Gods & Monsters

Chapter 14 (Part 2)

And so Louis lost himself a bit, just letting Harry kiss him at his own pace. It revealed everything he couldn't or hadn't said yet—revealed his inexperience and earnestness and tentative little curiosities. It was sweet and started chaste and drifted into curious and ended in not-so-chaste and Louis could fucking taste Harry, something exclusively Harry, and now he fucking knows what he tastes like, okay? He knows Harry's goddamn saliva and he's never thought about things like that before and it should be weird and sorta disgusting but it somehow makes Louis feel a little bit ruined for everybody else. For anything else. Fuck.

Eventually, the kisses and the licks and the purrs and the delicate hands died down. They dwindled into little pecks, little presses of exhausted, reddened lips against cheekbones and the bits just beneath each other's jaws.

Louis was fucking dizzy, was probably blushing. Harry was making these weird little mewling noises, face tucked into Louis' neck. He began doing that swaying thing again—it's something he's always doing whenever he hugs Louis, just one of his many quirks—and he clung to him tightly, Louis clinging back, face hot and feeling like it had been assaulted with pins and needles.

He felt hands on his face then. He blinked, dazed and terrified and trying to reign it all in, before finding himself looking into Harry's eyes, his sweet, happy eyes that looked worlds away and so, so openly fond. The hands began delicately petting at Louis' cheeks, occasionally sweeping his hair away with nimble fingers. Sweet. Fragile. Reverent, almost.

Another soft press of mouths.

"I'm glad I get to kiss you now," Harry mumbled, words disembodied in the dark.

Louis found them, though. Caught those fuckers and put them into his own body.

He scoffed, dutifully ignoring the trembling in his hands. "Alright, sap," he'd joked, but the words cracked.

"It's true," Harry said imploringly, quiet and confident and insistent. "I've wanted to kiss you since I first saw you. In the library."

It made Louis' heart drop a bit, a streak of guilt painting his entire body, Liam's face threatening to form in the back of his mind. He dissolved it though, pushed it away, let himself feel surprised instead. For now.

"Really?" he'd asked, genuinely stunned. (He recalled Harry's less than warm reactions to him...) "I thought you hated me? Honestly, I thought you, like..." He shook his head. "I practically had to stalk you. I was two steps away from getting a net to catch you."

But Harry'd only nodded. "Yeah, but like... I thought you were really handsome. I mean, like, I had eyes, you know."

Ah.

Louis pursed his lips. "Ahhh, I see how it is."

"No," Harry protested, childlike in that moment as he banged a gentle fist on Louis' shoulder. "No, but like... Then we started talking? And suddenly I forgot you were handsome."

"Oh, so I'm forgettable, am I?"

"No, no, no," he laughed, swatting at Louis still more. "Not like that! It was just that we, like, started talking, you know? It was like—I thought you were handsome at first when I saw you. And then we talked and it was sort of like, erased? A bit? And then I focused on what you said instead, you know? And we talked more and suddenly you became beautiful in a different way. And then, like, I remembered you were handsome and it was sorta like you were beautiful in all these different ways and it was just like... I dunno. I wanted to kiss you all the time then."

At the time, Louis had no idea what to say. It didn't really make sense but it also did and it was terrifying, just like Harry's kiss, and it was... Everything was a lot.