Devil's Due [h.s.]

Chapter 46

Chapter 46

The jet landed in the same ominous spot that it took off from – the weirdly secluded, fenced-in field surrounded by a forest with trees that shook so violently while we landed, I could have sworn the roots were going to be pulled right from the ground. Even when we finally touched down, they were still swaying, looking dangerously close to toppling right over.

"Dunno how you can just willingly watch that shit," a voice grumbled from behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder at Harry, who was looking at me, sprawled across the bed. He had a hand tucked behind his head, resting against the headboard, clad in only his boxers.

"Watch the plane land?" I clarified with a teasing grin and quickly pulled shut the small opening in the window that I'd been watching from. "You're right," I mocked, taking a few lazy steps toward him. "Only for the brave, I guess."

"You're an asshole," Harry rolled his eyes. "Careful before I find something you're scared of and hold it over your fuckin' head."

Despite his lighthearted tone, he looked a lot more unsettled than he had been a few minutes ago. A lot more unsettled than he'd been the whole flight, actually. As I took a seat on the edge of the bed, I couldn't tell anymore whether that unease was actually from his fear of planes itself or what we were ultimately going to have to face once we stepped off.

After he'd dragged us both into the bathroom to clean up, we'd both each taken a shower and wordlessly resolved that we weren't going to get the rest that Morgan had so nicely advised for the two of us. Instead, we'd spent the majority of the flight together on the bed beside each other, with mere inches separating us, arguing about trivial things like how planes were in fact "fucking worse" than rollercoasters (which I hated), whether summer or winter was the best season – winter, according to Harry, so he could hide more firearms in his jacket without being noticed which earned a pretty hefty eye-roll from my end – or what I believed to be his music taste, which was actually the topic that got him the most fed up considering he went so far as to grab my phone from me and add a bunch of songs he liked to my "H" playlist. Whether it was because he genuinely wanted to show me what he was interested in or just to shut me up, I didn't quite care. I was just ecstatic that he'd caved in the first place.

It had all been in an attempt to distract us, of course, from the subject that neither of us refused to bring up. The whole issue with Damien, with the drop, was apparently something else we'd silently decided was off the table as a topic of conversation for the flight home – like this jet was our little bubble, where nothing else existed, and boy if we were ever hell-bent on pushing this bubble to the absolute fucking limit before it popped.

In the moments where neither of us were talking, it would have been hard to dwell on the Damien problem anyway, given Harry's fucking hands. And how they apparently seemed more important than any other thought trying to fight its way through to the forefront of my mind, considering it was all I was able to focus on in the silence. How they always seemed to mindlessly make their way over to my legs, to my knees, my waist. How Harry had acted like he wasn't even doing anything, or maybe genuinely didn't even notice he was, when rubbing small circles along my skin with the pad of his thumb while adding songs onto my playlist with his other hand, grumbling things under his breath about how "fucking stupid" the interface of the app was.

Finally, when Morgan had texted and said the plane was landing in ten, did our little bubble falter a bit.

Harry still had my phone when the message had come through and seemed slightly annoyed that I had her number. He was apparently still holding onto his grudge from a few weeks earlier about her bringing me to the fight and he asked if I talked to her a lot outside of "the work I was doing with them." When all I'd said was that he could easily check my phone himself to figure that out, he'd caught me by the wrist before I could turn around to get dressed and seemed genuinely distressed – or at least from what I could make out on his face, considering what he was feeling was always a mystery to me unless he outright voiced it.