Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

40ᵀᴴ CHAPTER

                                        40ᵀᴴ CHAPTER 

        "When you look at a person, you never know what they're hiding"

She’s still asleep, and so he tries to be as quiet as possible, untangling from the warm sheets and standing up with care, trying not to make the wooden floor underneath his feet creak.

Harry takes hold of the already cold pizza and not-that-much-cold coke and climbs down the ladder, trying to find the courage to leave the warehouse and do whatever he needs to do. He’s already left a quick message scribbled down in some sort of used paper – there’s possibly a failed drawing on the backside of it, also crumple marks –, placing it down where his head had laid for the past night, and it reads nothing more than a simple ‘I should be right back xx’.

He puts on his coat (that somehow managed to end up on the floor one store down of what it should) and opens the gate just enough for him to go through it, which also means is not enough to make – much – noise. The snow has ceased almost completely, though the floor is still covered by a thick layer, and the cold that hits him is pretty much the same.

The walk home is longer, having his legs uncoordinated as a fact, his mind too out of focus to take a turn at the right street. His fingers are nearly frozen where he holds the food, and the moment he finally climbs up the stairs to his room, he ends up tripping on the missing tile Elisha usually does.

The door opens easily for him, unlocked, and he steps in only to place the pizza and coke down on the table and fall back against his bed. He needs to think of this for a while.

Too out of focus, you see.

--

When he comes back with two cups of coffee and a bag full of brownies, he tries to be as quiet as when he’d left. It is completely useless, however, because Leesh is already up and covered by blankets wrapped up around her, her hand holding tightly at the point the ends meet around her neck.

She turns to look at him and offers nothing but a weak, tired smile, one Harry returns easily. They keep staring at each other with a certain distance between them, but it doesn’t take long until he comes back to Earth and steps forward, raising the bag in his hand so she can acknowledge it.

“Brought breakfast, but you were supposed to still be asleep,” he admits quietly, going straight through Leesh and towards the mattress instead.

She’s plopping down on it right after Harry, glancing at him curiously.

“What about pizza?” she wonders, already grabbing her cup of coffee and sinking her hand into the bag. When she speaks next, her mouth is full. “No tea?”

Harry laughs quietly to himself and shrugs like who wants nothing. “Respectively: in my room, and no.” Elisha nods in comprehension and he lets slip another breathy laugh. “Can’t believe we ate nothing last night.”

The woman next to him laughs, too, reaching for her own cup and tightly wrapping her fingers around it, seeking some source of warmth. “Suppose we were busy.”

He simply smiles as an answer for a long while, and blame him as you wish, but despite the cold he can still feel the fire of someone else’s skin pressed to his, like it’s there, still burning and pretty much alive. It is dangerous, possibly – even more because playing with fire never ends up well – but he’s been missing the contact, and Leesha can’t be half as destructing as the women he used to spend his nights with after having his heart broken by Chrissie.