Harry Styles, a secret service agent working for British intelligence is tasked with finding the killer after a series of brutal but calculated murders across Europe. His mind is sharp, he's smart, arrogant and works with a precision that leaves no...
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Winter
I had avoided Harry since breakfast, through the day, to dinner, and now into the night. It was the kind of cruelty I didn't think I'd be capable of when it came to him. I left the room when he entered, I turned my face away every time his eyes settled on me. I answered him in single words that felt just as blunt as me slamming a door right in his face. I refused his hand every time he extended it towards me.
And because of all of it, because of my distance, my silence and my refusal to let him near me, tonight, he slept on the couch in the living room instead of the chair beside the bed, instead of the bed itself.
I wanted to punish myself. I didn't want to feel warmth or comfort, nor his kindness.
But by refusing myself of it, I was hurting him too.
I couldn't look at him without feeling my throat close and my eyes burn, without wanting to cry for what I had done to him, for how easily I had doubted him, how quickly I had walked away when all he had ever done was try to protect me.
He had been my protector from the very first night we met. He stepped between me and the cruelty of the world without hesitating. And since then I had done nothing but push him away, accuse him of lying when he was only trying to understand me, trying to find a way to help.
Even after I had left him, after I had pushed him away and shouted and screamed things into his face that weren't true, things meant only to wound because I didn't know what else to do with the pain, he had still risked everything for me, still came back for me.
And he still loved me.
I wanted to tell him the truth, wanted to explain what I had found and why it had torn me apart so completely, but every time I looked at him the words were instead caught somewhere between shame and embarrassment and that all-consuming guilt that felt like a fist wrapping tightly around my lungs until my breathing stopped working. I couldn't meet his eyes without wanting to disappear entirely, to fold myself inward and vanish, because the guilt was too much to carry while being seen, and I knew that avoiding him was wrong, that I shouldn't do this, that I should talk to him. God, I wanted to talk to him so badly. But the sickness of it was so heavy in my stomach that I couldn't find the words to say.
I hadn't slept at all. I couldn't. Not without him beside me. Not when this bed felt too wide and empty. The silence was worse when I couldn't hear his breathing in the dark.
But how could I blame him after the way I had treated him, after making it so clear that I didn't want him near me?
Still, it tore me apart from the inside out, because tonight was the first time Harry had ever chosen to sleep in another room. He hadn't asked if it was okay. He hadn't lingered in the doorway like he thought he might, wondering whether I'd let him in beside me or not.
Harry didn't kiss me goodnight.
He had never gone a single night without kissing me goodnight—not when we were exhausted or injured, not when we were angry, not even when we still pretended to hate each other. Ever since that first kiss on New Year's Eve, when he'd leaned in and kissed me goodnight for the very first time, it had become something constant, something as certain as the sun rising the next morning. Every night since then, no matter what had happened between us, he had kissed me before we went to sleep.
