“Why can’t I stare?” He pressed, turning to face her more fully, resting his weight on his hip rather than his bum, and he sat his elbow on the back of the sofa, “You’re the one who said you loved kissing me so much that we needed to do it all of the time –”
Y/N’s eyes go comically wide, “I did not –” she started to squawk but he kept talking over her.
“--so maybe I am staring at them. And maybe I should grant your wishes and we should kiss a little before the food gets here, and my breath is all onion-y.”
or
Y/N feels bad it's taking so long but Harry doesn't mind
(18k+ words)
part 1
ii.
Y/N thinks that cats might just like stomping on her head.
Ferret does it because he’s Ferret; he’s all lean limbs and awkward tufts of hair that spike around his ears, with paws that are too big but he doesn’t seem to grow into, and a torso that would be lissom if he wasn’t so clumsy – he looks like that kind of cat that stomps on heads. It would be more shocking if he weren’t just narrowly avoiding stabbing her forehead with his claws in the morning because he’s hungry. She couldn’t even blame him either, because it was a foolproof way to yank her from the depths of a dream. One minute she’s swimming in water that’s too crystalline to be real trying to speak to fish, and the next she’s in her bed, Ferret’s front paw pressed against her cheek while he purred (seemingly content despite his “starvation”).
So she assumes she’s at home when she feels it, only for whatever reason Ferret was being a little more graceful than he usually is. He felt a little heavier too, like his metabolism had finally slowed so he started plumping up, and Y/N could have the slightly fat cat of her dreams. His purr was. . .different, softer, a little more reserved than the engine-like revving that usually tore her into reality. And when he crawled over the top of her head, flopping his body in front of her face in what might be a suffocation attempt, she realized that there was much more fur, it’s softer – Ferret’s fur is kitten soft, but this is something different – something purebred. And it smells not like herself, or his stinky little self, it smells like Harry. Why would her cat smell like Harry?
Her eyes flutter open, fighting past the heavy feeling of her lids and the sun streaming in through the window. Y/N pulls her curtains at night and screws her blinds shut tight (not just from the desire to wake up in relative darkness, but fear that someone was looking at her through the window, despite being on the third flow of a relatively tall flat building), and it is something so deeply embedded in her nightly routine, she doesn’t even forget to do it when she’s drunk.
When her pupils finally adjusted to what felt like a blinding light, she took in her surroundings. However, her surroundings were mostly composed of the white fur that was currently stuffed right in front of her face. This is not her cat, and this is not her room, and the mattress she’s lying on is too soft to be her own. It’s only when the cat turns around and she recognizes Dolly’s sweet, bright eyes slowly blinking at her that she comes to the understanding that she’s at Harry’s. In his clothes, soft and worn slouching over her body, with his blanket pulled up just beneath her armpit. The window was open just a sliver, enough that the wind billowed the curtains out, and the fan whipped around above her.
Harry was nowhere to be found, but that was probably for the best right now. She was barely awake and it always took her a couple of minutes to attune herself to reality after she roused from sleep. Especially when she wakes up somewhere that isn’t her room. Her muscles were stiff like she’d not moved for a while, and when she pressed up from the bed, she stretched out her arms and stifled a groan. Did Harry have plans? It couldn’t have been that late in the day could it have been? But Y/N was known to sleep in sometimes a little too late after being out the night prior, even if she turned in around midnight. Maybe he had an appointment or something – maybe he had plans for coffee. Though Harry doesn’t strike her as the type to leave unannounced or without explanation, and there’s no parting note on his nightstand. Just her phone, which had no new messages from him either – just a couple of pictures that Eloise sent from the night before, and Niall “helpfully” reminding her that he’d slid condoms into the side pocket of her purse.
They didn’t sleep together, she knew that, but they did kiss. The memory of it slaps itself across her face as she raises her fingers, touching them to her lips, probably dried from sleeping with her mouth open. His lips had been so soft against hers, so pillowy – he kissed her like he really wanted to like it was the most natural thing in the world. When she remembered how he followed after her mouth as she pulled away, something twisted in her lower stomach that was a little too similar to arousal. Harry kisses like he needs to breathe, and that is without him even licking against her tongue – she couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he’d had.
She feels embarrassed, even if she isn’t the one to suggest it. Y/N had given in pretty easily though, without him needing to ask twice, and for some reason, she’s feeling shy about that. Maybe he’d realized how easy for it she’d been – maybe he left this morning because he was worried she was developing feelings for him. Had he noticed so quickly? Y/N would have probably run off too, to avoid the conversation, letting her down easy, reminding her that she’s only here to help him find his actual soulmate, not to sponge off his affectionate tendencies for her own –
“You’re awake!” His voice slices through her spiral and Y/N turns to look at him. Harry had showered, she could tell by how damp his hair still was, and he looked way too good for someone who also drank the night before. His clothes are cozy though, sweatpants and a shirt that matches the one she wore, “I was just coming to check on you and Dolly. She didn’t want to get up with me this morning, she was loving her snuggles with you.”
Y/N is still squinting a little bit against the light, her hand mindlessly running through Dolly’s fur, “What time is it?”
“Just a little over 9,” he replied.
“I’m sorry,” she used her other hand to knuckle at her eye, “I – you probably want to get your day started, and I’m here loitering in your bed.”
Harry makes an affronted noise, brows dipping in, his whole face drawing into a pout, “What?” He shook his head, “No, stop that, why are you apologizing? You looked so cute and peaceful sleeping with Dolly, I just couldn’t wake you up.” He motioned around his room, “I have no plans for the rest of the day. I made breakfast for us too.”
She blinked at him, her brows raising, “You cook?”
“Oi, do I look like I can’t?” He held out his hand for her and Y/N slid hers inside of it – it was unnecessary, she didn’t need help getting out of the bed, but his palm was soft and warm and Y/N couldn’t help wanting to hold it. She gets onto her knees on the mattress and then becomes acutely aware that she has no shorts or pants on, but his shirt hands low enough that it isn’t obvious. Harry helped guide her off the bed, and Dolly followed suit, “I made waffles and sliced some fruit. Give me a second so I can put a couple of eggs on the stove, it should still be warm so it’ll be quick.”
He squeezes her hand then lets go, leading the way into the kitchen, “You don’t have to –”
“I know what I don’t have to do,” he clicked his tongue, “I want to, though. I have coffee in the pot if you want, or there’s some peach juice I got from the market – it’s really good. The glasses are in the cupboard above the sink, Sweetheart.”
Harry’s kitchen is spacious for a flat; there was enough room that they could both move about comfortably unlike her own kitchen, where if there’s more than one human body and one cat body in there, you’re constantly bumping and knocking each other around. He clicks the burner on where a pan is sitting, waiting like he’d planned to make her fresh eggs from the start.
Once she got the juice, he directed her to sit at a small table he had set up closer to the corner.
“You don’t want any help?”
“I think I can handle two eggs,” he chuckled warmly, turning back to the stove. This was new. None of the people she’d helped before had made her breakfast; they would buy her something to eat, sure, or bring her breakfast in the morning before a shared lecture. Nobody had taken the time to make her a meal though, and it made her heart feel too big for her chest, displacing her ribs to make space for itself. He seemed happy to be doing it as well, humming low and sweet to himself as he cracked the eggs, murmuring and mocking Dolly’s meows as she curled between his ankles.
Y/N cleared her throat, “She stomped all over my head this morning,” she doesn’t specify who, and she doesn’t need to – Harry hums an understanding noise.
“She wants a second breakfast,” he flipped the eggs with an ease Y/N had only ever seen on the telly, “And she thinks she can trick you into it, the sneaky little thing.”
She runs her lips over her dry mouth, “She does this to all your sleepover partners?” Y/N doesn’t think she wanted to know, actually, but the question leaves her mouth before she could think about it. Y/N thinks that her subconscious loves to torture her, and wants to be reminded that she was not special in this. Harry had probably cooked breakfast for people before, and he would continue to do so when he found his soulmate. Y/N thinks whoever it is would be lucky to have someone who seemed so pleased cooking eggs for them.
Harry snorted, and she braced herself for him to agree, but he only shook his head, “No, actually,” he slid the spatula beneath the eggs and plated them, “She hated my ex, so she never really spent much time in my room when she was around. Now that I think about it, she hated most of my exes, even if it was just a couple of dates and not anything official – she wanted nothing to do with them,” he arranged her plate carefully, adding butter to her waffle and pressing the sliced fruit off to the side. He’d sliced the grapes too like he was worried about her choking on them and the thought almost made her giggle. Once he finished, he turned to her with a smile, “So, looks like you’re special, right? To win Dolly’s affection is a difficult task – she hated me the first few weeks she was here, and that’s when she was a kitten that I bottle fed.”
The food looks delicious – the eggs are fluffy and the waffle is still warm, a little steamy. She only realized then that Harry had carefully curated some of the fruit into a smiley face, and she was so endeared she could scream, “She probably just smells little stinky Ferret on me.”
“I’m over this Ferret slander!” Harry protests, sliding maple syrup onto the table, “When I met him, he smelled like you, and you smell amazing.”
Her face feels warm, “Is he paying you? I’ve never had someone defend him so adamantly before.”
Harry plops in the seat across from her, “He’s Dolly’s best friend,” he rests his chin on his hand, watching as Y/N picks up the fork on her plate, “Of course, I’ll defend him.”
She’s about to accuse Ferret of bewitchment but is stopped when the first taste of it hits her tongue. It’s delicious, is the thing – even for something as simple as eggs and a waffle, Y/N is pleasantly surprised, “Oh, Harry,” she murmured, politely holding a hand over her mouth, “This is delicious, what the hell?”
A dimple pops on his cheek, “Told you I could handle two eggs.”.
For a while, they just exist together. Harry watches her eat and adjusts in his seat to accommodate Dolly who all but launched herself into his lap, while Y/N ate. Eventually, she motioned toward his phone and told him to scroll through something because, “You eyeballing me is making me nervous,” and he only giggled and listened to her. They stay like that until she’s cleaned her plate, content and full without feeling too heavy. Harry must have still been stealing glances at her because he knew exactly when she finished, his eyes flickering back up to her from his phone.
