see you because you’ve been awfully quiet lately.”

“It’s just,” she starts before her eyes shift, taking in his entire appearance, “Alright, seriously what is going on with that hair, and when did you stop buttoning your shirts, you look bloody ridiculous.”

“I cut my summer siesta short to see you,” Harry counters, indignantly.

“I’m sure it’s Zayn cut your trip short to see me, he worries too damned much.”

Desperate to avoid further teasing from the brunette about his life and his hair and his choice of clothing, he steers the conversation elsewhere, “So you do know your effect on him.”

She refuses to meet his gaze.

“Think you’ll ever give him another chance?” Harry presses on.

No one really knew what happened between the pair, just that they sort of were.

Until they weren’t.

“I dunno,” Dee shrugs meekly, “Think you’ll ever quit pining over Victoria and finish your degree?”

Harry grins, even from a hospital bed with a belly full of blood, she’s still sassing him. He mimics her simplistic reply mere moments ago, “I dunno.”

Zayn shifts in his sleep and Harry wonders if he should cough loudly enough to startle him awake and make an excuse to leave.

“What’s it like?”

Dee’s voice breaks through his reverie.

He looks at her, all weak and washed out against the light blue of the hospital gown, her hair splayed across the pillow a stark contrast against the pale of her neck.

“What’s what like?”

“Loving someone for so long.”

She looks exactly like an art history major for once, quietly contemplative, almost as white as a blank canvas and spilling life all over.

Harry reflects on what she’s asking for a moment, eyes landing on the snoozing Zayn before them even though he knows she’s talking about Victoria.

The words come instinctively.

“Like you know them better than you know yourself.”

He’s twenty-one.

He drops out of college and sells everything he owns right down to the designer suits and shoes and ties.

He snaps a picture of the emptied out penthouse that his parents have been paying for, and sends it to them with a note;

Off to make my own way.

Love, Harry.

It’s hard to leave, but even more difficult to stay.

London held too many memories. And it held him back from all the things he wants to do, and see, and experience. His parents lit a fire in him in his youth and the fire, rekindled by the weeks on the road with Zayn, burned too strong to ignore.

So he leaves London on a tide of careful planning and pure brute force of will.

The new place he moves into, in sunny Los Angeles, is completely and utterly a dump.

Harry takes one look at the unpolished floorboards and the old walls, the mould on the tiles in the bathroom and the threadbare couch in the centre of the living room, and he signs the lease.

The wallpaper is peeling itself off the walls, he has absolutely zero furniture apart from the couch that also doubles as a pull out bed, and not all the taps work.

But there’s two bedrooms, a lockable front door, and a piece of paper that says that it’s all legally his.

He loves it.

He builds his first million from that dingy apartment.

And even though Niall's the one who's in the same country code as he is, Zayn and Dee are hte ones who are over with two bottles of champagne within twenty-four hours of him texting the group chat; one to spray him down with and another to drink.

They hit town that night, drinking far too much, running into trouble like flies to honey. And he can't help but think, he's killing it at this adulting thing.

He’s twenty-two.

He’s back in London temporarily because Dee had called and promised to track him down in the city of angels and swing a baseball bat at his head so hard that it’ll be delivered to Zayn as a graduation present.

“It’s also his birthday, in case you’ve forgotten.”

So he buys the first flight out to London and takes a taxi straight to Dee’s address.

The first thing Harry notices is a scent; an utter Zayn-ness lingering in the air.

It’s early, the sun barely has time to get warm, and he isn’t quite up yet. It disconcerts him, that whiff of Zayn. It takes him back to the days where he would lie in his best mate’s bed, back in Wellesley. And hours long road trips in the windy roads of Spain and Portugal.

“It smells like Zayn in here,” he announces, without so much as thought of what the words would sound like out of his mouth.

Dee laughs.

Evidently, it sounds ridiculous.

But recognising the scent is instinctual, like breathing.

And he finds it ironic that becoming so familiar with someone that you can smell them in a room makes them feel like more of a stranger than anything.

“So threats are the only way I can get you home then?” Dee crosses her arms sardonically staring him down from across the room.

But there is a tinkle of delight in her voice that Harry recognises.

And she’s also biting her lip the way she used to when concealing a laugh.

A gust of wind blows in from the balcony and the thrill, that dizzying pull of one Zayn Malik runs through his veins like electricity, igniting them right to their ends.

Before he knows it, he is enveloped in the familiar combined scent of tobacco and lemon and bergamot.

A warmth floods through him.

Must be the sun, he thinks, from the now open balcony.

“You fuckin’ idiot.”

His grin is better than any drug Harry’s ever experienced.

Harry chuckles appreciatively, casually grabbing a slice of uneaten toast from the Dee’s plate and taking a hefty bite.

Zayn starts talking about his post graduation plans, joining his father’s company and working his way from the bottom up.

“I mean, Liam’s working with his dad and they’re making a pretty good run of it, I figure I’ll do alright.”

He keeps talking and Harry’s mind, half awake from the ten hour flight and lack of caffeine can still absorb the continued deep timbre of his voice as he starts excitedly babbling about how it’ll be the first time they’re all in the same place at the same time.

There’s a new lightness to Zayn and Harry’s not quite sure what it is.

He’s going on about how Poppy and Louis have finally gotten their act together and moved in to their own place when Harry completely loses track of his words. Zayn reaches out to grab a mug from the top shelf, moving around comfortably in the kitchen that isn’t his, and Harry’s mind can suddenly register nothing else. He is distracted by Zayn’s movements; swift and seamless.

The way he easily pours a steaming brew into the mug, scoops two sugar teaspoons of sugar into it, dribbles in some milk before giving the concoction a quick swirl has him enraptured.

He extends the mug out to him and Harry’s gaze snaps from Zayn’s hands to his face.

“What?” Zayn looks down at the mug in his hands. “Did I get it wrong?”

“No.”

"So?” Zayn questions with an expression of easy nonchalance.

Harry isn't sure himself, but his stomach is clenching uncomfortably and he doesn't think it's from the long haul flight.

“You and Dee normally have tea,” his mind is apparently just making words up as he goes.

“There isn't any caffeine in tea though is there?” Zayn points out with a chuckle, “And you’re quite the grouch in the mornings.”

He slides the cup over.

Harry takes a gulp; the coffee burns as it fills his mouth and slips down his throat, but the sensation is better than the alternative.

“I got almost everyone home and a reservation at Hibiscus tonight,” Dee stands up, announcing to no one in particular, “Please wear something that’s buttoned up all the way?”

The latter statement is aimed at him, disarmingly sincere.

“And try not to burn down my house while I’m out, will you?” Dee looks at Zayn accusingly after chucking her plate into the sink.

“First of all, it was your candle,” Zayn huffs, an inside joke he isn’t in on, “Second of all, the house is still very much intact, innit?”

She shakes her head, small smile playing on her lips.

And that’s when it happens.

Zayn leans forward and catches her lips with his own. Casually. Comfortably. As though it’s a daily occurrence between them.

Harry barely registers her kissing him on the cheek and walking out after that.

More than any heartbreak, Harry realises, is when you didn't even know there was something to break.

And everyone seems to be moving forward so rapidly; Poppy and Louis, Dee and Zayn, Liam, and even Niall who they barely see anymore because the bastard has the audacity to study medicine while knowing his own health decline, because, "a sick doctor? Come on, it'll be a fuckin' riot."

They all seem to be working towards something substantial in their life. Whether it’s moving in with your on-again-off-again partner or finally labelling your relationship status or fitting into the shoes you’ve been groomed for your entire life, they were all traveling in the same orbit.

Change, Harry thinks, is always bittersweet. A scary monster that hides beneath his bed that he's learned to battle since the age of four, that first big terrifying leap into the unknown guided by nothing but the certainty in his parents hand.

And he’s happy for his mates, really, in all their certainty.

There’s just this bitter taste in his mouth he can’t explain.

He’s twenty-three.

And by now, he’s had one too many broken bones to not instantly recognise pain when he sees it.

Harry knows deep cuts from scrapes, however hidden they are by blood. He knows how bruises hurt and age and heal. And he understands intimately the look of pure stoicism in the face of pain.

So when he sees her, he knows she’s hurting.

He’s at a wedding out in Napa Valley and she’s just by the bar, the wine glass in her hand never too lonely for too long.

He instinctively just meanders towards the girl who looked as lost as he is.

“Let me guess, you want to buy me a drink from the free open bar.”

Her accent American, her voice bored, and her expression unamused.

“I was going to go with the ‘make me the third happiest person in the room’ route, but that works too,” Harry counters before taking a seat next to the one exchanging the proverbial blood bleeding out through her chest with gushing red wine in her hand.

“You’re Harry Styles,” her voice perks up.

“Excuse me?”

He’s more than a little taken aback; he hardly calls himself a recluse on the long list of millionaire start up owners, but he ever really considered the fact that his face and name might be common knowledge.

“You’re the heir to Styles Enterprises,” she goes on, as though reciting from a list she’s memorised, “You stuck it to your old man by starting up your own company five thousand miles away and you refused his buyout even when your four most expensive start up acquisitions failed. You’re kind of legendary in the industry,” she raises the glass to her lips once more with an eyebrow raised.

He’s more amused by it than anything.

“And what industry is that?”

“Tech journalism,” she lifts her chin at the words, pride evident on her face, “My name’s Beth Matthews.”

“Is that how you met and fell in love with the groom, Beth?”

It catches her by surprise. She’s blinking rapidly at his words, as though wondering if she misheard him somehow, “What are you—”

“Call it an instinct,” he shrugs.

He tells the barkeep that he'll have what the lady is having and plants himself firmly by her side for the rest of the night.

It's a familiarity, he decides. Their connection is one of two damanged people who sought for a home in others without having the blame of being the one who did the breaking.

Harry Styles didn’t unwittingly fall in love with Beth Matthews, he jumped; head first, eyes closed and trying not to think of it too much.

In hindsight, he should have really seen it coming; she does, after all, have the dark hair and eyes to match.

He hates to admit it, but he does have a type. And one moment she’s reluctantly laughing at his jokes by the open bar at the garden party of a wedding reception, and the next she’s whispering secrets to him at 2am from the bathroom they’ve locked themselves in.

He can’t for the life of him remember how they had acquired exactly thirteen thousand inside jokes over a few hours and too many glasses of wine, but all of them made him laugh and they’re snuggled next to each other with every crook and cranny of their bodies fitting perfectly.

Beth’s hair, which held scent traces of a lemon-y shampoo and the cigarettes she’s been smoking all night, reminds him of both home and the open road.

It’s quickly becoming apparent, even in his alcohol hazed mind, that he’s liking this girl a great deal more than he had intended to. It’s evolving into more than what he had hoped for; a few drinks, a straightforward shag, and a number on a napkin that will never be used.

But it isn’t until he finds himself staring at that the way her brow furrows before she sneezes that he realises that he’s a goner.

Hoping to impress her, he recounts the exaggerated tales of how he aided and abetted in multiple runaway brides in Vegas while attending a bachelor’s party.

“If you want, I can totally steal the bride and keep her distracted while you go for the groom,” he jokes.

An inexplicable sadness returns to her eyes.

A distraction; that’s all it had been for her.

“You know, it’s refreshing to see someone who can afford to take a million second chances but still holds on so strongly to the first,” she says.

He loses his trail of thought at that.

“Victoria. You still love her don’t you?” Beth prods on.

“What?”

“I mean, that’s what this all is, isn’t it? You keep falling for the ones you can’t have, like you’re re-living some kind of a trauma,” she slurs, “And it all stems back to that first runaway bride, that first person you fell in love with but couldn’t have.”

There’s a silence between them and Harry’s not quite sure what to say.

He hadn’t realised that he’d told this stranger so much about himself. He definitely wasn’t expecting her to be as perceptive to his words and stories and nuances.

Yet there they are, both stewing in their bleeding hearts and a lung cavity full of confusion.

Stranger still, is that his mind didn't immediately go to Victoria. As a matter of fact, it's been months since he had even so much as thought about her.

“You know, when we were sixteen, we used to sit on his parents roof and dream of a life where we’d go make something of ourselves,” she reaches into her purse and pulls out the wedding invite, the very one that had the smiles of the happy couple plastered on, “And now he has. I’m just not in it.”

His mind is a riot; as if he’s been hit in the head and all the blood is rushing to his head.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts all of the sudden.

She freezes, turning her head to stare at him.

“Well, if we never felt pain, we wouldn’t appreciate happiness nearly as much as we do, now would we?"

His eyes lock on her own hazel hued ones, astonished by her eloquence after drinking half the bar dry.

“You really think it’s that simple?”

She thinks for a moment before deciding on a response.

“I hope so.”

Beth gets to her feet unsteadily and leaves him in the bathroom alone, taking his heart with her.

He’s twenty-four.

It hasn’t exactly been a fun ride so far.

Harry has lived in six countries, aided and abetted in five runaway brides, invested in four failed start ups, been in three fights, and had his heart broken twice.

And he’s pretty sure both times were by the same person, wearing different faces.

Which is probably why when he rushes into the bridal room to find Dee frantically pacing and on the verge of tears, he doesn’t know what his presence is meant to do or not do.

“Tell me something good,” she pleads.

“What?”

“I don’t know, I just—”

“No,” Harry declares, the scene all too familiar for him, “No, no, no, no, no. No! I am not about to find myself involved in a sixth runaway bride situation, especially not with Zayn on the receiving end, Addison, you are not doing this to me.”

His head is spinning and he can’t believe it, she starts saying his name when her head tilts in contemplation.

“Did you just say sixth?”

He assures her it isn’t the time nor the place for the story and she starts moving around nervously once more.

Fearing the worse, he asks relucatntly, unsure if he even really wants to know the answer. Unsure if the deepest darkest parts of him actually wants for an opposite outcome, “What’s wrong?”

“Just tell me something good, Haz, I need to hear something good.”

Her voice is pleading and sincere. And he doesn’t quite know what is good or true is anymore. So he goes with what he knows, “He loves you.”

Dee sighs, sitting herself down, eyes flickering to the bouquet in the corner.

“Zayn’s loved you since he was eleven,” Harry all but forces the words off his tongue.

He hates to admit it, but it had been clear to him since that first English period that Zayn is utterly unobtainable due to the fact that he already belonged to someone else.

“You may have thought that he was interested in a play thing, a doll, a pretty thing to put in a trophy case but you saw the truth eventually, you walked in love with him with your eyes wide open. You chose him every step of the way.”

“That’s just it, isn’t it?” Dee whispers, barely audible, as though she’s talking to herself more than she is talking to him, “Everyone keeps telling me that I love him and that he loves me. And that we make perfect sense together. But how do you tell the difference between something that actually exists and something that only exists because everyone tells you it does?”

“What are you saying?” Harry exclaims, “This is Zayn we’re talking about.”

“The same Zayn who nearly had a heart attack in the garden shed when you didn’t come back from that stupid prank,” he starts, “The same Zayn who came this close to punching out a French physician, the one who bought you that ridiculously expensive painting when you graduated Sorbonne.”

She looks up at him pacing around the room, like she’s thinking.

“I just can’t shake this feeling that that nothing about us makes sense, not the way that—” Dee stops herself mid sentence.

She looks uneasy, even more so than she did moments before, like she’s about to confess something terrible. And for a moment, he’s almost relieved. Almost.

“Not the way that it should,” she finishes the sentence somewhat inadequately.

Dee looks like she’s choking when he says it, like suddenly there is not enough air in the whole room to fill her cracking lungs.

Secrets are a weird thing, he thinks to himself.

“Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense.”

Harry’s not sure who he’s trying to convince more, really, himself or her.

He sits himself down right in front of the bride, reaching to hold her hands steady in his own because she looks like she might disintegrate.

“Maybe there are a million universes out there where you don’t meet Zayn, and you marry someone else,” he suggests, “But you’re here, in this universe, and it’s real.”

She looks at him in something like wonder and he doesn’t know if there’s anything else left to say.

There’s a knock on the door telling him it’s time.

He gets up to leave her to it.

She has probably two good minutes if she wants to run. It’s an instinct he quite understands.

He’s lived in six countries to date.

He’s aided and abetted five runaway brides, put his entire life savings into four failed start ups, been in three physical fights where he's literally had the lights knocked out of him, and had his heart broken twice.

But he’s standing next to Zayn at the end of the aisle on his wedding day. And his smile is so full of light when he sees the bride walk down the aisle, it blinds him.

He’s sure that their paths cross in a different million universes in a different million ways, some of which they probably don’t even so much as glance at one another.

Maybe in all of them, Zayn never loves him back the way Harry loves him.

But still, he’s here in this universe.

So Harry considers himself lucky after all.

#1dff #one shot / request #gok zarry fic exchange #zarry fanfiction #harry styles #zayn malik

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

all that shimmers in this world (is sure to fade)

It’s red, right?

It’s the first day of classes and he swaggers in, all unfamiliar and bungling, before settling into the seat next to her.

Addison has known the kids in her form for ages; they’d all but grown up together, spent summers in the same places, went to the same hefty annual price tag slapped on preparatory schools. And so when he walks in, you would think that it would be noticed. But it flies right under the radar.

Poppy’s eyes don’t light up, Zayn doesn’t throw a sheepish grin his way, and Louis doesn’t greet him bluntly and matter-of-factly.

It was as if he was invisible.

But not to her.

She noticed him the exact moment he breezed past her in the corridor exactly seventeen minutes prior, going the complete wrong direction of their class without a care in the world.

But then he shuffles in right in the nick of time, alone and almost late, an irregular occurrence for Wellesley where students moved in packs and were primed for timeliness since the age of three.

The teacher pairs the class up to do an introductory essay on one another and it’s his smile struck her the hardest.

Your favourite colour, he prods, It’s red, isn’t it? I can see it bursting from the depths of your soul.

She laughs and rolls her eyes, because what else is there to do when you identify the exact moment when a stranger is about to sweep through your life like a hurricane.

People have always been quick to point out what parts of her parents are in her; her mother’s face and laugh mixed with her father’s humour and quiet decorum. She’s always expected to be composed, carry her name like armour. They see how she moves and speaks, and say that’s she’s a walking reminder of them.

What they don’t see is how she isn’t them.

And his choice of words stir a deep longing in her chest cavity like a dying heart aching to be healed. A balm for a festering wound she didn’t even know existed.

The one who introduced himself as Niall raises an eyebrow at her reaction, or lack thereof, playful and almost baiting. His eyes glisten with real sentience almost as though equipped with some kind of hidden knowledge about her.

In any other versions of reality, she would take the bait; face flushed, blue eyes blazing with fury, and fists clenched.

But she responds languidly instead, shifting the attention to him instead.

Don’t make it weird, Bardot.

He clarifies that his last name is Horan.

Whatever you say, Brigitte.

She smirks.

She walks off with Poppy and Harry and Louis and Liam and Zayn after class. He looks on, just as he’s always been, lips twisted in a wry smile and eyes full of the sun.

She doesn’t look back.

Because she didn’t know it then, but he was more than a hurricane tearing through her life.

He was going to be the one who would rip into her flesh, strip back the skin she wore, and burrow himself so deeply under her skin that she would never be the same.

