Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

25ᵀᴴ CHAPTER

                                                   25ᵀᴴ CHAPTER               

              “The heart has reasons that reason does not understand”

 

She opens her eyes to find shiny red lights far away from them, the darkness shrouding the late night completely, except for the small piece of road ahead of the car, visible only thanks to the headlights. The clouds are falling in raindrops, silently, hazing the weather.

Elisha feels the heater is on, but more than that, she feels a soft tissue over her arms and as she glances curiously at it, Leesh sees a not-of-her-own jumper casually placed over her sleepy limbs. Harry’s got his eyes focused on the road, humming quietly from the back of his throat at the song playing on the radio almost like a lift’s background track, his voice deep and husky barely filling the air.

The moment he feels her gaze on him, though, he smiles smugly but doesn’t turn around. Instead, he stops the humming and simply listens, falls into the half-silence that settles around. Leesh waits a few more seconds before adjusting on her seat, pulling her feet off of it and straightening her back. She pulls the jumper closer and hides her fists in it.

“How long?” she murmurs silently, leaning against the window and blocking out the cold touch, focusing on the warmth of her hands.

Harry doesn’t miss a beat, drumming on the wheel with his long fingers, the sound of the silver ring reverberating through the empty car. “You’ve slept or ‘till we there?”

“Both,” she states, yawning just for the sake of offering more oxygen to her brain. It’ll take a while until she’s back to her own sanity again.

“An and two hours, respectively.”

Elisha gaps at him, widening her eyes slightly. “Two hours still? How long we’ve been on the road?”

Harry does turn to face her, this time, and he looks tired but amused nonetheless, as if everything about the woman makes him want to laugh. “Three hours and a half. But, theoretically speaking, we’ve just started properly going somewhere at a considerable speed.”

Leesh gives up on the premise of staying still, slumping down the seat and locking her ankles together, fiddling with her fingers underneath the jumper. When Harry faces the road again, he doesn’t spare Leesha another glance for a few minutes, both completely induced into quietness.

Then, suddenly, he slows down and bends down enough to reach for one of his cameras inside the glove compartment, handing it to Elisha so she can see past the several pictures. He whispers a barely audible “clean it for me?” that Leesh agrees easily, until the moment she realises the pictures within the camera are not recent.

She complies it anyway.

--

Leesha’s mood the next day is mostly like the weather: apathetic.

When she opens her eyes, Harry’s still sleeping on the bed next to hers, his chest bare underneath the covers. The tattoos on his collarbone are half peeking out, the dark ink contrasting if compared to his milky skin. Outside, she can hear what’s been constant lately, against the rooftops, the same dripping sound.

In a moment, she pushes the warmth to her feet and dares a step out of the bed, wandering sleepily – limbs still lazy – towards his direction and shoving an arm underneath his pillow so she can turn off his alarm going off. Marimba should so be prohibited.