is your heart strong enough? // harry styles au

two.

The welcoming morning sunshine flooded each room in the tiny, drafty apartment. Warmth crept into the air, shaking the chill loose from Zella's limbs. The cold lingered on the hardwood floor as her feet placed flat down, stretching her muscles as she stood from her bed.

She was dreading returning to work that day. After the confrontation her and Harry had, she wanted to avoid him at all costs. At the end of it, she had made herself look and feel like a complete ass. There was nothing wrong with Harry, sure; it was just hard to overlook the laziness that seeped out of him day after day. He was of the type to spend his day goofing off or chatting away, not taking the reason that all of them were there too seriously. Every individual in that office space was there on an internship, a paid internship, with one of the highest business firms in the state. It was a hard opportunity to just pass up, and it most certainly was not easy. The work was laboring and very time consuming. Many days, Zella would push herself as hard as she could to get more completed than necessary.

Others in the office could not say the same for themselves. Her eyes would wander from person online shopping to the next making paper airplanes with invoices that needed to be entered into the system. A sense of pride held high above her head as she worked throughout the days.

"Goodmorning, Miss Zella! On time today, that's what we like to see!" Harry's raspy voice could hardly be heard over all the commotion of the early morning. "Are we ready to get this shit done? I'll take that as a yes!"

Harry's fake enthusiasm made Zella roll her eyes, sitting in her chair. "So ready to get this over with," she grumbled, her fingers shuffling through the new papers that laid on her desk.

"It won't be so bad!"

"I get it, please stop," she sighed.

The tone of Harry's voice changed completely when he spoke. "Put more faith in me, Zella. I'm here for the same reasons you are," his words were soft, yet harsh as he twisted towards her with papers clenched in his grasp.

"You don't act like it. It's hard for me.." her chewed on her bottom lip as she racked her brain for the words to finish her sentence without sounding like a royal asshole, "to put any faith in you that this will be finished correctly and on time."

"Whatever you say, princess," he scoffed, quick to turn back towards his computer monitor.

Harry split the stack of papers in half, dropping them in front of me before walking away. His long legs gave him an advantage to leave the office quickly, the elevator door shutting behind him.

Running her hands down her face, the mental battle to follow him won. She tried to push away the guilt that she felt, but her expression gave it away. Turning towards the door that led to the stairs, she sped down them. The exit door lead exactly to where she knew he would be. It was the hideout spot that everyone in the office knew about but Zella had never felt the urge to make her own visit to it.

Harry's back was pressed against the stone wall, his shoulders slumped as smoke floated into the air in front of him. His eyes landed directly onto her face. Instantly, her cheeks turned a shade of pink as the rest of her face grew warm.

"Wha.."

"I'm sorry," she cut him off before he could go on. "I shouldn't act that way."

The filter of the cigarette dangling between his lips, the green hues scanned her face. The long fingers lifted to his mouth before pulling the white stick from between his lips. His head bobbed up and down slightly in a nod, the chocolate curls bouncing around. The expression on his face was nearly unreadable, but she wanted to believe that he was accepting the apology.

"All good," his words were brisk. The sound of his heel grinding into the pavement followed. "You don't want to work with me and that's absolutely fine. But don't make it more dreadful than it has to be."

The chilly air nipped at her cheeks, the color growing a shade darker. The nerves in her stomach had started to tangle together again as he spoke, his eyes never straying from her face. The expression on his face was so serious, every sign of the obnoxious Harry from earlier that morning had vanished.

As badly as she wanted to beg for a new partner, there was no way around it. She was going to do her part and cross her fingers that by the end of the day, Harry was doing the same. It was hard for her to put something that she could so easily control into the hands of someone else. And that was her only explanation as to why she felt the need to act the way she had been.

"As I said yesterday, it's you and I," Harry's voice broke her out of her thoughts, his shoulder brushing against hers as he made his way back towards the door. "If I could have had my choice in anyone, you wouldn't have been my first pick either."

And with that, the door shut with a metal bang. Zella closed her eyes for a second, breathing in deeply and slowly exhaling before turning on her heel to go back inside the dreaded office.

Oh, how badly she wanted to go home right then and there. 

The idea of making a bigger fool out of herself in front of Harry again made an ache form in the back of her head. Why had she thought that he was genuinely happy to be partnered up with her? The two of them had been "cubby mates" for 2 months, they had no choice but to see each other everyday.

She took her time on the walk back to the office, her feet dragging with each step. Her eyes peered through the small glass pane window. The faint sound of laughter, chatter, and fingers clicking away on keyboards echoed in her ears. 

For the first time since moving miles away from her family, she was starting to question if she made the right decision of taking the internship offer.