Nothing actually happens to her.

That was the fact.

Before he arrived, chasing thunderstorms into the century old brick and mortar foundations with wrought iron gates, she felt more like half of a person than a full one. Always referred to in relation to someone else rather than a person of her own. It’s always been, “Poppy’s roommate,” or, “Greg’s little girl,” or “Harry’s friend, yeah?”

And she hates it. Because her life is so entangled with those who are deemed societally appropriate that she doesn’t really have any stories to tell on her own.

There is nothing in her life that was just hers.

And she hates it.

But then her adolescent years became meshed together into a montage of too little learning with too long interludes of parties, pranks, three am kisses, and groans erupting between sheets. And it all began when he arrived at the stuffy boarding school all Irish, and bleached blonde hair.

It had been the most excitement that the school had seen in a while and her eyes drowned in the sight of his reckless abandon.

Years on, far past the reaches of the learning institution they’d all grown to love to hate, she still gazes upon the marvel of Niall Horan with her eyes dewy in a hopeless kind of wonder.

When he walks into a room, Addison feels thirteen again; wide-eyed and incredulously staring at something she wants but cannot have, sinking into the belief of parallel universes where alternate versions of him and alternate versions of her.

The same, but different.

When he speaks to her, she fights the urge to grab his hands and run through the streets screaming that he’s real. Real and hers, all hers. Because there’s just something particularly satisfying about holding something that is not yours to take with both hands.

The sudden rush of blood to the head, veins positively pulsing, and goosebumps erupting across every expanse of skin.

When his eyes seek out hers, she is enraptured by the thought that he once planted in her head when he came back after summer taller, blonder, and more handsome than before; Do you ever think that we’re all just fish in the ocean, he says, that we’re all just trapped under a wave, forced to swim with the current instead of against?

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes, trying to unlearn being rich and bored and bourgeois.

Because if he was a fish, he’d be a shark. A force of nature and a dying breed, causing ripples in the ocean and striking fear in simpletons who did not understand how pivotal their function was in the ecosystem.

And if he was a shark, she’d be a pilot fish. An inconsequential moving piece, feeding on the scraps of life that he’s devoured and hanging on for dear life

In every version of every reality, she is completely and irretrievably in love with him.

And that, was wherein the problem lay.

Being with him is so god forsaken idyllic that she can’t even remember to hate herself for it.

His bleached ruffled mess of her making lay unmoving against the pillow, his bare chest rising and falling in unison with his breathing. A perfect picture of tranquility after a night of less than tranquil activities upon the sheet they lay against.

She wants to capture the moment and live in it forever.

She wants to scratch the images from the night before into the back of her skull, preserved until even after her life has long left her body.

But her eyes catch a glimpse on the clock above his shoulder and she curses under her breath, slithering out of bed carefully with her legs sliding beneath the sheets and hitting the ground softly.

His body instinctively mourns the loss of contact and warmth and she hears him shuffling beneath the sheets.

“Go back to sleep,” she instructs gently, hoping to make an easy escape.

“S’ cold,” he grumbles, she should have known that nothing came easy when it comes to Niall, “Come back to bed.”

“I can’t.”

“Why?” He cranes his neck, stretches slightly off the pillows for a glimpse.

He is not a morning person. Not the way she’s been trained to be. But given the choice, she would gladly live in his low grumble of a daybreak voice.

“I’m late for a wedding,” she answers, absent of thought as she collects and haphazardly throws on her clothes.

“Whose?”

Her eyes meet his from across the room, squinting slightly in the cruel light of day.

The silence sits between them uncomfortably.

“Mine.”

His words slice through the silence, disturbing her concentration.

You should make a career out of that.

She swivels around to meet the owner of the voice with paint thoughtlessly speckled across the front of her shirt. She’s never been rash, and wild, and impulsive. But she’s learning that it’s quite relaxing to disregard a rule or two. And one such rule involved being out of bounds in the late hours.

Girls like me don’t don’t have careers, she chuckles half jokingly after recovering from the shock of his sudden appearance.

It was a lot less than half in reality, but she struggles with the truth a lot more than she would want to have him believe so she continues makes light of her life laid out ahead of her; Girls like me have hobbies. And vested interests. And strong opinions about the state of the world. We pick our favourite clothes from pre fall/winter lines and we do charity. Then we settle on one of our few handsomely rich gentlemen callers. We keep our hobbies and charities and we have our children.

The words that come spilling from her mouth ring truer that she had hoped they would, and she shivers underneath the thin jumper.

The lit cigarette in his hand lay unsmoked while he listens, enthralled by the revelation and she easily swipes it from his fingers.

And the cycle continues, she adds while taking a deep inhale of the burning waste.

Because hurt people hurt others.

The latter rolls off her tongue in a whisper. A footnote to herself more than to him. And for a fraction of a second he looks as though he was having a stroke. The way his brow furrowed together spells out a raging internal conflict she had never seen on him, and the way his mouth seems to be on the verge of words screamed of a concern she couldn’t quite understand.

She could almost feel the gears behind his eyes working at breakneck speed. She knows for a fact that he’s going to articulate something painfully poignant.

Or crack a joke that would cascade niagara-esque waterfall teardrops down her face from laughing so hard.

It always was hard to tell with him.

And then, I have Arrhythmogenic Right Ventricular Cardiomyopathy.

That she did not expect.

Talk about a life laid out for you.

He chuckles gently as though he had just cracked a joke instead of divulge something incredibly personal and groundbreaking.

Because that’s what they were doing.

They were breaking ground on their relationship, doing the deep dive after years of dancing around each other and making assumptions.

Some days, when the gang are all sitting in the library right next to the window with the sunlight pouring in, she swears she catches him staring.

A split second, half a breath.

But he draws back. Recoils from her gaze meeting his. As though he’s trespassing. As though it is he who is allowing himself a luxury. As though she is something he cannot have instead of the other way around.

He laughs unnaturally, cutting through the tension sitting between them like something jagged and brutal, a harsh reminder of what she hid behind her little laughs. The same as when she confessed that her life was a cycle of unconscious abuse passed on for generations mere moments ago.

He proceeds to tell her about what it means and the implications of this faulty manufacturing and how some nights he feels like he’s dying his heart beats so erratically.

Not all deaths end in funerals, she thinks.

And sixteen is too young, far too young, to be dead.

So she grabs him by the collar and his bewildered lips find their way onto hers.

He pulls her closer, closer, closer, and his pulse was hammering so hard against his skin that she couldn’t be sure if it was his heart or hers violently protesting it’s cage of human flesh.

She is ravenous for him. Wants more, needs more.

Every part of her seeks him out, the taste of his lips, the feel of his skin.

But in a desperate frustrated need for air, they pull apart with chests heaving.

In that moment, she’s sure her heart is beating more than a few traffic laws in a school area.

Her hand that has his shirt fisted snake under the fabric and roam across the vast expanse of his skin as their lungs fought for the blissful flood of air. She wants to map out the world hidden inside him, in a savage search to find any vestiges of her name.

She wants to find them hidden, written in the spaces between his blood and bones.

Or perhaps find an echo of her name between the folds of his vocal cords.

It’s as though they both pull into the same idea at once, hands roving on one another’s skin, and he voices the thought almost hesitantly. As though it was a possibility that she’d say no.

Are you sure?

Drunk off of the burn in her lungs and the softness of his lips, she thinks that maybe she could have a choice after all. Her fingers traced the skin of his chest, the bumps of muscles and the dips between his bones.

Don’t make it weird, Bardot.

In one swift motion, she lifts the shirt over his head.

He’s sharing bits of himself he’s never shared before. And in return, she lays herself bare before him.

“You look beautiful.”

She’s looking into the mirror and half certain she hallucinated his voice. But then she sees his reflection in the mirror, right behind her, hovering uncertainly at the doorway, and turns to face him.

Poppy and Gemma and Doniya are off bridesmaid duty-ing and she contemplates about half a dozen things to say.

She can’t quite settle on anything that is a particularly good idea, and he delves into the spaces of the room. He fiddles with the bouquet, her bouquet. The one that she painstakingly picked out. The one she pored over dozens of painted illustrations before settling on.

She loved lilies.

And with a quick gentle prod of his hand, they are ruined. She loved them for two whole months, loved them up until the minute he came in. Because now she can’t unsee his touch on their petals.

“Are you staying for the wedding?”

He nods.

She opens her mouth to begin a sentence she doesn’t even know and he stops her.

“Red, don’t.”

The nickname rolls of his tongue easily, comfortably, and she’s never wanted to be a colour more in her life.

She never even had a favourite colour until he arrived, really.

He yelled out red and red was all she saw from that day. Passion and adventure swirled together, sweeping through her life and leaving everything different in its wake; as tragedy often did.

He whispered the word red and red was all she wanted to become.

It was the traces of her fingertips she wanted to leave on his skin, the colour of her breath when she pictured him with someone else, the dripping smile that clung on her lips whenever he detached his from hers.

No longer did the white against her skin feel right, and she itched to tear the fabric that clung to her like second skin right off.

“Niall—”

“If you say what I think you’re about to say, I might have a heart attack and die right here on your wedding day.”

The words come out as though pre-rehearsed; stoic and cold.

“And we don’t want that,” he adds nervously.

It doesn’t sound right, the formality in his tone, the barely there whisper of a laugh on the precipice of his mouth. It was unnatural, as though his throat was a cave that has forgotten how to echo.

She blurts out the first thing she can think of, “How did you know where to find me yesterday?”

A wry smile plays on his lips and he shrugs, “I keep tabs on you.”

“Horan—”

“Your postcards have return addresses on them,” he admits sheepishly, knowing when to push and when to pull.

It had been years since they had seen one another. But she paints him pretty pictures and sends them to the only address she knows.

The silence that sits between them is deafening.

“Are you going to tell Zayn about last night?”

“I don’t know, last night isn’t over yet for me,” she shrugs, fighting the urge to close her eyes and count to ten.

It isn’t that she’s scared.

Addison doesn’t do scared. Not since the boy with the lightning eyes and golden smile waltzed into her life that fine first day of school.

You are my terrible secret, she says to him after the school dance, fifteen and almost adult.

Fifteen and drunk.

And drunk and drunk and drunk.

He is her terrible secret and she’s pretty sure everyone knows it.

But it’s a rite of passage; this was what they would dub a the rebellious years.

She is sipping whiskey from a flask in his room and he’s waiting expectantly for his turn. His tie is undone and her hair is draped lazily off her face.

In the two short years since their first meeting, she’s become a fixture in his shared room with Harry.

Harry doesn’t say anything but she feels his approving beam thrown her way every now and then. He’d never been one for rules either, and the shit eating grin on his face the first time she just walks herself into their room and flops onto Niall’s bed, rewriting the rules to a new kind of propriety, was not lost on her.

They drink out of the same bottles, share the same jokes, smoke the same fags, and everything in between on those nights.

And most nights, it’s not just them three.

There are study groups, and prank plotting, and birthday celebrations, so many birthday celebrations.

But on the nights when it is just them three, she spreads herself onto Niall’s bed, filling out the white space as he toils away on his desk, wishing she could undo years of her life. Lying in the exact bed he sleeps on, thinks on, and dreams on, she contemplates conversations they never really had and wished they were real.

She wants to scrub clean their first meeting and instead tell him about how she likes to paint, and that she’s quite good at it if she says so herself.

Addison wants to tell him about the one time she climbed onto the roof of her prep school with Louis and jumped off with an umbrella to revel in a Mary Poppins moment.

It ended with a broken arm for her and a twisted ankle for him.

She wants to know the story behind his guitar and the first song he learned to play on it, if he’s ever had a pet, and if he’s broken any bones. And why oh why in the name of all things holy would he continuously subject his hair to that level of bleach damage.

But she doesn’t.

Because baby steps.

She whispers it again, loudly, as though mishearing her words would cause him to leave at any moment.

You are my terrible horrible secret.

Abominable, he quips.

He takes the flask from her, tired of waiting, his fingers brushing against hers gently before he pushes the cold metal against his lips, draining its contents in one gulp.

The image of Niall Horan, fifteen and drunk burrows itself into the darkest corners of her mind.

Something catches in her throat and it has nothing to do with the smuggled flask of which its contents they just emptied into their open mouths. All she can register is the realisation that she’s never wanted anything so badly in her life.

And she realises that she will probably never want anything so badly ever again.

They are suddenly dancing and her blood is pulsing through her veins in a dizzifying rate, her body reacting to his in every way possible; head tilted up, eyes alert, and lips parted.

All she wants is just to keep him as her terrible secret.

So she places her hand on his collar and allows herself that one indulgence.

She doesn’t care that any moment, his roommate and all their other friends are about to burst into the room. She allows herself a momentary lapse of judgement and pulls his face to hers roughly.

Lips meeting clumsily, he kisses back.

Her heart swells at the feel of his hot breathe on her chilled skin. And she doesn’t understand, can’t grasp what is happening because in that moment she is his and he is hers.

She doesn’t care what that meant on the long run. All that she knows is that she’s drunk.

And drunk and drunk and drunk.

But he wasn’t pulling away.

She’s tasting every drop of life in his breath and it takes both their intoxicated minds a second or two, but their bodies catch up and his hands send electric jolts up every inch of exposed skin within reach.

She is giddy as he groans into the kiss.

As though the starved monster within has been denied for too long.

And she feels as though he must have thought her up the day he walked into the classroom. The idea of a girl that he had crawled straight out of his brain and ripped back everything that she was, leaving behind nothing but bare bones.

She sighs into his touch and wonders why she ever denied herself of him.

“Are you alright, Dee?”

“Yes.”

It was well rehearsed. Poppy or Gemma or any amount of people would ask, “Are you alright?”

And she would answer, “Yes.”

But her head tells her she is not and her head is right.

Addison is a mess and she is not, in any sense of the word, alright. She’s paper skin and a bleeding heart, leaking all over her dress.

A puddle of nothing.

“Dee?” Gemma asks, and she has no clue what she is asking except that she doesn’t know the answer.

“Can you get Haz for me?”

Concern flits across her eyes, as it often does when you childhood friend and school mate looks like she’s losing the plot on her wedding day, “Is everything okay?”

She grins, a smile is nothing more than a second language to her by now, “Yeah.”

She is pacing back and forth in her wedding dress when the best man bursts into the room in a frenzy. Not a thing that is unexpected when the bride summons you at the eleventh hour right.

“Tell me something good,” she all but begs.

“What?”

“I don’t know, I just—”

“No,” Harry declares, throwing his hands up as it dawns upon him that overnight she has turned into something flighty and scared and crazed.

“No, no, no, no, no. No! I am not about to find myself involved in a sixth runaway bride situation, especially not with Zayn on the receiving end, Addison, you are not doing this to me,” the best man all but declares as he realises what is unfolding before his very eyes.

“Haz—” she starts saying before cutting herself off, “Wait, did you just say sixth?”

“Not the time nor the place, Dee.”

She starts pacing again and his expression softens, “What’s wrong?”

How can she even begin to explain it to Harry when she doesn’t understand it herself. When she can hardly hold herself together long enough to explain it to him. When she herself cannot come close to describing how after everything, she is still someone who likes the idea of being faithful and honest and loyal.

Her eyes trail to him every few seconds as he stands there, confused. Harry is ruffling his hair with his impossibly long fingers, moving his eyes around like it’s the first time he has ever been in a room like this with a bride coming undone.

Watching Niall is nothing like watching Harry, she realises.

Or Louis, or Liam, or any other boy she’s known for more than half her life. Not even Zayn, her husband to be.

Watching Niall is like like witnessing the plot of an unlikely movie unfold slowly. The kind of movie that suckers you in once you start, and for some reasons unknown, you just can’t stop. She needs to breathe him in like something primal, desperately dirty, that break for air after being underwater for too long.

She thinks that Niall may be the wine stain she can’t get out.

Or maybe she just doesn’t want to.

Maybe she doesn’t want the apologies spilled from their mouth like a bottle of bleach.

She brushes her thumb along the ridge of his jaw in the dark.

He’s looking up at her, eyes wide, as if the sight of her will make it go away. As if it would be enough to fix whatever that was broken in the cavity that was his chest.

It was their final year at Wellesley and their A-levels were just on the horizon. In other words, it was time to think long and hard of the legacy that they were leaving behind. It was an open challenge to each graduating class; to one up the class before with a prank of a lifetime.

And the plan was simple, to alter the school’s coat of arms so the motto reads “Vanitas Omnia Vanitas” instead of “Veritas Omnia Vincit”.

It was subtle, and it would go unnoticed. And that was where the genius lay.

The entire class was involved in what they started calling Project Vanity and the whispers made its round to every form, fuelling the rumours for weeks. It ranged from a plot to dye every student’s hair the day before they took class yearbook photos to a mass graffitti orchestrated onto the facade of their beloved school.

Naturally, all the plots concocted in the imagination would warrant expulsion.

But the true beauty of their prank lay in the fact that it would only be noticed by the establishment during the annual cleaning of the coat of arms during summer break when they would accept visitors and parents.

In other words, long after the entire class of ‘07 had graduated.

It was really quite genius.

And everyone in their form had a hand in putting the plan into motion; from perfecting the design, to sourcing the materials, to nailing down provost’s patrol schedule, to identifying all the possibilities and concocting a plan A through Z.

All was left was the actual execution of swapping out the words. Which fell onto the hands of Harry (for his height), Niall (for his eye for detail), and Addison (because some things just need a feminine touch).

It was dark, as it should be, and the gentle illumination from their collective phones not really doing their job well. Liam who had been in charge of wares had not checked to see if the batteries in the torchlight worked, and that had obviously put up a slight barrier for their nights’ adventure, but they had their phones at hand so it had gone off without much more of a hitch.

Except Harry is yammering on about his best mate slowly descending into the bellies of madness because he can’t figure out what he did wrong as the trio attempted to stealthily make their way back to their respective dorms.

You should go out with Zayn again, he says, It’s all he talks about and it’s reached a new level of annoying.

Addison is trying to figure out a way to explain that she knows she left Zayn out in the dark by breaking up with him abruptly, but how does she explain that to Harry when he himself is fumbling with the words coming out of his own mouth.

I mean, maybe, yeah, you felt like it’s too much to commit, but it’s been over a year.

And as if to add to the poetic justice of her conundrum, all she can see is Niall’s outline creeping the halls of Wellesley ahead of them.

She can see him, even in the dark.

And she’s struck by a thought that she will never be able to feel anything for anyone the same way she does about him. She doesn’t have the time for to understand the implications behind that startling revelation though, because something goes horribly awry. Because Liam had not been the only one to sleep on the job.

A shout stabs through the night and their little posse moving in a united little pack of three scatters quicker than anyone could say, “Run!”.

Harry, in a moment of understandable panic, dashes down the hallway with his footsteps echoing loudly in the night. Niall turns around, his face searching for something. His eyes scanning amidst the sudden sound and the unexpected flurry of movement.

And then he sees it; a light moving toward them and the unmistakeable stern voice of Provost Linton at the end of the hall.

Moving closer, closer, closer.

