Bad Friend

14- Avoiding Everything Part 1

i saw harry in tacoma last night. here's a double update!

With one last searing kiss to his lips, I rolled off of Harry, the two of us panting as we laid shoulder to shoulder on my bed. I knew I had to get up and get my day started—I had to take Cher for a walk and feed her, I had to open up the shop, I had to do literally anything else but lay here with him. But I was so spent, my heart was still racing, and if I was honest with myself, I don't think I could've gotten up from the bed even if I tried. My legs felt like jello, and I had a feeling that once the slight tingling stopped, my legs and hips would be sore. Still, I knew if I didn't make some sort of effort to get out of bed, Harry would try to talk, and I didn't want to talk.

"You can't move, can you?" Harry asked, his voice hoarse and sounding just as out of breath as I felt. And yet, he sounded unmistakably smug. Turning my head to the side, I found Harry already looking at me. There were beads of sweat dotting his hairline, the strands of his long hair splayed against one of my pillows like spilled ink.

"Yes I can," I told him, moving the sheet off of my waist and attempting to swing my legs off the side of the bed. Harry rolled his eyes and did the same, getting up to go to the bathroom while I tried and failed to stand up, ultimately just falling back onto the bed with a wince.

Four weeks. Four weeks had passed since Harry asked to stay with me and we kissed in my workroom. Four weeks since Harry had been waiting for me with the dinner he made for the two of us, since I'd dodged the bullet of talking about everything that needed to be talked about and pulled him into my bed instead.

Since then, things had been good. We kept conversation light, and any intimacy between us was strictly physical. It was perfect, actually. We made each other feel good, I avoided questions when I needed to, and we had a whole apartment to get to know each other in a way we had never let ourselves before.

Harry had been on board at first, adhering to the unspoken rules of our current dynamic, but after the third week, he began trying to needle me with questions or trying to start conversations that ran deeper than what we'd done that day. He obviously still disagreed with me and my stance on not needing to talk about everything, trying to bring it up before or after we inevitably ended up in my bed—or my couch, or the kitchen counter, or any other surface we found ourselves near in my apartment—without any clothes on, but I always kissed him, got up to take Cher for a walk, or promptly turned around and fell asleep before he got the chance. I thought that if I brushed him off enough times, he'd finally give up, that he'd see that what we were doing right now was more than satisfactory, but apparently not.

"Maybe. You do that on purpose?" I asked him as he came back to lay on the bed, his nose almost grazing my side.

I'd be lying if I said it wasn't difficult to leave so abruptly sometimes. I liked seeing him with his hair tangled because my hands had been running through and tugging on it, or his flushed cheeks after a particularly intense moment shared between us, or the green in his eyes that was brighter and clearer than usual after we had sex. It was a very personal version of Harry, one that only I got to see. It made me feel incredibly smug, and even a little special, but if he thought that his dreamy bedroom eyes, or being a little rougher than he normally was, was going to get me to stay in one place long enough so we could talk, then he was sorely mistaken.

"Maybe, or maybe I was just trying to show you how much I care. Think of this as being paralyzed with passion," he replied, the corner of his mouth tugging into a sly grin. "But you asked for it, don't complain now."

I huffed at his second statement and elected to ignore his first one. He'd been doing that a lot lately, being extremely affectionate and constantly saying how much he cared for me. He hadn't said the L-word yet, but I had a feeling it wasn't too far off, and I wasn't sure if it was trepidation or excitement that filled my stomach when I thought about it.