Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

48ᵀᴴ CHAPTER

                                         48ᵀᴴ CHAPTER 

    "There are certain things in life that you'll be forgiven for, no matter how thoughtless or stupid or reckless, but if you do that same thing twice, you're on your own" 

Harry stays there for hours straight, staring up at the glass and watching as the sky slowly turns dark. The sounds of the city disappear along with the sunlight, leaving behind only vague buzzes and leaves shuffling.

He can also hear his breathing.

At some point the floor beneath him had been cold, but now it’s been long enough for it to be warm under his back, the human contact too lingering.

Harry still has to digest the excess of information he’s been given lately; the fact that Chrissie came back and he rejected her still too much. As if it weren’t enough, now Elisha is in love with him, and things just seem to be going downhill. That was never meant to happen, and he should’ve known she wouldn’t be like his past flings of one or two nights.

It can’t be labelled as a nightstand if it goes far longer than a couple of nights only, right? It was stupid of his part to believe it could.

His head aches from so much thinking, and it feels like there’s a hammer hitting him every few seconds. Sometimes he growls at the pain, sometimes he just shuts his eyes tightly and prays to whatever God it is so it can leave him, but it never really does. Not for too long, anyway.

When he tries to stretch out his arms before lacing them behind his head he ends up hitting some of the takeaway boxes he’s ordered, now completely empty and still there. Right now, Harry just can’t find the strength to stand up and put it all in the trash can, no matter how easy the task might sound.

The structure of the gallery is almost fully done, which means the workers he hired will stop coming soon, and the rest is left for him to do. The details, just what he wanted the most.

It distracts him, but when he thinks of it it’s too much, too, and he wonders how in hell is he going to find time for that.

The bills don’t stop coming, and he’s got at least thirty more travels on his agenda; ones he’s not that much excited about. Harry’s got to buy new lenses for his cameras, and there are hundreds of photographs in the dark room on the floor below he still hasn’t bothered with even putting in order.

Somehow the dream of starting his own gallery is starting to drift away, much further than it was before. He doubts he’ll ever be able to handle something like this again.

So he sighs, keeps staring up at the sky and hopes time could freeze just so he could never leave this place. Here he doesn’t have to wonder putting up a façade, nor does he have to socialise, which seems just as bad.

He’s so immersed in his problems that he doesn’t hear the footsteps on the stairs; doesn’t feel the glare aimed towards him when the silence is settled again.

Indeed, Harry only comes back to Earth when a voice knocks him out of his trance and cuts through thick air.

“It’s been a week, Harold,” it says, and it startles him enough to actually jump (or something like that).

Harry turns his head frantically to the side only to spot Zayn a few metres away, leaning against the railing around the stairs and pulling something out of his pockets. He’s got his ankles locked and his shoulders slumped down, his hands fumbling to light up a cigarette, and there’s only one thing that could possibly mean: