boys don't cry. [h.s]

nineteen

May

On the morning of her birthday, Isabel and Harry were sat on the Piccadilly line in the most horrendously awkward silence she'd experienced to date, and Harry wouldn't stop staring at her.

Things had gone from bad to worse to positively horrific the evening before. After leaving Southbank and travelling back to Hammersmith, the pair of them arrived on her mother's doorstep without having said a word to each other in over an hour, and then, upon arrival, Isabel found out that the absolute worst had happened.

Her entire family were home.

Her mum, step-dad, sister, brother-in-law, niece, nephew, brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law were all crammed into her childhood home in a well-meaning welcome committee that made her want to cry because she was in such a foul mood she didn't want to see any of them, and because a full house meant that there were no spare beds and she and Harry would inevitably have to share.

She couldn't decide who she wanted Harry to meet less – her sister or her brother – but she wasn't given an opportunity to make her mind up before the pair of them were shoved into the middle of a family dinner that made Isabel want to throw up.

Her only blessing – one that made her praise every single possible God that may exist for making May the twenty-fourth an unusually chilly day – was that Harry's tattoos were hidden beneath his jumper, because that was the only possible thing that could have made James dislike him more.

James had the typical protective older brother thing down, the type of attitude that only the cocky, good-looking and equally as shady brothers can pull off. Isabel knew better than anyone at the table that James and Harry had more than enough similar experiences to sustain a very long conversation, and given the way James snarled the moment he saw him, Isabel guessed he knew that as well as she did.

Harry had, to his credit, handled the situation much better than her. He shook everyone's hands and introduced himself when Isabel failed to, offering to take their bags upstairs so that her step-dad would be spared the trouble.

"What the fuck, Isabel?" James hissed as soon as he was gone.

"Shut up, James," Isabel had replied flatly. "When are we eating?"

Isabel's mum had ordered a mountain of Thai food, and Isabel sat in an almost catatonic state while she watched her entire family devour Harry alive. Savannah – true to character – fired a thousand questions at Harry as he tried desperately to eat his Khao Phad one-handed, the other hand steadying both Isabel's niece Ruby and the cat who had climbed into his lap. Alex, her brother-in-law, and her step-father Mark sat in good-natured silence, while James' fiancée Georgia and her mother were practically fawning over Harry, and James was glaring at him from across the table, stabbing his chopsticks at his Som Tam with a scowl that said he wished it was Harry's face.

Harry just sat there, mostly in silence, his teeth gnawing on his lip in the absence of a free hand to play with it, and his cheeks flushed. And although Isabel had insisted since the second they had walked through the door that she and Harry were not in a relationship, nobody seemed to be listening.

"I knew I made Kanelbulle for a reason!" her mother said, beaming at Harry as Ruby tried to pull his bandana out of his hair. He smiled adoringly at the child in his arms shifting her in his lap before she crushed the cat.

"Don't let her do that, Harry," Savannah insisted, leaning across the table towards him. "She's always messing with my hair as well, it's a nuisance."

"She's probably surprised a guy's got a scarf in his hair," James grumbled, and Georgia poked him with a frown.

Harry swallowed, looking at Isabel nervously. "I heard from Is that you just got a job at ITV," he tried, flashing an uneasy smile at James. "That's sick."