Salvation in the Secular Age {MH/GD}

{I Could Hear You Giving Her Head, She Said}

YOU GUYS. I rewrote this part about  a thousand times before I was happy with it. This is all in Harper's POV, and I hope you like it just as much as I do. Love you all! Votes and comments are always greatly appreciated. I hope my flow continues with this one. This story, with all its characters and loose ends, is really hard to write--at least the right way. I want to do it justice, please forgive me if that means I take forever and then some to finish it. Also, enjoy this gif of Adam. BECAUSE HE IS A FREAKING GOD. Like, LOOK at how his fingers move. And he's so cute I can't even.

{Harper}

Throughout our ten years of friendship, I had fucked up, majorly, with Adam a total of two times. Meaning, I had tried, and embarrassingly failed, to sleep with him.

The first was time was the summer after we had graduated, two years after my father died, and one year after my mother had began seeing a man called Frank. I had moved back home for a bit, with my mother and Frank, and felt dead the minute I'd set foot in the home that used to be filled with the sounds, the smells off my father.

Matty and I spoke, a bit. Off and on. He was too busy fucking everyone else and writing songs and being a general dreamboat. We had this pattern of on and off again romances. We'd find each other when we were bored, or depressed--usually a bit of both.

That's what I had been to the psychiatric hospital for. Depression. Well, technically, I had swallowed a bottle of pills I found in my mother's medicine cabinet. I didn't die, of course. I was eighteen and crazy and also didn't realize that I'd just throw them all up, get the worst headache of my life, and want to sleep for days.

I didn't want to go to college. I didn't want to leave my room. I didn't want to live anymore, at least not the way that I was.

A few weeks before I tried to kill myself, I was creeping up the carpeted stairs of my house at around two in the morning. I was drunk, really drunk, and a boy whose name I'd already forgotten had torn my panties to bits and got me off in his car before taking me home from the club.

Frank was up, still, though my mother was asleep. His hands were worn and old, liver-spotted, when they grabbed me by the hips and pressed me against the wall. His breath was awful. His mustache was coarse and scratched the side of me face when he'd asked me if I'd been out being a bad girl, if I could do the things to him that I did to all the boys I saw.

I had spit in his face and screamed so loud it woke my mother. She believed Frank when he said I had misunderstood.

It's not that I wanted to die because of what Frank had done.

It's that when I wanted someone to talk to about it, I could find no one.

Except Adam, who visited me at the looney bin I was at for ninety days.

The woman behind the counter was a middle-aged African American, her hair in intricate braids piled at the top of her head, long purple fingernails clicking at the keyboard of the computer she hadn't yet looked up from. There was a water dispenser in the corner, and it was dripping a bit onto the floor, the paper cups next to it yellowed. Everything looked dirty, although the whole premis of going here was to get clean.

"Name?" the woman asked me, her dark eyes still neglecting to leave the screen.

"Mine or my visitors?" I asked her.

She narrowed her eyes at me.

Sandra was her name, and though I'd been there for six weeks, she still had trouble remembering mine.

"Your visitor's, Harpy," she said flatly.

"It's Harper," I reminded her. "And Hann. Adam Hann," I said the name of the boy who I could see in the waiting room, twiddling his thumbs together, ear buds in, beautiful blue eyes looking at the carpet.