Buttercup [H.S]

Chapter Twenty Nine

When I woke the next morning in the dim light of Harry's room, I was greeted with the same heavy haze that I had fallen asleep in. A mind that had been sliced apart by each sharp blade of the events of the last twenty four hours.

I'd half expected to find the bed empty and cold, imagined that the morning after what had taken place between the two of us Harry would have slipped away to avoid me at all costs. But instead, when my eyes blinked open, I was met by his limbs tangled around my own; his arm wrapped like a vine around my middle, his hand having slipped under the T-shirt I wore to rest against my stomach, his knee slotted between my own and his nose buried into my hair, where hot puffs of air warmed the back of my neck.

I lay frozen, heart quickly catching up with the racing realisation of what exactly we'd done.

He hadn't curled himself around me like this last night. After he'd wrapped me in a clean T-shirt and walked me to his bathroom, where he silently handed me a washcloth to clean myself with whilst he washed his hands and brushed his teeth, we'd both climbed back into his bed without exchanging so much as a look, let alone any words. For a while, we each laid flat on the bed, an aching distance between us that both seemed somehow too close and too far, staring up at the blankness of his ceiling.

I counted his breaths, wondering how many I could wrack up before he'd say something, address the elephant in the room: we'd just crossed a monumental line in our - now broken - friendship.

If it weren't for the way my body vibrated with the echoes of his touch; his lips, his hands, his smell and his taste, I'd not have believed it had happened at all.

But those breaths stretched on, until I relented on keeping a tally, and he just turned onto his side, back facing me, and fell asleep. I laid there until the well into the night, too stricken by the act we'd just committed to even really focus on all the other shit that my life had succumbed to.

However the red, dripping words that Kyle had labelled all over the walls of my house flashed in jolts.

Slut.

Whore.

The words left a sour taste on my tongue that I'd worked all evening to try to mentally scrub away, instead focusing on the lingering trace of Harry's tongue on mine. How the sweet saltiness of the skin on his neck had tasted when I'd pressed my mouth to it. But it brought me little comfort, because those bright red words would wade back in. I was a slut. I was a whore.

So, to wake to Harry holding me close, had left me unnerved, heart palpitated, nerves growing at the idea of him waking any moment to the position we were in, only to have to deal with the pain of him pulling away. We'd avoided talking about everything last night, and perhaps we still would when daylight broke, but non the less, he would still pull away.

How could we possibly work next to each other at the market after this; him once again hating me, me no longer able to ignore my feelings for him?

And it had been impossible to ignore them last night, both when we were exchanging breaths and gasps in the heat of his bed, and when we'd laid drifting apart looking at the ceiling.

The truth glared so obviously in the forefront of my mind, buzzing bright like a neon sign: I wanted Harry. I always had.

In an attempt to save myself the embarrassment of Harry waking to find himself spooning me, I slowly tried to inch away from him, working carefully to ease his arm from around my waist.

"Where are you going?" His voice croaks in his heavenly sleep laced rasp, tightening his hold on me, pulling me further into the warmth of his chest.

"I was just going to - uh..." but I trailed off finding no excuse and realising I didn't want one when his fingers squeezed me the way I did.