1DFF Autumn Fic Exchange 2016 @1dffautumnficexchange - Tumblr Blog

If You Give a Boy a Ballpoint

Written By: @harktheharold

Written For: @anniedeclarie

Summary: Delaware McKenzy and Harry Styles always had way too many differences for it to ever work out – not that they’d ever had an ‘it’ to work out in the first place, despite Delaware’s sustained crush on him throughout high school. Back then, all it took was a loaned ink pen to create a fast formed, and even faster broken, friendship. Now at University, Delaware wasn’t sure why fate pushed her and Harry back together again. Maybe because if you give a boy a ballpoint, he’s going to write on your heart, and in Delaware’s opinion blue ink stained like the devil.

Pairing: Harry x OFC

Word Count: ~25,000

February

Delaware McKenzy couldn’t find her black pen.

She had checked every pocket, every nook and cranny of her backpack, even dumped out the contents of that hard to reach zippered pouch, but she still couldn’t find it.

More than a little annoyed, Delaware dropped back into her seat, scanning the mess on her desk before just shoving everything back into her bag with a shake of her head as Mr. Gilbert called the calculus class to order. She wasn’t normally this disorganized, but the upcoming French exam had her nervous, and she had spent the better part of the previous night studying. And between the constant pressure from her parent for a perfect GPA and applying for college, the only constant in Delaware’s life was the large thermos of coffee that never left her side during the day.

Mr. Gilbert instructed the class to pull out their homework from the night before, and Delaware reached for her binder, trying to ignore the empty seat to her right, though not doing a very good job of it. Ever since the beginning of the school year, Harry Styles, track team superstar and headscarf enthusiast, had always been sitting ready and waiting for class to start no matter when she blew in the door. He was usually as punctual as she was organized. Today seemed to be the date of both of their downfalls, however, as his seat was embarrassingly empty.

What probably upset Delaware the most, though, was that she couldn’t deny that she was disappointed when she didn’t get to see him that morning. He was always there at his coveted corner desk at the back of the room, offering a smile and a soft hello – or a smirk if she came in late – and she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t say it wasn’t one of the most looked forward to moments of her day.

Which was why it was probably a good thing he wasn’t there that morning. Delaware McKenzy was supposed to be getting over Harry Styles, her one-sided crush something that four years of high school spent running in different circles had yet to cure her of.

Senior year was supposed to be different. In fact, Delaware had already decided at the beginning of the first semester that she wasn’t going to let her attraction to Harry Styles get in the way of school and what she needed to achieve before college.

Unfortunately, that plan crashed and burned the very first day when she ran in late to second period, only to find the last seat available was tucked in the back next to Harry Styles himself. Since then, it’d been a struggle to keep him from occupying much needed brain space, especially when the scent of his cologne always seemed to linger in their shared corner.

Delaware grabbed for one of her blue pens that she left normally left untouched, preferring black ink over blue; today it just being something she had to deal with as Mr. Gilbert turned the class’s attention to the matrix formulas written on the board. And that’s about when the door banged open and Harry Styles skidded in, barely looking winded, but having the decency to flush a bit when everyone turned to look at him.

Mr. Gilbert didn’t say anything, just nodded in the direction of Harry’s seat, but it wasn’t as if Delaware expected him to say something. Harry Styles had led their track team to State Finals and taken home the trophy, even placing them at the national’s level competition. While he wasn’t your typical jock, none of the teachers were going to say anything to him, especially since he had never made a habit out of being late.

As he slipped past Delaware, he caught her eye and gave her a sheepish smile, murmuring a soft, “Hi,” as he slid into his seat.

Delaware ducked her head, pursing her lips as her cheeks involuntarily went aflame. He looked good today, she noted, glancing at him from the corner of her eye. He was dressed simple in a blue plaid shirt and black skinny jeans, but the headscarf he usually tied so precisely to hold back his curls was knotted sloppily instead, and his chestnut locks escaped wildy every which way.

Burying her face in her textbook before she got caught looking, Delaware was trying to focus on understanding the formula when a hand lightly brushed her arm. She nearly flung the textbook across the room.

“Sorry, sorry,” a voice from her right spoke lowly, though she knew immediately who it belonged to. Harry Styles may have been apologetic, but the chuckle he was biting back said otherwise.

Delaware glared at him over her book and hissed, “What do you want?”

“Do you maybe have a pen I can borrow?”