He grows five shades paler and she recognises the signs that he’s talked about. She can see as his breathing labour as oxygen scorched through his lungs and his heart doubled down on its usual work schedule.

Addison starts yelling obscenities in every direction and tosses the torchlight in her hands as hard as she can to throw off off the provost. There is a crash, louder than she’d anticipated, and it starts raining glass over their heads.

Niall is too stunned to react as she grabs him by the hand and pulls him along, making unexpected turns before ducking into an empty classroom and throwing them both under a desk, eyes shut and hoping against all hope that the provost would be barrelling in the wrong direction.

She can feel his heart hammering in its cage and she is a sheet of ice as she comes to the realisation that she would give him her heart if she could.

Addison remembers reading somewhere that the organs and tissues and cells in a body can go up to four minutes without oxygen. And she’d rip her own heart out of her chest and put it into his chest if she could. She’d freely inflict onto herself every last rasping breath of her organs and tissues and cells to give his broken heart life.

I’d die for you, she says into the dark, fingers laced through the front of his shirt, holding it so tight as though a loosened grip would have him slip right through her clenched fists.

Her head is pounding and her ears are ringing from the scattered screams and it’s as if the entire world had suddenly turned to grey. Because for a minute, for the longest sixty seconds in her life, she saw a future where she never saw him again and she is shaking from it; Did you hear me? I’d die for you if it’d fix your heart.

His smile is luminescent, even in the jet black dead of night.

And I’d go to hell to bring your sorry arse right back, Red.

#1dff #one shot / request #summer fic exchange #niall horan #niall horan fanfiction

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

Hold All Our Secrets

She can see that something is wrong; a spark dulled by some unknown force. And inevitably she asks.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says.

And unwearyingly she sits and watches “nothing” eat up his words, hollow his bones and empty his soul. Because it’s easier; to put on that quick smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes and let those simple words slip so effortlessly from quivering lips.

So when she asks to meet and he asks her what’s wrong, he’s thrown off.

“I think we should break up.”

Her words hit the ground with a finality he didn’t know existed. And as someone who made a living putting to words how he feels, it’s suddenly as if no words had ever written.

There was a beat of silence and he’s thinking that he should say something that no one had ever said in the history of time to turn things around, because there had to be something he could say.

“I’m sorry.”

He’s never been good at hiding damage.

Her eyes trail his every move.

Silence.

Those eyes. The damn eyes that linger in his mind like a scalding touch on an ice cold skin.

He felt it the first day they met.

He was eighteen and the shock of becoming the world’s biggest boyband still hasn’t worn off.

They’re on the second world tour and he gets so blindingly drunk with the lads that he forgets what they were meant to be celebrating. The hangover that follows is not at all pleasant, and neither is the sight of her backstage.

He’s thanking one of the stage hands who brings him coffee and the lights illuminated her locks like a golden crown.

His bloodshot eyes flicker towards the incandescent flare and in his state of sobriety, it hurt.

He remembered that it hurt to look at her.

Then suddenly the lights are gone from sight, and all he can see is her. Her gaze bore holes into his and he never felt quite so small under her painfully penetrating stare.

When Paul introduces her as the new sound technician, he presses a kiss to her cheek with trembling lips.

He’s never been good at hiding damage.

Her lines are silhouetted against the windows, hunched over and swathed in bunches of sheet. The city loud outside their window, with the lights of London twinkling out beneath them he was sure.

But he ignores it. He can ignore everything with his eyes bathing in the sight of her.

He leans backwards, his eyes grazing the notches on her exposed spine.

She’s sprawled on the bed, her arms, skinny and pale reach for something. He watches as her gaze blurred as the flame shot up, tiny and wishful.

The ends of the cigarette burns orange as she inhales the fumes.

She exhales and a thin line of smoke follows, wispy and light, disappearing into nothingness. The remaining of the lit cigarette settles itself idly between her fingers as she ingests the toxic waste into her lungs, her hair in disarray and pristine white sheets barely covering her exposed skin.

The sight was almost obscene in his eyes.

Ironic, considering the breeches in propriety that had occurred mere minutes prior.

He forces himself to avert his gaze, his eyes landed back on the cigarettes sitting comfortably in the crook between her fingers.

She turns back to look at him, eyes hooded, all lazy and sleepy and satisfied.

All he wants is her lips; soft and plump.

The one where he could see every crack and every line on the pale pink skin, moist enough to kiss. The mouth that he imagined would taste like the one part cigarette and two parts sin, like the activities they were just involved in, united in passion.

And he stops himself from the trail of thought right there, shifting his attention to the cigarette that rested there instead as she fiddled with the lighter.

And he catches himself wondering, how much he’d like to be smoked by her; all lips and tongue and teeth and fingers.

A breeze comes from nowhere and stirs up the scents of their night together. He could smell the smoke and a bit of alcohol on her breath, mixed with the alluring breath of cinnamon and spice.

She smiles and lifts her head languidly, any semblance of his voice dies in his throat like the fading embers of fire when she her lips trace over his.

He quivers at the touch of her lips, soft and subtle like the inside of a rose.

He’s never been good at hiding damage.

“Hey.”

Her smoker’s voice was hoarse but melodic, as if beautiful, then scraped with sandpaper and trapped inside, rattling around with the smoke as it destroyed her lungs.

He is standing on an empty stage. The lights are out and the crowd’s gone home.

Zayn is gone.

The lads are off.

And all he’s left with is alone.

But her presence, her very presence, soothes him. Like a balm for a sickened heart.

He had thought they’d go one forever like that. But he was wrong.

And he spends the last few months endlessly trying to keep the memories alive and burning. Replaying the moments, trying to understand. Trying to remind himself that it was real. That he hadn’t imagined it all. Because he knew that if he lost them, he’d go crazy. And insanity in this wrecked state of mine would kill him.

He knows it.

He’d been so accustomed of being one fifth of a whole that he’d become lost on stage over the days since Zayn’s departure.

Old routines like recording, had too become different.

Interviews more tedious than ever.

The other boys see it, feel the absence sitting in the spaces between them, but they’re reeling from the lost themselves.

She sees it too but there’s nothing to be done.

He wants to tell her everything will be fine, that they’ll be fine, that he’ll be fine. But how does he explain something that he doesn’t understand himself. When he doesn’t believe it himself.

All he can think about is how Zayn isn’t on stage with them and it feels totally different and they don’t hold themselves the same way like they used too anymore.

He almost forgets how to be one part of a whole.

And he doesn’t know what to do.

And it’s just not the same.

He feels her hand graze over his fingertips and he feels his mind disconnect from his body. There are times where he wonders if he robs her of her senses as well. Because no matter how hard he tries, he just can’t resist her.

She who is so full of light and impossibilities from the first day. She who seems like she was forged to explore with the maps of the worlds behind her hands and a compass in her mind and cigarettes in her hand leading her adventure bound.

But all roads did not lead to him.

“It’s nothing.”

His voice cracks but he says it anyway.

“It’s just a hiatus.”

He’s never been good at hiding damage.

He kisses her on the cheek after the dinner that is painfully awkward. He’s timid and hesitant like they had just met all over again.

And if they were, he’d do it all over again.

Oh, how he’d do it all over again.

In a heartbeat.

Her skin leaves a lingering smell of perfume in his mind and there’s a thrumming in his ears like the roaring of a crowd.

“I love you.”

The words slip from his lips before he can catch them. Out of desperation or habit, he’ll never know.

And her face all but glows against the crystalline lights, even as she is breathing into her icy stoic mask. For a fraction of a moment, there is a glorious glimmer in her eyes.

But then her words were said with such finality that the moment replays itself like an echo.

“But it doesn’t matter.“

Her voice never sounded so cold.

The silence sits between them, twisting larger and louder until neither could bear it any longer.

He gaze flutters downward as she breathes the words that breaks his heart.

“Goodbye.”

He doesn’t know if she hates that word more than he does at that moment.

But she’s right; it doesn’t matter.

He meets her gaze with his lips lifted. He wants for that to be the last thing she remembers of him, stripped stark and bare, his eyes drinking in her in like she was the sun and he was one of the many planets in her orbit.

He wants to be etched into the eternities of her mind with a smile. One that is real and not plastered across the glossy pages of magazines and tabloid websites.

He’ll smile until it hurt.

Until it’s believable.

But in his head, the walls he call home reply with a plea for her to stay instead of silence.

#one shot / drabble #break up fic #1dff #harry styles fanfiction

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

Never Be Like You

He knows that there’s something wrong.

She knows that there’s something wrong.

But neither will do or say anything about it.

It just lingers between them, like an inexplicable morbidity has somehow interweaved itself between their two hearts in a parallel universe and by some twisted chance, the lines between worlds are blurring and it all just seeps into their skin.

There’s an intrinsic calm in watching the dissolution of a relationship.

Like the quiet before a storm.

His eyes are glued to the phone and that’s the last time she really sees any of him, and he’s walking out the door to do something that isn’t spending time with her.

Her granite mask cracks, but he doesn’t see her.

He doesn’t say anything else as he walks down the entrance hall of her apartment.

“I’ll see you, yeah.”

She doesn’t like goodbyes.

Work is in full swing shortly after that and her company booked a tour and suddenly she’s off and he’s off too.

He’s in London and then LA, and then London and then LA. Back and forth, back and forth.

There’s talk about a solo album, there’s talk of renewed romance on a yacht, there’s talk of a movie. She doesn’t pay much attention to idle gossip normally, but it seeps into her life rank and uninvited, like poison.

And she tries not to pay heed to it because it may be a hiatus, but life of a pop star doesn’t stop. Not really. Not ever. Especially not him. Him who’s so full of life always. Him who had something so irreverently sunny.

She notices it even the first time they meet.

The fierce happiness that swoops and bounds through his every movement permeates the air.

It’s infectious.

And she’s glad when his gaze meets hers that first day she joined them on tour.

He doesn’t see the bad in anyone.

When he talks to people, it makes them feel important, special, as if you’re the most important thing to him and what you’re saying is the most interesting thing he’s ever heard. Everything, everyone, is beautiful, fascinating, to him.

And he is beautiful to her for it.

She films him on her camera phone on their off days and he gets her into trouble more than once, poking his head into things backstage on their on days because he doesn’t belong there and she should know better than to distract the band from their focus.

He invites her to dinner with the rest of the guys four nights in a row and he calls her late at night at least twice a week; drunk, raucous and happy.

He is bright and alive and glowing.

She likes it, and he likes her.

There’s no room for anything else between them but they just are.

Between tours, she goes back to her real life and he goes out and does his.

“I’ll catch you at the next one, yeah?”

She doesn’t like goodbyes.

Everyone wants a part of him.

And he delights in it; jokes and charms, and lights up the room with the sunshine that glows underneath his skin.

Green eyes, wide smiles, and dimples. Even when everything else changes; his hair gets long, his muscles slowly form, colours spread over his skin, the dimples stay.

She revels in him. She doesn’t love the attention like he does though, so he keeps her out of it. They spend fitful nights in her tiny apartment with the moonlight spilling in, the sounds of the city too loud below them and the warmth of his breathing soothing her.

She’s happy thinking of the dip in her mattress where he sleeps on.

There are always at least three of his shirts at her apartment with the smell of him radiating through every fibre of the cotton and she doesn’t know how they got there.

She thinks of the stillness of their life in the crevices. That’s where she exists with him; the crevices.

She thinks of how she can hear him most days at home, the sharp snap of gentle, precise fingers shutting a notebook filled with his tidy scrawl. The mellow scrape of teeth tracing across the expanse on her neck. Snorts and giggles when she breathes all over him when he says she smells like death after nights out.

There’s a boisterous cacophony echoing through her apartment, and a pair of Chelsea boots in her closet at all times.

“Never know when I might pop by.”

She doesn’t like goodbyes.

She’s drowning in him. Which only made it it all the more apparent when he’s not really there any more.

She searches for his gaze when she’s watching the boys on stage.

She searches for his warmth when they’re in bed together.

She searches for him in a room full of people.

She always finds him, but he doesn’t always find her.

She’s at a crossroad when she starts feeling this way. She tries to map him out with her fingertips but he slips into this quiet desperation and it’s hard for her to watch him fall in step with everything that has gone wrong.

The fivesome becomes a foursome.

And their life in the crevices is no longer the only crevice that exists.

He starts cracking; his heart, his head, his passion.

She gives him everything he says he needs; time, space, understanding.

She spends days, weeks, months on end fighting for him. But then the tour comes to an end again, and he’s standing on the stage, quiet and contemplative.

She climbs on to the platform in the dark, disassembled, and just stands with him until he’s ready. It’s the last for at least a year. The empty chairs and the abandoned bottles whisper in the night, almost as if taunting him.

He shrugs at her, an aloof smile tugging at the corners of his lips. His voice is hoarse in his throat, crackling like precious antique vinyl.

“It’s just a hiatus.”

She doesn’t like goodbyes.

She’s in South America. The band may be on a break but the tour she’s working on is moving through the States. After weeks of missed texts and voice notes back and forth, she calls and asks if they could meet.

He makes a note to his assistant and moves some things around enough to pencil her in.

She sees his face in the crowd of the restaurant weaved between the other faces.

It’s not familiar to her, seeing his face from afar like that in a restaurant he frequents somewhere in LA. She wants to pulls him closer, closer, closer.

But she doesn’t. She just sits across from him. Too far. A safe space that she hates and is thankful for at the same time.

His face screams of something quiet and sunken. Unusual.

When she thinks about his face, she thinks about it up close, no further than five feet away. The way his eyelashes catch the morning light and the way she counts the seconds in the stillness of the morning before they flutter right open.

He kisses her.

She kisses him.

She remembers so many things about him. They come to her like pinpricks of light spilling through the blindfold. He’s etched in the back of her brain, the memories awash on her skin, like a phantom itch in the hardest to reach corners of her back.

A carousel swarms past her eyes. She’s unconsciously memorised it all, like when you fall asleep on a textbook and you wake with the words stamped across your face.

She knows him.

She knows the hurricane hair and eyes that see through her.

She knows that stupid, messy, cocky grin.

And suddenly what she had to do became so much more difficult.

“What’s wrong?”

His eyes, the same eyes that stopped her in her tracks the day they met are finally present. More so than they had been in days, weeks, months. And they stop her in her tracks. Again.

Before the paralysis moves up from her feet to her throat, she says the words that weighed on her mind.

“I think we should break up.”

His gaze falls, the lukewarm concern in his eyes melt away.

And for a moment she wonders if he’s going to say anything.

The silence that followed was deafening.

A pregnant pause.

“I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t meet her eyes and the sweeping hurt is instantaneous.

It hits her squarely in the chest. She thinks that if she could cry her tears would smell like silent hurt. But she can’t cry even if she wanted to. She’d already thought up how it would all play out in her head a hundred times. It feels strange to fall into that nothing.

They order and they eat. They say nothing and the cutlery clangs loudly.

The silence is explosive.

He decides to call it an early night.

He gets up to leave, and kisses her on the cheek the way she remembers he used to when they first met.

“I love you.”

“But it doesn’t matter.”

She wishes it does. But it doesn’t.

“Goodbye.”

#one shot / drabble #break up fic #1dff #harry styles fanfiction

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

Pulled Apart At The Seams

It felt like black.

Like an abyss with no end and pain was all that she could register. Copious amounts of it.

Even if she could find the words, there was no poetic way to describing the pain.

She rolled off the couch and landed on the ground with a less than graceful thump. There was a throbbing at the back of her head and a crick in her neck.

She stared at the clock on her wall to see that it was a little past one in the afternoon. Realising that she must have passed out after one too many shots of Belvedere before noon, she blindly patted around for her phone. Locating it somewhere on the folds of her couch, she saw no pending messages and so she reached for the remnants of her breakfast, aka the vodka, precariously placed on the coffee table.

She unscrewed the lid and lifted the bottle to her lips once more.

Because if she was going to be absolutely catatonically fucked, she might as well inhabit every sense of the word. Because if she was going to hit rock bottom, she might as well do it pissed off her arse.

Because, well, because why the hell not.

It hurt. It hurt the first time, the tenth, and the fiftieth. And she had lost count of the number of texts she’d sent him. Because she continued sending him drunk gibberish texts long after it had become apparent that he had his mind made up.

The sting of thorough rejection whenever she thought about him permeated through her very being, and she felt as though the world had stopped spinning at the exact moment he said he couldn’t do it anymore. Or maybe it just started to spin again and after sitting in a solitary stillness that was her life, it felt absolutely impossible to keep up.

Her vision blurred and there was no better reason than to take another swig of vodka.

It had never been her choice of drink, but he had loved it and she wanted to hang on to the taste of his lips a little longer. Even if she was kissing a bottle and not a person.

There was suddenly a pounding on her door, and she ignored it until she heard the voice on the other end of it.

“Rian, I can hear you ignoring me in there.”

She groaned as he continued his assault on her front door.

Pulling herself upright slowly, feeling her head swim in slow motion as she did so, she managed to drag herself to the door to find one Harry Styles standing on her doorway with the abject look of horror painted across his face.

Rian eyes narrowed at him involuntarily.

She knew she didn’t look her best, but he was the one who came traipsing to her side of town and banged incessantly on her door looking all kinds of dapper in his signature look.

Before she could think of something to say in her alcohol fueled mind, he beat her to the chase, “Why did you email me my calendar for the week followed by what looked like like your head banging onto the keyboard repeatedly?”

She gritted her teeth against his heavy unmistakable drawl.

Everything was too loud, the ground felt like it was moving, and the contents of her stomach was coming close to emptying its very liquid contents onto the feet of her employer.

“I need a week off,” she announced, voice hoarse and barely above a whisper.

The amount of light streaming in through the door and the added noise that was Harry Styles was not sitting well with her state of fifty percent vodka, fifty percent girl.

Almost as if noticing the signs and piecing them together, he leaned in to study her with a raised eyebrows, “Have you been drinking?”

There was a pause as her brain registered his question.

“Yes,” she nodded.

“So you’re well enough to indulge in afternoon drinking, but you need time off?”

“To indulge in the said afternoon drinking,” Rian cocked her head, wondering why it was not making as much sense to him as it was for her.

His brows knotted together as if it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard, and they stood at her doorway for what felt like forever before he made the perfectly reasonable request to enter her home.

“Fine,” Rian rolled her eyes, stepping aside a bit wobbly, “But I don’t want to hear a word about how the place is a mess.”

Harry scoffed, and she almost felt insulted if it weren’t for the words that came out of his mouth next, dripping with sarcasm, “And how would the place look if it were clean?”

She shut the door behind him and ignored the comment.

“What’s going on?”

Harry picked up the bottle of vodka whilst eyeing its contents or rather its lack thereof precariously. She snatched the bottle from him with such force she felt like she needed to lie down all over again.

“Jack broke up with me,” she sighed, bottle in hand, bum landing not so delicately on her couch where Harry eventually joined her. It felt all kinds of inappropriate to have her boss in her home whilst she was practically radiating alcohol from her pores, but she dismissed the thought quickly.

She hadn’t taken a day off in over fourteen months, and frankly, she felt entitled to as much.

And if he was going to invite himself into her home because of the shock that accompanied her asking for a few days off, it was completely his prerogative.

