Sweet Tooth [HS]

SEVENTY NINE

Two months later.

It had been said that time heals all wounds, but Max did not agree. Because her wounds remained. At first they throbbed when she smoked on her balcony and they bled when she lay down on her bedsheets. So for a while she quit smoking, because it reminded her of him and she couldn't stand the empty chair beside her that she could not even fill with Finn anymore. She spent a long time sleeping on the couch, and the first few days, in fact, were spent at Lexie's - because even the sight of her front door gouged up his ghost.

She was in survival mode for the first month. Just trying to get through the day, trying to eat and trying desperately to sleep. She realised Finn had been a buffer. A sort of tool she'd been using to block out how deeply wounded she truly was. She'd always known - but those first few days of being alone - that's when she really felt it. The shock and the adrenaline and the numbness had passed - and she was left with the bruises.

But time had passed. And the second month without Harry she learned to sleep in her bed again. And it was proper sleep. It was not dreaming of his face or waking up in the night or pretending he was there in the morning. It was that she understood reality. Understood quite fully that he was gone. She had disposed of the second chair on her balcony, and had thrown out everything in the flat that reminded her of him. Gone were his clothes, gone were the pictures on her camera roll - she'd even bought new bedsheets.

She busied herself with work at the studio. Found it was in those moments when she was sketching and tattooing and exchanging small-talk with customers, that she could lose herself. Of course, she'd had to buy a new sketchbook and when a woman had asked for a butterfly on her stomach she sort of thought she was going to faint - but on the whole, work had been good.

Finn had been avoiding her, but that was OK. It was awkward, yes, but it wasn't excruciating.

The hardest thing, actually, was avoiding Harry. Unlike Finn who she simply said goodbye to at 5pm, Harry was everywhere. He and Addison were in the headlines constantly, on yachts, on red carpets. His face was in adverts. His voice was on the radio and his songs played in shops. And as the days rolled on, it seemed like the world was getting more and more obsessed with him. Murmurings of his album were spreading, people were talking about it on TV, on the street.

It seemed like she was the only person in the universe who didn't want to hear it. Her, and Rory, of course, who seemed to have recovered. He was smiling again and playing his too-loud music, insisting on 'meetings' at the pub and spouting out ridiculous ideas for a fountain in the middle of the shop floor. Normality had, sort of, been restored.

But. Still. Although calluses had grown over and she'd learnt to cope with seeing Harry's fucking face everywhere - the wounds remained. It was just that they were scar tissue now- that the pain had lessened, but it had not gone. And she knew that it would never go completely.