“Y/N?” He started and she hummed, tucking her straw to the corner of her lips, “About last night. . .”
Harry trailed off and Y/N paused mid-sip, holding the juice still in her mouth. This is when he would tell her it was a mistake, she’s sure of it. He’d explain that he’d just been drunk, that kissing had seemed like a good idea when he was filled with cocktails but now he wanted to nip that in the bud. Little did he know that he didn’t need to worry about Y/N initiating any kisses or even bringing it up if he didn’t. She was an expert at pretending like something didn’t happen and nothing had changed, when she put her mind to it, and she was certainly going to put her mind toward this.
She swallowed, “Don’t worry about it,” she waved her hand, “We were drunk anyway, so we can just pretend that – y’know, that stuff happens all of the time. We don’t have to worry about it.”
For the second time that morning, Harry’s eyebrows furrowed rather than his face relaxing like she thought it might. It’d been like this before, where they’d kiss her then feel silly about it, and Y/N always promised that it was okay, that it came with the territory. Normally she’s being looked at with relief and gratitude, not disgruntled confusion.
“That’s not what I meant,” he went on to say, “I’m not worried about it, I was just – I wanted to know if that was okay to do now.” Harry pulled her plate away from her, closer to himself, “But if you don’t want that then that’s okay.”
“No, I –” she mirrored his confusion, “I just thought that –”
“That I regret it?” He filled in, and Y/N nodded, occupying her hands with the hem of his shirt, twisting and pulling at it with her fingers, “I don’t. I know it doesn’t seem like I think things through before I do them, but I do. It felt nice to kiss you, so I’d like to do it more – it doesn’t have to be anything complicated. Is that what you’re worried about?”
No, I’m worried about the cultivation of feelings for you that seem to grow by the second, and if you weren’t so oblivious, you might notice that dummy!
She doesn’t say that. It would be smart if she did say that, all things considered, because then it would be blunt and honest and they could eradicate any form of misunderstanding or miscommunication. Harry would know exactly where she stood and they could act accordingly so that it didn’t feel like a punch in the chest when he woke up and called her to tell her he had his mark. That would be smart, and it would be on trend with how smart she usually is with this, but it seems like a two-year-long sabbatical had expunged any trace of intelligence she still had.
Because instead of saying that, or even just agreeing that it would be better for them not to kiss, she rushes to say, “I don’t mind the kissing. I liked it too,” she shrugged her shoulders, trying to seem nonchalant about it but her heart is thudding so quickly in her chest she thinks it rivals a hummingbird’s, “So we can if you’d – if that’s what you want.”
“Is it what you want?” Y/N took a drink of her peach juice so she didn’t have to answer verbally, and nodded again, chewing hard on the inside of her cheek. Harry’s serious demeanor eases some, and a smile works back on his mouth, small and sweet, “Then that settles it. I was hoping you would say yes,” he takes her plate and starts to stand, Dolly having long since hopped off and shuffled away, “I love kissing.”
God, what kind of mess had she gotten herself into?
. . .
Harry liked doing things for people.
Y/N thinks it was something that was written in his DNA from the moment he was born, probably nestled somewhere close to the bit that was read for his soulmate. Harry likes to help, and he likes to feel useful. This means he’s cooking meals, bringing her lunches to work without warning her, and massaging her shoulders when she complains about them being stiff. He’s always listening; Y/N offhandedly mentions she’s out of her favorite candle, and Harry brings her one the next time he comes over. She complains about wanting meatless shepherd's pie, and Harry has a recipe ready, baking in the oven when he invites her for a Dolly-Ferret playdate. Hell, Y/N had complained about the water pressure in her shower and he came to work with a small box, and a big smile.
“Are you busy this evening?” He inquired, resting his bum on Niall’s desk (Niall was sitting there, but he was leaning back in his chair on his phone, so he wasn’t concerned).
“You know I’m not,” she clicked her tongue, “It’s a Wednesday night, those are reserved for wallowing and sleeping.”
Harry taps his fingers against the box, “Well, pencil me in, I’m going to change your showerhead.”
Finally, she looked at the outside of the box, and the brand she recognized because it was a luxury brand that Y/N had completely ignored when she scrolled past it online, “Harry, holy shit, that’s like – those are really expensive! You didn’t need to buy it for me, you could have just sent a link!”
“For this price, I knew if I sent you the link you wouldn’t buy it even if I plead my case to you,” and he wasn’t wrong, is the thing. Y/N liked to be relatively frugal and showerheads over a hundred notes was a little absurd in her book, “But I have this one and it is so good – you’ll wonder how you were showing before it.
“How much do I need to send you?”
“Nothing,” he waved his hand, “I bought this without asking, I’m not going to make you pay me back for it.”
“Harry –”
“Think of it as a gift,” he grinned, and Y/N had a very particular feeling that he wouldn’t accept no or any monetary payment, even if she got on her knees and begged, “You can buy me a coffee or something.”
Y/N scoffed, “You’re crazy,” she ran her fingers over the box, and her heart felt too warm – when was the last time someone bought her something, just because? It would have had to have been back then when she was doing this often – she used to get gifts all the time. Halting her soulmate gig also halted impromptu gifts every once in a while, and she wasn’t afraid to say that she missed that bit. No matter the cost, it was always nice to be doted on and pampered a bit.
Still, there must be a reason why this felt so special; a rapid bunny-like heartbeat thundering in her chest at the prospect of someone listening and caring enough to try and solve a problem for her. The gifts before were more materialistic – jewelry or clothes, maybe a painting that she saw in the store with them once that they bought weeks after they found their soulmate to smother any remaining guilt. This was. . .thoughtful. Something useful to her – something that she didn’t necessarily need, but that she wanted, that would make her life a little nicer.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah – hey, should I bring Dolly? She’s been meowing at me so much lately, I think she wants to hang out with Ferret again.” He smiles wistfully, “I’m starting to think they’re dating or summat, it’s kind of cute. Do cats have soulmates?”
She snorted, “You think Ferret’s stinky self would be Dolly’s soulmate? No, she probably – I reckon her soulmate would be some purebred Maine Coone or something.”
“You know, Ferret’s self-esteem is going to be seriously depleted if you don’t start complimenting him more,” Harry sighed, clicking his tongue, “That’s why I have to spend time with him, so I can nourish the growth of his confidence. He’s gonna go through life thinking he’s stinky and unloveable if you have any say.”
Y/N clicked her tongue, “Aish, you only love him so much because you don’t have to live with him.”
. . .
Harry is borderline appalled by the water pressure before he switches the showerhead. He turned it on, just to see, and he felt the length of time that it took it to get warm; you would have thought it was ice cold. Harry gasped like he’d been wronged by her landlord, brows furrowed, “How do they expect you to live like this?”
He’s quick in switching it out, and precise in his movements like he’s done it plenty of times. Y/N tells him as much and he admits that, before finally investing in a better quality showerhead, he used to have to buy one every year. They would always crap out, or the holes would clot off with limescale deposits that wouldn’t dissolve in vinegar, and he’d have to buy another one – after three of them, he had become pretty proficient in changing them out. At least that’s what he tells Y/N while he does it, Dolly and Ferret both watching with wide eyes in their spots safe by the sink.
Once it’s finished, he turns it on and gleams at her, “Tada!” He exclaimed and Y/N couldn’t help but match his excitement, her smile stretching over her mouth.
“Oh wow,” she murmured, stretching her hand out, her palm getting pelted by the water – it was still warming up, but the pressure was much better, “I’ll be living like a noble, for sure. I’ve never had a detachable showerhead before.”
“You haven’t? It’s got loads of different settings too,” he pulled it from the hook, pointing it toward the bottom of the tub, twisting the knob, and switching from setting to setting. Y/N watches in awe as the water pressure increases and the way it thins out, gets sharper, switching which holes the water was coming from. Some of them are softer, a rain setting, some harsher, a massage setting, and there’s one setting in particular that made Y/N’s eyes go wide. The water is coming from the center, fat droplets in a pressure that isn’t too hard and isn’t soft, and she is suddenly reminded of a very distinct (and NSFW) video she didn’t scroll by on Twitter one night. She’d stopped and watched the whole thing, actually, and had been halfway grumpy over the fact she couldn’t try it herself because her shower head was sadly screwed right into the wall (at least she could use the bathtub faucet though).
“Oh wow,” she laughed, her face feeling hot at the memory of it and the fact she was thinking about it with Harry shoulder to shoulder with her, “That’s – that’s nice.”
It must be written all over her face, because Harry inhales sharply through his nose, “Don’t be filthy!” He scolded her, scandalized, and Y/N scrambled as he switched the setting back to the main one.
“I’m not!” She lied, “You’re the one bringing it up, you’re the filthy one!”
Harry’s cheeks get hot, pink as a rose, and he flushes down to his neck as he turns it off, “So there it is your new showerhead. Use it responsibly.”
“Stop talking, right now!”
It only takes a little bit of time for Harry’s flush to go away; they settle out and return to normal, and Y/N pretends that the conversation didn’t happen at all while they’re ordering food. Instead, she focuses on how Harry ordered possibly every topping for his burger and chewing over her bottom lip trying to decide if she wants a medium fry or a large fry (she never finishes a large, but when she finishes a medium, she’s longing for more fries, and it’s just an endless, vicious cyclic horror story). She doesn’t think Harry is looking at her anymore after he put in what he wanted and passed his phone off to her – but a clear of his throat and a murmur of, “You’ll chew through your lip like that.” Indicates that maybe he’d been looking at her for quite a while. The gnaw of her teeth settled to a stop when she turned to look at him, head lulling to the side like it was too heavy to pick up (and sometimes, after a shift, it felt like it was).
“Oh,” she felt a little embarrassed, actually, because it wasn’t the cute, subtle lip bite they show in movies or describe in books – the front four of her teeth had been digging pretty harshly into her bottom lip while she debated, but it was something nobody had ever noticed before. So she doesn’t really know what to do, besides pinch her brows, “Stop staring at my mouth.”
