Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

41ˁᵀ CHAPTER

                                        41ˁᵀ CHAPTER 

                       "Prohibition is the trigger of crime"

 I am definitely in love with you.

Which. Fuck.

It’s not- it isn’t a thing she’s just realised, per se, but admitting it to herself feels so much more realistic than the small signs she’s been receiving lately. And it hits her like a bomb, exploding without warning or that pre-explosion tick-tack that at least prepares you for the worst.

It didn’t happen the night before; it wasn’t something she admitted to her conscience when she slept with him. Everything pretty much just happened, and at the moment Elisha couldn’t exactly say she was even thinking of something. They were both hectic and just lost on each other it was hard to get a grip on what was going on outside their little bubble.

Acknowledgment came the morning after, when she woke up all on her own and for about five seconds she thought he’d completely left and abandoned her to deal with whatever that thing was happening inside her chest. For about five entire seconds Leesh thinks she might’ve felt what people so call ‘heartbreak’, even if the slightest one.

Those five seconds were worth of self-hate and a lot of sentences floating her mind, such as ‘you knew this would happen, he’s obviously not ready’, or ‘he’s not a man to wake up next to’, maybe even some ‘cuddling? Your expectations are so stupid, Elisha’.

That until she saw the note next to her, and even though it wasn’t a complete relief, it was enough to know he hadn’t left her to solve things on her own and do the walk of shame.

She’s not sure if the moment he walked in was better or worse than the feeling of being alone. Because when he walked back in he still had that sleepy aura circling him whole, slightly puffed out and glossy eyes from slip, nose red from the cold and that same, tired – and always charming, always – smile, one she could feel weakening each one of her bones.

It’d been about the way his hair was still wild, and how he held their breakfast so casually. Also, possibly, about the way how things around them seemed to fit – despite the mess –, seemed to add to the familiarity.

Maybe it’d been about the fact she had been staring at his work for far too long since she woke up, or maybe it’d been all the staring from ages before that, from seeing her face so many times drawn into a paper, more than even she’d seen it on a mirror. Who knows, maybe it’d been about the way he always spoke so nonchalantly, and still held a burning passion she could use to light up a fire. And all those times, she had been watching carefully, as if begging to lose herself in his personality and drown in every endearing, loveable piece of him.

She feels stupid, and now she’s gotta make herself stop looking at him because it’s been long enough, and any second he might turn around and just catch her on the act.

Harry’s just as colourful as she is, except now he’s given up on paint fight since apparently something lit up inside him and now he feels like painting. He keeps pouring water drops into the colours and mixing them until they’re not two separate things; repeats the same movement with green and blue, and then red and purple, and at one point Elisha misses which colour is which.

There’s a handcloth he uses to dry his hands every once in a while, sometimes to clean his fingers so he can use one of them to fume the painting, sometimes just to adjust a detail he feels like the brush won’t cover.