Lemonade (Harry Styles A.U.)

Chapter 40: Lunch With Pink Idiots and Tragedy.

The Florida heat brought uncontainable stench from the marshy, dirty waters wafting through the hot air, carried with the breeze at the peak of the day one Wednesday afternoon. Harry had kept himself shielded beside the trunk of a tree, just hardly keeping himself safe from baking in the midday blaze through the thick foliage overhanging. His skin was still sticky and sweaty, his lab coat had been shed and balled up in a pile on the ground beside him, performing a delicate balancing act on top of the lunch bag he'd brought in attempt to save the white fabric from dirt and grass stains. Fingers picking mindlessly at a bundle of green grapes from a Tupperware container, book splayed open upon his lap, low melodic hums were shared only for his own ears through sealed lips. The tune was somewhere between a personalized mashup of Stevie Nicks and a made-up absentminded melody, hardly with any thought put into his efforts between bites of lunch.

Eyes scanning the word filled pages before him, his interest had fallen off slightly in favor of tapping toes and imaginary tunes to harmonize with the call of Floridian wildlife, both captive and not.

"How nice, gloomy twenty six sings."

His song was silenced instantaneously. A grape was placed upon his tongue to plug his face to capture any further noise he dared make, squinting eyes ripping away from the uncaptivating pages to follow the feminine tone interrupting his peace. Unsurprisingly, he was met with the sight of a bottle dyed redhead in a lab coat standing at the very edge of the cement pathway he'd intentionally veered off from. Grinning, her steps had been soft enough to go without picking up on her arrival, and though he'd only managed to catch all of a five minute conversation with her before, he fully expected the next words out of her mouth to be taunting. "Nothing says gloom like having lunch to the song of Landslide and the aroma of smelly pink waterfowl." Her nose shriveled, "You really could've picked a better spot, it smells like sulphur and rotting fish."

Harry glanced to the murky marsh waters gated off only by sparse wood pickets and overgrown wetland foliage. "Spoonbills make good company. Pelicans and I have an unspoken disagreement going on, they seem to not like," he gestured generally toward himself, "this. Whatever it is I've got going on, they hate it. The big pink idiots over there, we're cool."

"You just get more and more tragic."

Smirking, Harry's hands sealed the book shut and chose to play along, "Wait until I know you well enough to be my true and authentic self, you'll be weeping."

The sun beamed down upon her head in a way that created a glow in her hair, gleaming from just behind where she stood and leaving his face scrunched during his attempts at looking her way directly. The tree tops kept his skin safe from the rays, but not his eyes. His squinting was redirected down toward his lap while her hands slid into the pockets of her coat, her shoes scuffled into a relaxed stance on the pathway when her eyes locked onto the book beneath his palms. "What're you reading?"

Chuckling, the book was slyly stewed away from wandering eyes by slipping it underneath his thigh in the grass, hiding the title should she dare step any closer to see for herself. "I said, when I know you well enough to be my true and authentic self."

"Purple cover, gold writing," she declared, subtly pointing out she stood hardly ten feet away and could clearly see the spine of the book poking out from behind his knee. "I have access to google. Tragic book with purple cover, and boom I have you figured out."

His fingertips instinctively ran along the frayed edges of the worn pages. Sentimentalism was at the forefront of his actions, liking his secrets no matter how small they were because they were his to have and nobody else's. Still, he watched her brows raise expectantly. Maura's shoes began to inch closer, off the safe path of sidewalk cement and into the wide expanse of the purposely unkempt patch of grass he'd found himself seated in. The soles made contact with dirt and rocks, littered with weeds before he plucked another grape from his lunch and mindlessly enunciated words around the fruit on his tongue. "You intimidate me, Maura."