The One Where Harry Styles Sneezed On Me

Day Eight

Elise woke up with a hangover, just not the type when you at least have the wild night you may not remember to show for it. She was certainly not in bed naked, with another nude person, surreptitiously checking to see if they used protection.

This was an emotional hangover.

She'd got feelings, for a boy. Man, did she hate those. The last time she had them, it wreaked all kinds of havoc, and that was just her sister's boyfriend not a world famous object of obsession. She should have known how to read the signs, that mistake had gone a similar way. Time spent together in a house, some things in common,  a little tension, fear of rejection, a move, sex, secret relationship, discovery, a broken hearted sister, disappointed parents, and a transcontinental move to escape.

Ok, so this one was in a much safer place than that. Harry was a bad choice as a man to have feelings for, but for totally different reasons than Bryce. Her quarantine buddy was a bad idea because of the rejection and/or future rejection.

Did it count as rejection?

Elise felt rejected, but feelings aren't facts, as her dad liked to remind her. She supposed it was a near miss. She had gone the last 10% just like the movie Hitch had taught her. Maybe he would have finished the gap, closed the circuit, and such, and she could have felt those beautiful pink lips on hers.

But he was saved by the bell.

Instead they ate, and sat on opposites ends of the table just like she had set it. Elise liked that it wasn't a ridiculously long ostentatious piece of dead wood before yesterday. She'd even complimented Harry on it. Last night it was unsatisfactory, definitely not as close as she would have liked to be sitting.

And during cake time, which had turned out stellar, he had touched her elbow and the bones in her feet had rattled. His hand hadn't coasted to her palm, nor had he spun her into him and pressed his lips to hers. He'd just told her it looked great and handed her the knife to cut.

Elise couldn't even think about the couch.

He'd insisted that they cuddle, and had lain behind her in the unexpected big spoon position. She'd been very excited when he suggested it, thinking it was a typical boy ploy to feel her up and get to the kissing they'd almost started.

She figured she'd at least get to feel a boner.

That was an atrocious word. But everything else sounded even worse in her head.

She'd felt no erection, just the warm shape and had wanted with all her might to press back against it, but if there was such a thing as a platonic spoon, she'd just experienced it. Then Harry had fallen asleep, his head bookended by hers until his neck relaxed onto the pillow.

Elise threw in the towel then.

The little voice in her head, that sounded suspiciously like her sister, told her that good guys didn't want her, though they'd be bad long enough to take what she was offering.

She was pretty sure she'd called Jessica a jealous bitch over that. The words had stuck in her head though, and not that she was hoping to make a go of things with her sister's ex, but the idea that he was just playing on her dark side to explore his own, it just poisoned their relationship. It certainly contaminated her already fragile relationship with her sister.

Elise had wanted to go away then, needed an escape, if she left it would be better, her parents didn't have to feel disappointed everyday when they looked at her, and Jessica didn't have to feel betrayed. Hence, England, quarantine, Harry Styles.

The first several days she could not figure out how it was karmic in any way that she got to be so close to Harry Styles. Now that he had become just Harry, the lovely rich weirdo with the bad taste in books and great taste in music, she was temporarily living with, she had figured out the catch.