He swiped the bottle from her hand with ease and took an easy swig of the clear contents, “That married prick you’ve been seeing?”

“Oh I wasn’t aware that you had a monopoly on questionable decision making,” she glared at him stonily as he passed the bottle back.

Rationality and patience aren’t exactly a common strong trait when one had copious amounts of vodka metastasising through their veins.

Plus she was still reeling from the embarrassment over the circumstances of him, her boss, finding out about her dirty little affair. It wasn’t a proud moment, the past two years of her life has been dedicated to not so proud moments, but she was good at keeping Harry’s life in order and calling him in the middle of the night because his was the only number she memorised was probably the lowest rung in her ladder of bad decisions.

“Look, blokes and brain don’t always go hand in hand – we think with an organ, but one that’s a little more south,” he shrugged.

He’d always been consistently kind. And he had never really made her feel that she was anything less than a person; there were no coffee runs or laundry runs. Although there were the more occasional morning calls and house sitting she had to do.

But this was decidedly neither one of those occasions.

“Why are you here again?” Rian asked, breaking through her own reverie.

Another shrug.

“If you’re going to be depressing, might as well do it with some company.”

It was Rian’s turn to frown. Even in her half drunk state she knew his calendar for the week and he most certainly did not have time to waste on her, “You have a three pm with Jeff followed by a dinner reservation at Nobu.”

“Consider it cleared, my assistant is in dire need of some cheering up,” he grinned, cheeky and expectant. Almost as though he was sure he was succeeding in tearing down her defenses and what he liked to call her ‘serious outer shell’.

Over the tenure of their work relationship, he had never failed to attempt to loosen her up.

So she was a little obsessive compulsive about schedules and keeping things in order, but at least the one of them need to ensure that he doesn’t get fired and by proxy have them both out of a job.

And after dropping out from art school, she couldn’t exactly afford to be out of a job.

“Harry, you don’t have to do this,” she started saying with a sigh, contemplating how long it’d take for him to leave and leave her in her misery to finish the bottle alone.

He cocked his head, an easy smile on his lips and his loose curls dangling to one side, “Of course I do.”

It took her two years, but it was then that Rian learned of the real reason behind Harry’s social calendar, of which she is intimately involved with.

She’d always chalked it up to a lifestyle. Because he was a rockstar who couldn’t say no. Because he was too kind for his own good. She always knew on some level that it he was not shallow or selfish or any of the long list of tropes the media made him out to be.

But after two years, she finally realised that it was because he was lonely.

And he could tell that she was too.

ii.

It felt like blue.

Rian was sitting on the passenger seat of a retro Benz convertible with the top down and the sky looked like a limitless ocean of blue.

Blue that she was drowning in. Blue that she wanted to drown herself in and never come up for air, ever. Her insides boiled over with hurt and she wanted to just fall endlessly into the embrace of the cloudy hue.

It had been Jack’s favourite colour although he would never have admitted it out loud.

“Men don't have favourite colours,” he used to say.

But blue was a good look on him and he knew it.

Navy suits, blue ties, even his eyes were a light and airy baby blue. Like the crisp cloudless skies that LA would often have.

Funny how things could change so drastically.

All she could feel in his absence was the colour of healing bruises. The colour of lips when you’ve stayed in the pool for too long, teeth chattering in the cold that it has inflicted. It mirrored her jumbled emotions perfectly as Harry whizzed them through traffic in a mindless spontaneous drive.

She’s barely anchored to the present as she looked up to the sky in all its brilliant glory. And for a moment she thought that if she was blue, then Harry had to be gold.

He was Hollywood’s golden boy after all.

She wanted to touch his radiant surface and watch his rays ripple between her fingertips. She wanted to revel in his light. She couldn’t remember the time where her life felt like gold, a warm swirl of butterscotch; all sunshine and daisies.

There’s a warmth slowly spreading underneath her skin that had nothing to do with the weather or the alcohol, and she felt restless all of a sudden. But then she catches sight of the Japanese restaurant that she and Jack had dinner at and the words tumble out of her mouth carelessly.

“We had our first official date there.”

There was a pathetic sadness in her voice. A sort of longing. A longing for something that wasn’t even hers to begin with.

She could have laughed. Because how do you lose something that wasn’t even yours to begin with.

It’s only been about sixteen hours. But she already missed the way her phone would light up with his name. She already missed his voice, and his smile, and their memories.

But he never promised her anything.

And he was never really hers to begin with.

She hated herself for it.

“D’you want me to loop round and drive by the Affleck-Garner family home?”

His question throws her off and it took a moment before her brain fired the synapses to her mouth to catch up.

“What?”

Harry laughed, hair loose and flopping around in the wind as they pull to a stop at an intersection, “I said, ‘If you want to do the Hollywood break up tour, I could loop around and drive by he Affleck-Garner home.”

“Oh hah hah,” she laughed dryly, barely containing her enthusiasm and forced merriment.

Despite his best efforts, Rian had remained unswayed. Like a rock against the current.

“How is it that you’re resisting my wily charms, Ms Johnson?”

Harry seemed genuinely curious. As though it was something that been playing on his mind for some time, but had never had the courage to ask. Which was crazy because anyone who spent any amount of time within close proximity of Harry would be able to tell you that he is absolutely without shame.

The fact that she had walked in on him stark fucking naked more than once was enough proof of that.

“Having to bring breakfast for hungover mornings and occasionally take out the thrash for someone can do that to you,” she quipped, finding it infuriating that her drunk mind was finding it inescapably hard to let her mind, suddenly reliving the times where her gaze had landed on his tattooed torso.

Where her eyes, completely by accident, landed on the hard ridges of muscles rippled over his chest and stomach, the sharply cut hipbones, and not to mention the region a little lower from there.

He threw her a lopsided smile, staring fixedly at her, whilst his hands moved to throw the blowsy look he previously had on into a clumsily packed man bun.

She could remember a time where she wanted to touch his hair. Feel the soft dark curls against her fingertips. Lean into the crook of his neck and take in his scent.

She remembered wanting to know him the first time she saw him on the telly, watching him sing on stage, a teen chasing his dream. She remembered wanting to hold him when he and the boys got eliminated. She remembered feeling elated when his band was signed anyway. She remembered going out and buying that first album and the second and the third and listening to them all day.

She remembered wanting him for the longest time. Wanting to be him.

Just a teen chasing a dream.

But then Jack happened.

Her face contorted as though she had smelt something awful.

They were driving again and she could feel the onslaught of the tidal waves coming. Before she could even blink to stop the tears, Harry’s voice was already filling the silence that had taken hold, apparently having decided that any and all silence needed to be extinguished.

“Alright, new rule, every time you start whining about he-who-shall-not-be-named, I buy you something,” he declared, suddenly making a sharp turn.

She rolled her eyes with a scoff before her befuddled mind worked out that he was serious.

“I was not whining,” she protested.

He raised his eyebrow at her direction, indignant towards her protests.

“At this point I know that his pick of poison is vodka, that he’s a radio sports announcer, that his favourite colour is blue, and frankly speaking knowing this much about that prick is pissing me the hell off,” he said with a huff, hands gripping tight on the steering wheel that his knuckles writhed white.

She is too utterly stunned to say anything.

Of the two years that she’s known and worked for him, she’d learned that he was never the most composed (that was Liam) nor the most attentive (that was Niall).

But he was smart, and determined, and he always had a way with words. And at that moment, her fingertips tingled and she wanted to reach out and curl her arms around his frame. She riveted her gaze elsewhere instead, focusing her attention onto the shops they were whizzing by.

“I’m instilling positive reinforcement, everytime you so much as say his name, I will charge my card to something absolutely ostentatious.”

“That sounds like negative reinforcement,” she blinked at his sudden declaration, her head still swimming with a blooming anger she doesn’t quite understand and an odd serenity that Harry’s physical presence was bringing to her.

His eyes twinkled at her statement, ignoring it completely, “First stop, Burberry.”

“Harry, I can’t—”

“Nope, I’ve decided,” he announced pointedly, “Dressed like you shop at Forever Alone and whining about your ex arse of a boyfriend is just not going to cut it.”

She was going to argue, because a loose t shirt and distressed denim was her normal get up for non work days anyway. But then she realised that she had only thrown on the jeans because he had asked her too and was about to leave the house in sweatpants before he stopped her, and conceded to his point.

“Fine, just anywhere but Burberry,” she pouted, defeated, with her arms crossed and sinking further back into the seat, anger giving way to contempt and misery.

He raised a quizzical eyebrow her way, “Why not?”

“Because Addison shops at Burberry.”

“Who’s Addison?”

“Jack’s w— No!” Rian practically screeched the latter part of that sentence, vehemently protesting the look of glee on his face.

“Guess you’re getting a Burberry trench coat,” he said, a smug smile painted on his lips.

“Harry—”

“Think of it as a bonus,” he waved his hand at her dismissively.

“It’s June,” stated as a matter-of-factly with a small chuckle, the bitter irritation she felt was leveling out into a calmer sort of reflection; something a lot more manageable.

“A mid-year post break-up bonus then.”

Rian sighed, eyes fluttering shut in exhaustion already.

It was going to be a long evening, she could tell, as Harry revved up the pace of the car, maintaining its speed down to the infamous shopping district in LA.

iii.

It felt like purple.

Like a lilac sky bleeding into life at the wee hours of the morning. Like an explosion of citrus layered grapefruit. More specifically, it was a whiff of L’homme Ultime; woodsy with a touch of intense.

And just like that she was a pool of tears and memories, in her underwear, on the dressing room floor at Saint Laurent’s on Rodeo.

Harry had insisted that he was going to buy her a motorcycle jacket worthy of his personal assistant, which of course translated to stopping by the French fashion house to look at leather jackets costing more than her art school loan. Stepping into expensive shopping hotspots in LA had not been exclusively outside her range as a personal assistant.

And she’s used to seeing the sales girls fawn over him but it was the first time she was on the buying end of things instead of just being a bystander.

He’s anything but bored sighs and obligatory nodding as boys normally are when shopping. He’s easy laughs and childish giggles and filled to the brim with suggestions of what to try and where to go and she could feel his jovial mood beginning to have its effect on her.

Or maybe it was just the trail of champagne that followed them around.

But she had been ushered into a posh dressing room before she could so much as take a sip and Harry started jabbering away outside the changing room when she had just shucked off her jeans and caught a whiff of it of the scent.

Completely out of nowhere.

The sweet familiarity of the fragrance she had gifted him last Christmas completely ripped the rug out from under her. And she’s winded. She can hardly breathe as she slid down to the floor, uncertain if it was a panic attack or just an emotional meltdown.

She covered her hands over her mouth, breathing in and out as the tears welled up and spilled over onto her cheek.

There was a silent rapping on the dressing room door suddenly and she tried to ignore it, choking back the tears.

She stared at her reflection and could have laughed if her throat could remember how to. Her loosely tied hair was a nuclear explosion of a jet black mess that made Hiroshima look like a joke and her eyeliner left over from the night prior was a smudged mess.

She wanted to say something, but she couldn’t. Words swirled in her head, floating by too quick for her to catch any of it.

“Again, I can hear you ignoring me in there, Ri.”

She knew better than to ignore Harry Styles some more, and so Rian reached to unlock the door without leaving her spot on the ground. He poked his head into the room tentatively, eyes bright and curious as they swept around the mirrored space.

“No, but you were doing so well,” Harry proclaimed when his sight landed on her, evidently flustered at the crying girl in the dressing room.

He stepped in and twisted the lock on the door before returning his attention to her, one heavy brow slanted with disapproval. He slid himself to the ground, settling on a spot next to her and they sat that way, in silence.

“I don’t get it,” he announced, shaking his head, “You’re smart, and beautiful, and driven, and he’s just some married idiot.”

He’s looking at her like under his eyes he’s seeing everything good about her and she struggled not to flush under his penetrating gaze. As though he knew that the pain she felt wasn’t just any deep radiating sorrow. That it was beyond mere rejection, beyond a silly infatuation with someone that wasn’t even hers to begin with. That it was an echo how how she saw herself, how she saw the world.

And he couldn’t for the life of him understand that.

It was something that was so dangerous about Harry. She’s not sure if it’s the way that he could thaw out a numb heart like hers or the way he was so effortless about it.

And right then, for the first time, she admitted it out loud, “I went after him.”

The silence that followed her statement was deafening, his eyes furrowed in an unspoken confusion written across his brow. “He used to babysit me,” she explained inadequately.

“I was ten and he was sixteen, and he used to come by every evening because my parents worked late. And every night I’d show him watercolour paintings I’d done and he’d put on one of those sports announcer voices, ‘Such form! Beautiful technique! Splendid use of colouring! Look at how that mahogany purple blends into a deep royal shade of magenta, now that’s a risk that’s paid off!’” Rian chuckled at that last bit, remembering how his voice had made her feel like home. How his enthusiasm had been the one constant encouragement to pursue art.

“When I got into art school despite my parent’s adamant objections, I gave him a call and we realised that we were both in LA,” she shrugged, the words tumbling out of her mouth without so much of a thought.

It was innocuous, at first. But that quickly changed, morphing into drinks at dive bars and late night rendezvous. She sighed at the memory, dropping her eyes, unable to meet Harry’s gaze as she finally admitted to herself more than anything, that she was in a mess of her own making.

“I was alone in a strange town, and he was already a married man, but he wasn’t some fifty-year-old skeeze who took advantage of me; I pursued him, I went after him even though I knew that things like that only ever end one way.”

There was a pregnant pause. But then Harry sliced through the silence with an easy charm, “Half naked on the dressing room floor at Saint Laurent?”

A choked laugh escaped from her lips and suddenly she was very aware of how exposed she was. In every sense of the word.

It was all such a mess.

As a child who painted pretty pastels, she’d never thought in a thousand years that she’d end up nearly a homewrecker at the age of twenty two and slaving it out as a personal assistant to one fourth of the biggest pop stars in Hollywood to pay her student loans for a degree she never completed.

But he was telling her about how you’ll wake up one day and you won’t feel as sick and Rian’s struck, not for the first time, by how beautiful the specimen in front of her was.

She remembered watching him years ago on the telly and how haggard and jaded he looked right then in front of her in comparison. But even with the age and the complexities of Hollywood weighing on him, it wasn’t enough to make him ugly.

And she was pretty sure she was living someone’s teenage dream out there, but at that precise moment, she just felt lost; drowning in an ocean of lilac she never thought she’d end up in.

Not quite blue but not really red either.

Just a painful in between.

And it suddenly occurred to her that it may have been why she held onto Jack for so much longer than she should have. He represented so much of what could have been. But now he was just an ex. Not an ex-boyfriend, or an ex-lover even, because all they really were were secrets and empty promises, but an ex-something.

An ex-maybe.

Like her art career.

“You’ll be alright,” Harry announced in a low drawl, certainty seeping through his voice as though reading her thoughts, “Time will pass, and you won’t cry when you get a whiff of their perfume, and you won’t want to melt into the ground when someone mentions their name, and eventually you will put yourself together again.”

She wasn't quite sure what to say to that so she stayed quiet, as she always does; simple and quiet.

And they stayed like that for a while, her listening to him on the dressing room floor surrounded by articles of clothing she would never have an occasion to wear.

They talk and they laugh and her eyes dry and suddenly everything didn’t seem that bad.

He knew more about her than she thought he would; the fact that she’s was an art school dropout, the fact that she’s not in contact with her parents who cut her off, and the fact that she walked into an interview as a PA completely by accident.

She’s surprised and somewhat pleased for some reason, so before she could stop herself she told him about what all her friends from school once said about what they’d like to do with him and he laughed at that.

A full and hearty rumble with his head thrown back.

“You’ll be fine, Ri, I’m going to make sure of it.”

“By buying me clothes worth more than my salary?” She cocked her eyebrow, feeling a certain lethargy sweeping over her overshare session.

“Exactly,” he smirked as he got to his feet. He reached for a dress that she’s sure costs more than her beat up second hand Toyota, and she protested it meekly. But her words held no real weight to it, and he knew it.

Rian threw the dress on without much difficulty, but she feels the stretch of the fabric anyway as she picked at her appearance in front of the mirror. She had a lithe physique, sure, but it was mostly from a lack of workout as opposed to a solid diet of yoga and kale like the other skinny girls in town.

"You look good enough to dance,” Harry’s voice cut through her thoughts.

His statement caught her so off-guard that she stumbled back a couple of steps as she turned around to face him.

“What? No. No. No!”

“It relieves stress,” he said in a singsong tone, as if that was a good enough reason to dance in the, in her opinion, far too big dressing room.

He took a step toward her and held out his hand. She does consider taking it. But she doesn’t.

"Harry— No!”

Her eyes widened and she shook her head slightly for emphasis.

"No?" He asked, raising an eyebrow her way.

"No."

He reached out his limbs and took her hands in his instead of just offering it, and he began to sway them both to some imaginary music only he could hear.

She bit down on her lip, annoyed that the corners were already tugging upwards. And she smiled because she can’t help herself, "You know, you might need to re evaluate what a ‘no’ means.”

Harry started to sing to the odd tune they’re dancing to and she laughed harder than she has over the past day and the half. She’s out of breath around him and she realised that his particular brand of addiction can be tricky.

Despite her inner insistence to not have a good time, she felt giddy from the alcohol and bad decisions, and a small curiosity was impatiently bubbling up from within her. Her mind ran over the various events of the day, expression remaining relatively focused despite the wide array of emotions looming over her.

He was good at being the entertainment, that much was clear, from years of practice no doubt. But he doesn’t seem to bore of her, like she expected he would.

The fuzzy parts of her mind drew comparisons to the Harry in the press versus the Harry who cleared his schedule to cheer his assistant up and her half drunk mind decided that happy Harry was her favourite aesthetic.

She grinned to herself and he noticed the shit eating grin on her face. His gaze searched hers with an unnerving thoroughness and Rian almost shifted her glance as they continued to clumsily faux waltz.

Almost.

Because she couldn’t.

His dark green irises were tracing her lips, as though in full concentration, taking in their every curve. Harry was observing her as shamelessly as she was observing him, with an underlying sense of attraction in his raffish stare.

iv.

It felt like red.

Pure unadulterated red in all its passion dripping glory. Like a bonfire spitting out fiery red gold sparks.

Her nerves felt positively on fire. Her skin electrified at his touch. Her mind racing.

She had never wanted anything more in her entire life.

They’d stopped dancing, standing face to face and completely stationary for a still moment.

The air was thick with a sweltering unnamed tension. And suddenly his hand was skimming down the length of her waist, dropping swiftly along the curve, coasting into a slow, delicious freefall.

Her eyes flutter shut in the pure elation in his touch and her pulse skyrocketed when she reopened them to his expression. His hazy, heavy-lidded gaze.

And at that moment, Rian suddenly found that she could not breathe.

And it had nothing to do with the tight fabric wrapped around her body.

She swore she could feel electricity pulses shooting up and down her spine, further weakening her resolve.

A split, millisecond passed and that’s when it happened. His mouth was quickly on hers, all hot and demanding and pure bliss.

