Youth [h.s.]

Chapter Nine: Maybe I'm Amazed.

-

"Maybe I'm a man and maybe I'm a lonely man
Who's in the middle of something
That he doesn't really understand
Maybe I'm a man and maybe you're the only woman
Who could ever help me
Baby, won't you help me understand?"

-

"You don't have a phone?" Harry gapes at a blushing Anna. He immediately wants to take it back, or perhaps re-word his astonishment. She's embarrassed and almost ashamed, unhappy that she feels so. She's never had a surge of need to have the latest technology nor that she was missing out and doesn't want to start feeling that now.

Anna's face is now almost emotionless as she shrugs, "don't see the major importance of it. All my friends I'd ever need to get ahold of live on the same side of the city as me."

"Sorry," he offers a sincerely apology. "I didn't mean it to come out like that at all. I, ehm, just never really met anyone who didn't want an iPhone. Other than my gram." His eyes widen, "ah, shit. I didn't-"

"I just don't feel the need to spend well earned money on needless luxuries. Technology is great, really. Granted, I'm saving up for a new blender. I just feel that phones are barriers we've given ourselves. I mean, look around will ya? Everyone who could be having a conversation like us aren't. We've engrossed ourselves beyond screens and it saddens me."

Harry, on cue, looks around the café and surely enough almost every single individual bowed their heads to their laps and ignores their company.

"Sad, innit?" Anna sighs, nudging her coffee into her cold hands. Harry turns back to her, his heart thumping against his ears and feels a ghost smile on his face for no specific reasoning. He simply nods at both her and the feeling, bringing his coffee up to his lips.

"How long have you've lived in the city?"

"Almost a year now?"

His eyebrows shoot up in surprise, "really? You look far well adapted to the area for only a year. Would've guessed you grew up in the city."

"Doesn't take a lot getting used to when you grew up... Actually," Anna looks at him with a tilt of her head and he nods as if encouraging her on. "I don't want to lie to you-I'd like to be honest with you but I'll give you my whole life story when my coffee isn't getting cold."

"And I completely respect that," he smiles charmingly at her, unbending his legs slightly under the table. He amends her for being straightforward and honest with him, someone she just met, and respects her decision to disclose personal information later on when they are more comfortable with each other. In a peculiar way, her words give him reassurance that there will be a 'next time'. Harry's completely entranced by her. Entranced by her beautiful eyes with an embroil of gold, by the way her plump tulip lips stretch in a grand smile, the peach fuzz on her cheeks, the crook of her small nose, the mess of her eyebrows, her untamed bronze mane, the pause to gather her thoughts to speak, and the pause she takes to just think only to throw it away and break the dam over and over again. Entranced by it all.

"Don't do that." Anna says lightly, as light as a dancing feather. Harry's brows furrow, not quite understanding what she meant.

"I'm sorry?"

"Don't look at me with that smile and those eyes.. It makes me literally loose my mind. It's crazy and sudden but so is everything else. Yet.. you're not like everything else. You're so new yet so familiar but I feel... Just-just don't look at me like that because it makes me feel..."