labyrinth Δ harry styles

Door Nineteen: Clouded

NOTHING WAS THE same after that night. Indira fought with sleep ever since she returned from Harry's. It wasn't until after she left that she realized how much she had opened herself up. It felt weird to her. Sure she's opened up to her therapist at the time and bit to Natasha, but to sit there and impulsively cry—in front of a man she's hardly known nonetheless—over something that happened more than twelve years ago was beyond her wildest imagination.

He didn't even pity her. It wasn't that she expected pity from him or that Harry should have burst out in tears with her, instead it was the fact that he showed not a lick of emotion. Indira knew he could be emotionless and stoic like a statue—she's seen it before—but she concluded maybe that's just how he always was.

"Helloooooo?" Natasha waved her hand over Indira's face. "Did you hear what I said?"

"Oh, uhm, yeah," she tried to play it off.

Natasha leaned back in her chair with her arms crossed over her chest. "Really."

Indira bit the inside of her lip and looked down at her cup of ice cream. "Sorry...I don't mean to be rude. I'm listening now..." She took a small spoonful of the vanilla ice cream and let it melt in her mouth.

"Uh-uh. You've been in this pole-up-my-ass funk for the last two days. What's up." Indira couldn't say that she loved her candor.

"Nothing. It's fine."

Her fake smile wasn't even close to penetrating Natasha's thick skull. "Was is that fuck-head, Henry?"

"Harry," she corrected, "And he's not a fuck head. Just difficult to understand."

"Oh, like that's any fuckin' different," Natasha sneered as she licked her spoon clean of the strawberry ice cream.

"It is different. I don't know, I guess I'm just trying to figure him out. He's just so monotone about everything. Sometimes he's responsive—I suppose that's the right way to put it, but other times it's like...I'm staring at a blank wall." Indira took another small bite of the frozen dessert, but not truly enjoying it like she would have.

"It could be that he's just not as comfortable with people as you are." Natasha brought up a good point. Indira liked to think that she was pretty friendly when she needed to be and even her mom used to say she was a people person when she was younger.

Indira avoided telling her roommate the story of how she broke down in front of him to avoid looking stupid. She felt stupid enough just letting those thoughts run rampant in her mind without being expressed.

The girls shifted in the metal seats of the outdoor Ben & Jerry's ice cream shop. The weather had finally warmed up like it usually would around late April. Despite all the rain, it made all the tulips and daffodils on Newbury Street bloom. Indira sharply exhaled out of her nose when she remembered that the last time she was on this street she had run into Harry—well...he had run into her. It was still weird to think how far Harry and her have gotten closer since then. She wanted to believe that his charming persuasion was really what has gotten them this far, but what if it wasn't? What if her luck of being in a relationship with an attractive man—a model no less!—had finally struck?

But was she ready to be in a relationship?

"What does he look like?" Natasha asked as she stacked the empty cups of ice cream atop each other, wrapping the spoons around a napkin and stuffing them into the top cup.

"I don't have a picture of him," she quickly answered in truth. All it would take was one google search and Natasha would immediately expose the career he's in, which would engender more questions that Indira did not have all the answers to.