Time stood still as her mind short-circuited itself.

His legs moved them gracefully backwards until her back hits a solid surface, lips still connected. Her knees buck in the slightest and her hands drop to her sides, grasping at the cool surface of the mirror pressed against her back as if it were the only support she’s ever known.

His mouth possessive over hers, silently urgent and long overdue.

“Harry, wait,” she all but chuckled the words against him, voice reduced to a airy growl in the dizzying spur of the moment lust.

He dragged his teeth against her bottom lips tantalizingly and she had never felt more at risk of her eyes rolling into the back of her head in pure pleasure.

“You know, two years and I don't think I’ve ever heard you say that word,” he shot back in a low, husky drawl, lips curling at the corners as he brought them up the line of her jaw.

And it was true; in all her organisation and deadlines and schedules, she never needed a moment’s breather. Things were never too out of hand or too hectic. But then again, she had never been pinned between her employer and a mirror in a posh Rodeo Drive store before.

Her arms moved completely on their own and wrapped itself aggressive around his neck, drawing his lips back to hers.

His mouth slanted over hers and she felt, rather than heard herself, moan into his mouth

Harry’s hands were immediately on her hip, fingers dexterously pulling the fabric upwards as he let his fingers glide over a slither of her silky exposed skin. He dragged his lips away from hers and moved them across the line of her jaw, down her neck, and she relinquished whatever small vestige of control she had, craning her head to the side to allow him better access.

Her hands roamed downwards and deftly undoes it at a speed she'll be embarrassed about later.

Her knees grew weaker and weaker and she clung to him for support as his fingers clumsily tried to hike the dress up further and off. With frustrated growl, she heard a pronounced rip and knew that the seams had come undone. Not unlike her state of mind.

“Harry!” She hissed at the sudden maneuver, shocked.

He didn't even attempt to look sorry, merely muttered against the expanse of skin on her neck.

“Well, that’s unfortunate.”

The drawl was warm, teasing, and he reinforced it by giving her earlobe a playful nip. His lips slowly brushing up her neck, tongue flickering out every so often and eliciting many a hitched breath from her already overworked lungs.

“I can’t afford that dress, you know,” she announced in a stubborn concession, though given the breathy, hungry way it came out, it was clear to anyone who could hear them that it was not a huge concern of hers.

And neither was it his.

“Buy you the dress,” he murmured against her skin.

“Buy you anything in the shop you want."

Rian tried her best to be mad about the the dress that he’d just ruined, a dress she quite liked but was never going to have a chance to wear. But she can’t seem to make herself feel anything that wasn’t unabated lust when his lips was on her skin the way it was and his body flush against hers.

In a swift movement, he swivelled her around and they were both facing the mirror.

She watched as his hands move down slowly, his pupils dilated and their breaths heavy and in sync. Her eyes slid close as his fingers wormed their way into her cotton underpants before settling themselves against her sensitive bundle of nerves.

Harry circled a finger around her clit and she gasped audibly, aware of their current predicament, grounding against his hand, moaning desperately. She could feel his breathing grow more ragged against his neck and her hands clung to his neck for support.

Harry was whispering her name into her ear in a low sultry voice and she knew she was a goner.

Completely lost.

Any inhibitions she could have dreamt of having flown out the window.

His hands suddenly moved upwards and Rian groaned at the sudden lost of contact, eyes flying open to be confronted with her reflection with Harry behind her, a small smirk on his lips as his hands moved up to paw at her chest, releasing them from the fabric that was her bra.

She looked completely undone in her reflection, dress hiked up to her hips and cleavage spilling out from above the neckline of the dress.

His lips nipped and licked on her neck once more, and her hands flew forward, barely supporting herself against the mirror with her knees wobbly.

Harry’s fingers moved back to their frictional spot from before, pushing the flimsy cotton fabric of her underwear aside, parting her and trailing his fingers through her wet folds. His hands worked sensational circles around her clit while his other hand rested on the mirror next to hers.

His dark eyes were boring holes into hers from their reflection and arched her back against him, eyes hungry as he pushed a finger teasingly into her.

Removing one hand from the mirror, she grasped blindly behind her, finding and massaging the bulge in his boxers as she felt her wetness clutching at his fingertips.

His mouth dropped down to nip over her collarbones, coaxing an involuntary mewling sound from her lips.

“Fuck,” she gasped.

He slowly pushed another finger in, pumping in and out, deeper and deeper until his two fingers are deliciously buried knuckle deep.

“Harry, please,” she groaned, her voice a low gravelly whisper as her hand surrendered his pleasure, planting them both against the mirror to keep herself upright and hips wiggling against his diligent fingers.

“I’ll get you there, don’t worry,” he purred into her ear.

She panted out breaths in an attempt to maintain some sort of control but he was everywhere. His lips on her neck and his fingers’ against her entrance, but she still wanted more.

Needed more. And just as she was about to combust, her cheeks aflame and her eyes dilated, she felt the pressure of him pushing impossibly deep inside of her beautifully slowly.

She arched her back impossibly further and raised her heels, balancing on her toes, desperate for more. Feeling his hand move to the sides of her hips, he moved out a little way experimentally and thrusted back in.

“Shit.”

Rian silently cursed the thin walls in her head and rocked her hips against his wantonly, feeling their bodies flush up against one another.

It wasn’t long until their bodies were slapping against one another, too loudly and too recklessly, pushed up on the far too thin dressing room walls. But she was too far gone to care, looping her arm backwards around his neck and leaning onto his shoulder for support.

Finding a rhythm that suited them both and letting his pace build slowly, Harry slid in and out of her to a delirious beat, pressing her hard against the wall while her breath caught in her throat.

He was moving in a slow, smouldering rhythm and Rian wasn’t quite sure how she was still standing as her hands moved completely of their own accord to paw at his half-buttoned silk Gucci something or other shirt.

Harry hoisted her bum further up with ease, and none-too-gently continued their lower body assault on one another.

He was whispering sweet nothings into her ear, his voice strained and breathless and quiet.

It sounded too distant for her to centre her attention around as a bubbling heat rose from her core, a combination of Harry and the underwear he opted not to peel off.

Her neck tensed at the additional contact that the fabric provided, incessantly rubbing her clit as he drove her to her edge. Rian bit down on her red lip and bruised lips, and her eyelashes fluttered involuntarily. She was on the precipice of an orgasm and it was hard to focus on anything but the blinding sensation of his sweet friction.

“Stay with me,” he demanded with a groan, so low and guttural it was practically a growl.

She struggled to keep her eyes open and she forced herself to trail his gaze in the mirror, landing on her own face. One that she barely recognised. Bathed in the intense gratification as his hips took her, hard and deep and steady.

“Fuck,” she gasped, barely holding on.

He clamped a hand over her mouth when he moved harder, his skin slapping against the back of her thighs as the other hand gripped the side of her waist tightly, moving her to his rhythm. Rian felt like she was on the brink of passing out, her stomach twisting and her muscles shuddering with a wave of pleasure.

Heat blasted through her body at an alarming speed.

And then in a moment that felt like a second and forever at the same time, neither of them could even think.

It felt like… a swirling technicolour.

Everything blended together and the dripping palette whirled at the back of her mind so violently she could no longer distinguish where one began and the other ended.

Everything was eerily calm. And quiet. Like the eye of a hurricane.

For a moment, everything stopped; the thumping beat, the rush of blood to her head, the ache in the hollow cavity that was her chest. She couldn’t feel any of it anymore, or think, and hell, she wasn’t even sure if she was breathing.

Every colour merged and melted together into his green eyes and jet black hair and every colour in between.

Her eyes opened gently and seeing his reflection behind her is better than seeing him for the first time in person.

Rian shuddered against the wall and he collapsed against her.

It was exactly what she needed; to not think, to forget even if it was only temporary.

As her dazed mind slowly came back to their senses, she wondered how no one has politely disturbed their little tryst quite yet.

But then again, the walls of Yves Saint Laurent have probably seen and heard a lot worse.

And they kept their skin to skin contact for a while, holding onto the moment that each is so terrified will disappear if either one of them let go. She doesn't know what she should say, or if she should say anything at all, and Harry can't seem to stop touching her.

His hands skimmed over her body, a ghost over her skin as though he’s afraid that if he removed they physical contact, she would disappear.

When he finally spoke, an apology spilled from his lips, one that she didn’t quite anticipate.

“I’m sorry,” he stuttered, “I shouldn’t have—”

“Hey, I seduced a married man and then proceeded to get into my boss’ car drunk off my ass,” she started saying, incoherently babbling almost, letting the electrified atmosphere overcome her deliriously sore body.

Her mind is hazy from the exertion and probably the vodka that is still making its way through her system but she felt that it was both more than enough of a just cause to absolve him of whatever responsibility he thought he had.

She chuckled to herself, making light of the situation, and told him exactly that.

Because it didn’t have to be more than what it was.

But Harry merely kept quiet, eyes steadily trained on hers, flickering with something too brief for her to decipher, leaving behind nothing more than the same dark emerald stare.

He looked totally inscrutable, brow lowered into one of the deepest frowns she had ever seen on him. It was a strange frown, not quite angry, not quite confused, not quite brooding. It was as though he had his guard up.

It was a look that didn’t suit him, she decided.

But then out of nowhere, his lips were on hers again, and she felt herself melting against him, her hands sliding up and meeting around his neck.

Rian didn’t understand what they were, and she probably never would, but in that moment, it really didn’t matter. All that mattered, cheesy though it may be, was that his touch made her heart flutter in ways she never expected to feel again and her skin boiled at his touch.

He nipped at her lower lip, parting her mouth with his and she felt her brain cells die.

The kiss lasted no time at all and when it ended, Harry rested his forehead on hers, their chests heaving in unison.

It comes out as barely a whisper, but the words that came out of his mouth would be ingrained into her mind for the rest of eternity.

"You’re not one of those girls to me."

#1dff #fic: pulled apart at the seams #one shot / request #dressing room smut #smut #for ally #basically

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

Fists Full of Flowers // Your Eyes Will Lead Me Straight Back Home

the first time he really wants to kiss her, she’s wearing his jumper.

she’s wearing one of his jumpers that he knows she really likes, and he knows she nicked it off him without even washing it. he knows right then that he is fucked.

completely and utterly fucked.

he doesn’t know when or how exactly, but seeing her in his jumper, he knew that he’s hers and she’s his, at least, more or less anyway, and it’s fine. it’s something that they didn’t talk about. it’s something that they sort of just accepted as the ways things are and not at all something he might have possibly hallucinated.

he’s dropping off their usual breakfast loaf at her house and she opens the door in his jumper.

her cropped hair was in disarray, and all he wants to do is to let the loaf fall and kiss her, not unlike the first day that they met when he was ten-years-old and already doing deliveries for his mother.

but then he reminds himself that he hasn’t so much as held her hand in the six years that they’ve known each other so he thinks it might be an overkill if he just grabs her and snogs her senseless at the doorway while somewhere next door, alice would’ve looked on all smug and knowing with a shit-eating grin on her face.

so when she tells him to join them for breakfast, he does. and although he wants to kiss her all morning whilst he charms her grandparents over bread and butter, he doesn’t.

because it was enough to just sit next to her, talking over toast and tea.

it felt like home. and it was enough.

ii.

it’s two years later and they haven’t even gotten their a-level results yet.

he’d impulsively put together a portfolio and applied for an artist visa to germany because he heard some teachers talking about it being a viable option for those who didn’t think that university is for them.

and when the letter arrives he thinks himself half to death because he wants to go, he wants to so badly but he just doesn’t want to leave. because university is expensive but he doesn’t want to be well into his twenties delivering bread for his mum.

it’s okay, she’s saying, it’ll be okay, look at me, you’ll be fine.

and oh god oh god oh god he is.

he is.

he’s looking at her, and she’s incandescent. even with shadows cast on her face, her skin is illuminated with the streetlights from the outside and he wants to kiss her so bad, pour his heart out to her with a violent sweeping kiss.

but with the visa settled and years of odd jobs stacked up to save up for university, he knows he’ll be leaving soon. and it shouldn’t have mattered except it did. he’ll be off trying to get an internship, a job, anything; and he hated to think about what she was going to think if he kissed her now.

so instead he asks her to come with him to germany, holding on to the hope that she’d say yes so tightly that he was sure he would burst. because she was like the sun and he’s just the moon reflecting back her luminescence.

she laughs and shakes her head.

she says she can’t.

he pleads for her to just be with him and he regrets it instantly. there is a look on her face he can’t quite decipher.

thoughts of kissing her melt away.

they ended before they began.

iii.

when she didn’t show at the train station, he knew that there wasn’t anything left to say.

but he comes home for jomu’s funeral.

barely out of the madness of the commute, he sees her from across the room, dressed in black with the eye bags to match. but that’s not the first thing he notices. the first thing he realises is that she looks so different from the girl he thought he knew.

the girl that he could make laugh so hard that the sound of her voice ringing was the only thing that he’d been able to hear was no longer there.

she looks so fragile and tired and broken that he wants nothing more than to reach out and hold her in his arms. he wants to kiss her fatigue away and tell her it’ll be alright the same way she assured him it’ll all be alright all those years ago.

for months he’d been bouncing between cities, writing postcards to her that he never sent. and then his mum calls and tells her that jomu slipped in the shower and it was too late for anyone to do anything when they found her, and he marches right on to the airport to catch a flight home like a man on a mission.

but then he sees liam making his way across the room full of people and she falls into his arms easily.

the urge to swallow her pain whole gives way to a growing bubbling anger that he thought he had forgotten. the sweeping jealousy envelopes him and he can’t think straight.

he’s always known that liam had a thing for her. he’d long suspected that liam poised himself for the right moment from the start; been on the fringe of their relationship, waiting, biding his time. and not two weeks after he makes his way across borders and lands himself an internship with an art house in berlin, he knows that liam gets his wish because he sounded so happy, giddy almost, when harry calls him.

and when he checks his phone he sees that alice had posted a picture of them at someone’s birthday party and liam’s hand is gripped around her waist so tight for the shot, he knows he’s left marks on her skin more than once.

he wants to pry her from liam’s arms, but she’s weeping and his chest aches and he’s not sure why anymore.

he wants to go over and say he’s sorry, that he understands now why she couldn’t come with him. that he knows now how selfish that had been. but he doesn’t. he can’t. not when she’s in another’s arms. because that’s all that she is now, a crying girl in someone else’s arms and he didn’t know what to do.

he doesn’t know if the anguish he feels is from regret, or self-loathing. because she’s fine without him.

so he leaves again.

and he never tells anyone that he ever came.

iv.

it’s way past midnight when he walks around the town he grew up in.

for the first time since he left, he manages to make it home for christmas and he wants to soak up as much as he can before he has to leave again. there’s an intrinsic calm that washes over him. a sort of contentedness that he hasn’t found anywhere else.

photography has taken him far and wide; he’s been to paris and milan, siem reap and bali. but it all leaves him empty. hollow. he leaves and there are watercolour stains on his mind that fade to black if he stays still for too long.

people came and went. things change all the time. things get better then they get worse. he used to think that he was invincible. in control. but now, he didn't even know what he was doing most of the time.

he remembers his mum telling him that no one can get by on their own. that everyone needs a little help at the end of the day.

he stares into the slick dark roads and he barely sees the silhouette of her face through a frosted window of the flower shop. his feet stop moving entirely of their own accord.

she doesn’t see him because it’s late and she’s probably tired, but there is a look of concentration on her face as she’s poring over a stack of paper. she reaches behind the counter instinctively, her hand returning with a bottle and a glass capped over it.

her gaze shifts onto the bottle for a moment before deciding the conduit is not necessary.

she takes a swig straight from the bottle and he could have sworn that there were tear tracks down her face when the bottle is placed next to the papers.

he wonders what pretend ghosts she fights now. what sights, and smells, and sounds haunt her, erupting from the deepest shelves of her mind.

her face crosses his mind often, her eyes, her hair, her lips; all the parts of her that was never really his. all the parts of her that he never got to claim. the sighs, and the smiles, and the alcohol laced kisses that he never got to taste.

under the stars embedded in the deep velvet skies, he wonders if it was possible to lose someone who was never his to begin with. he fell in love with her mind and soul without so much as laying a finger on her body, and it was gut-wrenching to watch the world take the girl he knew and reduce her to a shell of a person she once was.

she returns her attention to the papers scattered before her and he could have sworn that there were indeed tear tracks down her face.

he wonders if it’s poetic or ironic that the one who lights a fire in you ends up not being the one you end up with. he stands there minutes too long and before he knows it, the lights go out, and he can no longer see her silhouette in the little half shop.

he doesn’t know what he expected really.

he walks away, defeated and disappointed.

she’s leaving and he’s arriving.

she had her shades on because spring has arrived and there’s actually a reason to wear sunglasses and she doesn’t see him.

his feet stay rooted as hers carries her gracefully towards the hunk of metal that she calls a car.

he lets himself pretend, if only for a moment that he’s looking at the same girl he spent the majority of his teenage years being hopelessly in love with. he lets himself pretend that he doesn’t know that she drinks far too much whiskey and smokes far too many cigarettes now.

and he imagines himself walking right up to her before gracefully tipping her over like they do in the black and white pictures he’s seen to kiss the shit out of her.

but she slams the boot shut quickly, almost as if she knows he’s there lurking behind the trees like some kind of stalker, and before he knows it, she’s driving off in the opposite direction.

he finds himself wanting to know her again.

he knows they’re not going to just get back to coffee and bagel ‘dates’ by the side of the road. he’s well aware that even if they started anew, there’d be no staying over and sharing the bed because the couch would give you stiff neck.

it would be more like awkward lingering glances from across the room and hearts skipping a beat at goodbye cheek kisses.

but he wants to get back to that middle ground between friendship and something more. he wants to know if she still takes her coffee black but sweet. if she still sketches. if her scrabble skills have gotten better. if she still wears black satin slips with floral doc martens in the summer.

he watches as the girl he once knew sped off, becoming smaller and smaller until it’s no more than a dot in the distance.

vi.

he’s almost a year home now and he still feels it. feels it all play in fast forward every time he sees her until it stops at the present, with her there, in front of him.

he still hangs on to every word that drops from her lips, has soft sweet dreams about falling asleep next to her, kissing her neck. sometimes he has to remind himself to breathe when the staggering weight of it all collapses on him.

it’s spring again and he sees her walking down the street in one of those flimsy dresses, several bouquets in hand. her face is devoid of makeup, her hair substantially longer since he first returned, and her brown eyes sparkling with warmth.

her heart, still soft under the snarky quips and hard exterior. so he buys far too many flowers over the past twelve months, making up excuses after excuses; there’s a spring photoshoot, it’s gemma’s birthday, it’s for a themed party, a wedding centrepiece, lies, lies, lies.

because all he wants to do is be near her again. maybe wipe the tears off with his shirtsleeve again if he ever gets the chance.

he tears his eyes away and raises the camera to his face for a few test shots for light.

she’s setting up the flowers under the canopy and they’re white lilacs, pink roses, and gardenias; choices of a true romantic. niall is proposing to the beautiful girl he met with flecks of green in her eyes with all of their friends present and he’s wondering why he’s not the one dressed up in a suit preparing to get on a bended to make a promise of forever.

it’s been a year and he’s found out that she drinks lattes now. All the sketching she does is work related, her scrabble skills only reach a passable level a couple of whiskeys in, and the satin slip has been replaced by ripped denims dungarees worthy of a florist.

a spring shower starts falling lightly over their heads as the woman of the hour arrives and niall makes a show of it while the guests are all cramped under the canopy with the scent of roses and lilacs floating down on them.

he weaves between people and captures the details as best he can.

he loves it when things go wrong. not because he’s sadistic, but because he’s forced to get creative. because he’s forced to make the best of the elements he has to work with and the pictures almost always come out better than planned.

she says yes and the fat rain drops start violently hammering down on the couple and the guests.

the crowd scatters quickly, running for cover, the newly engaged couple getting drenched and not having a care in the world.

it’s just them all of the sudden. with the spring showers raining waterfalls over them as the shoves his equipment into the safety of a waterproof camera bag, slinging it over his shoulders.

