Always

Chapter 23

Hope you like it x

The next two weeks passed in a blissful haze.  The entirety of my thoughts was consumed by Harry.  My body was constantly longing to be near his.  It didn’t matter where I was: at home, at school, at work, anywhere in between.  I was fully and completely infatuated.  This quiet, lanky, previously completely unnoticed boy had taken over my life.  Every night I wasn’t at work was spent together, doing nothing usually other than contentedly hanging out in each other’s presence.  Every moment I spent was him only pulled me further into his spell.

  It had taken him nearly the entire two weeks before he had accepted my hand at school, linking his in mine as we walked down the hall.  Just as I had a few weeks earlier, I had reached my hand across the small distance separating us, only this time instead of acting as if I’d shocked him, he tentatively closed his large hand around mine before tangling his fingers into mine.  I had nearly released his hand in surprise. 

I wasn’t the only one who had been surprised, however.  To say we had been stared at by the other students was an understatement.  Judgmental eyes probed our clasped hands, surely very confused as to how this had even come about.  While my friends had some idea of what had been going on with Harry and I, the vast majority of the rest of the school had been completely oblivious. 

The effect of Harry and I being together was something I did not see coming; I had figured most people wouldn’t even notice, much less care as much as they seemed to.  It was none of their business, why should they let it bother them so much?  How very, very wrong I was.  People seemed to take it extremely personally that we had become something.  The “popular” people were insulted that I had dipped so low into the rankings of the school, while the “lower ranking” students seemed insulted I hadn’t chosen them.  Nobody was happy. 

The only good thing that had come out of the entire thing was that for once, I seemed to be getting the negative attention rather than Harry.  While this thought comforted me slightly, it only seemed to disturb Harry.  He didn’t like the fact that people were trying to use him against me to hurt me.  After much reassurance on my part that I did not care in the slightest, he finally stopped bringing it up, although I could tell that it still bothered him beneath the surface. 

One particularly nasty incident had been the first time Colt had spotted us together.  He wore a sneer so intense that I was sure it had to hurt his face, somehow managing to look absolutely shocked, disgusted, and infuriated all at once.  While I had taken one look at his expression and averted my eyes anywhere else, Harry had amazingly held his eye contact until he was past us, something that had to have taken every ounce of courage he had.  I knew Colt wouldn’t be particularly excited about it, but even I was surprised at the intensity of his anger, which only seemed to grow with every sighting of us.  Luckily, we didn’t run into him and his ridiculous rage that often.

Harry was rarely the carefree Harry that I had come to know while we were at school.  Seeing me as the target of snide remarks and rude glances seemed to take a toll on him.  Despite my efforts to loosen him up at school, he remained the quiet, soft-spoken boy I had met on the first day of our project. 

As far as I was concerned, nothing these people had to say or do would have any effect on us whatsoever.  I did not give a shit what anyone thought.  I liked Harry.  A lot.  And that was enough for me.  I didn’t feel the need to explain myself or justify our relationship because the only people it really concerned were Harry and myself. 

While it was true that I had no desire to explain things between Harry and I to anyone, I did have an urge to at least talk about it amongst ourselves.  Aside from our confessions two weeks ago after he had taken me to his spot for our own drive in, we hadn’t really talked about what we were feeling.  Normally, I wouldn’t have cared.