This Thing Upon Me [Order The eBook] [Harry Styles]

Chapter 6

(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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That's it. That's all it had taken to leave me vomiting hours later and trembling on the floor like a wet dog. It was late when Jeff rang to check in, telling me I was paler than he'd ever seen when we parted. "Yeah...mm-hm." I answered to everything—more an acknowledgement that I had heard rather than an attempt at a response. For now, I couldn't form coherent sentences. To say I was drained would be inadequate—more like enervated, weepy, listless.

I glanced to the bed after hanging up from him, but rejected its warmth a moment longer. When the floor began to swerve beneath me, I got up from where I had sat cross-legged, having watched the clock above the fireplace for hours, (the numbers quivering whenever my eyes watered over). Now I cracked the balcony door and studied the terrace like it didn't belong there, listening to the early morning traffic and horns. It was four a.m.—fast approaching five.

CIGARETTES. Yes, again. I wanted one, but there were none to be found. They were his, anyway. One tucked behind his ear, or lit and dangling precariously from his pillowy lips as he texted. One half-smoked and crushed in a hotel ashtray. Dozens of filters thrown along the molding of the balcony at his London home. Dozens collecting in the dirt of the nearest potted plant around his patio until the gardener found them. A new box tapped compulsively against his palm out of habit, as he imagined it did something to pack the tobacco more soundly. How much time had I spent wishing to be this flimsy cylinder full of a poisoned plant?

My rationale was simple really: I wanted him to breathe me in. I wanted to swirl around his insides—invigorating his blood and delivering that tonic jolt that dispelled even his gravest concerns. I wanted him to look to me for the unsolvable, the vexing, the absurd. I wanted to be what he depended on blindly, deluded that I did anything to truly rid him of his problems. I wanted him to remain addicted to me no matter how toxic or demanding I became. My greatest desire was that he should yearn for me hourly and tremble until he got a hit—that his fingers should itch to hold me. That I should become his absolute torment.

Had someone asked me to describe HIM in one word, I would simply say: cigarette. Quiet, moody, beautiful (unearthly beautiful) these were all close seconds. By now the smell of smoke was affixed so strongly to his memory that at times it bled beyond nostalgic to manifest him before me. So too had the striking of a lighter become synonymous with his laughter. Or the flicker of a flame remind me of the sheen of his lips...and then the flash of a wry smile.

By the time the smoke had reached me (even that of a stranger's cigarette), I always felt him close by, as if he was there reading just over my shoulder, or falling asleep on my back as we stood in the shower midday.

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After parting with him, I had listened to Pillowtalk at least ten times by now, each time excavating a bit more of us than before, mesmerized by the candor in his vocals. To hear him singing about ME in earnest was unnervingly intimate. Confrontational, almost. It set little fires all over my flesh, and if I didn't pause the song occasionally to take a breath, they would incinerate me.

How hadn't I noticed it was about me before? Had I deluded myself so much in 2015 to think he could just simply move past what we'd had? Deluded myself into thinking anything he had with HER could come close to what he had with ME? Not in a lifetime. Not in a million years.