United

Choices

I stood at the crossroads between the cemetery on the north side of campus and the music room on the south. I wasn’t sure which way to go. I held two letters in my hands.

The first, from Jasper, was the apology I had expected, and a plea for me to meet him after class to talk it out. The second, from Harry, said nothing other than “Meet me at the lake.” I couldn’t wait to. My lips still tingled from our kiss last night. I couldn’t get the thought of his fingers in my hair, or his lips on my neck, out of my mind. 

Other parts of the night were hazier, like what had happened after I sat down next to Harry on the beach. Compared to the way his hands had ravished my body not ten minutes earlier, he had seemed almost terrified to touch me.

Nothing could shake him from his daze. He kept murmuring the same thing over and over, 'something must have happened. Something changed', and staring at me with pain in his eyes, as if I held the answer, as if I had any idea what his words meant. At last, I’d fallen asleep leaning on his shoulder, looking out at the ethereal sea.

When I woke up hours later, he was carrying me up the stairs back to my dorm room. I was startled to realize I’d slept through the whole ride back to the conservatoire, and even more startled by the strange glow in the hallway. It was back.

Harry’s light. Which I didn’t even know if he could see. Everything around us was bathed in that soft violet light. The white bumper-stickered doorways of the other students had taken on a neon hue. The dull linoleum tiles seemed to glow. The windowpane looking out on the cemetery cast a violet shine on the first hint of dull yellow morning light outside. All of it directly under the gaze of the cameras.

“We’re so busted,” I whispered, nervous and still half asleep.

“I’m not worried about the cameras,” Harry said calmly, following my eyes to the them. At first his words were soothing, but then I started to wonder about something uneasy in his tone: if Harry wasn’t worried about the cameras, he was worried about something else.

When he laid me down in my bed, he kissed me lightly on the forehead, then took a deep breath. “Don’t disappear on me,” he said.

“No chance of that.”

“I’m serious.” He closed his eyes for a long time. “Get some rest now, but find me in the morning before class. I want to talk to you. Promise?” I squeezed his hand to pull him to me for one last kiss. I held his face between my palms and melted into him. Every time my eyes flickered open, his were watching me. And I loved it.

At last, he backed away, and stood in the doorway gazing at me, his eyes still doing as much to make my heart race as his lips had done a moment before. When he slinked back into the hallway and closed the door behind him, I drifted off into the deepest sleep.

I’d slept through my morning classes and had awoken in the early afternoon feeling reborn and alive. Not caring at all that I had no excuse for missing classes. Only worried that I’d slept through meeting Harry. I would find him as soon as I could, and he would understand. Around two o’clock, when it finally occurred to me to eat something or maybe pop in on Mrs. Leith’s religion class, I grudgingly crawled out of bed. That was when I saw the two envelopes that had been slipped underneath my door, which set my back severely in my goal of leaving my room.

I had to tell Jasper off first. If I went to the music room before the cemetery, I knew I’d never be able to make myself leave Harry. If I went first to the cemetery, my desire to see Harry again would make me bold enough to say to Jasper the things I’d been too nervous to say before. Before everything had gotten so scary and out of control last night.