Sweet Tooth [HS]

NINETY

Three months later.

Winter slipped away, and spring had come. Max woke up to sunlight, relinquished the layers, shedding skin and sadness like she did her winter coats. Things were good.

After her chaotic plunge into the world of press and publicity, things had settled down.

Her face was no longer on magazines, people didn't look at her for too long in the street, the crowds of paparazzi outside the studio had dissipated into nothingness, moving on to the next victim of scrutiny the public could obsess about.

What was left over, though, was her work.

A week after the attention had shifted, Max had finally plucked up the courage to open her message requests. After combing through the senseless hate and stomach-churning messages from old men, Max had been startled to find that so many people had reached out enquiring about her work.

People were praising her designs, begging for commissions, trying to get into contact about setting up appointments. At some point, the world had figured out that The Inkshop was where Harry Styles got his tattoos done, and that it was Max who designed and inked them for him - and so she, and Rory, and poor Lexie, were overrun with customers, old and new, begging to be inked in the same place Harry Styles was.

Rory was not about to turn down customers, and Max was both shocked and gratified by the fact she was being appreciated, not completely for her romantic association with the Harry Styles, but for the work she did for him.

As a result, in the proceeding months, her work schedule had become hectic.

She was overloaded with commissions and appointments, had three sketchbooks on the go at all times, and The Inkshop was more crowded than ever. While at first it was just Max's work thrusted into the spotlight, soon Finn, Lip, Tyler and Lola gained more and more notoriety and all of them were inundated at work. Sometimes there was a line twisting around the corner, and Rory got in trouble for disrupting the street. 

After a month or so of chaos, Rory employed two new staff members, Angelica and Mick, to try and tackle the growing interest in the parlour, but even then, the workload was immense. 

So, last month, Rory had approached Max with the beginnings for plans for a sister studio. Not only that, but he wanted Max to run it. It was an honour and a privilege and Max was hardly about to turn it down.

So as the cold melted away into the tentative warmth of April and May, Max was juggling new plans for the future and the chaotic stress of the present. It was good.

It fulfilled her, breathed a new life into her body by giving her something to focus on, away from the stresses of Harry Styles.

Of course, though, she kept up to date with him. There was no more pretending like he did not exist and binning magazines and leaving the room if someone mentioned his name. It wasn't realistic. She couldn't pretend like the past did not happen - she had to deal with it.

Only now she observed him from a distance. She asked Rory how he was doing in rehab or how the lawsuit was shaping up, occasionally giving him tattoo sketches for him to show Harry for when he went to visit.

She never went to see him. She still needed time. They both did.

But they texted, occasionally.

He'd say things like fucking staff here is a joke i think I finally see the value in Jack Jack. You were right.

And she'd send him the occasional picture of a tattoo she was proud of or a design he might be interested in.

It was brief. Tentative. Like how when you build a bridge you can't start in the middle, you start at opposite edges and work your way inwards.

But slow was good. Slow was a start.

And she barely had time to think about it, anyway. With work, with springtime, with this strange feeling of happiness that started budding inside her chest.

She realised the day she left Harry, that she had not felt like herself in a long time. That she'd just felt so dead, like she'd been drained. But now she felt teeming with energy, electric, alive again. She was defined by her talent as an artist, by her strength in moving on, in moving upwards. It was so strange to Max, who had felt so stagnant for so long. She'd always hated how Harry was constantly busy, doing new things, occupying fresh places - while she stayed the same, waiting for him to come back.

But now for the first time she felt like the playing field was evening out. She wasn't thinking about Harry, she was thinking about herself: her career, her parlour, her happiness.

Of course, some days were better than others. Sometimes she would find herself on her balcony or his song would come floating through the radio, and she'd find herself folded back into painful memories of her past. Sometimes it made her cry and other times it made her laugh - but she was happy to admit to it.

It was part of healing. 

She realised in those days after L.A., pretending that she did not love Harry was just as painful as what he did to her. It was self-inflicted torture she'd designed to cope, but really, it was denial. While before, it felt like she was growing hate in the places her love had been, like she was trying to patch up the broken places with a feeling that ultimately made her feel more broken. Now it was different. There was no ignoring and patching-up and hoping the feelings would all go away.

Now she was aware of the spaces inside her, the pieces of herself she'd lost in the shipwreck of her and Harry's love over the last six years. She fixed them by herself. She acknowledged them, and day by day she felt herself recovering. She did not fill the gaps with men she did not care about. She did not squish hate into the empty holes in her chest.

She let them be. She acknowledged the spaces, and knew it would simply take time for them to heal on their own.

That is not to say she didn't at least try to go on dates. In the three months following Harry's overdose, she eventually plucked up the courage to sit though a few drinks and dinners and conversations with men who's names and faces she could barely recall when she got home. Sometimes they offered for her to stay longer, some asked for her to stay over - but she never did.

Not because she couldn't, but because she simply did not want to. The echoes of Finn still overshadowed her sometimes - how unfair it was to pretend to somebody that her heart could become theirs when really, truly, it belonged to somebody else.

Because of course, in her heart, Max loved Harry all the time. But she loved him now in silence, from a far away distance. It was a quiet kind of love, a softer kind.

While in some ways her heart belonged to Harry, she knew it belonged to herself. She belonged to herself. It was not like it was against her will to care for Harry anymore, that she had no power over her feelings, that she was his because he controlled her. No. It was a strange, new, conscious kind of feeling. A power she had, a desire to care for him, rather than some chemical demand that took her heart out of her chest and brought it to Harry's feet.

As time stretched on she realised how utterly incapacitated he had once made her. But as her life slowly and then suddenly became her own again, she realised that she wanted to share it with him, one day. Maybe. If they got that far.

She often wondered if he still loved her too.

She hoped, deep in her heart, that he did.

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little chapter... watch out for the next one... it's a big one xx