Harry Styles: A Collection of One Shots

Not Like the Others

Word Count: 2.2k

Warnings: smut-ish (at the end)

Something was off with Y/N. Harry had known this for the past few days. It wasn't that she'd been acting completely different, just so much so that being the caring and attentive person that he is, Harry had picked up on it.

At first, it was turning down second helpings at dinner. He didn't think much of it aside from giving her the side-eye, because it was her favorite meal that Harry only cooked for her on special occasions. Next, it was her offering to pleasure him in the morning with her mouth instead of letting him take care of them both. Again, it was odd for her to turn down early morning sex, but he'd assumed she was just tired. Then came the nights when Y/N refused to sleep naked. Harry and Y/N always slept without clothes on, Harry claiming that it was just one more layer keeping them apart, which he hated. Again, he thought it was weird, but the weather had been particularly nipply lately so he'd chalked it up to her simply getting chilly throughout the night and needing the extra warmth.

The last and final straw, the whistle-blower that tied all of her off-kilter behaviors together, came to Harry when Y/N was in the shower. She was rinsing off after dinner, which she had only picked at anxiously with her fork without actually eating much of, and Harry was cleaning up the kitchen and living room to prepare for the movie night they had planned. When Harry went to move Y/N's open laptop from the coffee table, he accidentally woke up the screen, and what he saw puzzled him to no end. It was an article pulled up on her browser, one from a tabloid company titled, "Reasons Why Y/N is Harry Styles' Best Girlfriend." The article was filled with photos of not only him and Y/N but of him and his past girlfriends as well. The point was to prove how much happier Harry looked with Y/N as opposed to his exes, but Harry was peeved regardless. Sure, some of these women had done him wrong in the past and left him feeling absolutely gutted, but he hated seeing them being put up against each other in this fashion.

Only adding to his frustration, the next tab over from the article was twitter account that Y/N and Harry had made one drunken night in order to spy on his fans and have a good laugh at how funny some of his followers were. They logged on and scrolled through the tweets together occasionally, but the tweets pulled up on the screen were all about Y/N's body rather than jokes about how badly they wanted Harry to run them over with his car or memes made out of the horrid candids people had taken of him on stage. They claimed that Y/N was better than Camille because she "actually has an ass," and that Taylor could never pull off a dress like the one Y/N wore on New Year's Eve because she didn't have the right curves like Y/N did. Again, not necessarily negative comments, but this coupled with the other article Y/N had been looking at was enough for Harry to comprehend what was happening here.

It didn't take much for Harry to put it all together, and it broke his heart when he did. She was comparing herself to the other girls Harry had been with. He wasn't stupid. He knew what people said about Y/N and he knew very well that she looked much different than the other girls he typically went for. People certainly picked up on Harry's "type," seeing as he was always a hot topic for the press. Therefore when Y/N came along, everyone had tons to say on the matter. He avoided the comments as much as he could, but it was clear that Y/N was unable to say the same.

In the midst of planning how Harry would approach her on the subject, Y/N emerged from the top of the stairs and made her way over to the couch, dressed in an oversized shirt of Harry's and a pair of her favorite underwear. Harry quickly closed her laptop and moved it into the kitchen as if he hadn't just been snooping through her browser history.

"Alright," she huffed as she plopped down onto the plush cushions of the sofa, wet hair sticking to the nape of her neck, "What're we watching tonight?"