“Why can’t I stare?” He pressed, turning to face her more fully, resting his weight on his hip rather than his bum, and he sat his elbow on the back of the sofa, “You’re the one who said you loved kissing me so much that we needed to do it all of the time –”
Y/N’s eyes go comically wide, “I did not –” she started to squawk but he kept talking over her.
“--so maybe I am staring at them. And maybe I should grant your wishes and we should kiss a little before the food gets here, and my breath is all onion-y.”
She’s used to this kind of thing; Y/N hadn’t been lying when she’d described it. In the past, people got their wires crossed, tangled up, and twisted when it came to this whole “pretending to date” thing. Just how it is in every film, every book, every story written and posted on the internet with your two favorite characters in a show, or members of a band – when you pretend to date, your heart longs for it. It aches and yearns for the intimacy of actually being in a relationship, so things like holding hands, cuddling, and kissing become practiced parts of the ruse.
There had also been the debatable fact that whether or not the more intimate she was with someone, the quicker they were able to find their soulmate. Back in UNI, there hadn’t been any proof to these claims and Y/N didn’t bother to test them out, but she knew some people swore by it. She knew through word of mouth, it was whispered that if she kissed them, or touched them, then their soulmate would come quicker. Maybe that’s what Harry was doing. . .or maybe it was a little bit of both. Honestly, with him, it could be either; hyped up on the companionship of spending time after work together for a meal, and the desperate need to do this with his actual soulmate and not a cheap stand-in for the better thing.
Either or, Y/N had never claimed to not be selfish sometimes. And she thought it was okay to be selfish, now and then. She’d spent the better part of her life so far aiding everyone else in finding long-lasting love, so shouldn’t she reap some benefits? Like kissing pretty boys with curly brown hair and green eyes?
The air feels right for it too. Her windows are open wide, a warm, spring breeze blowing through the screen and billowing the curtains out now and then. The fan above them in her living room whips around above their heads too, so it is unsurprisingly chilly but for now, Y/N was comfortable with it (and shocked that her candle – a sweet but pleasingly light, artificial strawberry scent – had been able to keep a flame in these particular conditions). The wind smells and feels like spring, and after a long, frigid winter, she’s pleased with it.
It’s their second kiss, so it’s a little clumsy. Harry crawls closer to her on the couch and he’s the one to officially initiate it; they tilt their heads the same way, and their noses bump into each other, and she wondered how they were much more refined with this when they were both off their asses. Instead of getting flustered though, Harry giggles, his ears scorching red but his eyes crinkle when he smiles and it’s contagious enough to make her laugh too. When they settle, Harry goes in again, head tilted to the right and his lips are soft against hers.
Their first kiss was chaste, even for them being drunk, just a simple, gentle peck that lasted for a couple of seconds.
This one was a little more involved; Harry hovers over her, so he’s using one hand to keep himself balanced but with his free hand he has carefully cradles her cheek in his palm. Harry likes her top lip, she’s noticed, that even in two kisses that is the lip he usually goes to put between his own. He pushes them together, releases them, then pushes them back together, and this time his tongue traces along the line of her lips and Y/N tries not to make a surprised sound in her throat but fails.
Harry pulled back right away, “Sorry,” he murmured, sheepish in his tone, “Was that not okay?”
“No, it was – it was fine, just –” she giggled, also feeling embarrassed, “Um, just I haven’t really kissed like that in a while. I’m worried it won’t be very good.”
He had understanding eyes, wide and soft as he nodded, “Ohhh, alright,” he replied but made no move to withdraw completely, “We can stop here if you’d like, but – I mean, if you don’t mind, I don’t mind. I’ll guide you through it.”
It makes something curl low in her belly, the promise to guide her. Harry wanted to kiss her so badly that he didn’t even care if it wasn’t good – she bristled with the knowledge, and her whole body felt like it was buzzing – like her veins were humming. She nodded, wordless, just hoping he understood what she meant and he did (he always does). So Harry goes back in, he tickles her lips open with his tongue and slides his tongue into her mouth. It’s warm and wet and he tastes like the smoothie they picked up on the way home. Y/N follows his tongue as it strokes against hers, rubbing against each other, following each other – she tries to remember to breathe through her nose, but she isn’t doing very well at it.
Harry’s a good kisser, and he shuffles closer, nearly sitting in her lap as he straddles one of her thighs. His fingers slide from her face, back to the nape of her neck, where they curl through the strands. Y/N feels like she melts, into the cushions, into his hold, and at first, her hands stay lamely in her thighs, but Harry plucks one up and slots their fingers together. He squeezes like he’s checking in on her, and she squeezes back. It feels good, this feels so good, and something feels like it’s clicking into place in her brain – maybe she should seek out kisses more often. She thinks, once Harry leaves her, Niall would, if she asked him. Or Eloise, even, sometimes she likes a friendly kiss once in a while.
She isn’t sure how long they’ve been kissing, but it’s at least long enough that his phone buzzes with a notification reminding them that there were items in their cart. It’s embarrassing, the way they both jump, and Y/N accidentally sets her teeth into his bottom lip. Harry makes a sound that’s somewhere between a grunt and a groan, “Sorry!” She reached out, the pads of her fingers gentle on his mouth, like her touch would soothe it at all – if anything, she was just reminded how warm his lips were in comparison to her icy hand. Harry doesn’t flinch away from it though, he only stares at her, eyes all wide, “My bad, I – your phone scared the shit out of me.”
“Me too,” he spoke against her fingers, then finally pulled back, a soft smile pressing his cheek up, “Did you decide what you wanted?”
“Mhm,” she agreed, and she’s thankful, that they’re just going back to normal conversation – she doesn’t even know what she would say if he brought it up, “Tell me the total and I’ll send you money for it.”
Y/N’s lips tingle and buzz for the rest of the night.
. . .
It had been rain-filled the last few days. To get Y/N through the thick of it, she reminded herself that it was the sky feeding the grass and the seeds deeply embedded in the soil. Y/N doesn’t mind the rain so long as she doesn’t have to go out into it, but sadly, this wasn’t the case, because some wealthy man hadn’t shown up in her life bearing the same mark she did on their bodies, and told her she doesn’t need to work yet. So each day, she trudges into work, no better than a wet rat drenched in rainwater, scurrying around on the streets. Especially when the rain decided to fall at a slant and her umbrella went in the opposite direction it should have, and the hoodie she wore could really only save so much. She was just thankful that her hair hadn’t been caught in the crossfire of the rain’s argument with the ground, and how hard it was darting against the pavement.
And of course, she gets zero time to go assess the damage alone in their work bathroom.
Harry, who is looking a little too dry for the onslaught outside, is standing at the elevators. The sound of her shoes squeaking against the linoleum must have garnered his attention, because he turned from the elevator, his eyes set in her direction. First, they light up, like he’s excited it is her he’s seeing, despite him seeing her almost every day, and then his eyes roll over the rest of her body, and he pulls his lips into his mouth like he’s trying not to laugh.
“Don’t even start,” Y/N grumbled before he could start teasing her and Harry gave an insulted sound, something close to a scoff but not quite.
“I wasn’t saying anything!” He defended himself, placing a hand on his chest, “Just – this look is cute, even when you’re all dripping wet. You kind of look like Dolly after her baths. It’s almost a shame your hair didn’t get wet to complete the image I’m seeing in my head.”
Y/N could yell at him, or call him a dick (playfully) like she would Niall or Eloise, but she knew that wouldn’t get to him. If anything, she thinks he thrives off when she snaps at him because the fire of it never reaches her voice and he’s once again reminded that she’s just a big softie.
So she pouts instead, making her bottom lip big and fat, and Harry’s face warps from someone two seconds from making a cheeky remark to someone amid a panic, “Oh, hey, none of that,” he frowned, and for a moment he looks guilty like he had brought the rain on himself, “You must be cold, right? Cold and wet, that’s an awful way to start the day.” Y/N nodded, and Harry’s frown somehow deepened, “Poor thing. You know, I have a sweatshirt in my employee locker and –”
“You use that?” Y/N can’t hide her surprise – the employee lockers were little scams, she thought, because why did she need to pay a monthly fee for a locker that wouldn’t be used anyway? There were more than enough for everyone to have one without payment being an issue – she always thought nobody was stupid enough to fall for the clear scheme and keep things under and at their desk.
But of course, Harry would have one – for some reason, that just makes too much sense.
“Yeah, of course I do,” he reasoned, “Once, I ran into one of my coworkers and they spilled their coffee down the front of my shirt. I had nothing to change into, and it wasn’t worth the drive back home, so I had this huge stain – it was embarrassing,” he shook his head, “So the next day I bought one of these, and always keep an extra pair of clothes in it!”
Y/N bit her tongue because she wanted to ask why he doesn’t just use his car, but he was smiling so triumphantly at his sensibility, that she just couldn’t take it away from him. “You would let me use your sweatshirt?” She said instead and he nodded quickly.
“Yes, obviously. It won’t help with your bottom half being soaked, but at least you’ll be dry up top, right?”
Harry’s sweatshirt would be big on him, so it’s plenty big on her, but Y/N likes it. It’s soft, and the inside still feels fleecy and new, like the washing machine hadn’t damaged the fibers yet with repeated cycles (probably because it’s been living in his locker for however long). It smells like his chosen fabric softener; the same that he washes his linens in, because as soon as she pulled it over her head, it felt like being submerged in his sheets again. A part of her longs for it, snuggling up in his bed, Dolly cuddled close between their legs and she even added stinky little Ferret who would no doubt be trying to smother her awake so he could eat. The very imagery of it makes her so content, that she almost forgot that she had to spend 8 hours using her brain today.
It’s warm, and Harry’s waiting for her outside of the bathroom. He grinned way too prettily when he saw her and went to readjust the collar, which must have flipped in on itself, “You look so adorable,” he complimented, and Y/N’s heart did a flip in her chest that she didn’t bother to ignore – it was becoming more mental effort to ignore the organ’s reactions to him, rather than just accepting them for what they were, “It should be illegal.”
Y/N rolled her eyes, her face feeling hot, “You should be the lead in a romantic comedy.”
“Because I’m so handsome?”
“Because you’re so cheesy.”
. . .