“why did you come back?” she asks.

his heart stops for a moment, and the seconds tick by. something that hurts seeps through his veins as she stands before him, eyes wide.

he never really thought about why.

his heart is pounding frantically in his chest but then the words come out and it’s the only truth he knows, “because you didn’t come with me,”

she exhales a shiver, her brown eyes like both icarus and the sun.

he thinks of all the times that he’s been wanting to kiss her for the past decade, all the parallel universes in which he would find her regardless of the world’s that set them apart and he goes for it. he closes the gap between them and she's kissing him back, desperately and hungrily, like he’s the only anchor tying her to the ground.

her lips taste like spring and mint and sunshine, and she presses up against him like she needs him to breathe.

their nose bumps and her hands curl through his hair and the kiss ends far too soon and there’s a confusion written in her eyes.

she looks at him all beautiful and ethereal and breathless.

“i’m not good with expectations,” she says, face flushed even though the spray of spring was chilly against their skin.

“that’s fine,” he whispers, just loud enough for her to hear over the pitter patter of the raindrops, “i don’t have any,”

there’s a shit eating grin on her face that could power cities. as if she’d just come to the realisation that she was going to be okay for the first time ever. she reaches up and kisses him, and he smiles against her lips, because how can he not.

he smiles into her kiss, feeling persephone’s garden blooming through his chest.

and if the world suddenly turned to black and white, then that kiss would’ve been in colour.

#spring fic exchange #fists full of flowers #ffof part five #mini fic #one shot / request #harry styles

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

Fists Full of Flowers // Just Promise Me You’ll Always Be

There was a pounding in her head the likes she’d never felt before and her mouth tasted of something particularly foul. In-su attempted to roll over and deeply contemplated the possibility that she had gotten hit by a bus the night prior and somehow managed to crawl back into bed when memories of the night before flocked back to mind in flashes.

It was Zayn and Jessie’s wedding, because Zayn had finally gotten his head out of his arse and proposed, and In-su apparently somehow managed to get home from the afterparty of the wedding in one piece despite the open bar.

She inwardly thanked whatever deities that must have been watching over her that it was a Sunday and was about to pull the covers back over her head when a voice cut through her fogged mind.

“Rise and shine!”

His voice cut through the crisp winter morning and pain was all she could register.

Definitely still drunk.

“Niall,” she croaked, throat dry and scratchy, “Sweetheart, darling, sun and stars of my life, it’s a Sunday,”

“And a lovely one at that,” Niall arched a cocky brow, expression growing sly as he leaned back against the door all suave like with complete control of his limbs.

“We don’t work Sundays,” she announced with a groan, unmoving from her spot on the bed as Niall moved into the darkened room to pick up pieces of her garments tossed unceremoniously around.

It’s not that she wasn’t grateful of Niall’s dedication in constantly checking up on her; after once accidentally finding her next to an empty bottle of whiskey under the counter of her shop sobbing her eyes out at nothing in particular, he had taken up a personal responsibility of ensuring nobody would find her like that again, ever. And she loved him for it, she wouldn’t have gotten thus far with the business, or life for that matter, if it weren’t for him. But she had gotten better in recent months, she really had, and she really preferred for him to not be so damned chipper all the time.

Scenes from the previous night were blurry at best, but with the amount that they had all drank with the exception of a six months pregnant Bree, she was wondering how he wasn’t nursing the world’s worst hangover.

“I’m Irish,” he shrugged as he moved around her bedroom space, picking up garments she’d discarded from the night before before she tumbled into bed.

In-su blinked at the oddly unfamiliar patterns on the ceiling, “What?”

“You asked how ‘m not nursing the world’s worst hangover,”

“I didn’t realised I said that out loud,” she sat up and feeling the room spin with the sudden movement.

The room seemed to be moving in slow motion, and a small movement from the bed she was on shoved her from her reverie.

“What are you doing here, it’s Sunday,”

He and Louis were the ones adamant about taking Sundays off. And since they were the ones who were doing the on-ground running she’d acquiesced to their very reasonable demand. Except there he was on a Sunday morning raining on their off-day.

“I think the better question is, what are you doing here, princess?”

The confusion hit her like a bus. Her eyes scanned the room and for the first time since waking up feeling as though death sat upon her shoulders that morning, she realised she was not in the tiny little space above her flower shop.

“Oh my god,” Harry’s slow slur from beside her on the bed mirrored her sentiments exactly, “Ni, I know I said I’d help you with the proposal but could you please not be so fucking chipper?”

The one with the mussed up curls lying in bed next to her seemed to not be clothed, so it was a relief when she looked down to find herself in one of Harry’s jumpers. Her head perked up as her brain struggled to process the scattered bits of information available to her, “Wait what happened last night, what proposal?”

Niall’s amused grin only grew wider when he pushed the curtains open, the fabric smacking against the wall with all the subtlety of two cymbals crashing together. She wanted nothing more than to have her hands around his throat; her ears were ringing and her eyes stung from the feeble light rays and she was pretty sure she’s not the one who gets to ask the accusatory questions in the scenario.

“V'been shot,” the bloke in the bed with her moaned, flinging a dramatic arm over his unconscious face, “I’m dying...”

Too tired to even bother with him, she snapped her blurry gaze over to Niall and tossed the first thing her hand could reach at him. He caught it deftly and fell onto her side of a bed heavily with a flump.

Her memories from the night before weren’t incredibly vivid, but sitting between her friends on that bed with her stomach threatening to empty its content on a bed that decidedly wasn’t hers to empty its content of, there was suddenly a clear picture of some amount of dancing on a table with the owner of the said sheets.

She remembered looking at him and just wanting to know.

She wanted to know how he could look her in the eye and smile after all that damage he’s caused to her psyche. She wanted to know if he had some kind of satisfaction seeing her torn apart. She wanted to know where it all went wrong.

How they had gone from being best friends to her feeling as though she wasn’t enough.

Never enough.

Falling in love with him was something that she hadn’t planned on.

But then again, neither is death. And love and death had more in common than people think. For one, both are avoidable but not entirely inevitable. For another, it doesn’t just unhappen.

People don’t just suddenly unlove someone the way corpses suddenly came back to life.

So even though there hadn’t been enough alcohol in the world for her to dance in front of everyone she knew, when Harry somehow managed to get John Mayer blaring from the speakers, she took his hand and stepped up onto the table with him.

And that was pretty much when everything went blank.

“You don’t remember?”

There was a certain tension lacing itself into the air, and she felt a pang of wariness shoot through her body at the thought that something might have occurred after the dancing that was worth remembering but having blocked out because of the sheer embarrassment.

In-su had been hesitant in all her interactions with Harry since that night where she admitted out loud how much of a mess her life was. But his insistence in worming his way into her life wore her down despite all the unresolved tension she felt.

Harry had after all been a confidant for a time, and she missed that aspect of whatever they were pre-adulthood. It was easy what they were way back when. And since Alice had decided to go back to school, it felt good to have him back in a, more or less, neutral territory.

“I remember the dancing,” she managed to choke out through the bad taste in her mouth, contemplating laying back down before deciding against it.

“But not... how we got back here.”

Despite all the changes that had crept into her life in the past months, In-su thought that she’d handle being thrown a curveball better. But nothing, not Louis’ impending fatherhood, Zayn’s new relationship status, not even Alice deciding to do her postgraduate could have prepared her for waking up in Harry’s bed with an audience of sorts.

Friends sleep together when they’re too drunk, don’t they?

Her head raced with a thousand incoherent semi-drunk thoughts as the seconds ticked by.

“Well it’s the least I could do after you kicked me in the head,” Harry remarked, a smile evident in his voice as he reached his arm up to pat her on her shoulder.

“I didn’t,” she cringed, “Did I?”

In-su looked over at Niall for reassurance. The blonde boy averted his gaze from her, which was all the answer she needed. Refusing to show any sort of breakdown in composure, like a sense of mortification, she turned to meet Harry’s questioning gaze, “I wish I could say that’s the first time that’s happened,”

Harry laughed openly, the force of it moving the bed ever so gently before stopping abruptly when, she could only assume, his head started to throb too, because she knew hers hadn’t stopped since Niall disturbed her alcohol-fueled slumber.

“We should do this again sometime, except maybe with a reduced amount of alcohol, and by reduced I mean to the point of non-use,” Harry joked, rolling out of bed on his side and landing onto the floor with a thud.

He had always, always, made that joke whenever they woke up hungover in their college days. And In-su laughed, every time.

“Non-use, sounds like an interesting concept,” she played along.

“Yeah, we grab like a coffee, or some other scintillating non-alcoholic beverage and play scrabble,” his drawled slowly, mind sluggish from alcohol damage recovery, before poking his head up from the side of the bed, eyes hooded and ringed from lack of sleep what with the copious amounts of liquor probably still coursing through his veins.

“I feel like I should break out a bottle of Glenfiddich to understand what’s going on here,” Niall protested, a little lost with the repartee unfolding before him.

In-su shot a glare at Niall, “Neither one of you’s explained this proposal business yet by the way,”

“Can we talk about this after some coffee?” Harry groaned, about half endeared with her commitment to uncover the truth and half frustrated. Mostly frustrated, because Harry wasn’t exactly known to deal with the after effects of binge-drinking very well.

She threw a bottle of water she found on her side of bed and after the mess of hair named Harry hydrated himself enough, the trio unsteadily trudged to the kitchen where a painfully sober looking Liam was.

“Morning, love,” he greeted smugly.

In-su smiled uncomfortably as she slid into the chair next to Harry, purposefully not meeting the gaze of Liam inwardly happy that it was Liam and not Zayn because he would have been as subtle as a nuclear bomb.

She grumbled out a throaty and disgruntled, "Liam, I will punch you in the throat if you keep staring at me."

“Top of the morning to you too, Ms. Ahn,” he smirked, the sarcasm and a splash of gloating in his tone not at all gone unnoticed.

Before she could respond to Liam’s very unhungover remark, a tray of takeaway coffee was slid across the table her way and all thoughts of a biting response melted as she took the takeaway cup from the tray.

Harry’s arm instinctively reached out to lazily open the fridge for the milk before handing the carton over to her. Between buying too many flowers, bringing over baked goods for jobu, and bribing her with coffee to deal with his often time very eclectic floral demands, he’d learned exactly how she liked her coffee over the period of a few short weeks.

"I'm never waking up this early ever again," she muttered, drowning her cup of coffee with milk and wondering if she could throw herself in it too.

"Speaking of—what the hell are you two doing up over at the Styles household at this hour?"

The smug expressions on the fresh-faced Niall and Liam was immediately dropped. And she was grateful of their own admission to guilt because it meant that there’d be less questions about what she was doing there.

"Nothing," Liam quipped almost too quickly.

"We're always up this early," Niall nodded in agreement.

"Got a thing for sunrises,"

"Dewy leaves,"

"Birds chirping,"

"Big morning fans over here,"

In-su rolled her eyes at her pals’ less than inconspicuous behaviour and felt an oncoming headache caused by the exaggerated eye movement, "If you’re trying to evade the question about some kind of proposal,” she motioned towards Harry, “Loose lips here already let it slip,”

Liam side eyed his coffee, and she smirked at their absolute inability to keep a secret.

As she took another sip of her coffee and began feeling more humanly, Niall caved and explained that he had been planning on proposing to Lennon for a while now. He’d even taken to meeting up with Harry and Liam on a weekly basis working out the planning because it just has to be perfect. Naturally, Liam who had just gotten out of his mess of an on-again-off-again relationship with the daughter of a partner where he worked had not been of much help in the matter and Harry, the genius that he was, had only managed to work out that his role in the whole thing was to photograph the affair.

Taken aback by the information dump, she didn’t quite know what to make of the whole exchange. So she just stared at her bleach blonde friend until her brain decided to move her mouth.

“And you thought you’d ask these two fools to help with your proposal and not me?”

Her raised eyebrow and sardonic tone had Harry thoroughly humoured apparently, his head tossed back slightly at her words with a rumbling laugh tumbling out from the back of his throat.

A low-burning anger flooded through her without warning or reason; of course it was bloody easy for Harry to enjoy himself, he wasn’t the one slowly losing all his friends as they slowly and surely moved forward with their lives leaving her behind. It was an irrational thought, something she should be able to get over quickly because they were just adults. Her and her ragtag team of friends were just doing adulty things like adulting.

Everything was the way it should be. And the small stab of bitterness quickly gave way to guilt for not revelling in her friend’s collective happiness.

The whirlpool of emotions shocked her a little. She shook her head of the thoughts as Niall and Liam began regurgitating everything they knew about diamonds and rings from their trip to the jewelers with Zayn when he decided it was time to pop the question.

Things were different, but the same; Zayn and Jessie were still Zayn and Jessie who would probably return from their honeymoon with yet another petty squabble that will take little over a couple of days to sort out, Niall was still Niall although he’d soon be officially one half of what everyone has begun to endearingly call Liall, Liam was still Liam, Alice was still Alice, Harry was still Harry, and she was still In-su.

Except they were kind of better models, newer and improved. Debugged and upgraded for an optimised experience.

A small smile tugged at her lips.

She wasn’t going to wallow in the bad, and make herself feel worse. She refused to give in to that urge yet again.

“Hey,” Harry murmured, nudging at her, breaking her out of her reverie, “What’s going on in that madman brain?”

With his gaze locked on hers, it was as if everything fell into place.

Everyone was right where they were supposed to be.

And to say that that precise moment was special or perfect was inadequate. They were words that were too shallow to mean anything. Scripted imaginary words, that were too artificial to accurately describe something real.

“Nothing,” she shook her head with a small grin, “Nothing at all.”

He stared for a moment, the annoyance in his eyes clashing somewhat with the twitch of amusement at the corners of his lips.

Liam and Niall were bickering about the use of helium balloons and the off-chance that the balloon would get loose and he’d lose the ring when he conceded to try to read her mind.

A wave of warmth immediately washed over her, spurred by the heat of his unclothed body so close to hers. But she determinedly ignored it, inching back with her paper coffee cup in hand so that she was as far away from him as possible.

There was no need to make things complicated.

Despite what was obviously going to be a lot of very complicated planning she had lying ahead of her.

“I’m telling you, tie the ring to the balloon, it will be the cutest thing ever!”

In-su sighed, eyes fluttering shut in exhaustion; it was going to be a long sodding day.

#spring fic exchange #fists full of flowers #ffof part four #mini fic #one shot / request #harry styles

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

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Fists Full of Flowers // Easy Baby Maybe I’m a Lie

It was some time after his twentieth visit when In-su lost count of the times Harry decided to pop by the shop.

It’s kind of what happens when someone routinely buys flowers and brings over pastries and sweets for lunch dates with an elderly Korean man that was her grandfather. So when the bell dinged on a Sunday morning even though the door clearly indicated the shop was closed, she knew it wasn’t him and yelled out in a sweetest voice possible that they were closed.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” drawled a low voice from the doorway.

And there it was again.

That obsequious little shit of a voice that had driven her to kiss more bottles than boys over the past six years.

In-su felt her heart literally skip a beat and she greeted the owner of the voice that haunted her since his return some six months ago. With a wave of nausea, she realises that in six short months since his return, Harry has integrated into every part of her life, weaved himself back into her friends, her family, and her home.

“And what can I do you for today, Mr. Styles,” she started in faux formality.

“Even though you know for a fact that I have a standing dinner appointment with my parents and a whiskey date with a rambunctious American blonde on Sundays,”

“Flowers,” he said simply, “I have a Virgin Suicides inspired shoot today,”

Of course, she thought, why else would he be there. She felt her throat on the verge of a malfunction, like the time she tried to scream underwater and ended up having a bitter aftertaste of chlorine clinging to her mouth for hours after her grandmother pulled her out of the pool.

“Shame,” she forced a smile onto her lips, “A certain leggy lawyer would be gracing us with his presence today too, thought you would’ve been invited,”

He’s suddenly quiet and sunken.

She noticed it about him when he first wandered into her shop. He’s no longer the gangly, pretty boy with doe green eyes and dimpled cheeks. They grew up together, dragged one another out of the shell of preteen timidity and awkwardness. But he had grown into a man in her absence and it had come to mutual friends and a cloak of comfort from other people to be around one another outside of the flower shop.

“So what kinds of flowers were you thinking?” In-su asked, noticing the silence had gone for too long.

“Dead ones,” he said with a decisive nod. As though it was a conclusion that he had just made.

There was a pregnant pause before she managed to verbalise her thoughts, “What now?”

“It’s symbolic,”

“And you thought a florist was the best place to get symbolic dead flowers?”

“No place better,” he cooed meekly, eyes wandering around the tiny shop.

She laughed it off and worked her magic, packing him some dried floral crowns made of baby’s breath and a smattering of other withering buds.

It’s barely noon and In-su never wanted to scream and then down a bottle of whiskey so much in her life.

The rest of the day passes by routinely and dinner with her parents wafted by in a daze. Before she knew it, she was sitting on a high stool opposite one Liam Payne at the pub she and her friends frequented because of a certain blonde bartender who liked handing them free drinks.

It was a truly miracle that Alice hadn’t been fired yet.

But then again, there was no bartender more dependable than one who hated drinking so perhaps that’s why the owners turned a blind eye to their dwindling stock of the generic brand of house pour whiskey.

Liam chinked his glass with hers and they down their shot of whiskey in one go, toasting his promotion before setting the glasses back down on the countertop with a thud.

In-su glanced across the bar to see Alice busying with some teens who definitely did not look old enough to drink but she recalled their own underage drinking days fondly. As a matter of fact, remembered the night when their little posse became family.

It was some random house party that some rich kid was throwing. It was out of their circle and Alice had begged her to go because Niall and Louis were going, and Louis didn’t want to go without Bree, and Bree didn’t want her boy’s best friend as a third wheel, so she roped Alice into the mix, and Alice was too much of a chicken to consider the possibility of spending time alone with Niall who obviously had a crush on her very gay self.

And so after an hour of whining, begging, and pestering, In-su agreed to tag along convincing Harry to come with on the condition that Zayn would be extended an invite too. And so they they all crashed the very unmodest home of some private school going teen.

