Faking Elegance H.S.

XXXXI

Harry Styles

I couldn't sleep.

It had been a long and tiring day, and I was completely content and comfortable beside Dahlia, but I just couldn't doze off, prevented by a nagging at the back of my mind- that feeling like I needed to get something off my chest.

Dahlia had been sleeping soundly for at least an hour, laying on her side, facing me, her head tucked beneath my chin. With my left arm draped over her and my hand pressed flat on her back, I could feel her ribs expand and contract with steady breaths, and I felt her exhale against my collarbones.

I tried to focus on the pace of her breathing, hoping that the constant adagio rhythm would lull me to sleep, but I still couldn't for some groundless reason, so instead, I mentally replayed the eventful day, wondering if occupying my mind would get rid of the nagging.

After the flight and checking into the hotel, the next event on the itinerary was lunch, so in accordance with my carefully laid out plans, Dahlia drove us to Île de la Cité, a small island in the Seine, where we ate at Au Vieux Paris d'Arcole, a quaint cafe I'd researched a couple weeks ago.

I figured the cafe would be a perfect and scenic location for our first meal in Paris- with its stone, teal-accented storefront, fuchsia tables and chairs, and wisteria growing up the facade- and it was. I had also figured that Dahlia would like the wisteria, and I'd predicted correctly again- I could tell that she had a vast appreciation for the way the purple petals hung over our table for two because she took pictures of the facade and it was written on her face. She always made the same face when she was stunned by something- her eyes would go slightly wide with her awestricken assessments of whatever she was surprised by, her lips would separate slightly with a bit of jaw-dropping amazement, and then she'd smile.

She fit in with the scenery. She sat across the table from me, talking animatedly about some field trip she went on when she was fourteen and how the group of five girls she was with got separated from the rest of the class and was left behind at a museum in Washington DC, and she possessed a lively spark when she was retelling the story, which ended with the group walking through the city to get to the next stop on the trip- because apparently they deemed that to be a great idea with no safety issues whatsoever. The way she told the story made her seem even brighter than the bold colors that surrounded her- the green of her dress, the teal accents on the building, the fuchsia table- and I couldn't help but imagine that our surroundings were staged for the sole purpose of complementing her, like the wisteria grew the exact way it did just so that single petal could flit down and land on the top of her head. Springtime in general complemented her- I'd noticed that when I showed her the flower field at Hyacinth Manor- and it made me favor the season even more. It was strange to think that her favorite season was autumn- she must not know that spring was created for her and her alone.

When we'd finished our meals, we walked around for awhile, and I took her to see the Notre Dame Cathedral, which was the first item we could check off on our sightseeing bucket list- I didn't check off the Eiffel Tower quite yet because we'd be seeing that from a much closer perspective than the hotel balcony later in the week. We both took pictures from all sides of the infamous structure, and I stood behind her while taking some of them, saying that I "wanted to get a better angle" when, in reality, I was trying to get her in the frame because I liked seeing her in the bottom corner of the pictures. They were the first pictures I'd taken on my new phone, and I set one of them as my wallpaper, exchanging the generic, preset wallpaper photo for one that was much more personal.