The Timeline [h.s.]

77.

January 7th, 2019:

Claire had one enormous, huge, massive, gigantic, immense, large, tremendous, large, time-consuming, mind-consuming, numbing and painful problem.

Harry Styles.

She reckoned she had never been so fatally crushed after sleeping with someone, ever, in the course of her entire - pretty short but just as eventful - life. At 23 years of age - just turned, mind you - Claire had fallen victim to the oldest trick in the book, put into motion by none other than the man she considered to be her best friend. Her special friend. Her.... something.

She had been seduced and abandoned.

She had had the most mind-blowing sex - and the most two crushing orgasms of her entire existence - and then she had been left stranded, with Harry walking out on her in the middle of the night, while she slept cocooned inside of their love nest. She had woken up to an empty bed, her core aching from the intense activity of the previous night, soon to be joined by her entire chest area - aching for totally different reasons.

Goddammit, was she a fucking moron!

Each day since that Godforsaken night, Claire had replayed all the events and moments that had happened, the details stark with clarity against her mind's eye. Had it been any other one night stand, she would've simply replayed the sexy parts, whenever she needed a quick way to get herself off. But no! Of course it couldn't be that simple: Claire had had to go and have feelings for the fucking day, and the guy had to be none other than her (now former, she guessed) best friend, global superstar Harry Styles.

Harry fucking Styles.

And the worst part of it all? She had hoped that he wouldn't have simply been abandoned like that. Because, nestled deep down inside of her heart, there still burned a little kernel of hope, ignited by none other than the same prick who had abandoned her.

So, when she had woken up on the very late morning of December 27th - the clock ticking closer to 11AM by the second - and she hadn't found Harry in the bed right next to her, the depression he had left there as he cuddled her and grazed his heel against her leg all throughout the previous night, still quite ruffled and messy.

Claire had blinked her sleep encrusted eyes a couple of times, trying to remember what had happened, who she was, where she was, and why her legs and the very sensitive organ between her legs tingled like she had been ravished by someone who meant it.

Once she had remembered - and consequently blushed at the memories - her lips had twitched up in an involuntary smile, as she recalled what Harry had so candidly told her after they had finished fucking: everything would be changing, then.

Right, of course. Of course it had to change, Claire agreed with him.

And at first, she hadn't taken his absence from her bed as something negative. Not at all.

She had hoped.

She had thought, rationally, that she had overslept, and that he had woken up a bit earlier than she had, and that since he had already tired her enough as it was the previous night, he would let her sleep and go on about his morning routine, and maybe - just maybe - go down and make breakfast for the both of them, or pop off to a bakery round the corner and purchase it, since Claire (nor David, for that matter) wasn't the type of have everything on the ready to make pancakes from scratch.

Clichè? Yeah, a lot. But Claire loved clichès, if they were done right by the right person.

Except that, once she had attended to her business in the bathroom, and descended the stairs, hugging herself in her nightgown and anticipating what she would say to Harry when she saw him standing in the kitchen - should she kiss him? Should she ask him to decide what they were supposed to do? Should she wait and see if he was going to demand that the both of them go back to the way things were when they had tried to be casual? (Claire didn't want that, obviously, she wanted exactly the opposite of casual with him, the previous night had simply cemented that knowledge inside of her brain) - she had come up short.