boys don't cry. [h.s]

thirty four

November

"Are you seriously telling me you're wearing that to a date?"

"It's not a date, Rory," she told him for the thousandth time, but he wasn't listening.

"You could have at least worn a dress," he grumbled. "What's the point of wearing jeans? Why do you insist on wearing denim all the time?"

"I promise you Harry'll be wearing jeans too," she said, but she looked in the mirror above the mantelpiece nervously now, adjusting her shirt. "Probably ripped ones, too."

"How did he rip them?" Meera asked pensively, looking up from the papers on the table.

"He bought them with rips in," Isabel said with a laugh.

Meera frowned. "Well he should have taken them back."

Isabel glanced over to Rory on the sofa and they exchanged a smile.

"Are you nervous?" Rory asked, frowning as she looked back at the mirror.

"No," she mumbled, swallowing loudly. "I don't know. Maybe. No."

It was a half lie. She wasn't nervous about seeing Harry, but she was nervous about this date situation. As much as she was telling Rory and Meera it wasn't a date, it kind of was.

It had been three weeks since the marathon, and she and Harry had only seen each other a handful of times. Harry had been busy with his exhibition, as had Isabel with the film festival, and they'd both agreed it was best to give each other space. And then at work, things were tentative between them, shy smiles and playing with each other's fingers under the table. That's as far as it had progressed: there'd been no proper kissing. Not yet anyway.

On the weekend they hadn't spent any alone time together either, just gone to the pub or slobbed about at the boys' house with the others. And as much as Isabel loved being with everyone, she'd wanted some privacy with Harry as well. Neither of them knew what things would be like now they were together, but she wanted them to figure it out and not have their only moments together be in the suffocating confines of the shoe booth, or in the car home from work, or a few seconds alone in the kitchen before someone bounded in.

The only respite was that they texted constantly, sometimes even when they were in the same room. They peeked over their phone screens, smiling at each other in silent delight, and they texted way into the night, until Isabel's thumbs hurt and her eyes burned from the brightness of the screen in the dark of her room. It felt like a secret somehow, like they were fourteen and had school in the morning, and in those texts Isabel learned more about Harry in three weeks than she had in eleven months. It was all silly things - that he was listening to Muse's Hysteria the first time he kissed someone, the fact that he hated broccoli more than anything, the story of when he had his first ever asthma attack during the 100m sprint on sports day in Year 4. And she told him, too, about the time James whacked her over the head with a branch and she had to get stitches in her eyebrow, about how she and Louis had got together, about how scared she was of graduating. It went on for hours, and they both knew everything they were saying was unimportant and trivial in the grand scheme of things, but somehow that made it even more exciting, like each fact or story or secret was a gift that the other pressed into their skin until it was embedded there forever.

There was only one instance in three weeks that she and Harry had been alone together out of choice, and that day had come nearly a fortnight after the marathon. That day was also Adam's twenty-fourth birthday.

It had been setting out to be a fairly uneventful Thursday when Isabel answered the phone to Harry and accepted without hesitation his request to come to the pub that evening. The pub around the corner from Liv and Caitlin's house had been so often frequented by their group that the landlord gave them free drinks if they stayed past twelve, and it didn't seem like there was anything special about the invitation at all.