hiraeth ; harry lewis

xviv. what are you so afraid of?

His first dream of the new decade was about Val. That was when Harry knew he was in trouble.

It wasn't a very eventful dream, but the fact that he even remembered her starring role in it was significant. Usually, his mind only held on to the location of the dream, letting everything else be lost come the morning.

This time, however, he recalled her presence in the distorted dream world. They had been sitting on the edge of a grass-cloaked cliff, side by side, legs dangling off the edge. The sky above them was beginning to awaken, the rising sun contouring the clouds pink and colouring the horizon a hazy orange. Their bare feet knocked together often; eventually, she got so fed up with it that she hooked her foot around his, pressing their skin together.

He remembered looking over at her. Val's attention was still fixed on the sunrise, and the light of it washed over her features, soaking into her warm skin, tracing the gentle rises and falls of her side profile. She turned to meet his gaze, brown eyes lit up like pools of gold, and her plush lips curved into a small smile. The loose, flyaway strands at the top of her head were glowing, giving the impression that she had something like a halo above her, that she was an angel who had come down to grace the Earth with her divinity.

Harry woke up with that very image burned into the back of his mind; beautiful, angelic Valentina Morgan, looking at him with the softest smile on her face and raw affection in her eyes. He had laid there for half an hour, sheets pulled up to his chin, still feeling out of breath.

Something inside him had shifted after she kissed him on New Year's. Sure, it had only been a peck on the cheek, but it could have been more, and he'd wanted it to be more. The memory of it haunted his waking moments for days after the party, even when he tried his best to act like he wasn't affected by it. Looking at her, talking to her, only made him think more about how close their faces had been, how if her kiss had landed a few centimetres to the right of where they had, their lips would have connected.

It filtered into his dreams as well, never with the same clarity as the sunrise moment on the clifftop, but in bits and pieces; her hand brushing against his, her dazzling white-toothed grin, the way she moved under flickering fluorescent lights. An image of significantly less innocence (her hair on his pillows, her breath against his neck, her body lined up with his) snuck in there as well; he hadn't been able to look her in the eye that day without his cheeks heating up.

Seeing her in his sleep, drifting to her in his thoughts, being with her in real life...it was almost overwhelming. His life had been consumed by Valentina Morgan. Perhaps it had been that way ever since they met on the set of the speed dating shoot, with the very first smile she sent his way, and now it was only more apparent how drunk he was on her presence.

Harry had only ever been in love once. For all his casual, carefree energy, he was the exact opposite when it came to romance; he poured his whole heart into his relationships. It was probably something to do with his social awkwardness, prompting him to cherish the social connections he miraculously managed to secure.

He and Katie had known each other for a long time before they started dating. Guernsey was by no means a large community, and so she had been a fixture of his childhood and of his frenetic teen years. Falling for her had been a slow, gradual process as they both fumbled through the motions of romance, inching down the road from friends to lovers with clumsy steps. It had felt like a natural step in their relationship, like an inevitable result of their closeness. She was fit, and funny, and they got along great. Why not be together? Everyone expected it of them, anyway.

Love with Katie had been easy and familiar. It reminded him of life before YouTube, running bare-footed through the muddy fields of Guernsey and laughing as loud as he wanted, without fear of judgment or ridicule. It reminded him of when he was young, the dizzying feeling of not knowing your own mortality. He would always miss that feeling.