Devil's Desire [h.s.]

Chapter 20

Chapter 20

The weeks passed as quickly as the days.

Mornings bled into night. Fall shifted from something comfortable under the rising sun to that chilly type of air that curled around your ankles and snaked up your spine when it set later in the evening.

It wasn't until one afternoon where I was gathering leaves in my mother's backyard that I realized we'd been here for almost three months. Three months since I'd woken up from a coma, gunshot wound fresh in my shoulder, having had to come to terms with the fact at some point or another the anticipated trajectory of my life had been yanked clean in the opposite direction than that in which I'd imagined it.

France had weird seasons. Where I was used to a cold, almost dry, air in the fall—things here were wet. It rained constantly. Almost daily I woke up with a tension headache, pain bludgeoning behind one of my eyes as if it'd taken up camp somewhere in my brain. It was awful. Dreadful, to say the least.

It didn't help that alongside these blinding, white headaches, I normally found myself buckled over the edge of the bed every morning before the sun rose, hoping Harry didn't wake up while I repeated into my muffled palms memories that had tried their very hardest to evade me the days before. I always made sure to tuck myself back into his wandering arms before he'd noticed I was gone.

Despite this, our preparations droned on. Olivia and I diligently arrived at the gym every other day, letting either Harry or Zayn work us into such exhausted states that we normally passed out the moment we arrived back home. As heavy as it weighed on us, we both knew it was necessary.

My sign language was slowly getting better. We'd all made it some sort of unspoken rule to greet one another with ASL at breakfast. Harry would lean against the counter with his arms crossed, looking positively amused, while I attempted to sign 'pancakes', 'eggs', or 'bacon'. Once I'd been slightly overtired and accidentally signed 'cat', to which he'd promptly dropped Meatloaf into my lap and kissed the top of my head, murmuring that he'd hoped I wasn't being serious because it might actually kill him to have to cook our cat.

Meatloaf purred the entire time as if I hadn't just accidentally threatened to eat her.

Harry, infuriatingly, had somehow picked it up quite well—as he did everything. By week two, he could nearly communicate in full ASL sentences. Or at least what I assumed to be full sentences. I wouldn't know either way. He'd just grin when I'd grumble and roll my eyes, promising that all of the things he was saying were nice.

Like the Italian, I had no way of knowing otherwise. Maybe he'd been cursing me out this entire time. Putting spells on me. I will say it was nice to watch his hands work though.

Things between Olivia and the rest of the group hadn't exactly improved, but they'd gotten less tense. Things between her and I had as well—the one-sided resentment I'd been harbouring towards her clearing nearly the day after my fit when I'd awoken to my period and realized, ah. There it was. The reasoning for my insanity.

Brutal that I had to deal with a gunshot wound, being on the run at my mother's house, and now my fucking period. Things were not looking up. I wasn't sure they ever would.

But at least I had a boyfriend that was nice to me—even if he'd been half the reason I was shot in the first place.

Said boyfriend was currently walking anxiously at my side while the group of us descended the grassy hill and into a forest a few hundred feet away from my mother's house. He'd been on edge since this morning. Since Zayn had suggested over breakfast that as great as the self-defence sessions are, Olivia and I would eventually have to learn to properly shoot a gun at some point.