And that was how the rag tag bunch of misfits met Liam.

Teenagers were such complicated little creatures, she thought to herself with a little snicker as her attention shifted to the not-so-teenager in front of her staring at his empty glass with a frown.

“So are we gonna talk about this or what?”

In his impeccably cut suit and gelled hair, Liam raised an eyebrow at her comment as he signalled for Alice to fill up their whiskey glasses.

“You’re here with me instead of your central London flat with your girlfriend shaking the sheets celebrating your promotion, so come on, what happened?”

“She has some party,” he said dismissively, waving his hand for added effect before reaching behind the counter for the bottle himself.

“Oh, so you’re not fighting, we’re just your backup plan then,”

“Whatever,” he shrugged, raising the glass to his lips again, “Why aren’t you drinking out of a Macallan 18 bottle with doucheface anyway?”

“First of all, Harry’s your friend too,”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he smirked.

In-sun ignored his smug comment, sensing the tension and not wanting to approach it even if she had a ten foot pole, “Second of all, stop deflecting,”

“If Harry was my friend too then why isn’t he here? I distinctly remember sending out a group text,”

“He’s got some shoot over at London, popped by to get flowers for the models and everything,”

“Is that envy I sense, In?”

There was an edge in his voice, bitterness, whatever for she would never know.

She sighed audibly, “Can we not talk about my non-existent relationship problem and talk about your very real one before Zayn and Niall get here with their girlfriends and we get segregated by gender?”

“I wanted to enjoy a night out with my friends and she wanted me to traipse around with her friends, again, so we had a spat,” his knuckles writhed white and she was surprised the glass wasn’t caving under the pressure of his fingertips.

She knew it well, that feeling of wanting some kind of pain.

Distraction was the name of the game and she knew it intimately. Because nursing a hangover was better than nursing heartbreak.

In-su reached over to catch his wrist as he raised the glass to his lips once more, “It’s a spat, not the end of the world, go easy on the cheap whiskey,”

Though he set down the whiskey, he did not follow through on it as the night went on.

He did not go easy when their other friends arrived and flaunted their very happy relationships in front of him, and he definitely did not go easy when Bree announced that she was having just a glass of wine because she was pregnant.

He especially did not go easy when Harry belatedly arrived, long locks perfectly tousled despite having rushed back from his London shoot, not wanting to miss out on the night of celebrations.

He raised glass after glass to his lips, swallowing the amber liquid within as she witnessed his descent into the very familiar territory called the bottom of the bottle. Several rounds of champagne to “celebrate the good news all around” later, Liam excused himself for a cigarette.

Denial, In-su thought to herself, it’s a beautiful thing.

“You okay, big boy?”

Her voice must have startled him as he swayed outside the pub, struggling to light his cigarette.

“Great,” he slurred, “Never better,”

He tripped on nothing in particular and she put her arm around him, semi-supporting his weight. She revelled in their closeness, inhaling his scent that was so familiar yet so foreign, like a distant memory.

It was a long time ago when she decided that she wasn’t going to lose her head around Liam. He was everything that Harry wasn’t. He kissed her unthinkingly and held her hand. He could go off see the world but he understood the need to stay, even if for a little while. He was a combination of friend and lover, and it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began.

And it was for that reason she ended it before anything could really begin. Before he would love her and she would think that maybe she loved him too.

“Home?” Liam asked, burying his head into the crook of her neck as his fingertips squeeze into her hip.

They both pretend that the request isn’t one that hurtled them into a moral grey area. And if it weren’t for the way he asked, so hesitant and tired and absolutely hapless, she might have denied him.

Because there comes a point where the mask would have to crack.

And they would both have to admit that they’re just lonely people who landed together because the people they wanted didn’t want them.

“We can do that, yeah,” she muttered, just soft enough for him to hear but not loud enough to admit to herself that it was a slippery slope they were tripping face down into.

He was a difficult drunk, all uncooperative and a tangle of limbs. She would need help to mobilise him at all, and maybe hail a taxi. But she need not look too far as Harry wasn’t two steps behind her when she looked around for assistance. He offered to drive them back to her shop and home, and she took the silent minutes to admire him behind the wheel with Liam huffing slightly and readjusting himself next to her. He helped carry the already snoozing Liam to her bed, and she allowed herself a few peeks at Harry as they worked his shoes off together.

They stared at him until they’re sure he’s completely asleep, his breath coming out evenly through his chapped lips, before they retreated into the kitchen where In-su groaned when she checked her watch.

She tried to pry her eyes away from the reddish mark on his neck; one that she noticed but made no mention of when he entered the pub earlier. Because she didn’t want to have to imagine the red fingernail marks on the ridge of his spine and the bruises on his hips.

“I have to be up in an hour for today’s deliveries so I’m going to make some coffee,” she offered, “You should have some before you head home,”

“I don’t know how you do it, you know,” he pressed his hip against the counter, his arms crossed in front of him as he watched her.

In-su flicked her electric kettle switch on, mindlessly responding to Harry’s comment, “It’s quite easy really, the instructions are on the box,”

A soft chuckle escaped his lips, “I meant with everyone,”

“You're a good friend,” he said quietly. Almost inadequately.

In-su shook her head, “I’m just better at holding my liquor,”

“Still can’t take a compliment then, yeah,”

She froze at his words. Slowly, she turned around to face him, his eyes wide and expectant somewhat. Reminiscent of their younger days.

Everything was bright and childish when they met; the glowing green in his eyes, the honey-hued gold in hers, the permanent pink in their cheeks. It was hard to stomach the fact that they weren’t ten anymore. Heck, they weren’t even eighteen anymore, with her ready to drop everything and go with him just because he asked.

She was just a sad girl with a passport that’s never been stamped while he was Harry. As simple and as complicated as that.

It was the way they’ve always been.

They stare at each other for a few seconds and In-su opened her mouth before snapping it shut with a shake of her head. She swallowed thickly before letting the words escape into the present, “Harry, I’m a mess; I live out a flower shop I inherited, I drink a half bottle of whiskey on the daily, and I keep renewing a passport that’s as empty as the day I got it,”

“You’re great with jobu,” he countered, not missing a beat and taking a step forward, “You see your parents often, you’re obviously a good friend, and you run this business beautifully, do you have any idea how highly Niall and Louis speak of you?”

“That’s because I pay them handsomely to do it,”

“All things considering, I think you’re doing okay, In,”

It was a glorious lie, but ultimately still a lie.

“I’m really not,” she whispered with a shaky breath.

Sure, there were good days but there were also the bad days. The terrible blues that took over so completely that she’d reject the mundane formalities of life and skip all her meals or refuse to shower so it wouldn’t feel as though she was controlled by something or someone or some higher powers beyond her grasp.

Having to care for her sick grandmother gave way to caring for a business and a heartbroken grandfather and on days where she wasn’t completely permeated with the blues, she’d still wake up at the crack of dawn feeling like her entire life was falling apart.

She was exhausted, so so exhausted. Always tired. Hating every single cell in her body.

And he thought that she had it all together.

What a joke.

Niall, the Irish sunshine that he was, had to kick her front door in often to force her out of bed. Because she knew she had a business to tend for, bouquets to pack, and a grandfather to see, but she just had no motivation to do it. Not until a friend or two came hounding at her forcibly removing her from the bed.

In-su blamed Harry on those days. Blamed him for his half-hearted efforts and conditions when he tried to drag her along on his adventure. Blamed him for walking away. But there he was, impossibly close, closer than they have been in the years he was gone and the months since he’s been home and she can feel his breath, all warm and minty invading her space.

“I know why you couldn’t come with me, you know,”

The silence that followed and lingered between them was deafening.

His words were cruel and unforgiving like the deepest throes of winter. It’s the first time they acknowledged that he had asked and she had even considered it an option, a genuine possibility.

Just be with me, he had said.

His words burned itself into her mind, tattooed with the ink of the deepest regret splashed across her brain. The feeling may have passed, but the memory stained in its wake.

Harry was staring at her, unflinching. She dared herself to raise her eyes to meet his steady gaze. Almost as if he was admitting that the only kind of love he had to offer was stupid and blind. His eyes fluttered down to her mouth and she could’ve sworn that that was exactly how people forget how to breathe.

The kettle whistled and the heat from the bubbling over water cut through the tension like a knife.

She spun around instantaneously, hand shakily tearing open the instant coffee packets before spilling them into two separate mugs.

And it was then that In-su came to the realisation that the only thing worse than Harry coming back was if he didn’t.

#spring fic exchange #fists full of flowers #ffof part three #mini fic #one shot / request #harry styles

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

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Fists Full of Flowers // Against The Dying of The Light

She was sketching samples of floral arrangements for a wedding centrepiece when the bell dinged signifying some scintillating soul who still believed in the art of picking out flowers in person had wandered into her shop.

In her best singsong customer service voice, In-su hollered a customary greeting as she stepped out in front of the counter before stopping dead in her tracks.

He looked the same, but different.

Same messy hair and green eyes. His locks were a little longer, sure, his shoulders a little broader, and legs a little longer too, perhaps, and there was a bit of ink peeking out from the faded Rolling Stones t-shirt he had on, but still, he was essentially the same.

He was dressed almost exactly like the person who left six years ago, except he adorned his feet with what looked like branded boots instead of converses.

But she couldn’t focus on that.

Harry had a blank stare on his face that she couldn’t read and In-su never felt like she needed a shot of whiskey more in her entire life.

Somehow she managed to choke out the words with a small smile on her face, “How can I help you?”

Shit shit shit, she cursed in her head as soon as the words leave her lips.

“Hey, In,” he drawled after a moment, familiarity seeping through his voice despite her overly formal greeting.

“Harry,” she said softly, as if the name had been sitting on the precipice of her lips even after all that time and space that sat between them both. Saying his name should not make her feel as unsteady as it did, and yet everything was frozen and silence just sat between them.

“I’m looking for some flowers,” he started saying slowly, unsure how to proceed as much as she was before pulling into another trail of thought, “Do you own the shop now?”

He swivelled around, taking in the interior and the fresh flowers scattered about in the tiny space.

“Yeah, jomo left the shop to me,” she started saying, “I think umma’s kind of just glad that I have something to do since she’s always been disappointed that I never got into Cambridge to make full use of appa’s CAMben employee benefits,”

Shit shit shit, she cursed some more in her head, knowing full well that she was babbling.

“Oh, is he still teaching?”

“Yeah, I don’t think he’ll ever retire,”

There was genuine interest in his mossy green eyes and she could practically feel the dozen or so questions that must have been burning in his throat. But he knew he shouldn’t ask, and she knew she shouldn’t either, so they kept to fairly neutral territory instead.

Conversation between them was different, but the same. Somehow.

Between the awkward silence hovering between them and not needing to explain that jomo is Korean for grandmother and umma is mother and appa is father, their interaction felt like riding a bike again for the first time in a long while; a bit finicky at the start because you know the technique, you’ve fallen far too many times to count when you first took off the training wheels, but somewhat like a second nature once you get the hang of it.

“I know your mum still runs the bakery,” In-su started saying as her eyes trailed him as he wandered around the shop while her feet refused to cooperate.

“Yeah, she hires college students to do the deliveries now though,”

“I know, she’s always going on about how they’re flaky,”

He smiled at that and she wondered for a moment why she ever wanted to forget the curve of those lips.

It felt like it was the perfect opportunity to ask if he’s back for good, slip in a casual reference to see if he’ll be doing the loaf runs for his mum again now. But she knew she shouldn’t and another silence fell over them because what was the designated decorum for meeting someone that you kind of had feelings for and suspected that they kind of had feelings for you too after a few years and a lot of growing up shoved in between?

He hates you, she thought to herself, and she didn’t blame him for hating her because she did too, a little bit.

They weren’t really a couple back then, not really, they were mates and they spent an unreasonable amount of time together and sometimes she stole his jumpers and sometimes he’d point his camera at her and capture these really beautiful candid portraits, but it had been common knowledge that they were just friends.

They just, were. And nobody ever talked about it. Which made for things to get rather complicated when one asked the other to come with him to Germany and the other just never showed up.

“So you said you were looking for some flowers?”

In-su tried to ignore the fact that her voice had noticeably gone up a pitch.

“Yeah, it’s uhm, my mum’s birthday tomorrow and I wanted to surprise her,”

“I think that can be arranged,” she laughed slightly awkwardly, “Do you want us to deliver?”

She couldn’t help it, but there was a hope lingering at the forefront of her mind to maybe, just maybe, see him again. No matter how much it made her feel like ripping her hair right out, seeing him, she wanted to be the badly painted wall in his life, hiding in plain sight behind the wallpaper and glamour.

“Delivery would be great, I heard from Liam that you have Niall and Louis doing runs for you?”

Her cheeks started to feel warm.

He was saying that he spoke to Liam, but all she was hearing was that he knew she ran from her annual spring break ritual, far and fast like a prey running from its predator, as soon as she knew he was going to join them.

“Uhm, yeah,” she conveniently turned around to reach for some samples so he could choose the bouquet, “I set up this thing when I took over the business, because, well, no one really buys flowers anymore because we think it’s too expensive and too much effort for something that lasts no time at all,”

She’s babbling again, but she needed to do something to stop her hands from shaking; and a shot of whiskey or a cigarette were both not options at the moment.

“But I thought if you cut down on the size and the cost and really amp up the convenience, then friends don’t need birthdays, and husbands don’t need anniversaries, and boyfriends don’t need Valentine’s Day to send a bunch of happiness, you know?”

He’s nodding, flipping through some sketches of bouquets as though having to make the decision between magnolias and lilies were the worst thing ever with a perpetual frown on his brow, so she stopped talking and let him ponder the selection for a moment.

When he left with his bouquet that day because he really didn’t want to bother Niall by squeezing in an extra delivery, she thought the worst was over.

Pained as it was for her to even think it, In-su was sure that it would be the last she would see of him because as a photographer who has carved out a name for himself over the years, Harry Styles had to be just visiting. It had to be just a pit stop before he went back to real life. The feeling of having the rug ripped out from under her had to be because he was passing through on the way to London where he worked as a photographer for Vogue or something.

But then he was back just a few days later when she’s about to call it a day and lock up the shop, looking for more flowers because he was doing a wedding shoot as a favour and she’s reeling all over again.

“Since it’s for a wedding, you’re probably thinking pastels?”

“Pink roses maybe, with some primrose and rue?” Harry suggested off the top if his head and she’s not sure if it was intentional that he’s asking for a mixture of flowers representing love and regret.

She reached behind the counter for some art samples she’s drawn up before and when she turned back around, he’s holding up and studying her secret work stash that was a bottle of Glenfiddich with an eyebrow cocked.

“Get wild in the shop often now, do we, In?”

There’s a familiarity in his tone of voice that burned in her stomach. Because his voice all low and slow, calling out her name was just as she remembered, but nothing at all like how she thought it would make her feel.

She snatched the bottle from his hand, cross from the accusation, “It’s for my lunch breaks,”

“Get wild for your lunch breaks often now, do we?”

“I visit jobu for lunch, it gets rough,” she shrugged.

Harry pulled out a couple of glasses from behind the counter as if he knew exactly where they’d be and against her better judgement, she uncorked the bottle, filling them up. Because hey, if they were going to do adult things like discuss wedding photography bouquets, they might as well handle it like two grown ass people.

And grown ass people share drinks while discussing work at midnight, regardless of the history between them.

“What d’you mean it gets rough?”

There was concern etched across his brows as he accepted the glass from her. His fingers graze hers lightly, but it wasn’t as though she paid any attention to it really. It wasn’t as though the sight of him stepping foot into her shop set off the tormenting orchestra of regret in her mind of what could have been.

She refused to think about that.

“He’s just depressed, I think,” she took a big sip of the whiskey and revelled in the smoothness of the blend trickling down her throat, paying no heed to his gaze at her.

“I mean, the doctors say he’s physically fine, but I pop by for lunch everyday and he weeps when he sees me because he’s reminded that jomo’s gone. I hold his hand while he tells me she’s gone and he doesn’t know what to do anymore and then we sit. We eat lunch that umma’s frozen for us and I read him the paper, and then I come back here and pour myself a few whiskey neats before I flip the door sign from closed to open again,”

She avoided his eyes because it’s one thing to start a shit conversation about your shit life, but it’s another thing to accept sympathy from someone who has their shit together when you so utterly don’t. She swallowed mouthfuls more of the alcohol until the only heat she felt was the bubbling warmth of whiskey in her stomach, refusing to acknowledge the fact that his eyes on her made her feel like a native of how love is supposed to feel.

Because she can’t remember how love used to feel like, really.

Was it even love that she felt all those years ago?

She knew for sure that tumbling into bed with Liam repeatedly for the months that followed his departure definitely wasn’t love. It was just a pause. A pause filled with longing between two souls. A longing to feel. A longing for a connection.

But how is she even going to begin to explain that to him?

Fortunately, she’s saved from an internal meltdown by the raucous laughter of Niall and Louis as they come bursting through the door. She pulled out a couple more glasses, explaining that it wasn’t entirely out of the norm having little drinking parties in the shop once their little foray into e-commerce started paying off.

In-su, Louis, and Niall made quite a ragtag team in the running of The Happy Bunch. After all, not all of them could afford to be lawyers like Liam, startup owners like Zayn, or be awfully content with throwing underage pompous kids out of the bar like Alice. In-su sourced and packed the orders while holding down the fort in the daytime, Louis updated social media and did the daily drop-offs in London, while Niall covered the general Cambridge area, charming the population as he went, putting his literature degree to good use.

She was content with the hum drum life of running a semi-successful floral business, really. Or at least that’s what she tells herself daily.

So they chink glasses in the closed flower shop, toasting to adulthood and old friends as she faded into the background while the other three chatted, catching up with the going ons in each other’s lives.

The minutes ticked idly by and she had been lost in thought while they drank and talked.

She’s never been sober when everyone else is not before, and Niall is wobbling a little talking about how he’s fucking chuffed about The Happy Bunch really taking off because he’s met this really beautiful girl on delivery. Just as he began to wax and wane poetics about the bits of green in her warm hazel hued eyes, Harry’s gaze falls on her a second longer than it should have, and she noticed it because she always does, and she doesn’t know what her life is anymore.

She could still remember the loud boy with a smile that could light up any room. He was the boy who cycled around Cambridge, dropping off bread for his mum’s bakery. But now there were fine lines around the dips and curves of his face and faint bags under his eyes.

She wondered if that’s how she looked like to him too, the same but a little worn out from the weight of the world.

But then he shifted his gaze away from her and that was that.

The second time he sauntered into her shop quickly turned into the third and the fourth and the fifth and before she knew it, Harry had become almost a weekly fixture at the flower shop allowing for them to quickly slide back into the blurred lines between friendship and something more.

There were still some things that they didn’t talk about obviously; why didn’t you show up, what are you doing back home, didn’t you always want to do art instead of run a flower shop.

All the questions remained unanswered, lingering between them were those words unsaid.

“You know, the whole reason I set up The Happy Bunch was so that losers like you can send out flowers without having to come here, so maybe it’s time you checked that out?”

In-su crossed her arms as he sheepishly paced around looking at the fresh flowers for the day.

