Complicity [h.s]

01

make sure you read 00 first! this is technically chapter 2!

Hi, angel,

Today I thought of you while brushing my teeth. It was a memory of you sitting on my bathroom counter, in my shirt, your legs wrapped around my hips, watching me while I brushed. If I close my eyes and think about it hard enough, I can feel you. You're a weird science in my brain, it doesn't know how to process you sometimes. It likes to think you're actually in front of me—an annoying trickery when I want you so bad.

It's approaching summertime soon, kinda. I'm hoping for the weather to get warmer. It's only April, but May is just a few days away.

Your birthday is in May.

It's almost your birthday, love.

I've never gotten to see you on your birthday—you didn't join the tour until June last year. You'll be twenty—finally. I'm twenty-four now, my birthday just passed a couple of months ago. I didn't realize I missed my birthday until two weeks later.

Have I always been four years older than you?

Yikes.

You need to turn twenty so I can stop conceptualizing the fact I'm twenty-four and in love with a nineteen-year-old.

Today I'm sitting on a rooftop in a lawn chair, right across from the—

"What's the difference between a peach and a nectarine?" Niall says with a mouthful of the fruit, interrupting my thoughts.

I turn my head to him sitting in the lawn chair a few metres on my left, the skyline of New York past his head. His grey hoodie stays up with a backwards red cap on underneath it. He chews annoyingly loud with his feet kicked up.

"Google it." I look back down at my journal, feet kicked up on the ledge of the brick rooftop. My pen starts scribbling through the pages again.

Oh, I didn't even tell you yet, Av...

I have a special roof I like to go sit on. That's where I am right now, writing to you. I've been coming here for months now, perched on an old lawn chair with my feet kicked back on the ledge. It's nice up here now that the weather is getting warmer.

Niall joins me sometimes, I'm not sure why. All he does is bother me when I'm trying to concentrate. Why do I come up here? Well, besides now that I write to you—I also like to take pictures.

I'm a photographer I guess, just like you.

"Isn't one of them fuzzy?" Niall interrupts again.

"I don't know," I say shortly with my eyes down on the paper, hoping he'll read the room and understand I don't want to talk.

"Because I think a peach is fuzzy..."

"And is the one in your hand fuzzy?" I ask as if I'm talking to a four-year-old.

"Well..." he trails off. "I ate it."

I turn my head and see he's just holding the pit. I roll my eyes and look back down at my book.

"Then I guess it's a mystery," I say under my breath.

"But aren't I allergic to peaches?"

"Nope." I correct while multitasking.

"And how would you know?"

"Because you're allergic to pineapple. We have this discussion every few weeks when you make pina coladas and Louis has to jam an EpiPen in your thigh." I correct in an uninterested tone, hoping he'll shut up now.