Meet Me In The Hallway

No Vacancy

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

I stood on my stoop in the pajamas I had been unable to get myself out of for the better part of a week and stared into the face of my heartbreak.

Harry looked a little broken too. And tired. His eyes had bags fit for an Upper East Side socialite on vacation.

"What am I doing here?" His voice was higher than, like two octaves up. "Well, see, my girlfriend was supposed to come with her brother to start tour. And when he turned up, she wasn't there. And when I asked where she was, I was told that she had decided to sit this leg of tour out and was going back to uni." He was livid and the words were tumbling out of his mouth faster than I had ever heard and without the usual filler words he used to pause while he thought over or conjured up what he wanted to say. I wondered if it was evidence of his strong feelings or lots of rehearsal. "And I was really confused, because last time we talked, she was really excited about seeing me in Brazil. So I was really excited about getting there, but look at that, no girlfrien—"

"I'm going to stop you right there Harry!" He was talking abnormally fast, but my voice was shriller than I'd ever heard it. "When was the bloody fucking conversation you are referencing?"

I waited and he looked slightly puzzled. I knew exactly when the conversation had been. It had been between two and three weeks long since he had rung me. I remembered the conversation really well, because it had come after another stretch of silence, and I was feeling angry and confused. He'd told me then he even neglected to call his beloved mum and loud best friend too from time to time. It was character flaw he recognized. But he had promised he would be better. He said he would get better and I believed him. It broke me a little that I was easy to forget when he couldn't see me and that he didn't miss me the way I did him.

After every stretch of silence though I gave in like his face was water in the Sahara. Harry always looked so silly and sweet when FaceTime connected and he immediately would started waxing pretty about all the places we were going and what he wanted to do together, so I would just take sip after sip of him rather than bring my thirst and his silence up. This was a recurring theme over the stretches we were apart. I got surly when he was silent, but I was so excited for the table scraps that he threw me when we finally spoke I didn't complain. Or when I did it was apparently not long or loud enough to get through to him.

Apart from the surface conversations where he had promised to call and stay in touch and said every word but the three I longed to hear strung together, I had not whinged about his horrible habits.It genuinely puzzled me. How could a boy who was stuck having long distance dealings with everybody in his life be so damn clueless about staying in touch? It was inconcievable, and I knew what that word meant.

But I'd been so happy to hear his voice and touch the screen when he laughed and to see his God damn dimples that I had folded like a run of dominoes. As though my entire purpose was to be set up as knocked down for his pleasure.

It's funny how the idea of being for his pleasure was so arousing in one context, but devastating in another.

"Fucking weeks ago, mate." I saw him ready to interject. He hated when I called him mate now. I held up a hand to stop him. His protest was going to fall on deaf ears at best or totally piss me off at worst. "I suppose I should be glad that you were still hoping to see me. I was just not sure if you remembered my name since you clearly forgot my phone num—"

"Melody!" He tried to interrupt.

"Ah, you do know my name, well, is it that you forgot that we are 'together'? You know, like you said and I mentioned that people who are together call each other! You promised H!" I used air quotes and watched him blow out a frustrated breath.