The longer it goes on, the harder Y/N thinks it’s going to be when he finally gets his mark. They were going on two months of playing pretend, and Y/N wouldn’t lie and say she didn’t like it. She’d always become relatively close with the people she’d done this for in the past, but never to this degree – never to the point where Y/N actually had to remind herself that they weren’t dating. No matter how close she became with them, there was always a distinct cleaving between reality and what they were doing for show. When they held her hand or brought her breakfast, or smeared their mouths against hers, she always had it lingering in the back of her mind that this wasn’t really for her. That all of their actions had one, overarching, transpicuous goal.
With Harry, it didn’t feel like that. When he held her hand, it felt like it was because he wanted to. When he brought her breakfast, it was like he couldn’t imagine stopping and not buying her something as well. When he kissed her, it was with purpose, with intent, because he wanted to feel his mouth pushed up against hers and lick against her tongue. There was no subtext or hidden motives. . .he just wanted it at the time, with her, and that’s why he was doing it.
However, that’s just what it felt like. The unwelcome reminder of what this actually was manifested randomly, when she least wanted it to. Whether she was going about her nightly routine and it slapped her across the face or when their knuckles brushed together as they walked side-by-side down the street, and it slammed into her like a biker not looking forward. It’s almost like her brain waits until she’s forgotten about it enough to truly enjoy herself before it decides to strike. Harsh in its words, reprimanding her for being so stupid, for soaking this up like an affection-starved sponge, for breaking her own rule of not letting her heart get too caught up in this.
The reminder hurts, but it’s necessary. It makes it just that more manageable not to escape into her delusions, which is for the best. And, for at least a couple of days, she holds strong, keeps a level head, and doesn’t fall down the rabbit hole of feelings and premature heartache at what’s to come. She can appreciate the time spent with her friend without thinking of what is to come, and instead of wallowing in her misery about it, she is proactive and conceives plans to eradicate her feelings. Or, at least diminish them enough that she could still stay in Harry’s life without it being a problem for him and his soulmate. She thinks she would still like to be in his life, even if it would hurt. Y/N would rather see him happy, gleaming, smiling brightly, and loving someone else than not see him at all.
She does pretty good with that, as she said, for a couple of days.
Then Harry whines. He pouts his mouth when she doesn’t automatically link their fingers together while they walk, and he nudges his head beneath her arm like a puppy asking for pets, and he uses this berry lip mask and comments so longingly about how, “Nice my lips are right now, it’s a shame nobody has made an effort to kiss and taste them.” If Y/N was determined to stop these burgeoning feelings in their tracks, then Harry was hellbent on fostering their growth. He sends her messages throughout the day, just checking in on her, or telling her about things he saw that reminded him of her, or telling her the song she recommended to him has been stuck in his head all day and he can’t get enough (which Y/N treats like a proclamation of love from any of her friends when they tell her that – it makes her feel all too warm).
Eloise had been hesitant at first, and skeptical of their outings together. She was never rude or mentioned anything, but she would give Y/N a look when Harry would wander his way onto their floor (nobody ever questioned why a book cover artist would need to be on the editors' floor, but everyone loved Harry too much to point that out). The more Harry showed up though, the more integrated he became even in their friend group, going out to eat with them, or out to bars, and he, Eloise, and Niall even scheduled to get pedicures together (Y/N’s feet were too ticklish for someone to go near them, which was ammunition she did not necessarily want to give Harry but she had to).
Niall doesn’t question anything because he’s Niall, but he’s just as bewitched by Harry as everyone else. And the feeling is mutual because Harry just couldn’t get over the fact that Niall was good with numbers when he seemed like someone barely good with letters. He had a habit of sitting on the small stool Y/N had hidden beneath her desk (to rest her foot on, of course, not so that Harry had a seat for when he took extended lunch breaks up on their floor) and quizzing him.
“How many hours in 7 weeks?”
“1176.”
“If my order was £21.22, what would a 42% tip be?”
“8.91, but at that point you might as well round up to an even 9.”
It’s just too easy with him. Things are too normal and Y/N feels too happy, for this to be what it is.
They were stretched out on a picnic blanket again, another lunch spent outside with Ferret and Dolly, but now they are staring up at the clouds and watching them pass by. Y/N thinks about how big the world is, and she wonders who would see the same clouds that they are seeing right now. Would Harry’s soulmate see them? Would they feel a twinge in their heart, knowing that he’s looking at the shapes with someone different? That he is reveling in the calm and the quiet with a person that isn’t them?
Was her soulmate looking up at the sky too? Would they see the same cloud, so fluffy and white that she just wanted to sink her body into it? Were they with someone else? Did they even exist?
Harry’s hand is big and warm, resting over hers on the blanket.
“What do you think your soulmate is like?” Y/N doesn’t realize her lips are moving until the words are out of her mouth. The breath Harry was in the middle of taking pauses, and the gentle caress of his thumb over her knuckles stopped, and even the one bird that had been singing suddenly ceased its chirp, as if even the world around them was wondering why the hell she brought it up.
She could hear his head turn to look at her, “What?”
“Your soulmate,” she repeated like it was obvious because it should be. She’d just realized that since a week or so after they started, she really hadn’t heard him mention them and Y/N wasn’t used to that. Normally, the person she’s with has mentioned their soulmate no less than forty times in seven days. They don’t give her a chance to forget that she’s merely a stepping stone to a better, more fulfilling love life. But sometimes, it feels like, even Harry’s forgotten why they started all of this in the first place, “I was just wondering what you think they’re like. You’ve never mentioned it before.”
Harry cleared his throat, his hand slowly resuming the way he rubbed over the top of hers, sending pleasant goosebumps up her arms. His leg is resting on the bottom half of her dress to keep it from billowing up and out, so they’re pressed relatively close to each other, though she couldn’t say they wouldn’t be like this, even if her wardrobe wasn’t an issue with the wind. The sun is warm, even hidden behind the puffy white clouds they’re staring up at.
“I used to think about it a lot,” he finally replied, his voice gentle, “I’ve never thought much about what they looked like. Back in school, everyone would always theorize what color hair they might have, or the color of their eyes, if their skin would be pale or brown if their skin had freckles or moles, but all of that seemed so. . .I don’t know. It just didn’t seem important to me, ever, what they looked like.” That makes Y/N’s lips twitch up in a smile – of course, he wouldn’t care, he’s just so good, but she thinks that someone as beautiful as Harry, could only end up with someone just as beautiful, if not more (if that was possible), “I guess, I’ve always just imagined that they would compliment me and I would compliment them, not in appearance, but in the way we fit together, you know? Their strengths are my weaknesses, and my weaknesses are their strengths so that when we’re together, then we’re just. . .unstoppable, seems cheesy, but that’s the only word I can think of.” Once he’s started, it seems easy for him to keep going, and Y/N likes that. She likes how much he talks, how open he is, the way he wears his heart on his sleeve, “I think they’re someone I would feel so comfortable with, it’d be as easy as breathing with them. That I could just exist in their presence and not feel like I have to be. . .on? Y’know, I can just be me. Someone who, knowing that I’m coming home to them, even if we’re in the middle of the biggest fight – I feel relieved and happy.” He shrugged his shoulders, “I kind of imagine them to be someone funny, who makes me laugh. I think they would be okay with cuddling too, and me waking them up with kisses in the morning because I can’t help myself. Even if they hated those things though, I would love them. Unconditionally.” Harry nodded to himself, “That’s what I think, at least.”
She felt herself smiling, sighing gently, “That sounds nice Harry,” she flipped her hand over, weaving their fingers together, “Really nice. I’m sorry it’s taking so long.”
He squeezes her hand, “I don’t mind,” he murmured, “I’ve waited my whole life, so I don’t. . .I don’t mind waiting longer.” Then, he’s turning, and Dolly readjusts the way she’d coiled up in between them, belly-up, now finding Y/N’s hip to rest her chin on, eyes falling closed again. Harry’s on his side now, looking at her, and Y/N can’t help but turn to face him. He always looks pretty, but he especially looks gorgeous on days like this. His skin is glowing (he swears by his skincare routine and Y/N really needed to try it one day), and his eyes are big, and light. The kind of green they are in the sun makes her wonder what they would look like reflected off the ocean, like maybe they were two, smooth marbles that belonged at the bottom of the sea. Someone stole them from a mermaid’s den to put them in Harry’s head and make him look at her the way he was right now. Like he could peer through her soul and read through her very being, “I have you, so it isn’t hard.”
Y/N wanted to kiss him right now but it didn’t seem like the right time. Not after he’d just finished divulging what the person made just for him was like – it would seem like she was clinging onto something desperately, and she didn’t want him to know how hard this was for her. Harry, as soft as he is, would let the guilt eat away at him and that’s the last thing that she wanted. She just wants him happy, that’s all, even if it can’t be with her.
So she only nods in agreement.
“You have me.”
. . .
After spending so much time with each other, when Harry isn’t around, Y/N’s days are. . .quiet. Long and quiet, in a way that she used to yearn for after her days at work, but now she feels just slightly off put by it. Her days at work are quiet, her days after work are quiet, and the thought that this is what it would be like when Harry did find his soulmate just about gives her hives. It’s deafening, almost, if she thinks too much about it, but she’s sure she’s just getting too deep in her head.
Harry went to his Nan’s farm a couple of hours away because his cousin just had a baby, and they were using it as an excuse to all get together. He didn’t invite her directly, just slyly mentioned that she’s always welcome to anything that he was going to do unless he ever specifically stated otherwise (“Which would never happen,”) and Y/N thanked him. Despite how close she felt to Harry, she would hold true to her early request that he not get her involved in family affairs. It’s just one thing that she won’t do, especially because she’s worried that if all Harry’s family members are like him, then she’d like them too much. And liking them too much meant it hurting when this inevitably came to an end, so she’d like to spare herself the additional heartache.
