The Clique

Part 7

This is the part where the secret makes his debut appearance.

"You need to breathe."

"You need to breathe and calm down."

"You need to breathe and calm down and stop crying."

"You need to breathe and calm down and stop crying because you're scaring me."

"Do you hear me?"

"Do you hear what I'm saying?"

"I just told you I loved you and you ran in there and left me out here. I just poured my heart out to you and you left me. I thought we promised each other that we were never going to leave."

"I'm not leaving you," she responded weakly. She coughed once and her heard her sniffle. "I just need it to settle in." He heard her turn on the shower and pull back the curtain. "I expect some sort of highness after my splashie," she spoke softly. And then she stepped in, leaving Harry to think about what he had blurted out only moments before.

She had run into that room as soon as she had said I know. Was he being that obvious? He was trying to play hard to get. Guess that plan failed.

She stood their under the scalding water, eyes closed, mouth open catching drops of water on her tongue. She was so quick to end the awkward conversation with the boy on the other side of the door, that she hadn't even stripped out of her clothes which apparently made her look soft.

Her reaction all really came down to one thing: the word love.

She knew he loved her. She knew the moment he laid eyes on her on that god damned dance floor that he loved her. And she tried to avoid it by making sure he knew she was a friend. She didn't want anything more than a friend but all her other friends knew she needed something more than that. 

They all wanted her to move on from Sam. But she didn't want to.

She didn't want to move on because if she did then all the work she had done was all for nothing. She had already given up her job, not being able to step inside that law firm without thinking about him. Her friends had forbidden her to go to down to the prison to see him but she just had  too. She had to go that one time because she had just fucking admitted to having a small teeny tiny crush with Harry and the fact that she knew  he liked her back. Well, that just caused her to break.

Sam had always been there. Always. He was there for the moody weeks, for the overworked night shifts. He was there when her parents didn't show up to her University graduation. He was there to pick her up from the one night stands she had when they were still best friends and not yet more. He was there for everything.

And it was hard for her to accept that he wouldn't be there for anything else.