The Other Harry #Wattys2015

Chapter 36

-Chapter 36-

It all feels very familiar, the way the bottle hurtles through the air from my balcony. We'd waited for the sound of glass shattering last time but it didn't come. It does now, shards of green glass splintering out onto the pavement with a sound I can only call finality. Like something's been in the air and falling for a very very long time, only just now hitting the ground.

"You dick!"

It's my voice, but I'm struggling to keep up with it and the words just slip out. Below, he stumbles, avoiding the glass with an amused huff and then looks right up at me.

Six weeks of separation isn't nearly enough time to forget what somebody looks like, but he has shifted a little in my memory. Between the near-constant barrage of Other Harrys and the freckles on my brain, I've found myself building up picture that is flatter than it ought to be. More fixed like a photograph or a poster than the real life thing below.

Seeing him is like drowning from the inside all over again.

His whole face is everything we went through together, every tip and turn of his bone structure speaks like a chapter in our brief and bloodied up history. Even if his hair were longer, even if he wasn't thinner than is considered healthy I'd be able to pick him out of all the clones in the world. One Harry out of hundreds, mine.

"Yep," he says, briefly looking down at the smashed bottle, violently opened up and abandoned like a murder scene. "This is going about as well as expected." But then he's smiling.

His hair's grown since I saw him last, becoming this dark sprouting scrubland, he looks cleaner, dressed in a dark t-shirt, a jacket and jeans that actually fit him- bought with him in mind and not just stolen or scrambled together from things belonging to other people. But his voice and his smile is just the same. And I've missed it so much. I feel the hole in my heart that he'd left behind, only now realising how big it's been these past few weeks.

I chuck another one of Joey's old beers off the side, needing some way to force the overwhelming crush of emotion and energy out of my body, needing to hear something shatter.

"Hey- Would you get down here, you nutter," he says, opening his arms out a little, like I'm just going to fall back into them after six whole weeks. I want to, I really really want to. But I'm terrified of closing the distance between us, reminding myself what it's like to kiss him and touch him only to have it all go away again.

Once again, it turns out I don't have a bloody clue what I want. All that talk to Joey about wanting to see him once to say goodbye. What utter bollocks. I can't bear this. I'm laughing and crying and shouting, feeling more things that it should be reasonably possible to fit into my body.

"Just as soon as I've run out of bottles," I shoot back, chucking another.

He laughs softly now too. "Pop a top on and come down," he says. Calm as you like against the raging storm I'm kicking up. "Come and have a brew with me."

I look down at myself, I'm still just in my bra. I must look flat out deranged to an onlooker; topless, yelling and throwing things. Not how I'd pictured this going either. Because, I admit it. I have imagined it. I've tried not to. Tried to tell myself that it wasn't going to happen and that was fine but at night, or quiet moments by the river or in the bath I don't really think about anything else.

"You utter dick," I say shakily. "I haven't seen you in nearly two months and now you're here...talking about getting tea."

"Something boring and normal, just the two of us...."

As he speaks the car behind him opens and someone gets out of the driver's seat.

"just the two of us and Norris," he corrects, sounding intensely unenthused.