Right By Your Side ~ Larry Stylinson

Chapter 17: Can't give you up

"Even if I leave you now, and it breaks my heart
Even if I'm not around, I won't give in, I won't give up on this love.."
The Veronicas

When Brad had arrived at the house the evening Louis left, Harry had forgotten he was even coming. Looking back, he could cringe at the state he was in when Brad arrived – curled up between Liam and Niall on the couch, working his way through his second box of tissues, with red puffy eyes and a running nose – it wasn't a good look.

When he'd broken down and told Brad everything that had happened with Louis, Brad had looked confused.

"I don't get it" he'd stated.

"What?" Harry asked.

"Well, you love him, yeah?"

"I do" Harry nodded. "So much."

"Well, what are you doing here then?" Brad had asked.

"What do you mean? I asked him to stay and he wouldn't, and I can't just up and leave my job – it's not something I can do just anywhere. I need to be here, you know that." Harry replied.

Brad shrugged. "All I know is that if I had to choose between Erica and a job, it would be a no brainer for me, mate. A job is, well, it's just a job. I'd clean toilets if it was the only option for being with her."

"That's easy to say when you didn't have to make the choice, though, isn't it. And I'm calling bullshit on the toilet cleaning" Harry replied with a raised eyebrow, making Brad chuckle. "My job isn't just a job to me, Brad. It's my whole career, it's what I've worked for, I love it and I don't want to do anything else. I can't do this back home, it has to be here. I was kind of hoping Lou would move here – he can teach anywhere, you know? I want to be with him, but I can't just give up everything to do it. It wouldn't work."

"Well Louis staying here would have been ideal, yeah. But he didn't, so the way I see it, you have two choices – accept that decision and move on, or decide that he's worth giving everything up for. Obviously, the decision has to be one you can live with, so you need to be sure."

"But I don't like either of those options" Harry had whined. "It's such a difficult choice!"

"If it's a difficult choice, then there's your answer – it should be an easy one, mate" Brad had told him. "The leaving here may be hard, yeah – but the decision to go should be easy." When he'd left, he'd hugged Harry tightly. "I hope you work it out buddy. I hate seeing you so miserable."

***

In bed that night, Harry had tossed and turned, Brad's words echoing in his mind and not letting him rest. It wasn't as simple as Brad had made it out to be. It was all well and good to say the decision should be easy – in theory that may be right, but in reality, it was oversimplifying things. It was more complicated than that.

Harry loved his job. He didn't want to leave it. That was something he was sure of.

Or, at least he'd been sure about it before Louis left. Now he wasn't sure of anything, only that everything felt wrong without Louis here. The bed was too big, too cold and too empty – a fitting metaphor for how his life suddenly felt. He was struggling to imagine going back to the way things were before Louis exploded into his life. In such a short time, Louis had burrowed under his skin and somehow made himself essential to Harry's happiness. Now he was gone for less than twenty four hours, and Harry was floundering to regain any sense of normality. Instead, it felt like his world had ended.

He even tried to imagine the kind of jobs he could do if he moved back home to England to be with Louis and found that he couldn't really imagine himself doing anything other than what he was doing now and being happy with it.