1930's starlet, Anna Rose, expects to marry hotel mogul, Norman Gates, after her residence at the Winter Garden Theatre in a malignant entrapment that leaves her deeply wishing and searching for a sense of freedom. Little did she know, she would fin...
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Their evening strolls became a nightly engagement, albeit one that required more effort on her part. They could only meet after Harry's night shifts ended, while Anna sometimes was at her apartment by mid-afternoon or slightly later. This left Anna to herself, needing to wait for Harry before she could tell him about her day. Though, sometimes she'd make up a reason to use the elevator just to see him for a few minutes.
Seeing Harry became somewhat of a necessity for Anna. She couldn't put her confounding feelings into words, but the yearning and need to be around Harry was always there and intensified whenever she was away from him. Each walk seemed to grant her more access to his elusive soul. She's learned enough about him from that first night to know he's the kind of person who truly cares about everyone around him, and would gladly put anyone else's wants and needs before his own, not to appease his ego, but to see to it that they are content in themselves. Though that is not to say that Harry is a pushover. He's capable of speaking his mind with the competence of knowing the proper time and place to say and do the right things. There's been more than a few times when Anna's blinded by her privilege, and Harry is there to pull the Persian rug beneath her feet to let her land on the cold concrete of reality. While he can be rude and harsh at certain times, he's equally gentle and kind. She didn't think men like Harry still existed. The kind of man to be well rounded in his interests, who bares himself so willingly as he does emotionally, who preserves his humanity when too many have fallen off their moral bearings, who's naturally as charming as he is that he somehow knows exactly what to say when she speaks to him.
And frankly, he's quite handsome as well, but not in the traditional sense. He helms a sense of effeminate beauty in his features which Anna felt oddly drawn to. She finds her speech catching in her throat whenever he speaks. His voice tended to be much deeper when it was worn out, but would rise in pitch when he wanted to express more energetically. It was quite pretty, which was another thing about her thoughts of Harry that she felt was odd because she didn't normally think much of another's voice unless they were singing. She did once catch Harry humming a tune when she rode the elevator and gathered he had the ability to sing too– another point for him if she were counting. She was right, and one night he sang the song he'd been humming, a lullaby that his mother used to sing for him.
"My mother never sang lullabies to me," She admitted to him. To which, he responded, by singing louder.
Harry always knew what to do at the proper time and place.
Norman didn't know much about this part of her life. When they first met when she was thirteen, he was hardly interested in her as he was several years older, but when she grew older and eventually their paths met again on the eve of her nineteenth birthday, a relationship between them was formed. Their first date was hardly a fairy tale dream; she only recalls a simple dinner full of him talking about himself, and then him taking her against the wall of his ensuite later that night. Their relationship began very frivolously and raunchy, and in a way, an act of defiance against the standard her mother upheld for her for years. He offered her a cushion of comfort for years, never really allowing her to fall and learn to get up by herself.
