full throttle || h.s. ||

forty-four || red light risks

the song for this chapter is "American Woman," by The Guess Who :)

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Harry

   I couldn't tell you exactly how long it was that Finley and I laid next to each other on the start-finish line. It was long enough that my back hurt when we finally decided to stand up, but it was a pain I didn't quite mind, but rather liked, as it was a reminder of what had just happened.

   I don't know what it was that made me want to open up to her tonight.  Maybe it was something to do with the fact that she said she didn't like the sky, and how my mind instantly went to the guy in her nightmare as the cause for it.

   But she opened up to me too. I knew that it was hard for her to talk about the sky. I could tell by the way she sucked in a sharp breath of air before speaking. I could tell by the way she pinched her eyes shut when I snuck a glance at her without her knowing.

   But she did it anyway. And I knew that, for some reason, she was pushing past those boundaries for me. 

   I hadn't told anyone about my conversations with the moon and the person who it reminded me of, not even Caspian, and I told him pretty much everything.

   I don't know how she knew to do it, but when she reached for my hand and grabbed at my wrist instead, my heart felt like it had just sped up to a million beats per second. I had never told her the significance of that tattoo, or that it correlated directly with the same person who reminded me of the moon, but with her keen intuitiveness, she knew that I was feeling an ache underneath the ink etched onto my skin, and she did her best to soothe it. 

   And when I told her about my favorite Planet, she managed to flip the sad and depressing script that I had related to it and turned it into one of hope and inspiration. Liking Pluto the best used to be something I did with a tinge of shame, and she had just managed to make it something that I felt a little pride about. 

   "I think Pluto is something. I think it's something special," she had said, and with the softness in her voice and the quietness of the night around us, I knew, that at that moment, she was no longer talking about the actual planet. 

   She had managed to stitch together so many torn shreds of fabric within my mind in just a few hours, my soul feeling more whole than when I had first laid my back down against the chilled asphalt. 

   My eyes drifted over to her as she drove her car in the seemingly empty streets. The rest of the city had gone to sleep, but at this moment, I had never felt more awake. Hell, I didn't even want to blink right now, no matter how much the wind caused my eyes to sting.

   It felt so weird, allowing myself to feel joy from such a pure night of occurrences. Sure, I found pleasure in winning, I found pleasure in sex, I found pleasure in the meaningless things of life.

   But it had been so long since I had felt my heart feel happy from something that actually meant something, without any physical or reputational reward involved in it.

   It scared the fuck out of me.

   As if on cue, my hand reached down to rub at the tattoo on my wrist, a thick and dry gulp having to be forced down my throat as we sped through the dark and uninhabited streets.