The Sixteenth Chapter

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"How's it hangin', Nicole? Cherry decent?"

As soon as your door slammed shut, the heavy breaths exerted from your chest drowned the echo of your footsteps trudging up the staircase. You'd just agreed to follow Harry to god-knows-where to do god-knows-what, the faded souvenir mask of his slushy dimple and raw eyes pounding rocks into your skull to convince you to let your guard down for an evening of mystery.

It was thoroughly unlike you in every way, consenting to be picked up from your home at a time when you're typically slipping into a nightgown for the evening, settling all of your trust and safety into the hands of a person that you would have much rather leapt from a window to avoid just weeks ago. You could still feel the prickle of his palm print in yours as you jogged down the hallway past your kitchen and banged Nettie's bedroom door wide open, your hair falling in natural feathers around your cheekbones as you whined about having just made a huge mistake.

What you didn't know is that in that exact same moment, Harry had escaped a single block away and tumbled into the first patch of grass he saw, allowing his eyelids to fall shut with the setting sun flushing against the smile sculpted into his handsome features. He was well beyond the point of feeling nervous or apologetic for his feelings. He wasn't even sure if the term 'excitement' quite cut it, but he knew that there wouldn't be many diverse thoughts passing through his mind for the next couple of hours, aside from lucid abstractions of what was to come and the reflection of how it felt to have your hips nestled against his as you hung upside-down in a hammock of gooey, caramelized heaven from the swaying trapeze bar.

To him your body felt a lot like dipping your big toe into perfectly tempered, foamy bath water; when it was neither too hot nor too cold, the luscious puffs of cherry-scented bubbles consuming him straight to the bone, the line of where your honeyed skin ended and his began unidentifiable.

Cupid's arrow had been honing in on his heart for months, but now it was so deeply lodged into his chest that he had begun to accept the permanent ache as an infinite growing pain. And fuck, it hurt so good to be punctured by venomous infatuation.

The lightness of the clouds had nothing on him.

Nettie didn't try very hard to hide her discouragement of the predicament, suggesting that perhaps you could feign illness or turn all of the lights off inside of your apartment while you hid under the bed and pretended you weren't home when he returned to pick you up. She was understandably worried about his intentions, pointing out how little you truly know about him and how he chooses to spend his free time on the weekends. You don't know any of his friends outside of the circus or much about his social history aside from the handful of burners you'd seen him unabashedly flaunting around the courtyard of your workplace. It's possible that you'd find yourself in an uncomfortable situation with no escape, trapped however many miles away from home in a town you'd never even step foot in before, mascara dripping down your cheeks as you shivered and searched the desolate streets for a payphone.

You knew better though. You knew in the very pit of your heart that Harry would voluntarily walk straight off of the edge of a cliff to avoid inflicting any amount of pain on you. That much was explicitly clear in the streak-free mirror of his eyes, the tweak of his sensible smile, the stability of his warm hands. There was no use in attempting to convince her of this though, Nettie was less than impressed by a sprinkling of bewitching flattery and cursory doting. She'd seen it all before and didn't trust such a snap twist in behavior, regardless of how many head injuries or life-altering near-death experiences were involved.

Human beings are as dynamic and static as the ocean. The tide rises and falls with the phase of the moon but the substance under the surface is always the same; a groundwork of haunted, empty shells and polished sea glass. We all have shadowy ghosts and lustrous treasures, but it's the strength of the swell that determines our characters. Harry was riding a crest of desire right now, but what happens when the wave crashes to shore? What will be exposed, phantoms or gemstones?

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