Before She Falls

Chapter 6

"Sleeping in here?" Harry slurs together and closes the door behind him, his bottle of rum almost at its last drop in his hand.

"Yeah, I think so" I say still sitting on the edge of a bed.

"Where's Liam?" Harry asks as he places the bottle down on the dresser.

"In the bathroom with Danielle, sleeping" I reply and kick my flip flops off.

Harry laughs and runs his fingers through his hair. He tugs at the bottom of his green shirt and peels it off of his upper body and above his head, revealing several tattoos and a toned stomach. He tosses it on the floor and looks over at me.

"Never seen a lad get undressed before?" Harry's mouth forms a smirk.

I turn my head away from him quickly, not sure what to do with myself in this situation. My vision's still little blurry and I'm a bit dizzy. I take a quick glance back at Harry and he's already stripped down to black boxer briefs. He's holding his head in his hands.

"Are you alright?" I squeak as Harry looks towards me.

"My head just hurts bit" Harry rubs his temples with his fingers.

"Probably too much rum for you" I tease him as I stand up. My legs start to feel like pudding, so I quickly sit myself back down on the bed.

"Too drunk to walk, huh?" Harry says as he watches my attempt and failure to hold my own weight up.

I shake my head and laugh, "Of course not."

"Are you falling asleep in that outfit?" Harry points at me.

I look down and realize that I'm still wearing my new sweater and shorts.

"I guess so" I say leaning back in bed, realizing that I didn't buy any sweats or pajamas while I went shopping earlier.

"Do you want a t-shirt? Something more comfortable?" Harry offers me.

"No, no, don't worry about it" I brush away his suggestion with my hand.

Against my gesture, Harry opens a drawer to the dresser and pulls out what looks like a black t-shirt.

"Just take it" Harry says holding out his shirt to me.

"No, it's really fine, Harry" I shake my head at him, still only in his underwear.

Harry rolls his eyes, "Now you're being the stubborn one."

I smile when I realize he's making fun of when I said that he was being stubborn earlier today.

"Fine, hand it over" I reach my hand out as Harry happily tosses it to me.

"What a pushover you are, I call you one name and you give in" Harry says and grins as he lays himself down in his bed, next to the one I'm currently sitting on.

I don't know what to say, so I just roll my eyes and laugh. I ready myself to stand up and proceed to the small hallway that leads to the bathroom. I strip my white sweater off of me when I know Harry is no longer in view. I pull the black t-shirt over my head and onto my body. It smells like laundry detergent, lavender maybe, with a mixture of what smells like of cologne. The shirt stretches down to cover the top of my thighs. I leave my new shorts on and walk back to the bedroom, where Harry is lying straight on his back with the white hotel sheets draped over him. The linen coves his body up to his inked chest where I can see two swallows on each of his pecks.

"Do you need shorts too?" Harry asks as he sees me enter back into the room. I can't tell if he's being serious or just teasing me.

"No thank you, I'm alright" I smile. I could feel the alcohol still in my system and it made it hard for me to use my motor skills to climb into the bed.

"You're going to sleep in your denim shorts then?" Harry asks me in his attractive accent and I want to tell him to just keep talking because of how nice it sounds when he speaks.

"No" I answer as I pull the sheets on my bed over half of me, taking a little while longer because I can't quite seem to grasp the end of the blanket to pull it over the other half of my body. "I'll just take them off."

"Oh" Harry's lips make an "o" shape" and then smiles. And that's when I realize what I had just said sounded a little more sexual than I intended.

"I didn't mean it like that" I blurt out, trying to cover up whatever Harry was misunderstanding.

"No I understand" Harry assures me and I can see his signature smirk in the corner of my eye. "Do you want me to turn the lights off?"

"Sure" I answer, finally wrapping my whole body up in the warm blankets.

Harry rises from his bed and shuffles over to the light switch near the door. I take every opportunity I can to look at his tattooed arms, well-developed abdomen, and I can't help my drunken eyes from trailing down to his black boxers. He looks at me before turning the lights off and I don't know if it's because he knows I was staring at him or not.

He doesn't say another word, but I can hear him returning back to his bed. I listen to the mattress shift as he relaxes back onto it. I turn onto my side and hear Harry exhale softly from the next bed over. I figure I would take my shorts off before I end up falling asleep with them on and since the lights are off, Harry wouldn't be able to tell that I'm undressing myself to just my underwear and his own shirt.

I reach my hands under the blankets and pull my shorts down to my ankles; I kick them off, take them, and place them next to me, on the empty space on the queen-sized bed.

"Katrina?" I hear Harry's raspy voice ask. I couldn't tell if it's the alcohol making his voice huskier or just the fact that he's sleepy.

"Hm?" I reply, too drunk and just too tired to actually form a word.

"Do you think I'm an asshole?" Harry asks and I'm surprised and a bit speechless.

"What?" I don't know what else to say to a question like that.

"Do you think I'm an asshole?" He repeats again in almost the exact same tone.

"What do you mean?" I put off answering the question a second time.

"I saw the way you looked at me when I answered your 'Never have I ever' question" His accent was heavy and his voice deep.

"I was just a little taken-back, that's all" I admit, not sure if I should be as honest as I am being right now.

"Can I tell you why I cheated so that maybe you wouldn't think I'm such a dick?" Harry asks me in a very sincere tone.

"Sure" I answer and place my hands behind my head.

"Alright, so I was dating this awful girl, Lauren, about a year ago and I was really unhappy with her. She was gorgeous but very demanding and jealous; she wouldn't let me do anything without her. She'd yell, scream, and cry if I didn't do exactly what she wanted me to and I was just about fed up with her and our relationship really...but I felt like I couldn't break up with her because her uncle had just died. But that didn't stop her from making me do things for her; the death actually put her need to control me at an all time high. And there was this one night, that she told me to come over and keep her company while her whole family came over to morn her uncle." I hear Harry take a deep breath.

"But I was just so sick and tired of being around her and her family, they were just as awful as she was by the way. So I ignored her completely, text, phone calls, everything. I called this other girl, Lindsey, that I knew was absolutely obsessed with me. She had been dying for me to hang out with her, so I told her to meet me in the parking lot behind this really popular diner down the road in the next hour. And she did, and she hopped into my car and, yeah." I listen as Harry's speech starts to speed up when he ends his sentence.

"And then Lauren ends up finding out the next day and basically wanted me dead. Turns out Lindsey was the one who told her, the girl went and bragged about it to about everyone she knew" Harry's voice trails off after his story.

"Never cheat, the girl will always find out" I say softly, and almost giggle. How could Harry be so stupid as to think his girlfriend wouldn't find out about his backseat hook-up?

"I learned my lesson, trust me" Harry chuckles. "Am I still an asshole?"

"Well you did give me a shirt to sleep in, so you can't be too bad" I smile even though the room is pitch black.