Pink {H.S.}

Chapter Fourteen

Dedicated to Maddie cause I almost got punched for saying that the last chapter was the end of the story.

*~*~*~*

I stare at her for a moment, not believing who was in front of me. "D-Delilah?" I manage to stutter out finally, after a prolonged silence, puncuated only by the hammering of the rain and the occasional clap of thunder.

"Harry. Can I- can I come in please?" she asks, clearly swallowing her pride. I simply nod, stepping aside to let her in. she steps inside the door, hanging her coat on the rack and discarding her shoes nearby. I shut the door and turn to face her, dumbfounded. Was she really here? Did that really just happen? What was going on?

She looks up so that she's looking me in the eyes, hers looking more beautiful than I remembered. But there was something else. Something that I didn't remember from last time. And I have to say, it looked a hell of a lot like nervousness.

I finally come to my senses, gesturing into the living room and dryly telling her that she "Can go sit down if she wants." She nods, before walking to the living room with me hot on her heels.

"So..." she begins and trails off as we both sit on the couch, a thick air of awkwardness separating us."Pretty crazy weather out there, right?"

"Delilah, why are you here?" I sigh, not realizing how rude it had come out as until I said it. She looks at me like a lost puppy, and makes me feel like I've just delivered a slap to her face. I sit there, opening and closing my mouth like a fool as I don't know how to recover from what I've said.

She only nods silently to my response, beginning to stand up. "Listen, I came here to tell you that I was wrong, that I shouldn't have moved away without saying goodbye, that I shouldn't have given all this" she gestures between us as she says this "away. To hope that against all odds, you'd forgive me and possibly want to start again. But now I can see that I was all wrong." She was already at the door, and standing in front of it, putting on her soaked coat by the time that I had regained enough sense to comprehend what was going on.

"No wait, Delilah!" I all-but shout, chasing after her and grabbing her wrist just as she grabs the doorknob. "You don't have anything to be sorry for. I was the prick who didn't want you to follow your dreams. I should have gone with you. When you said that you needed me to need you to stay, and that you were leaving because I didn't, you were right." She looks sad at my words, and begins to speak.

"Listen, Harry, I get it. You didn't need me. No on-"

"Because I shouldn't have needed you to. I can leave here whenever. I have absolutely nothing tying me down. I could have packed up and flown across the world with you that night, but I didn't. And I've regretted it every single day since. So if you want to try again, if you want to forgive me for not believing in you, for being scared, for not committing, for letting you walk out, then I can say you would make me the absolute happiest person in the world."

She's crying silently at the end of my speech, incapable of words at the moment. Instead of telling me that she does in fact forgive me, she just rises up to her tippy-toes and presses her lips to mine, wrapping her hand around the back of my neck in the process.

*~*~*~*

I awake to see Delilah lying beside me, her hair sprawled out in all directions and the covers pulled tightly around her. A small smile is etched on her face, and it really hits me how beautiful she is, and I'm hit with a pang in the chest as I realize that I almost let her slip out of my fingers.

We had stayed up until three in the morning last night talking. I had asked her near the beginning, of course, why she was in England again. I had found out that she apparently had decided to stop renting her old apartment, and had bought a house closer to the campus, in a subburban area. Now that she had all the extra room, she could take a lot of the stuff she had left here in the first place at her parent's house. So she came back to get it, and while she was here realized what I had many times before; that we couldn't live without each other.

She had asked me how my writing was, and I had told her that I had actually recently been dropped. She told me that there were tons of publishers in New York, and that she had actually incidentally made friends with one during her first month in New York City.

That was another thing. Somewhere during the night, it was decided that we would move to New York City. She already had the house there, and I had nothing here, Jase had started actual school and lord knows there's enough of those in New York, so it only made sense to move there.

I wasn't going to let her slip away again.

When three a.m. rolled around, we decided finally that we should sleep, and since the storm was still crazy and her parents lived a half-hour away, that she would just stay at my place for the night.

Now here we were, and I couldn't think of a more perfect way to wake up than to her smiling face. It suddenly occurred to me, almost as an epiphany, that this was how I wanted to wake up every single morning for the rest of my life.

I loved Delilah, in the truest, most honest form of the word. Being away from her made me really realize this. If I could spend the rest of my life loving her, then I would be happy. Perfectly so.

"Stop staring at me you perv." She mumbles, cracking open the eye facing me. I chuckle as she does the same, before I tackle her into the bed, peppering her face with kisses.

Yes, this was how I wanted to spend every day from now on.

~*~*~*~*

A/N: There you have it. I have one more chapter planned, then my epilogue, then my acknowledgements, then that's it. I may be crying more than a little bit. This book has been more than a year in the making, and I can't believe it's really drawing to a close. Also that it's taken nearly a year to write fifteen chapters. Anyway, the final chapter should be posted soon so stay tuned folks.