So she sat this one out and told him to have fun and to send her pictures. He’d always described his Nan’s farm as something out of a fairytale, with rolling fields of green and acres upon acres of land she sat on. There was an apple orchard on the property that he used to go and pick apples from all the time when he was a kid, and a farm with horses, cattle, and chickens – sometimes she had sheep too. She never sold them off to be butchered, but she did sell their milk and eggs, and the sheep’s wool when it grew out enough to shave them down. According to Harry, she didn’t need the extra money (retirement, plus her ex-husband's pension, and her current husband’s (her soulmate) business funds more than just their leisure lifestyle), so she took it and put it away. Harry suspected that she put it away for grandchildren and expenses they may have in their future because she was always the first to help with tuition, graduation parties, weddings, and vacations. She’s a generous woman, through and through.
And she loved babies, so anytime someone had one, they brought it over to meet their Nan. It’s cute – Y/N wished her family did stuff like that.
He would be gone for a four-day weekend, starting on Thursday, and he would return Sunday night. Harry promised he would send plenty of photos and messages, but after he texts her that he’s made it safely, she doesn’t hear from him much the rest of the night. Y/N doesn’t take it to heart, she knows he’s busy, and the service out there isn’t the best thing in the world. Still, she finds herself missing his rapid-fire, ten messages in a row when it could have been put together in two. Her phone only buzzes with a photo Niall sends of his pedicured feet and asks if she’s jealous that he could sell foot pics and she couldn’t, and then a message from Eloise asking if she wanted to get breakfast in the morning.
Otherwise, the night is quiet. Ferret is extra cuddly with her, snuggled up against her chest, and she wondered if he missed Dolly (who made the trip with Harry, because her long-time cat friend Mr. Muskrat lived there – he told Ferret not to be too jealous though, because Mr. Muskrat was 15 years old and not looking to be a suitor at the time). Typical Thursday nights for them had been Dolly playdates lately, or at least a Harry playdate, who smelled like his friend. Ferret is never this snuggly with her, usually slinking around and “accidentally” pushing things off the counter (the little bastard), so she petted him between his ears and cooed, “I know, stinky head. I miss them too.”
Eloise and Y/N get breakfast that morning at an acai bowl place near their job. Eloise complained about her current boyfriend, who likes to sit with his headset on at his computer while she’s on his bed and clearly horny. “I mean, are there hot characters in Genshin? Does he want to fuck them more than he wants to fuck me? Because I’m sitting there, ready to get my shit rearranged and he’s talking about some bitch named Neuvillette.”
“I think that’s a male character,” Y/N pointed, “With beautiful hair, so he might want to fuck them, sure.”
Y/N gets her first photo from Harry around lunchtime, when she’s forking noodles into her mouth from the ramen bowl she brought. Normally Harry makes her stop eating so she can enjoy her lunch, but today she eats as she edits, and threatens to stomp on Niall’s feet when he tries to take a slice of the cucumber she had in her snack container. He pouted at her, big and deep, and it didn’t have nearly the same effect that Harry’s does on her, “You’re much more giving when Harry’s around,” he noted, “He’s never allowed to leave again.”
“I’m not giving, he just takes what it is you're after and gives it to you.”
“Well, you don’t yell at him for it, so it works out in my favor.” Niall sighed, leaning back in his seat, taking his thirty-minute break with his phone about 10cm from his face, “Did you see the girls from Dance Moms are finally doing a tell-all? They’re at each other’s throats and –”
Niall keeps going when Y/N’s phone buzzes, and she sees a photo from Harry. The fields are beautiful, so green, hills and hills of it further than the scope of the camera could reach. There are trees and flowers, the clouds look as lush as the grass and the sky looks extra blue there, unbothered by the pollution of city streets. The countryside was always quite beautiful, she’d say, especially all the stars you could see at night.
Isn’t it pretty?
I wanna roll down a hill like a kid
I’ll get grass stains though so i might not
Maybe i will though
if i can convince one of my younger cousins to do it with me
hahahaha
Y/N huffed a breath through her nose, replying.
I would roll down the hills if I were you
It’s very pretty, it looks very soft and I think a couple of grass stains would be worth it
Does it smell nice out there?
The message is read immediately like he had the thread open and was waiting for her to reply. The three dots pop up immediately.
It smells SO GOOD
Like flowers and grass and spring
Does spring have a smell?
It hasn’t rained for a few days so the dirt should be dry
I’ll roll down the hill! I’ll have someone take a video to prove it
My mum asked who you were bc you’re all over my socials
I said you’re my best friend!!!
Miss you :((((
Y/N’s heart squeezes in her chest.
Miss you too.
I’ll look forward to the video!!
After work, she stops by the grocery store and picks up food for the weekend. Her cooking wouldn’t taste nearly half as good as Harry’s would, but she could at least make the attempt, and there was a vegetarian stuffed pepper recipe that she’d been wanting to try. Harry had promised to make it for her when he got back, but she was craving them now. It was crowded for a Friday, but the weather was nice, so it kind of made sense – there were always hoards of people in any and every store on a Friday with mild temperatures and a nice, warm breeze.
She doesn’t realize until she’s at home and packing all the food away that she bought things that Harry likes too. The protein bars that he eats as a snack, and the oversized oranges that he swears by (they are extra juicy and sweet). Those two at the very least she could lie and say she got for herself, but she also picked up these god-awful snack cakes that he loves – ones Y/N could not get behind in the slightest – and those could only be for him because they would have no other reason to be in her pantry. She feels silly for it, wondering why her brain was convinced that she needed to buy snacks for him when he wasn’t even with her.
Y/N had just finished making dinner and pouring herself a small glass of wine when she got another message from him. This time it’s a picture of Dolly with another cat snuggled together – Mr. Muskrat was a British shorthair, who was still looking around while Dolly had her body tucked up against his belly.
Don’t show Ferret!!
Are you eating yet?
We had my Nan’s shepherd’s pie. . . so delicious.
I’ll have her make some so I can bring you it Sunday!
Y/N sends him a picture of the stuffed peppers.
Looks so good
Chef Y/N
Make some for me next time!
Ferret rubs between her legs, lacing around her ankles before slinking off to his food bowl beside the refrigerator. She liked the message and felt a smile stuck on her lips; she could tell he was smiling at his phone. She doesn’t know how she knew, she just knew, and his smile had always been contagious so she just let it spread across her cheeks.
They message back and forth for a while and Harry lets her know he might disappear in a bit because they were going to drink wine and sit on her patio and look at the stars. It was something they did when he was younger (minus the wine on his end), where they would pick their favorite star out and name it, after finding the staple constellations that everyone seemed to know about. Y/N told him to choose a star for her since she couldn’t see them as well. The clouds had shifted from puffy, white pillows, to heavy stones of grey, threatening a storm later that night. It was dark, so she couldn’t visualize the clouds either, but the sky was dark and endless, save for the little peek of the moon every so often.
Y/N pours another glass of wine, and halfway through she’s feeling a little unsteady on her feet. A lightweight right down to it, she giggled to herself for not being able to handle her liquor even a little bit and headed to the bathroom. She’d done this tango enough to know she wouldn’t drown in the tub, she wasn’t drunk by any means, just pleasantly lightheaded and tipsy. Bubbly as the soap she puts in her bath to make them foam up right over her chest, filling the water a little too high so with one wrong move she’d be sloshing it onto the floor outside of the tub. She soaked for a while until she started to feel sleepy and all the bubbles had dissipated so she was just staring down at herself in the clear water.
By the time she crawls into bed in her pajamas, the clock reads 10 PM and she’s feeling like an old lady. Tipsy off two glasses of wine and tired from her bath, and she’s only up an hour later than she usually is on a work night.
Before she could start wondering when she’d left her UNI party days and the ability to pull all-nighters, her phone buzzed at the side of her head.
Is it weird that I want to kiss you right now?
Can’t stop thinking about it.
Y/N pauses, blinking at her phone, her breath stuck in her throat. He messages her again.
Sorry if that was too much
It wasn’t too much
I want to kiss you too
Maybe it was the alcohol that made her say it. Harry must be a little drunk too, and there’s no telling how many glasses he might have had at that point. He gets carried away when he’s talking with a glass of wine in his hand, and sips and sips and sips, refills, repeat, until he’s three glasses in and confused about how he’d gotten this drunk this fast. He just gets caught up in the conversation, always giving his all to the person speaking, sparing every second of his attention on them and what they’re saying that he isn’t paying attention to much of anything else.
Good
That makes me happy
Bc i want to kiss you like, all of thetime
Your mouth always tastes so sweet
I’d taste you all over if you let me
Arousal sizzles through her lower belly, manifesting in a little trickle she can feel building up between her legs. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting but it certainly hadn’t been that – she guesses she should have expected it though. Harry is much more touchy when he’s drinking, more handsy, and less particular about where he puts his hands. She thinks back to the first night that they kissed, how he’d been holding her hips while they danced, how he kept wiggling her skirt down over her bum, the way he’d grab her hands and pull them to his bare chest making her rest them there, like he wanted nothing more than to be skin-to-skin.
Y/N has sexted a couple of times but never with someone she was actually really, really attracted to nor with someone she had feelings for. It was normally a dick pic sent unprompted, and Y/N had to answer back mid-skin-care routine, hastily, a little disgruntled by the sudden meat on her screen. The girls she’s been with were always much more tactful and artful with their nudes, but even then, the timing was just never right for her to really sit down and get into it.
But this. . .she could tell where this was going, she was pretty sure.
You’re being filthy
Aren’t you at your nan’s house? There’s no time for perverted thoughts
Y/N nibbles on her bottom lip, waiting for his reply.
Sorry, cna’t help it
Everyone’s already asleep anyway
My room is on the opposite side of the house
Alllll alone, wish u were here
I’d let you
You’d let me what?
Taste me
Fuck
Really? You’d let me?
I want to, i just know you would be so good
The sounds you make when we kiss are always the prettiest
I bet you sound pretty like that too
I’m embarrassed about how hard i am thinking about it
Y/N’s heart is thudding in her chest. They’ve always been playfully flirty but they’ve never really gotten into it like this before. Never so candid about the sexual feelings they might have for one another. Everything had been mostly platonic, up to this point, except for the kissing but even then. . .their kisses did get rather filthy. They would kiss for so long that it would get kind of sloppy, their lips swollen red and slicked with spit. Harry had started nipping and biting and pulling at her bottom lip, and when he would she’d end up making sounds that she was trying to keep to herself. Then there was every time they would rearrange and she would scoot forward, and they’d be groin to groin, and Y/N had to desperately ignore the way he would always be half hard in his bottoms.
