Right Place, Right Time

I Wish

When I woke up the next morning for a moment I wondered if the whole thing with Harry had simply been an amazingly vivid dream. Then I saw his Burberry heart shirt —  actually now my Burberry heart shirt — hanging over the back of the chair and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

I met Harry Styles. I hugged Harry Styles. I beat Harry Styles at table tennis. I saw Harry in his boxers. I dirty-danced with Harry. I sat on Harry's knee, and I stroked his tattoos.

And he walked off and ignored me.

I sat up and pulled open the curtains covering the window next to my bed so that the room was flooded with light. Phoebe's bed was empty, her Frozen duvet thrown back. She was probably downstairs watching her Frozen DVD for the seven millionth time. She and my brothers were only allowed to watch DVDs at the weekend, and if she didn't get up early enough to get her DVD on first, Ben and Sam would hog the TV watching The Fast and the Furious movies one after the other.

Phoebe's side of our shared room featured a few Frozen posters but was mostly plastered with pictures of horses. My little sister was absolutely horse mad, so it was a shame that we lived in the middle of a city and that Mum couldn't afford for her to have horse riding lessons. I dreamed of the day when I could make enough money to get Phoebe a horse of her own, but in the meantime she had to be content with the dozens of posters that covered two walls.

My side of the room was stark in comparison. Until a couple of years ago it had been covered in One Direction posters, but when I turned 18 I decided I should be a little more grown up, and I'd pulled most of them down. Instead I put up a framed pictures of the Statue of Liberty, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China — all landmarks I desperately wanted to see — along with Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, which I had managed to get to.

There was still one framed poster of 1D from the Where We Are tour that I really loved, and a current calendar featuring them. I looked at the picture of Harry on the calendar, which hung above my desk, and wondered where he was and what he was doing. It was just on half-past nine, so he was probably in bed sleeping off his big night clubbing. I hoped he was alone, and tried not to think about the fact that Jacinta could well be with him.

She was probably a very nice girl. But it was hard for me not to feel resentful towards her because of the way things between me and Harry turned to crap after she turned up.

I needed to know why it had all gone so wrong, but the only way I could see that ever happening was if I texted Harry, and he texted me back. It was time to stop dithering, I needed to just do it. But when I switched on my phone, I was distracted by the fact that according to the little symbol, I had 27 messages. Bloody hell, someone was desperately trying to get hold of me.

And then something occurred to me... I hadn't given Harry my phone number, but calls had been made from my phone to both his mum and Preston, so my number would be in their phones. He could have got it from either of them and texted or tried to call me. Even if he still didn't have a replacement phone yet, which was highly likely considering it was still fairly early in the morning, he could have phoned me from a landline in his hotel.

I took a deep breath and checked my message log. My heart dropped a little in my chest when I saw that all of my messages were from my best friend Abby in Edinburgh. There was nothing from Harry. Of course not, I don't know why I had even got my hopes up. He wouldn't call.

I flicked through Abby's texts. They started with, WTF Em? Is that you on stage with Harry Styles? And It looks like you... was it you???????. Next came You're all over tumblr with Harry Styles. OMG Emma — HARRY STYLES!!!