Matilda | Harry Styles

THIRTY-THREE

"Okay, all of you - are you listening?"

I heard Elin scoff beside me, and I turned to look at her, noticing the expressions on everybody else's faces. Both Elin and Sarah appeared completely amused, and even Mitch, beside them, had a playfully dismissive expression on his face. I glanced across to the other side of me, where Harry sat next to me, as Pauli murmured something beside him that caused him to laugh, also. Nobody could take her seriously.

Stella huffed from her position, standing in front of us. We were sat in a row, the group of us, on the tour bus, where Stella had summoned our attention. We were leaving New York to head for New Jersey, where Harry was going to be playing two shows. We were probably only twenty minutes, at most, into the journey, when Stella had cleared her throat in an attempt to gather our attention.

I'd probably had one conversation with her, at most, for the duration of the tour - and it was to insult me. We weren't friends, by any means, but day-to-day, it didn't have much impact on me. Nobody paid her much mind - she was constantly working; I had to credit her for that, but nobody seemed to have any form of connection with her, and she seemed to prefer it that way. The only person I'd ever see her converse with, other than Ally, was Harry - and I realised how much I trusted him, in that I didn't feel at all insecure in those interactions.

The way she'd touched his arm, and lean into his shoulder, seemed to have become far less of an issue than I'd suspected on the first day I'd seen her - I wasn't sure I'd seen it happen at all, since. They'd seemed so close, upon my arrival, but Harry never seemed to carry a huge amount of conversation with her - there was never any opportunity for her to be so touchy. At least, never when I was there.

I'd sort of grown used to the evil looks I'd receive from Stella. It wasn't exactly constant, but she didn't filter it with much else - she'd either refuse to look in my direction whatsoever, and when she did, it certainly wasn't to meet my eye; it was more, whenever she saw Harry and I together, that I could sense her eyes on me, on us. Her pursed lips, and narrowed eyes - they were a given. At times, it made me uneasy, but I was never around her for long, nor was my attention ever on her - it was always drawn away, by the people I was actually spending time with.

Everybody had been exchanging amused glances from the moment she'd declared that she and Ally had an announcement to share with us. I would've felt bad for her, had she not been so awful, and if there wasn't a general consensus that, generally, she wasn't a nice person.

Harry was sitting beside me, and my legs were brought up onto the couch to allow his hand to curl around my knee. He was stabbing a plastic fork into a boxed salad that looked deeply unappetising, but he stubbornly insisted that he loved it.

I wasn't sure how he had an ounce of energy left after the day he'd had yesterday, or the evening that had followed. Though the encounter with the paparazzi had definitely bothered him, he didn't let it spoil the remainder of our dinner, or the rest of our night. I couldn't quite contemplate how, upon arriving back to the hotel room, either of us had located the energy that we had to let our hands trace along one another; or for his hand to fall between my legs as mine pulled at his clothes in a haste to remove them - but we'd found it. He'd hissed lowly in my ear at my mere urgency to feel him, as I'd immediately reached for him upon our arrival back to the room, but he certainly didn't object to it. It was evenings, between us, just like that, that I never wanted to be parted from.

"Okay," Ally stood up, bringing her hands together. An excited grin was on her lips, as I snuck a glance at Harry, who seemed just as clueless as the rest of us. "We have some really big news."

"Harry," she said, looking at him, "the shows at the arena this week won't be going ahead." Harry frowned, immediately perplexed as he set his fork down.