They never brought it up, they just kept kissing until they were breathless and eventually stopped.
Show me
She sends it, then hides her face in her pillow and squeals. Ferret is over her, apparently, because he hops off the bed and leaves through the crack in her door. If she’s annoying him he usually just goes to sleep on the sofa for at least part of the night (but she always wakes up with him back in her room, on her bed, trying to smother her).
It takes a little bit, but a picture does eventually come through. Harry’s in a bed, the flash is on because the room is dark apart from what might be a salt lamp in the corner of the room, the orange glow recognizable and telling in the photo. Harry’s only in a pair of white briefs, his stomach looks soft against the elastic band but she can see the muscles in his abdomen form well-toned lines. His hips are always just a bit softer than everything else, and it makes her want to dig her teeth into him.
The briefs do very little to hide anything. Harry is hard and the fabric is thin enough that she can make out the ruddy tip where it’s tucked over on the left side. Her mouth all but waters and she plucks at the waistband of her underwear mindlessly, wondering if she should touch herself. Wine always makes her a little horny, and Harry. . .well, Harry always makes her a little horny too. How his hands are always all over her, big and broad, it’s hard not to consider what it would be like for him to hold her down. How he would grab at her tits, and squeeze and knead them in his palms. The way he could envelope her throat with only one of them.
It looks so pretty, even like that
You’re really that hard from thinking about tasting me?
Yes yesyesyes
sorry
You’re just so pretty and you always smell so good, i just want to bury my face in
or have you sit on my face
And go until i can’t breathe
shit . . .is this okay? I feel like sexting wasn’t in our unofficial agreement
Y/N snorted – of course he would ask when they’d already started.
It’s alright, some of the others have sexted me before too
Comes with the territory i think, with fake dates and all
I… hate that
Sorry
That makes me so jealous for some reason
Y/N smiles, huffing a laugh through her nose.
You don’t need to be jealous tho
Anytime i’ve done it before, i’ve never been this wet
She does finally sink her hand underneath the fabric then, letting her fingers slide down into her slit. Her folds are really wet for having not touched herself yet, and they’re soft and swollen from her bath, where she’d trimmed herself a bit. She dips her fingers in and swirls them around, feeling herself clench, like her body was trying to entice them inside of her.
That almost made me cum :((
Want you here
Not just for this but just bc i miss you so much
But for this too
Just wanna make you feel good
Are you touching yourself too?
Yeah, i am
Ugh
I know you probably look so pretty
Will you come hard for me?
And if you’re comfortable, send me a picture of your fingers afterward?
So i can imagine them in my mouth
It doesn’t take much for Y/N to cum. She’s already so worked up that when her fingers do meet her clit in a slick, wet slide, she rolls her fingers over it in tight circles that make her thighs threaten to close. Her brain is all over the place: images of Harry two hours away with his hand wrapped around his cock and his balls full and heavy, picturing him between her legs, tongue slurping and licking her, getting drunk off it. Y/N had never sexted someone who seemed more like they wanted to get her off rather than talking about how far they could get their dick down her throat, so this was a pleasant surprise.
In the end, it was the thought that Harry is taking more time between sending each message because he’s too busy stroking over himself with one of his hands. If he thinks she would sound pretty, then he must sound like a dream, moaning and whimpering. She would pay to hear it.
But she doesn’t have to pay, because Harry sends a recording.
That’s what makes her cum. His breathing deeply, moaning low and muffled like it was in the palm of his hand, and the wet, slick sounds of his palm against his shaft. Did he use lube or did he spit into his hand? Or maybe he was just that drippy and leaky with precum that she could hear it so loudly. Whatever the reason, it sends her straight into her orgasm, from the tips of her toes, bursting through her veins and fizzling into a pleasant hum. She’s breathless and sticky by the time she’s finished, the mess between her legs cooling into something uncomfortable. Y/N doesn’t let this distract her from swirling her fingers right outside of her hole, thighs twitching from the sensitivity, and her pussy fluttering. She turns the flash on her camera and takes a picture of her two fingers, and the sticky string that connects her index and middle finger together when she pulls them apart.
She double-checks that it’s Harry she’s sending it to before she pushes the blue button.
The response she gets only a minute later is Harry, his cock softening against his thigh, and a pool of cum in the shape of a heart on his lower belly. He sends the pink heart emoji, with the smaller one that sits atop it (it’s his favorite), and a message.
You’re the best
Im so sleepy now
Goodnight xx have sweet dreams
Send pictures of you and Ferret in the morning okay???
Love you!!
Y/N smiles at her phone, feeling boneless and lazy. She needs to get up and pee and clean up a bit but she gives herself a second to just exist, melting into her mattress, wishing that his ‘love you’ was a little more than just Harry being sweet. But, as she is with most things, if this is the only time she’ll get it then she’s going to milk it a little. Pretend that he meant it in a way different than he does.
Sweet dreams, love you too!!
. . .
Sunday night, there’s a knock on Y/N’s door.
Harry stands there, holding Dolly underneath his arm and a floral casserole dish in the other.
“I told her you were important, so she made some just for you,” he told her, “Now invite me in so I can get my bum in a seat that isn’t a car, ‘cos I’m sore.”
Y/N is relieved that nothing changed after Friday night. Harry had been messaging her like normal on Saturday, but she still had some reservations that he might be a little weird about it when they meet up again. Y/N didn’t regret it but she didn’t know how he felt about it, and she didn’t want to assume that he was in the same boat. If he didn’t bring it up, she wouldn’t, and if he wanted to pretend like it didn’t happen, then they could do that too.
But when he’s handing her the dish Y/N’s mouth pops open to say, “Oh god, you didn’t have to hand deliver it after you’ve been traveling for so long. I would have come to get it from you!” Harry replied with.
“It’s the least I could have done after you put me to sleep on Friday,” his voice is teasing, and light, but his face still flushes at the memory, despite being the one who brought it up, “And dealing with me drunk and horny.”
She laughed, any remaining tension seeping from her shoulders, dissipating into thin air.
. . .
Harry needs to tell her.
On Tuesday morning, he woke up with what felt like someone branding him – maybe a little less severe. On his lower right hip, just above where the elastic of his underwear usually rests, and for a second, he thinks that Dolly had scratched him. That’s unlike her though; Ferret may stomp all over Y/N’s body and have little to no control over when his claws slip out, but Dolly is very particular about when the pointed tips dig anywhere that isn’t her scratching post. She’s his good girl, through and through, the only time he ever feels her nails is if she’s kneading biscuits on his chest or sometimes his thigh, and even then it was never like this.
He’d still been half a step in a dream when he reached down, expecting to feel skin raised and inflamed, but he felt nothing – just the smooth surface of his hip. His brows furrowed, he peeled his eyes open and raised his sheets, then sucked in a gasp so hard it nearly chokes him.
Like a new addition to his skin, like a birthmark, decorates a small patch. It’s nonsensical, like most of them are, a doodle that looks like a circle, turning into a swirl, dots that could be stars, three lines that remind him of Dolly’s whiskers, uneven in length. It’s a shade darker than his skin, and there’s no indication that it had even just appeared – no irritation or swelling, despite it feeling like a smoldering wound. A cat scratch that had been cauterized or something, that’s what it felt like. Has anyone ever described that before?
He sits up a little too fast and gets dizzy, his brain swimming and swirling. Harry can’t take his eyes off of it, his heart hammering – he’d wanted this so badly. Every day since he’d learned about soulmates, he woke up and mapped out his whole body, looking for anything that hadn’t been there the day before. At first, he never felt discouraged when he didn’t see it; his mum had caught him searching a few times and always told him that it would happen when the time was right. That his person would appear almost in tandem with his mark, and that everything would fall into its place when it was meant to. So don’t panic and don’t rush it.
So Harry waited. He waited until he was 10, and his first love (who was three years older than him) met his soulmate at the neighborhood pool. He waited until he was 14, and his girlfriend who he was sure was the one, woke up with a soulmark beneath her ear and Harry had nothing beneath his. He waited until he was 18, in UNI, happy as can be with his partner, only to be left yet again, when their mark popped up on his thigh and all Harry had was his smooth, peach-fuzzer, pale skin.
He waited until he was 21, until he was 22, until he was 23, 24, 25. He waited until he was 26, and the girl he’d been dating for a year and a half and he loved her enough he was looking at rings and talking about down payments, and making promises that soulmate marks wouldn’t change anything – woke up with delicate swirls and scribbles above her ankle. He waited four more days, and she was crying, apologizing, telling him how sorry she was but she met them at work, and it all just clicked into place. Something she’d never experienced before, something beautiful.
Harry waited, until he was at a work party, welcoming some newbie who was talking about the girl across the table like she was some deity sent by Cupid himself. And he watched her get nervous under the attention, brushing off the rapid-fire questions, with two friends flanking either side of her shooing them away. Then he saw her excuse herself, a little while after, and instead of going to the bathroom she was making a beeline for the exit, and Harry’s feet were carrying him after her before he could even think twice about it. He’d only had two beers with his meal, but his tact, and social awareness had snuffed out into a nonexistent puff.
Harry waited, and he waited, and he waited until he decided that he couldn’t wait anymore. And if this girl was real – if she could help you find your soulmate just by pretending to date her? Well, he thought it was worth a shot. Anything would be worth it, to not feel this pain of someone being chosen over him again, and again, and again.
Y/N was so understanding when he spoke to her, and even when he (shamefully) started to snivel and cry about thinking he was going to marry his ex and how bad the last 4 years have been as far as romance was concerned. That was his first clue that Finley wasn’t fucking around, that people must come to her about this often enough. She comforted him, promised to think about it, and then the next time they saw each other, she agreed to do it. Harry had spent the entire weekend stressing over asking her if she would say yes or not if he’d made her uncomfortable, if he might have ruined her night. Y/N managed to comfort all that panic in one simple conversation. Honestly, even before they spoke to one another and sorted through all the details – when she messaged him the night before, Harry had felt at ease almost instantly.
