Lonely Nights // H.S

27.

'I guess that's how I know you'

*

It's been a week since I last saw Harry. Not because he has been avoiding me, rather I felt he should have some space to decide what he's going to do. Whether he will choose Prue or me. If he'll continue with an engagement he was once so sure of or take a chance with someone he has only known in secret.

Hardly an easy decision to make, though I suppose to an onlooker they would find it a simple choice. Go with the girl he's loved for longer, the one he's chosen to sneak around with because he simply cannot quit her. They fail to acknowledge that his feelings are also similar for Prue, and he wouldn't have asked her to marry him without them. He was prepared to start a life with her, not me. He had said goodbye to me and whatever feelings he once harboured.

Until he didn't, I suppose.

I'm not sure what changed or when. He told me it was after seeing me properly for the first time in years, immediately being hit with the realisation that he'd always feel that way for me, but how does one become so sure of something like that in an instant? It took me years to realise how deeply I care for Harry, and even when we were reunited, a month or so passed before I accepted the existence of it. But he was so sure, so soon, and he tried to fight it, only to give in.

He loves me. He really, truly loves me.

Every day since the last his words have spun around every corner of my mind with such vigour, I worry I may have dreamt them.

I love you, Willow Mackey. I'm certain I always will, no matter what happens.

It's hard not to let myself become giddy with such a declaration. It does not come with the promise that he will choose me, but I would also be foolish to ignore the possibility that the changes he said he wanted to make were that in his relationship with Prue. That his words to me, about how much he loved me, said several times to make sure they stuck, meant a commitment.

An oath, perhaps. First a secret, now a promise.

To hear those words said back to me after believing myself entirely incapable of being loved seems like a fever dream. Something my mind conjured up out of sheer desperation. Not the kind you'd make up while sleeping. No, the kind that comes in sickness, that is a hallucination, or a mirage. So real, but barely there. Sometimes, I feel like I must ask him to say them again, just to be sure. It would go against the space I've given him, breach the one thing I promised him, but I've become so selfish with my desires as of late that it's too easy to cross boundaries at this point.

I wonder if telling me he loves me felt as much of a relief as it did for me. Breathing for the first time after being suffocated with loneliness for so long, or the feeling you get when you go on a plane and fly for the first time, or even seeing colour for the first time after only experiencing grey. A lot of firsts, really. It is the first time I've ever been in love, though. When he said it to me, it reminded me of walking through the meadows by my house with him. Sitting amongst the grass and the flowers, in our own little world, only each other in company. Lost, but found, all at once.

Did he feel that too? Did he feel the sun on his skin, or the cool water of the lido? Did he smell the wildflowers he enjoys picking for me? Did he hear the wind, always present? Or was it his own secret spot that he has brought me to a few times now. The library corner he reads to me in, the one he runs away to when everything gets too much. We are each other's safe space now, in a way, because our own hidden places are now tied up with memories of one another.

Every time I think of that moment, I am in the meadow, to be honest. Slowly walking through with his hand in mine, not a care in the world.

Love, I have come to realise, can be so mesmerizingly beautiful when it is reciprocated. It is, of course, not meant to be perfect, because a perfect love only awaits some cracks in its exterior until the dam breaks and a flood sets in. But, if it is returned with as much fervour and honesty as the first person gives, something about it seems much brighter and pleasant. Almost as if nothing can go wrong. No cracks, no floods.