Recovery / / h.s

Chapter Forty-Three.

Silence, I learned, was actually a comfortable thing. I used to hate it. I hated the way the silence came down on you and nearly crushed you under its weight and I just always felt so alone in silence even when I was surrounded by other people. Things were different now. I could sit with Harry in complete silence, him with one of his books that he never seemed to put down and me with a pen and my journal just writing. It reminded me of when I was younger and my mom and dad would just sit at the kitchen table together for hours and not say a single thing. The love was still there, as if just being near each other was enough for the both of them. It was comfortable and every so often we would look up at each other and just smile because we knew the other felt it too. The feeling that this was how things were supposed to be was evident in both of us.

I loved watching him read. The way his eyebrows would furrow and a look of bliss for a fictional place would take over his face, he sat back on the couch with one leg over the other and the book folded in his lap. He just looked so peaceful when he was reading, so content.

"What are you writing about today, baby?" He asked, not looking up from the page. This whole cancer thing scared the hell out of me and there were just so many emotions going on at once that all I could do to help myself was write. I just wrote whatever came into my head, whatever I was thinking about that day. Most days it was about Harry or my mom.

"You," I answered honestly. "Me. Us."

His head perked up, his eyebrows raised and a questioning look on his face. "Interesting."

"What are you reading today?"

He held the book up. "Rereading, actually. And it's The Outsiders."

"Your favorite."

"The one and only," he was giving me that stupid goofy smile that he flashed whenever he was happy. It was my favorite smile of his.

"You're so cute, you know that?" I gushed, placing the pen and paper on the coffee table and moving from the chair to the couch beside him. He closed his book and sat back on the couch, a smug smile on his lips.

"Cute?" he chuckled. "Sorry to break it to you, love, but I am not cute."

I giggled, poking his dimpled cheek with my index finger. His tongue darted out and swiftly swept across his lips. I payed close attention to how his lip ring twitched around. "Yes you are. You think you're such a badass, but you're just a big... cupcake. You're a cupcake."

"A cupcake, huh?" He raised an eyebrow and when he was looking at me with his eyes furrowed and his lip pulled between his teeth, it was so hard to remember what the hell I was even talking about.

"Yeah, a cupcake," I stammered out and he chuckled. God god he knew what he was doing to me and he was amused by it.

"Mmmm," he hummed, pushing my shoulders down until I was laying on my back and he was hovering over me. "Out of all the words you could have used, you fucking used cupcake." He dipped his head down to kiss my neck and I could feel his unkempt curls brush the side of my cheek whenever he moved.

"What-" I stammered and I could feel him smirk on my neck. He constanly made my head a clouded mess of jumbled up thoughts and incomplete ideas. "What other word should I have used?"

"I don't know-" he placed a kiss to my jawline and then one to my lips. "Masculine-" Kiss. "Hot-" kiss. "Rugged."

"Rugged?" I wondered with a raised eyebrow as his hands slipped under my loose sweater. The warmth felt amazing against the chill of my skin and i let out a slight whimper.

"What's wrong with rugged?" he wondered, pulling away from attacking my neck with his lips to look at my face. He was still smirking which ignited something inside of me that only he could simultaneously start and put out.