His second inkling, that this wasn’t some elaborate joke, was how halfway reluctant she seemed about the whole thing. Harry figured it must be hard doing this time and time again, helping people find their soulmates only to be left with nothing to show for it. To go from seeing someone frequently, to not seeing them much at all. To never know if your soulmate was out there, or if the consequence of having such a power meant you had no soulmate at all. That’s why he tried to make it clear to her that no matter what she chose, he wouldn’t hold it against her. Hell, he was just so enamored by the fact that she’d done it in the past. If it were him, he might withhold his powers out of spite – why should everyone else get their soulmate, and then he’s left all alone? How was that fair? So for Y/N to do this regularly – god, he just thinks she must be a saint.
Harry could follow the rules she set out just fine, he didn’t mind them, and she was nice so pretending to date her wouldn’t be hard. Actually, about three to four weeks into it, he’d forget pretty frequently about the whole arrangement. When he was planning things with her, it was genuine; Harry wanted her to come with him to get Mediterranean after work, and he wanted to go to the theaters with the nice, reclining seats and watch a movie in IMAX together. Harry wanted to go on picnics and kitty playdates, and he wanted to spend time with Y/N in the mornings before work, in the evenings after it, and on weekends when they both had nothing to do. When he wasn’t with her, he missed her. All of his other friends knew about her, Adam could probably recite Y/N’s sub sandwich order because for some reason that comes up a fair amount.
“Are you sure she isn’t your soulmate?” Adam asked one day (unprovoked, because Harry hadn’t even spoken about her for at least twenty minutes) when Harry was waiting for a thunderstorm to settle down so he could drive home safely, “I’ve just never seen you so. . .taken, with someone before. And that means when it comes to you because you fall in love every three seconds.”
“Heyyyy,” Harry pouted at him, but he really didn’t have an answer. This – how he felt about Y/N – certainly felt different than it ever had before. Harry was someone who did become infatuated fast, but with Y/N it felt so natural, so certain, so sure, that he was supposed to feel this way about her. That Y/N had been placed on this earth so that he could see her smile and hear her laugh, and he had been put on this earth, to do the same for her.
Harry thinks she’s beautiful; her brain, her face, the way her giggles sound, and the noise she makes when she’s grumpy, huffing, and pouting. Her tears are beautiful when they slide down her face and leave her cheeks sticky. The furrow in her brow is beautiful when her eyes are glued to the screen trying to decipher what the author could have possibly meant by using the word scrumtrulescent to describe a car. She’s beautiful when her lips are all swollen red and bitten from his mouth. She’s beautiful when he wakes up from a nap finding Ferret smothering the bottom half of her face with his back. She’s beautiful when she asks him to describe what he thinks his soulmate might be like, and she’s beautiful when she’s oblivious to him describing her.
Because it has to be her.
It just has to be.
Harry throws his bedding around, looking for his phone that he knows got tangled up in his sheets the night before. He looks at the time – 8 AM – and knows that Y/N is already awake and getting ready for work. She’d messaged him a photo of Ferret with one eye open and the other closed with Ferret the scallywag beneath it. A headache threatens to grow behind his temples when he realizes that if Y/N had woken up with a mark, feeling like she’d been branded, then she would have told him. Or, in her panic, she wouldn’t have bothered to message a photo of Ferret.
Of course he won’t know for sure until he sees her, and until he can somehow peek at her hip, but right now it’s not looking. . .great for him.
It shouldn’t matter. Harry should just be happy to have one, he knows, but the truth is, Harry can’t be happy if Y/N isn’t. He doesn’t want to stop the way their dynamic is now. He doesn’t want to add another person to it, and he doesn’t want to figure out someone, and how they would feel about Harry’s relationship with her, when he’s so clearly in love with her it’s almost obnoxious. And how would he propose a polyamorous relationship where Y/N was included without seeming like a sleazy guy? Actually, how would he explain that he was going to love Y/N probably a little more than whoever his actual soulmate was?
Harry had never dreaded meeting his soulmate before.
But with Y/N involved, apparently, he’s just feeling a lot of new and different things.
He needed to tell her. It was one of the things she requested of him, at the very start, one of the only things that she requested. She didn’t want him to prolong things to spare her feelings, she wanted him to let her know, so they could end things inconspicuously.
. . .technically, though, that was only if he found his soulmate right? And what if it wasn’t to spare her feelings? What if Harry is doing this to spare his own? Then it’s different. . .right?
He wouldn’t keep it a secret for long, and if he really does find his soulmate, of course, he’ll tell her, but at least for now, Harry would like things to change relatively little. Knowing Y/N, she’ll back off if she knows he has his mark. She’ll try and leave him room to go and seek out his person, making herself distant so he wouldn’t have to feel bad when he distanced himself (not that he planned on that, even a little bit). Always so self-sacrificial; his mind and body yearn to see her now. Harry is nervous, and his mark is burning, and he simultaneously wants to stare at it and pretend like it isn’t there.
The thing was, Harry had finally accepted that maybe he didn’t have a soulmate, and he was alright with that. He thought that maybe he and Y/N were just soulmates who didn’t have soulmarks. Him all of a sudden having one complicates things.
What was he going to do?
Fuck, what was he going to do?
.. . .
Harry attempts to not be so obvious about it, but he’s never been very good at hiding things.
It must be written all over his face as soon as he walks through the door, Niall spots him outside of the elevator, and his brows furrow, “Why do you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“Constipated,” he replied easily, and Harry huffed at him, “Relax your brow.”
Harry does loosen up the muscles in his face some, “You’re right,” he murmured, “My bad, the sun is just kind of bright today.”
Niall surely doesn’t believe it because the sun has only just barely made its appearance from behind the clouds, but the good thing about Niall is that he isn’t pushy and he doesn’t quiz you. If you don’t want to discuss something with him, then you don’t have to – it's as easy as that. He just needs to count his blessings that he hadn’t run into Eloise, because she would have had him confessing everything in a matter of three seconds, with one look over her shoulder.
Harry is itching to see Y/N but he’s already late, so he has to go straight to his floor. He’s greeted by the secretary, and his floor manager almost immediately, then his cubby buddy and a couple of his other coworkers swarm him as soon as he walks in. Harry would be alarmed if they didn’t always do this, chatting about a little bit of everything, and a little bit of nothing, while Harry boots up the tablet so he can start his final draft. It was for a romance novel, and humiliatingly enough, in the first couple of drafts, the woman he drew on the front had a striking resemblance to a certain editor a couple of floors down from him. So he’d decided that he’d try the author’s other vision, without any people on the front, and instead draw an intricate mural of flowers hidden among a grassy hill.
He draws until his hand cramps and he just can’t take it anymore, packing up for lunch twenty minutes early, and the floor manager just winks at him and tells him to not let anyone know he gets special treatment just for today (he lets him do this quite often, actually, and nobody really bats an eyelash – the floor rules are much more lax than most floors in the building). Harry takes the familiar pathway to Y/N’s floor, and makes his way to her briskly, catching only the tail end of the conversation she must have been having with Eloise.
“--must’ve slept weird or something, I don’t know,” then she caught sight of Eloise looking behind her, and turned around to face him.
It feels like a weight had been lifted from his chest – he isn’t sure why. Just knew that it felt like it was hard to breathe a little, like when the air is clouded and heavy with smoke from a bonfire and he’s sitting a little too close, but when he saw her, it was good. Like being in the countryside, where the air is light and feathery like the wind. He wanted her there with him so badly when he went to visit his Nan, he could barely contain himself, but he knew she didn’t like getting the family involved. It wouldn’t be for nothing though, he would be introducing her as the person who should be his soulmate, no matter what the mark on his body said.
“Harry,” she smiled, “Where the hell were you this morning, I got you a muffi–oh!” Harry wrapped his arms around her, and honestly, it’s more of a headlock than a hug, but it’s the best he can do from this angle. Y/N doesn’t seem to mind, leaning back into him and wrapping her hand around his forearm, “I mean, it’s only a muffin, I hardly think I deserve a hug.”
You deserve the fucking world.
“You underestimate how much I love a muffin,” he replied instead.
. . .
Y/N isn’t typically a huge fan of swimming, but under the right circumstances, she could get behind it. These particular “right circumstances” are the manager of Harry’s floor coordinating a party for his own birthday and inviting everyone, and telling everyone to invite everyone, to his massive house with his equally massive pool. Y/N doesn’t mind a pool house party, because there’s somewhere to escape if it gets too cold outside and there’s a toilet that flushes and food that hasn’t been sitting stale under the watch of 2 or 3 teenagers who hate that they have to work in the summer.
And she’d get to watch Harry wander around in a tiny little bathing suit, so. . .well, she couldn’t complain.
It started at noon, but she and Harry didn't arrive until a little after 3 PM when the sun had lowered just enough to be tolerable and so Harry didn’t turn bright red underneath it. A lot of people had already been a few drinks in, but Y/N wasn’t necessarily in the mood for it. She stripped out of her clothes with Harry at the beach chairs, a little taken by how much of a resort vibe the pool gives. At first, she had no idea where the floor manager was getting this money, but she overheard someone say his soulmate was some lawyer bigwig. Which, how lucky is that, because now they have a 40,000-gallon pool, lined with white cushioned beach chairs. There’s a fire pit made of grey bricks, and seats around that. They’ve even got large umbrellas hovering over some seated areas — it’s amazing.
The pool was ice cold at first, but once she (Harry) shoved her shoulders beneath the water, it ended up being okay. Harry is swimming around too, though they hover close to each other. Y/N tries to suck up his body heat the best that she can, and maybe she just wants to be pushed up against his naked body — sue her.
Harry doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, he reminded her a bit of a guard dog, “Jesus,” he murmured, retying her top for the 4th time because every time she resurfaced from the water it would loosen bit by bit, “Is this top made so you have no choice but to flash people? We need to leave a bad review.”
“It used to be much better,” she admitted, “I haven’t bought a new top in a while.”
“Let’s go shopping for a new one before it gets warmer enough that these parties are happening all the time,” he suggested, “I need a new one too, this one is a little short.”
