Devil's Desire [h.s.]

Chapter 10

Chapter 10

The moment that I came bounding down the stairs, clad in workout gear and a pair of runners—my mother's—that were just a size too big, I knew this wasn't going to end well.

Harry had dressed quickly. He was in a shirt that curved over his biceps, wrapped around the muscles beneath his shoulder blades which feathered as he shifted to assess my outfit, and a headband that pushed back his far too grown out hair. His eyes, wholly unimpressed, landed on mine as I stopped on the bottom step.

His hand was wrapped around the banister, fingers tapping against the wood. He seemed to be waging internally whether accepting my proposition had been something that he was going to regret.

"Are Zayn and Morgan coming?" he asked, his hand drifting to my shirt. With deft fingers, he pulled back the material enough to regard the wound on my shoulder, which I'd been sure to wear a shirt with sleeves long enough to cover. It was well enough healed now, already scarring over, but Harry didn't seem to care. The fact that an injury lingered there was problematic enough. His eyes glazed over as he surveyed the injury, and I shrugged him off with a small hum.

"Do you want them to come?"

"Truthfully, I want none of us going," he huffed, letting his hand fall back beside him, "but I figured we'd at least wait around if they were on their way down."

They weren't coming, despite it being Zayn's idea to get Harry to the gym. Him and I had been working steadily on the recovery of my arm these past few weeks and in the first couple of days he'd brought it up, among a number of other things that I didn't quite feel ready to vocalize to Harry yet, I decided I would make it my mission to get him to comply.

"No," I said, cupping Harry's face and tugging him toward me for a kiss. "They aren't. Just us." His arm instinctively wrapped around my waist, and he pulled me closer, deepening the kiss, only to pull away at the last moment.

This had been the extent of our affection as of late. Soft, fleeting kisses. Hands that lingered on my skin, couldn't seem to get enough, only to withdraw when I attempted to hold them there. He was touchy—had always been—but it was always to a point now. The way he'd wordlessly help dress me at night and in the mornings. How he always slipped into the shower behind me, arms curling beneath my ribs, the water cascading over two bodies that may as well have been one, while he mapped kisses along my shoulder blades and up toward my shoulder, whispering things against my skin that I couldn't catch, his hands threading through my hair amidst dollops of shampoo, only to withdraw the moment I turned around, desperate for something he didn't seem entirely willing to indulge in.

It was worse at night. When he slotted my body flush against his, our legs weaving together as I felt his breath fan over the back of my neck, his nose buried in my hair. How he simply held me still when I wiggled around to face him, my lips lingering for just a beat longer on his, trying and failing to convey what I was asking for in those silent moments where it was just the both of us in the dark, breathing in one another's air, two people who seemed eager for separate versions of comfort.

"Beautiful," he'd murmur as I drew a hand down his chest, trying to aim lower, only for him to catch my wrist and bring it toward his face, kissing my palm and gazing deeply into my eyes as he went on, "Always so beautiful. My sweet girl. 'M so lucky. La mia bella ragazza. My beautiful fuckin' girl."

And when he looked at me in those moments, gaze so vulnerable in a way that I still couldn't believe I was allowed to be privy to, all other thoughts about what I'd been wanting to do tumbled from my brain. The way he soothed that lingering, anxious part of me with a simple kiss to my forehead, a set of soft fingers drawn up my arm, I wondered if maybe this was what it was supposed to be like all the time. Just us together, existing in the same moment, chests heaving with even, equal breaths, reminding either party that we weren't alone.