𝐆𝐑𝐈𝐌 & 𝐃𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐆! | harry styles

𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈

WE'RE halfway through dinner, spaghetti again, when the doorbell rings.

Dad looks up at me, and I look up at him because no one has ever rung our doorbell at seven o'clock at night. It sends me into an immediate panic, and I can see the same in him but probably for different reasons. We both stand at the same time, chairs scraping in unison, and I follow him to the front door. I wait for him to reach for his gun, but he doesn't. He just opens the door wide, and a wave of cold air hits me before I have a chance to peek around him.

Harry is standing there in all his pale, perfect, undead glory.

"What are you doing here?" I gape from behind Dad, and Harry's eyebrows furrow in the center. He ignores me completely and sticks his hand out into the air between him and my dad, clearing his throat.

"My name is Harry Styles, sir. You must be Chief Greyson."

Dad wipes his hand on the napkin still in his fist and returns Harry's handshake. I'm not sure if he notices how cold Harry is because I can't see his face. It must not have struck him as that odd because the next thing I know he's inviting Harry inside, and the three of us are in the kitchen, and I'm sitting in front of my half-eaten spaghetti, totally grossed out because all of a sudden it looks like someone's bloody insides instead of tomato-dredged pasta.

Dad is asking Harry if he's hungry.

Jesus.

"No, but thank you. I ate before I came over." Harry's eyes skirt to me, and I resist the urge to laugh because I don't even want to know what he means by that. "It looks delicious, however."

That time, I do laugh. Just once before I clamp my hand over my traitorous mouth. Both Dad and Harry are looking at me like I'm crazy. A vampire calling my bloody linguini delicious is the funniest thing I've heard in a long, long time.

Dad shrugs and goes back to his dinner, talking to his pasta. "So, Harry, haven't seen you around these parts before. Where are you from?"

"Originally from here," Harry says. "But we moved away when I was quite young. I've only recently returned."

"And your parents? What do they do?" Dad is fishing for info but making it seem innocent by not staring Harry down, or giving him the full-blown hands-on-the-table, mustache-twitching, good cop interrogation.

"They've both passed, unfortunately." Harry actually looks sad. It's the first bit of vague emotion I've ever really seen on him, and he actually looks human all of a sudden. Not so hard or cold or heartless, but soft and weary and remorseful.

"Sorry to hear that, son." Dad sounds sympathetic. He understands. Both his parents are dead too, and he knows what that kind of hole feels like. Harry looks away, toward the kitchen window, speaking to neither of us.

"It's better this way. They were very sick." He looks back at Dad, who is still just staring at his dinner, and then at me. "I've inherited their house," he says, his eyes locked with mine. "I do believe I plan to stay."

"Well, what exactly brings you to my kitchen tonight?" Dad slurps up more spaghetti and gets some in his mustache and all over his lips. His table manners suck, but it's only been me all these years, and the sudden company has obviously caught him off guard.

"I came to ask you for something." Harry's eyes dart to me again, and oh, my god, he's going to ask my dad if he can marry me. That's what olden time guys did, right? Go ask the girl's dad for permission to marry them? I shake my head at him, and he's shaking his back at me, and I'm not ready to get married because I haven't even kissed this guy. I haven't even kissed any guy. That's like buying a car before you even test drive it. That's like buying a house when you've only seen a photo of the outside, and you don't know if there's mold in the walls or birds in the chimney or a body buried in the basement.