Sweet Tooth [HS]

SIXTY SEVEN

Six years before.

The airport was predictably crowded for 9pm on a Friday night. It was all squeaking suitcase wheels, echoing announcements for flights being delayed, tired yawns of travelers, rustling of magazine pages. And it was Max's thundering heartbeat as she stood beside the arrivals gate, her eyes fixed on an empty doorway as she waited for passengers to start streaming out.

She was waiting for Harry.

He had been in America for two weeks now, and it was two weeks too many. She missed him. Missed him like she missed the air to breathe or like she missed the sunshine in winter. She was so cold without him. Felt like a jigsaw missing a piece, like a body missing a heart. Incomplete was the word she supposed. Incomplete and in-fucking-capable. Because this was all she had been thinking about, the only thing in her mind, for two immeasurably long weeks.

She had been stuck replaying when she had stood in this airport, two weeks before, clinging on to him, terrified that if she let him go he might be gone forever. Or she would imagine what he was doing out there, using her mind to embellish the vague and infrequent texts he had sent her.

But mostly, Max was using her memory. She was fixed on the curve of his lips, the colours of his eyelashes, the sound of his voice when he said her name. How he hummed the M and he whispered the X and it was an endless Maxie that was her name but really it was his. And she thought about the way he smiled, all crooked, all dimples that Max thought she could build a home inside of. And it was the way he made her feel when he touched her, or when he didn't touch her. When he just existed there beside her, smoking cigarettes, singing a melody that Max kept lodged in her memory, that she had not stopped replaying since he had left.

But now he was coming home.

And she was going to hold him in her arms again, the arms that had felt empty and hollow and utterly fucking useless ever since he had gone. And she was going to kiss him again, feel his body, hold his hands, maybe never let him leave ever again.

She knew leaving was good, that it was necessary for his career, a step in the right direction and the move towards his dream. She knew that. And she knew how excited he had been before he left, his eyes all wide and his smile so big - and Max knew she should be happy for him.

And she was. She truly was.

But it was just that since knowing Harry, which was only a few months, she had not really left his side. He came into The Inkshop daily, sometimes getting a new tattoo, sometimes just coming in to pester her as she worked. Not that it annoyed her, no.

Nothing he did could.

Because when she saw his face it was like a heart attack each time, like an explosion of butterflies in her belly, a whole fucking zoo that had been expanding and expanding with each moment they spent together. It was just that when he looked at her she forgot how to breathe. It was that since he was away she had felt this hunger that made all food taste like nothing. It was that when he was there she could not think about anything else.

It was that she loved him.

Yes.

She loved him.

And she had told herself on the car journey here, had told herself at night when she was alone and imagining the creaking pipes were a knock on the door - she had told herself that right now, as soon as she saw him, she was going to tell him.

Because she loved him and it was filling her up and it was overflowing out of her and he needed to know. He needed to know so it might anchor him down so that he might never forget her, might never leave her again.