She’s not trying to push him away, really, it was just that those damned butterflies were creeping up in her stomach again and she needed them to die a painful and horrifying death.

And she couldn’t kill them damned fluttering if he insisted on being part of her life again.

“I’m a fan of nostalgia,” he shrugged.

The weight of his words that could be openly interpreted to possibly mean that he’s looking for someone in his past, someone like her, wrapped around them like a blanket. But then, as if sensing the tension, he sliced through it like a lightsaber cutting off an arm, instantly cauterising the wound as he went.

“And besides, I thought you set it up to get Ni and Lou employed,”

Having him flit into her life and fitting himself into the cracks, In-su was sure she was losing her mind.

When he left to see the world, she thought that if she drank enough whiskey and smoked enough fags to throw up her insides, it meant that the poisonous taste of repulsion would leave her mouth and disappear from the tip of her tongue. That she could stop hating herself, and stop hating that she hated the hand she was dealt with.

But it had become clear that she’d only distracted herself all those times. And Harry Styles is exactly how one’s mind unhinged and slipped into oblivion, she was sure of it.

She sighed.

Between birthday bouquets, photoshoots, wanting to perk up the living room, thank you flowers, and a totally logical array of other reasons why he needed flowers on a weekly basis thus far, she couldn’t even hazard a guess of the purpose of his visits anymore.

“What d’you need this time anyway?”

“Something that says I had a lovely night, but I’m probably not going to be calling you again,” Harry mumbled something else under his breath too, but she doesn’t catch it.

Instead of prodding him for more, she ignored the sinking sensation in her stomach and rolled her eyes, “Well, you’re just beating them away with a stick, aren’t you?”

She put together a modest bouquet and set them aside for Niall to deliver after lunch when Harry was just kind of loitering about, staring at pastel coloured peonies that had arrived that very morning.

It seemed a bit ironic that he was just sending flowers to someone whom he had no intention of seeing again yet stood there oh-so-casually admiring the traditional floral bunch reserved especially for twelfth wedding anniversaries.

“They’re your favourite aren’t they?”

Harry cut through her reverie almost as if he read her mind.

She’s too surprised to say anything because how could he remember something so menial from a conversation they had when they were just children? But then again, nothing about Harry should surprise her that much really, every time the flower shop’s bell rings to reveal a certain photographer walking in, her chest grows tight and her mind is a flurry of memories like a dark gravity under her feet pulling her down with with the burden of yesterday.

If he meant any of what he said about wanting her to be with him all those years ago, she was sure he felt it too. Except he kept coming back, so maybe she imagined all those loose touches and lingering looks when they were teenagers after all.

The stunned silence doesn’t phase him and he continued his shuffling around the small space, moving his eyeline from flower to flower, deep in some sort of thought process.

There were always instances of them tip toeing around one another, as though their relationship was a minefield and they had to navigate walking on broken glass to ensure that there were no sudden implosions.

She walked to the door and flipped the sign from open to closed. And because her life is just that predictable, he asked if she was headed to see her grandfather for lunch.

She shrugged, picking up the keys to lock up, “The highlight of my daily calendar,”

In-su was nothing if not completely a creature of habit; about once a month she took a weekend dinner with her parents where they would walk her home after and her mother would fuss about how she wasn’t taking care of herself, and she would follow that up with a trip to the pub where Alice worked. And that was about the wildest that her social calendar would get.

“If anyone wanted to murder you, they’d know exactly the three places they’d find you, wouldn’t they?”

She rolled her eyes at him again and he offered to drop her off. And then he offered to follow her in to say ‘Hi’.

After that day, Harry’s subsequent trips somehow all involved him bringing some sort of baked good over suspiciously close to lunch hour, successfully infiltrating her daily break time routine with her grandfather.

It was the middle of July when it became clear that he wasn’t passing through and that she had to accustom herself to his presence.

She eventually lets him get her grandfather a dog, because he insisted that the man needed companionship. As much as her parents are wonderful Asian children who still live at home to care for their heartbroken father, they still have their lives and he’s still alone at home for the most part.

They pick out a Golden Retriever from the pound one fine Wednesday, and she’s not quite sure she’s ever seen her grandfather smile so bright in the years since her grandmother died.

She’d hate to admit it, but his presence brought a certain lightness to her life; she laughed more, and was quicker to entertain the whimsies of people who walked into her shop.

Alice pointed out that she liked the smiley In-su in passing at the bar one night, and Niall even mentioned once or twice or ten times that she’d gotten a lot less groan-ey. The latter might just be him projecting his happiness from his own renewed love life, but heck, even her mother noticed that her laundry mounds seem to have gotten smaller.

It was in the warmth of summer with a glint lighting up in her grandfather’s eyes when she realises that perhaps it wasn’t the grand forces of the universe that kept her from living after all.

#spring fic exchange #fists full of flowers #ffof part two #minific #one shot / request #harry styles

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beingheldby-you · 8 years

Text

Fists Full of Flowers // Anchored Down in the Throat Love

“I swear!”

“No fucking way,”

In-su laughed, shaking her head, knowing full well that her confident constant dismissal of Alice made it easy to want to punch her in the face.

“Stop being such a twat,” Alice declared.

She raised an eyebrow at her blonde leggy friend, her amusement simmering away. Alice was about as American as they got and hearing Brit slangs roll off her tongue easily was strange, even years after she began picking up words like twat and bint.

It was funny to think that not ten years ago they were basically those really funny people you hear at pubs bonding loudly and giggling openly over the different meaning of the word “pants.”

Growing into her adolescent years as a neighbour to the ‘out of towners’ who moved in next door to her, In-su explained British TV and real football to her new friend, and she explained American football and the concept of iced-tea back.

It was more or less instant friendship.

“She was totally coming on to me,”

“Fine, tell me exactly what happened then,”

In-su leaned back on the poolside lounge chair, lowering her sunglasses over her eyes as her ears perks with semi-rapt attention.

She didn’t know how they got there to be honest.

It all started with an innocent question; what’s spring break and why is it such a big deal.

And that was how their own version of of sun, sex, and poolside fun came about. It included the two girls driving an hour out to Hambleton Hall, their other friends optional and subject to availability, copious amounts of alcohol, soaking up the feeble sun rays, and lots of gossip; all crammed into one convenient four-day weekend.

The tradition hadn’t been broken since it’s formation when they were nineteen, and the lusciously warm morning air smelled exactly like the beginning of every spring they’ve had for the last five or so years; a mixture of fresh cut grass with touch of chlorine.

Because they could never afford a beach vacation anyway.

It was still early in the morning and the sun had just began peeking out of the clouds illuminating miles of dewy fields, sleepy forests, and the rustic small town roads. A low mist was hovering in the gardens, enjoying its last few moments of dominance before the sun, with its renewed vigour, vanished it in its entirety.

Birds flitted from tree to tree, singing greetings and stories to one another, not unlike In-su and one of her closest friends.

“So she��s taking her time,” Alice started, lowering her voice several registers to what effect In-su will never know because it was nine in the morning and none of the other guests were even close to waking up yet, “She makes eye contact several times and then walks right on over, and leans over on the counter, her shirt dipping way low,”

Her eyes glaze over for a moment and In-su can just countdown to her friend’s face flushing, relishing in the memory of it.

“And?”

She prodded her friend along before she wet herself in excitement.

“Her tits were like,” she gestured with her hands, “This far from my face,”

She let out a low whistle, “Nice,”

In-su has seen the said tits for herself and she could appreciate that they were probably every lad’s wet dream. Evidently, it was few lass’s as well, and she wouldn’t blame them; Veronica had an ass that looked better than most of the female population’s face, full breasts that were the envy of town, and a jawline that looked like it belonged carved into marble by Michelangelo.

“So she’s leaning over the counter, and she says, ‘Hey, Alice,’ because yeah, she totally knows my name, and she’s just like ‘Hey Alice, my ice is getting a little lonely, do you have a few more cherries back there for me?’”

“You dangled a cherry into her mouth, didn’t you?” In-su asked, exasperated at the rate that the story was going, “You dangled a cherry into her mouth, she knotted the stem with her tongue and then you went down on her at the dingy dirty storage cabinet,”

Alice groaned and leaned back into her own recliner chair, sending off all types of vibes that that’s exactly where everything went sour, “Nope,”

Her eyes widened with interest, albeit well-hidden behind the sunglasses she had on, and she prodded for her friend to spill.

“Well, what happened then?”

She sighed, “Harry Styles happened, that’s what,”

In-su felt her heart sink to her stomach at the first two words; Harry Styles.

It was, and always had been her curse.

The memory of him washed all over her like phantom fingerprints against her skin.

“When did he get back?”

“I dunno, he sauntered in and obviously, people notice when that bastard enters a room,”

“Obviously,” In-su echoed monotonously.

Alice sighed sympathetically, distracted from her own story and tilting her head to get a better view of her friend, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said with a huff because honestly, she was on the damned spring break trip because Alice had begged and begged and begged. Because it was tradition. Because it was the only reprieve she could get.

She wasn’t sure how was supposed to digest the information that Harry was home, really.

The piece of information landed onto her lap like a grenade and she wasn’t sure what to feel because on one hand at least she found out while she’s away and at a safe distance instead of running into him smack bang in the middle of town. But on the other hand, she didn’t know what the other hand was but she really needed a whiskey neat and it was nine in the morning and Alice was unfortunately too much of a judgemental bartender, so she reached for her cigarette pack and pulled one out instead, lighting it promptly just so her hands stop shaking as her friend changed to subject and her attention span evaporated.

Suddenly she feels eighteen again, pacing in her room, boring holes into the carpet, and staring at a packed bag so hard that her brain felt like it was about to bleed right out of her nose.

As she exhaled a wispy line of smoke into the spring air, In-su wondered how she could possibly be so cursed.

Looking back, she doesn’t know how she could be anything else really. He left all those years ago, a small university town boy off to explore the world behind the lens.

“Come with me,” he had said.

And she laughed, her legs hanging off the counter with him sat beside her, “And do what?”

He shrugged.

“Not everyone can just take a few pictures and submit a portfolio for a visa you know,”

She tried to sound angry, but there was no real weight in her voice. It was light and teasing, designed to set his mind at ease.

They were in his mum’s bakery at three am with the lights out because he’d just gathered the guts to open the letter to find that his artist visa for Germany was approved and he’s scared out of his mind that he was going to let everybody down.

Because what if I fail, what if I can’t get a job, what if it’s too hard and oh no oh no oh no.

He was looking at her adoringly all of the sudden and In-su almost forgot how lungs and oxygen functioned when the next words come out from his mouth.

“Just be with me,” he said simply.

The memory was so far ingrained in her that even years later, it was a moment that she knew would be etched to the back of her lids for all of eternity.

It’s a horrible feeling really, having the memories hover there like a ghost waiting in your bed.

She remembered how much it scared her when her grandmother got really ill and began forgetting the details whether they mattered or not; her name, her address, her favourite skirt. How she needed help remembering the names for things as simple as remote control and teaspoon.

In-su laid awake for entire nights imagining what it would feel like to lose bits of your life like that. As if memories were nothing more than sea water pooled in cupped hands.

And then he left, and she let him.

She let him leave without her and every cobbled road reminded her of impromptu picnics.

Every bicycle bell ring, his morning loaf runs. Every nutella by the spoonful, free fudge days. Every John Mayer song, tear tracks on filthy skin.

She wanted nothing more than to forget.

Because he was young and talented with a ravenous hunger to boot while she was someone who could never just sail away with him on an adventure of a lifetime.

So she stayed and cared for her grandmother as she got sicker and sicker. When she passed away, the moment for impulsiveness and throwing caution to the wind was long over, and she threw herself at the floral business she inherited instead, developing a strong work ethic alongside a brand new business proposition, and taking to living upstairs from the shop.

While it sounded like a novel idea, her loft just above the flower shop was a literal landfill of junk to counterbalance the surprisingly well-performing business.

Dirty laundry was constantly piled in unruly mounds, the bed a perpetual state of being unmade, volumes of books piled carelessly pervading any empty space, and filthy dishes piled in the water stained wash basin.

Whenever her parents would drop by, they’d act surprised at the state of things although they’d make a visit every other month. And then her mom will give her a look, and she’d reluctantly let her help with putting some laundry away while they pretended not to see all the empty bottles of whiskey.

Her excuse was that every waking moment that wasn’t spent at the shop or sketching, she filled with family and friends, leaving little time for herself much less cleaning. The real reason was the fact that there is a certain urgency in filling up her time with activities that required her brain to function at full capacity.

It was her preferred coping mechanism; out of mind and out of mind.

Because losing bits of yourself suddenly wasn’t all that bad.

And so she pushed and pushed and pushed until she’d managed to drive the memories into the deepest darkest crevices of her mind the curve of his spine, the scar on his right wrist, the mole on his left cheek, the feel of his two green eyes and one beating heart.

She’d buried all the details that she unconsciously memorised.

Or so she thought.

Because the past has a tendency of coming back to bite you in the ass.

Because you can’t unknow the things that you’ve learned by heart.

Like all those stories from unofficial family history lessons digested unknowingly, she knows it all. Because she knows him. His smile, like rocket fuel, burned through her mind simmering just below the surface.

Thoughts of Harry Styles pervaded her mind so much so that she didn’t notice that her other friends had arisen and arrived, breaking out a few poolside cocktails much to Alice’s dismay.

She leaned back to observe the new additions to the pool as the camaraderie and friendly banter went around.

Zayn was flying solo for the first time in ages since him and his long-time girlfriend had decided to “see other people” and he seemed generally at ease to be spending time with his friends alone. Neither of them were actually involved in the act of “seeing other people” although Zayn does seem to be trying hard to make a case that he was indeed in search for someone else to, well, look at.

Truth was, he wasn't and neither was she; they were way hung up on each other, but he was too much of a coward to admit it and so was she.

Liam of course, was locked in a lurid affair with his boss’s daughter. She had yet to meet this secret girlfriend of Liam’s, but Alice insisted that she was darling from the one time he brought her to the bar. Of course, that didn’t stop anyone from giving him shit for dating a partner’s daughter at his place of employment.

“Wait, did you say Emily Hart?” In-su faux wondered out loud, “As in Wolfram and Hart? Isn’t that where you work, Liam?”

"Oh, ha, frickety, ha, real funny, In," he retorted as the rest of them chuckled, "It’s hilarious really, I’m dating the daughter of a multi-million pound law firm partner who happens to be my boss and I'll probably get fired if we break up, but yes, have a laugh at my expense,"

She loves her mates, really, she does; they’re shitty and irritating and funny and total losers but if she didn’t have them she’d probably have ceased to exist a long time ago. So even though she was certain that management was going to stroll right up to them any time soon to tell them to cut it the fuck out because as much as they appreciate the annual business brought to the country house, it wasn’t America and life isn’t a Girls Gone Wild video, she just laughed along and joined in on their general idiocy.

Liam was talking about something or other going on at the office when he pushed his sunglasses back into his thick, black hair completely changing the subject, “You know, Haz called yesterday,”

A familiar nausea was creeping up unexpectedly, and she was sure it had nothing to do with the fact that she drank half a bottle of whiskey the night before.

“He’s back in town?” Zayn asked as he too lit up a cigarette.

In-su swallowed the lump in her throat before stubbing hers out onto a makeshift ashtray.

She couldn’t speak even if she wanted to, she was sure the contents of her stomach would emerge from the bottom of her throat if she tried, so she kept her mouth shut and her teeth clenched. They had all gone to college together, of course he stayed in contact with his friends, after all they weren’t the ones who left him pacing back and forth at a train station as the minutes to departure ticked by, not bothering to text or call or offer any form of explanation.

“I told him to come, he’s missed out on all of our spring breaks so far, should be good, yeah?”

Alice peered over to her as if to watch for a reaction and she offered a blank stare, speechless, unsure really of how she felt about it.

How did everyone suddenly pull into the same thought process all of the sudden?

How did Harry Styles become the main conversation of their spring break?

Zayn’s brown eyes darted from Liam to In-su, ever vigilant and mindful.

He was the first to find out that there may or may not be something going on between her and Harry, and he was also the first to notice that she may or may not have had a subsequent fling with Liam after Harry left the country. But as much as a sweetheart he was, he had absolutely no chill.

“You don’t mind, do ya, we all haven’t seen him in ages,”

She shrugged, gunning for nonchalance, “It’s fine, he can take my room, I have plans anyway,”

Because she was too much of a coward to face up to him in person.

Because every once in awhile, a sense of panic would strike her hard and in a moment of vanity and greed, out of fear of aging, she would’ve packed a bag and contemplate calling him. Contemplate explaining all the reasons why she couldn’t go with him then and how those excuses don’t hold up anymore.

Because even after all that time sitting between them, even after all that silence, there had always been a part of her that just wanted him to come back.

And now he had.

Alice’s eyes narrowed at her sudden declaration, confused, “What plans? I didn't know about any plans.”

“For fuck’s sake Alice, you don’t know everything that I do,” she protested indignantly.

“And if you must know, I planned to leave a little early,” In-su huffed, removing the sunglasses from her eyes before doing a few quick stretches, “There are way too many orders coming in and I can’t afford to not make sure deliveries go out as planned at the start of spring,”

Alice sighed, “Let Niall deal with it, or Louis,”

She laughed at the suggestion, “There’s a reason why I pack and they send, have you ever seen their floral arrangements?”

The boys started chortling at that too, as Alice wrinkled her nose, puffing out her cheeks in annoyance. Liam couldn’t even speak the words without laughing, little snorts emerging through as he tried to verbalise it, “They can’t be that bad,”

“Oh no, they really are,” she retorted dramatically, staring pointedly at Liam as he stretched out his legs, letting the young sun’s light reflect on his torso, the well sculpted torso that looked like it belonged in a museum on top of the head of Adonis or some other Greek god.

She’s transfixed for a moment, because some people really do just get lucky; he looked the way he did and graduated top of his class from King’s College. And she’ll never understand the ease in which he settled himself into the groove that was life as much as he’d like to complain that he was struggling.

“Just stay for a bit,”

In-su shook her head in response, ridding herself of the thoughts of his skin pressed against hers because she couldn’t bear to be so alone and so empty after she let Harry wait at the train station for someone who didn’t exist.

Because the version of her that he wanted didn’t exist. The version of her who could throw her things into a bag and leave did not exist.

She was just small town girl; a third generation settler in a foreign land that felt more like home now than anywhere else.

She wanted to call him, she did really, text him even and list out all the reasons why she can’t go with him. But she doesn’t. Because all the excuses don’t hold up compared to how much she wanted to go. To just be with him.

Except his dreams were too big for her.

So she let him walk right out of her life. And some days she gets hit by an urge to just pick up the phone and dial his number, if only just to hear him say her name, to hear him yell at her, to hear him say anything.

“I can’t,” she declared, ending the discussion promptly.

She tore her gaze from Liam’s befuddled one and her eyes flit across to Zayn who had a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, as if he knew all the things that she couldn’t admit out loud.

#spring fic exchange #fists full of flowers #ffof part one #mini fic #one shot / request #harry styles

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