Drifter | (Harry Styles AU) • COMPLETE

Chapter 63.

Harry's POV

It's almost midnight when I finally board my plane. I buckle my seat belt and as I go to adjust my phone's settings to 'airplane mode' she calls again.

This is her fifty-fifth time calling me since I walked out.

And just like the others, I let it ring until she hangs up. I let it ring even though all I want to do is answer. I want to answer and I want to tell her this was all just some crazy mistake.

But I don't, because it isn't.

I tap the small airplane key, slipping my phone back into my pocket. I stare out the window, pinching the bridge of my nose, willing myself not to cry again, reminding myself this is what's best.

"Allergies?" The older woman in the seat next to mine says when she sees me rubbing my eyes for the hundredth time.

"Yea," I mutter rubbing my nose, leaning in toward the window so she can't see my face,"Allergies."

The flight I'm taking now will take me to Atlanta, and from there I'll have to wait around a few hours before my next flight from Atlanta straight to Athens.

Most of the four and a half hour flight to Atlanta is spent trying to sleep but I soon realize that I can't even do that without dreaming of her. I can't handle the dreaming, because I don't want to think about her. And I sure as hell didn't want to think about what I had just done. Yet somehow I ended up doing just that for more then half my eleven hour flight from Atlanta to Athens.

Somewhere between the fifth and sixth hour of the flight I start to wish that I had made a mistake, that the reason we broke up is because I fucked up. It be so easy to get rid of this heartache because all I'd need to do is apologize, and then we'd be together. It be so simple.

But that wasn't the case.

It was far more complex. I'm sure she didn't understand it either because I barely did. I only knew that I couldn't just stay with her like a person waiting for something they know is never coming. I couldn't keep making up excuse for her.

I deserved more, and the fact that she wasn't willing to give me that just proves that I did the right thing in leaving.She wasn't ready to commit to me the way I was to her. She was still holding back. Sure she had told me her secret, but she still couldn't give me all of her. I allowed her to form a bad habit that only half her efforts was enough, even though it wasn't.

I was enabling her.

And it had to stop.

She had to learn that when you love someone you don't hold back. Her lesson was one she would have to learn on her own. This was something only she could do for herself, she couldn't keep relying on me because I wasn't enough to change her.

I just hope she knows that I did this for her more then myself. I did it because she needs to trust herself for her own happiness. Because realistically, how long can you be happy when you're only half alive?

When people talk about breaking up they always focus on how much it hurt the girl when the guy left her. But what people don't care enough to realize is that it hurt the boy just as much, if not more, having to leave the girl.

When the plane finally lands I realize I have a whole other issue to deal with- my dad. I don't know how much of what Martin said was just him exaggerating. After all I had just seen my father last week and he was fine. Martin didn't seem in a state to explain clearly what was wrong with our father but the way he sounded so desperate I knew it had to be bad.

With no luggage to claim, I walk around the terminal aimlessly looking for the one person I had hoped to never see again in my life.

"Harry," I hear a voice, that could practically pass as my own, say from behind me. I turn around slowly, my limbs feeling heavy, most likely from my lack of sleep during the over all twenty hour mission I pulled to get here.