Eternal [HS]

Chapter Sixteen

THIS IS A TERRIBLE IDEA, but it's too late to turn back now.

The human world has many differences to the one he's used to, the first of which being how smiley and talkative the people who live in it are.

He took a train to her house, an hour away from the secluded portal between their worlds, and before he could object, this teenage girl sat down right next to him on a nearly empty train. She droned on about how shitty the weather is, which reminded her of her shitty boyfriend and the shitty way he stood her up at the winter dance. She seemed to really like using "shitty" as an adjective for everything as if she only recently started cursing and now uses the word in every applicable situation.

He doesn't mind that Jo talks a lot and asks tons of questions since he knows her and they're friends, but he can't stand it when it's an annoying child he doesn't know.

Harry began counting down the seconds to when they'd reach the stop that Niall said was Jo's hometown when he called him a few hours after she fell asleep on the couch because the girl would never stop talking. On the phone call, Niall tried teasing him about his motives for wanting to go to her house and retrieve some of her clothes and personal belongings for her, but he shut it down before he could get far.

It's not like he was doing it to flirt with her or make her like him romantically, he just realized how hard it must have been for her to abandon her normal life because of those horrible men that tried to kill her. If he could send her back home, he would, but that isn't a possibility. So, all he could think of to help was to bring her old life to her.

The train came to a stop after what felt like a million years.

He, despite not believing in God, let out a silent thank you to the man upstairs for ending his torturous interaction with Naomi. She took it upon herself to relay everything from her name to the first ten years of her life story to him. It made him consider giving her a stranger danger lecture, but he decided to shut up and endure her rambling with only a "Wow," and "That's crazy," now and then. She hardly had the chance to say goodbye before he was speeding out of there with her address open in Google Maps.

The side of her house looks over him, and the climb to her bedroom window on the second story would probably intimidate most people, but, with his "insane" hobby of climbing without gear, it doesn't scare him. Yet, what could've stopped his heart if he were still human, is the "Missing" yard sign with her photo on it in the front yard.

He takes a glance around the back yard for her parents or the dogs she has told him endless stories about—like her two-year-old seventy-pound pitbull puppy that she claims is the sweetest dog you'll ever meet—and jumps onto the air conditioning unit below her window to get a start. It only takes a quick jump up to grasp onto the edge of the window and kick his leg out to use the top of the fence surrounding the yard as a foothold, and he's up without any of her family members or neighbors seeing him.

It's strange to see her room.

Once he carefully slides the window open, thankful that it was unlocked, and steps inside, seeing where she used to spend all of her time is like taking a peek inside of her mind.

Clothes are bestrewn across the floor, photographs are stacked on top of her dresser, and the sewn-together, twenty-something-year-old teddy bear that she mentioned while they talked last night sits on her bed. It's easy to picture her here. It's somewhat messy, but it's clearly hers, and he can see her so vividly in every discarded set of scrubs and the human-sized dip in her mattress that marks where she used to fall asleep every night.

In a way, it starts to feel intrusive as he begins taking the clothes from her dresser and stuffing them neatly into the backpack he found in her closet. He was never supposed to know her, they were brought together from entirely different worlds, and yet here he is, rummaging through all of her belongings because he couldn't stand to see the look on her face when she talked about missing home.