salute [h.s]

december 31 - new year's kiss

december 31 - new year's kiss

1D Fanfic/Salute Excerpt (ch.18)

Harry/Piper

"Where's my kiss?" Piper demanded.

"You'll have to wait until midnight for that."

Piper scowled sternly at him because she was not happy with him teasing her and then making her wait. He leaned in to press a gentle kiss to her nose that made her scrunch her face up and the resulting laugh she coaxed out of Harry was worth it. She loved that smile and those gorgeous dimples of his.

"I think it's started snowing," Piper said as she reached up to rub off some white flakes that had appeared in Harry's curls within the last couple of minutes. "Unless you've developed a wicked case of dandruff."

"How dare you," Harry said as he brushed some white out of her own hair in return. "Dandruff. Yeah right. Have you seen my hair? It's perfect."

"It could do with a cut maybe," Piper said as she fingered the curls at the nape of his neck, twisting the little hairs around her fingertip.

"D'you think it's too long? Should I just shave it all off?"

"Don't you fucking dare," she growled at him as she slid her fingers into his tousled locks. "I love these curls more than I love life itself."

Harry chuckled at her dramatics. "Good to know." He glanced past her and then upward, closing his eyes when flakes began falling on his face. Piper was pretty sure that what she was viewing in front of her was some sort of divine art and she was very glad that Harry had made an attempt to sober her up because she wanted to remember this moment for the rest of her life.

He ruined it by sticking his tongue out to catch snowflakes. "It's really coming down," he mentioned as he glanced around them in the alley. He stood abruptly, leaving Piper cold and confused on the ground. When he held his hand out, she stared at it warily. "Dance with me?"

"What?" she laughed incredulously, glancing between his hand and his gorgeous face.

"C'mon, it'll be fun. Romantic too."

Piper couldn't argue with that so she let Harry take her hand and pull her to her feet. He took a moment to dust off his coat and then draped it over her shoulders to keep her warm. She nearly combusted right there. It was the little things, and Harry was so good at little things. He noticed and he reacted. Nothing was too small for him. And he was just the type of gentleman that would stay cold if it meant keeping his girl warm.

After she had slipped her arms into the sleeves, the jacket big on her but not unmanageably so, Harry took her hand once more and pulled her into the middle of the little street, twirling her underneath his arm before pulling her close to him. Piper would hazard a guess that Harry was actually quite a dancer but both of them knew without saying it that she was not in any way an accomplished dancer. Booty shaking she could do, ballroom she could not.

It didn't matter. They didn't need to be fancy or professional. They were swaying back and forth to the quiet din of music they could hear from inside the pub and they were together and that's all that mattered. Harry's arms held her close and safe. Her hands curved around his shoulders possessively. Their eyes never drifted from each other as they moved slowly, the snow falling softly around them.

Piper wished she could take this moment and preserve it forever. She wished she could put it in a box that she could put on a shelf. She would take it out every so often and crack open the top. She would take the moment out and just live in it for a while, just to feel the same sense of peace and tranquility she felt standing in that dark little street at 11:55 as the snow fell silently around them.

She felt a little bit transcendent, like she'd escaped the plane of humanity and jumped somewhere else. It seemed impossible that it felt like only the two of them existed in the world when she could hear the music in the background, but it truly did feel like that. Her hand tightened on Harry's shoulder just to make sure he was still there, still real.

He was.

She wondered how she got lucky enough to have met him. That job she hated so much had brought them together. If she hadn't been in T branch that night, stuffing brownies in her face, she would never have heard that deep voice on the other end of the line, calling her petal for that very first time. That one moment had been the catalyst of all this and she was baffled by the sheer unpredictability of it all. She felt smaller than herself when she looked at things like that. The events leading to this moment, this interconnected moment that relied on so many other little small things, all came together in just the right way. What are the chances of that?

"We defy the odds," Piper said aloud before she had realized the words were even coming out of her mouth. Harry's brow furrowed a bit and his lip pouted ever so slightly as he tried to analyze what that meant.

"Yes we do," he said finally.

Sometime over the next couple of minutes, there was a ruckus of noise behind them and then Louis's voice was echoing through the alley. "It's a minute to midnight. You two are going to miss it!"

"Leave them," Eleanor said to her boyfriend softly, smiling at the couple dancing in the road.

The two of them didn't move. They just kept swaying there in the snow. And when the crowd inside the pub started counting down, Harry began counting down with them, his voice barely above a whisper.

When he got to zero, when midnight struck, he kissed her sweet and slow.