“Nooo, the shorter the better,” she tells him, reaching down and pinching at the fabric where it’s just about halfway up his thighs, “It makes your bum look peachier.”
His face gets pink and Y/N revels in it, loving how flushed and shy he gets with her.
They stay inside of the pool for a while, only getting out when Niall has reached the point of being drunk that cannon balls with their floor manager had started seeming like a good idea. Then Y/N crawls out, with the help of Harry’s hands on her hips because someone was occupying the ladder (the person occupying it, Harry tells her, is named Gene, and she doesn’t know how to swim so Y/N doesn’t want to make her let go). Harry squeezed her hips and re-adjusted the suit bottoms that had ridden up her cheeks. She has half the mind to suspect Harry is jealous of the others seeing her and she couldn’t help the giddy little bubbles that fizzle in her chest because of it.
So now, it was around 6 PM and the sun was lowering in the sky but still pretty warm. Y/N and Harry don’t need to be sharing a seat but they are, and Harry’s legs are outstretched on either side of it while Y/N has her own crossed, a towel flopped over her lap. She’s turned to face him and Eloise, who sits on the neighboring seat, talking idly, while Y/N demolishes a bowl of sliced fruits that were in the kitchen. There were quite a few still left because people were focused more on day drinking than they were on the catered fruit, so she was trying to figure out how she was going to steal them for herself. They were so juicy and sweet, everything so wonderfully in season, and honestly, she wondered if they added some sugar to them.
“Is it good?” Eloise inquired, her eyes trained on Y/N amused.
“So fucking good,” she nodded, then stabbed her fork into an orange slice and holds it out for her to have it. Eloise goes ahead and takes the whole fork and plops it and the fruit into her mouth, “Hey –”
“Find those pics of Ferret when he was a baby. The one with him compared to the grapefruit and then he started biting it – he looks so skunky in that one.”
Y/N’s eyes lit up, “Omg, you’re right!” She sets the bowl down on her knee, reaching down for her purse and rifling through it for her phone.
“What is up with this consistent slander on this poor cat?” Harry exclaimed, clearly exasperated and it made Y/N laugh – he really would defend Ferret no matter the circumstances, “He doesn’t even smell! He smells like Y/N’s rose oil most of the time like he’s been rolling around in it!”
“It’s not so much the smell as it is the look,” Y/N explained, “I mean, he’s just so – Oh, shit! Harry, I’m sorry!” The balance of the bowl on her knee had not been nearly as sturdy as Y/N had taken it for, because the rest of the fruit, along with the juices that had settled at the bottom, splashed out and onto his lap. If the setting was different, she honestly might have bent down and licked him clean, but this was a work event (no matter how drunk everyone was getting) and she didn’t need an HR ticket against her.
So she uses the towel in her lap, “It’s okay, baby don’t worry about it,” but she’s already rubbing him down, wishing she had a bottle of water to pour over it.
Harry has quite a few tattoos, but she’s a little confused when with one of the swipes of her towel, something like ink emerges from his skin. Her brows furrow and she squints looking closer, rubbing again, “Wait – Y/N,” he grabs her wrist, making her stop and Y/N is confused.
“What, did you get my name tattooed on you or something?” She joked, but when she looked up at him, his face is. . .eerily serious.
Dread tickles at the bottoms of her feet, when her eyes flicker down at it again. She can see a circle that turns into a spiral, and when she strokes the towel again, three lines, like cat whiskers. Confusing little doodles, not in the black ink that the rest of his tattoos are in, but in a pigment just a shade darker than his skin. . . .like a birthmark.
Like something written into his DNA.
Like a soul –
“It’s time for cake!” Someone cheers from somewhere – Y/N can’t really focus on much of anything right now.
“Oh,” her voice is gentle, just above a whisper, and this inky, dark feeling crawls up from the base of her feet, wrapping like tendrils around her ankle, yanking her further into a pool of it – of something murky, and rotten. Even so, she fights to put a smile on her face, just a little one, “That’s good, Harry,” she avoids his gaze, “This is what we were doing it for, yeah? This is good.”
“Y/N –”
“When did you get it?” Why was he covering it with makeup? Did he just not want it to be a big deal at the pool party? Everyone turned it from a birthday event into a Who is Harry’s soulmate event. He must have just found it this morning and didn’t want to stir up a fuss, or anything. He would be kind enough to think ahead like that – everyone gets so interested when Harry’s involved, it might take away from the celebrating, and the cake, and the pool.
But why wouldn’t he tell her? That’s – why would he want to keep that a secret?
“Last Tuesday.”
Two weeks ago.
He got it two weeks ago.
Her eyes narrowed, “Why didn’t you say anything?”
Harry looks flustered as Y/N takes the towel back, pulling her legs out from where she’d been tucked close to him, “I just didn’t want –”
“I told you,” she keeps her voice low, she’s not trying to make a scene and this doesn’t need to be as dramatic as it could be, “I said you don’t have to prolong anything because you feel bad for me, okay? I’m not some. . .some pitiful creature that you have to coddle from the truth. That shit pisses me off, Harry, and you know that.” Y/N presses herself up but she doesn’t do it too quickly, lowering to grab her bag but Eloise had already plucked it off the ground for her.
“Please, that isn’t why,” he pleaded, and he looked so distraught, if Y/N didn’t feel so upset maybe she could listen to him. But she doesn’t want to right now – the emotions wreaking havoc in her body are so intense that she isn’t sure which ones to listen to. She’s sad because if he has his mark that means his soulmate must be close by – that their time pretending to be together would come to an end, and he would go on, and live his life happily with someone who wasn’t her. They would get smoothies together after work, cuddle with Dolly on the sofa, and curl up next to each other in the recliner seats at the movie theater. They would wake up to each other in the morning, or they’d send messages saying they love the other so much, and they would share clothes all of the time (Did Y/N have to give him his hoodies back? She probably should – they weren’t hers to keep anymore).
And she’s angry, so fucking mad, because she told him not to do this shit. It had happened more times than she would have bothered to count, where the person gets their mark and finds their soulmate and they don’t tell her because they feel bad. Because when everything works out for them, that’s the perfect time to start feeling shitty about using her. Now they feel guilty that she’s going to be all alone, poor pitiful Y/Nm with no soulmate, and no romance in her life, just this uncanny fucking ability to make sure that everyone else gets their chance. She just wanted people to be real with her, and honest. She was an adult, she could handle this, and if she couldn’t then she wouldn’t do it.
But she had! She’d done it again, after swearing it off, because she wanted him to find his person. Even when she realized that she had feelings for him, she still wanted him to find them, even if it was going to suck for her. Even if it was going to hurt.
Because that’s what this feeling is, all dark, and inky, and suffocating. When she’s angry and she’s upset, the amalgamation usually transcends to hurt. This time, it’s excruciating. This time, she wants to press herself into her mattress and stay there for months. This time, Y/N wants to cry. . .she really, really wants to cry.
Eloise follows her to a point when they are far enough from the others so that nobody is eavesdropping, “Do you need company or do you need to be alone?”
“I just, need to be by myself for a second,” she replied, and she hates, hates, hates that she knows that she’s like that, but Harry isn’t – he doesn’t want to be alone when he’s upset, he wants to be with people, and the thought of him being alone right now. . .she can’t stand it, “Could you – I know its a lot to ask, but could you please stay with him? I don’t want him to be alone.”
A look crosses over Eloise’s face, something understanding as she nods, “Of course,” she replied, “I can handle him. He’s an idiot but so is Niall. I’ll rally the two of them together.”
Y/N smiles but it hardly reaches her eyes, “Thank you, El.”
“Message me when you get home.”
Y/N actually holds it together for longer than she suspects she might. She keeps it together while she’s pulling on her t-shirt and shorts over her wet swimsuit and orders an Uber. She keeps it together the whole ride home, even when the driver won’t stop talking about. . she’s not really sure what he was talking about, but she was humming and nodding like she might be listening so he kept going. And she keeps it together on the way up to her flat, when she gets through the door after she showers, and washes her face and brushes her teeth.
Then she goes into her room. Ferret is sitting on the bed, minding his business.
Y/N cries then, for some reason. And, not for the first time, wishes this ability was not her own.
. . .
Harry knew he probably looked stupid in front of Eloise and a ‘yanked from his drunken stupor to sobriety by way of angry Eloise’, Niall. But he’s stressed out, and upset with himself and this fucking mark on his hip, and his eyes have been filled with tears for the last twenty minutes while Niall squeezes his thigh, teetering on the edge of the bathtub, and Eloise holds a bottle of water for him, her hip cocked against the sink. They’d fled to the bathroom so that they could have some privacy.
“I’m an idiot,” he cried, and Eloise nodded while Niall shook his head, “I shouldn’t have – I shouldn’t have kept it, I don’t want her to be mad at me.”
“Let her stew over it for a little while,” Eloise tells him, setting the water bottle on the counter, “She just needs a minute to gather her bearings and then she’ll be ready to talk. She’s probably more hurt than she is angry, anyway.”
Harry frowns, and Niall adds, “Yeah, once I accidentally spilled my coffee all over her new purse and she didn’t talk to me for like. . four hours, but after lunch, we made up.” He smiled, and whatever he’d been drinking was still swimming in his gaze, “She just needs to work it out in her head.” He doesn’t have the slightest idea what they could be fighting about, since he’d been kept out of the whole soulmate agreement situation, so Harry does appreciate the attempt on his end. Even when Eloise mutters something that sounds like, “Very unhelpful Niall.”
“I didn’t want things to change.” He snivels, “I wanted it to stay the same, I just want – I want to be with her. I don’t want a soulmate if it isn’t her.”
“Just tell her that, when you get the chance,” Niall encouraged, “She likes honesty.”
Eloise replies, “For once, I do agree with Ni. She’s someone who appreciates complete transparency, so tell her exactly how you feel, yeah? Don’t hold anything back.”
Harry nodded, only feeling slightly better. Still, he’s overcome with so much guilt he just wants to run to her flat and fix it right now. But he won’t – he’ll wait until she’s ready to talk.
And then he’ll tell her he’s in love with her, next time they speak.
This hurt so, so good 😭😭😭😭
