The Story of us

Chapter 17: When breaking into a house, don't wear a skirt

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania - 414 miles

I was officially going crazy. And by that, I meant that I was eighty-eight percent sure that I had a thing for Harry.

I had expressed this to Nyla a couple of days prior since she was really the only one that I could talk about with this (Travis would tell Harry in a heartbeat, and Niall wouldn't quit making fun of me for it), and she had screamed. Literally. I knew for a fact that I hadn't been that insane when I was a teenager, at least nowhere near to her level.

"This is the best news that I've heard all day!" she squealed loudly, finally setting her phone down and grinning widely at me. "Oh my God, Lexi, I can't believe that you have a crush on Harry! Finally, am I right?" She paused for a minute and then finished, "Ahh, you two just give me so many feels!"

I gave her a not so gentle push to the shoulder and scowled at her. "Okay, first of all, it's the only news that you've heard all day. It's barely the afternoon. And second, don't call it a crush. For fuck's sake, Nyla, I'm not twelve. I still don't even know if I like him for sure. And you can't get feels from people in real life, only TV characters. God."

She ignored every single sentence I had just delivered except for the second to last one and shook her head solemnly. "No, you definitely do. Stop trying to convince yourself out of it, Lexi; there's nothing wrong with liking somebody."

I didn't say anything else after that, because Travis, Niall, and Harry had just made their way back into the car after an extremely prolonged stop at the gas station. Nyla was driving this time because she complained that she never got to do anything, and Niall had expressed that he was getting tired of chauffeuring our asses around everywhere. That left Travis to sit in the passenger's seat beside the teenage girl, and me to be squashed in between Niall and Harry, both of whom took up a significant amount of space.

I wasn't sure whether or not I should have been avoiding eye contact with Harry, or if I should even be talking to him at all. I had been in a relationship for so long that I had forgotten all about what it meant to have a crush on a guy; I wasn't used to thinking this way about someone who spoke more words to me than just, "why are you even wearing a bra, Lex?" and "wanna go one more time?" I had no idea how to act, or what to say.

I guess that I was still the exact same in Harry's eyes, though, because he was still treating me the exact same way that he had for as long as I had known him. And I really had no idea why I had been expecting anything else. "Hey," he said, but he wasn't even looking at me. Instead, his gaze was focused solely on the screen of his phone, and Nyla and I exchanged a wary glance.

"Hi," I repeated. And after that, I had no idea what else to say, which was ridiculous, because it had never been like this between the two of us. Even when I had hated him more than anything else in the world, we still never ran out of things to talk–or argue–about. Why did I have to let my stupid feelings get in the way of things?

Harry glanced up at me after that and gave me a small smile. I couldn't keep my heart from skipping a beat when he leaned in closer to me and said, "You look nice today."

My eyebrows shot up quickly and, my voice shaking a little bit, I asked, "What?"

He gave me a strange look and set his phone down on his lap. "Um. I said you look nice today?" The way he said it made it come out sounding more like a question than a statement. Why were things so weird between us, all of a sudden? It wasn't as if he knew that I might have a crush–argh, thing for him. Right?

"Oh." I wasn't sure what else I could say to that. "Uh. You do too, I guess?" It was the truth. He always looked good, probably even after he had just run three miles or something. (And I wouldn't know what I looked like after doing that because I didn't run.)