Delaware reached for her bag and dug around for a spare pen, pulling out a blue ink pen identical to the one that she was already using, and slipped it into his open palm, ignoring his soft thanks as she turned back to face the board before she could analyze how warm his hand was.

She found out anyway when it touched her arm again a moment later. “Do you maybe have a spare piece of paper I can use to take notes on?” Delaware was staring at his hand on her arm – there was probably more warmth in it than in her whole body – and he quickly continued, “Only if it’s not a bother, sorry.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” she said, scrambling for a spare sheet of paper from her binder and shoving it at his chest. Just anything to get him and his very warm hands away from her.

Her cheeks fully emblazoned, Delaware hunkered over her own desk and tried to focus on what Mr. Gilbert was explaining about the Matrix of Partial Derivatives, but the gradient formula started to blur with the chain rule as the scratching to her right became heavier and faster, the noise grating in her ears.

Snapping her head around to glare at him, she exclaimed, “Well, you don’t have to break the fucking pen!”

Harry Styles’ head shot up, startled, and he raised his eyebrows as he looked at her in surprise, not saying anything.

Mr. Gilbert was giving them the eye from the front of the classroom, and Delaware huffed, slouching down in her seat as the teacher continued with little more than a warning look, saying, “If you will all turn to page 147, you'll see some example problems.”

Delaware flipped through her book, running a hand through her hair before reaching for her pen to copy down the equation.

“Psst.” Harry Styles was trying to get her attention again.

She looked at him from the corner of her eye before focusing back on her calculus, pursing her lips slightly in concentration.

She was ignoring him.

Harry Styles shifted in his chair, taking a glance to the front of the classroom at their teacher, before turning to face her, whispering again, “Psst! Delaware!”

Delaware nearly dropped her pen. She turned slowly to face him and Harry Styles smiled a little. “What did you call me?” she asked incredulously.

He immediately frowned, the hint of dimples disappearing. “Delaware. That is your name isn't it? Delaware McKenzy?”

Delaware nodded dumbly. “Yes, that's my name, but–” she cut herself off.

“But what?” Harry asked.

I didn't think you knew that. Delaware shook her head. “Doesn't matter.” Giving a furtive glance towards Mr. Gilbert, she asked in a hushed tone, “What do you want?”

“Do you think I could share your textbook with you?”

“You want to share…my textbook,” Delaware repeated. Harry nodded. “Where's yours?”

Harry looked sheepish. “Forgot it at home this morning.”

Delaware bit her lip, darting a look back at their teacher again. Maybe it was his slight British accent, made more prominent when he whispered, or maybe it was the boyish dimple and pleading green eyes, but Delaware found herself relenting. “Fine,” she said, trying to ignore Harry’s immediate smile.

Sliding her papers out of the way, she shifted in her chair, lifting the large textbook to slide it towards the edge of her desk. Thankfully, the odd numbers were on the right side of the page, but Harry still leaned over a bit farther than he probably needed to and Delaware found herself holding her breath, trying not to breath in his warm and spicy cologne.

Somewhere in being dazed by his enticing cologne, Delaware missed him tugging at the corner, trying to pull the book to him, and she gave a defensive tug back. She hissed, “What are you doing?”

“I can’t see it,” he whispered, looking up at her with clear green eyes, blinking slowly.

“What?” Delaware asked, staring at him and trying to pull the book to her chest like a shield. He wouldn’t let her, though, and even tightened his grip.

“I can’t see it,” he repeated, giving another pull. “Let me have it.”

Delaware let go suddenly, and Harry lost his grip on the corner of the textbook. It slipped from his grasp and banged to the floor. The whole class went strangely quiet, and both of them raised their eyes slowly to find Mr. Gilbert scowling at them.

“Don’t interrupt my class again,” he growled out.

Delaware’s face turned a shade darker and she ducked her head, staring at the corner of her desk, ignoring Harry Styles, Mr. Gilbert, and the rest of the class, willing her embarrassment to wilt and fade away but it wouldn’t. And neither would beautiful Harry goddamn Styles, who kept trying to catch her eye for some reason unbeknownst to man.

And as soon as the bell rang, Delaware was up and out the door, grabbing her things and darting out, ignoring Harry Styles, who was calling her name behind her.

“Delaware?”

Delaware jumped, looking up to see Harry Styles peering around the corner of the row of books her table was so discreetly hidden behind in the library. He looked just as surprised to see her as she was to see him, and he took a couple steps forward, stopping right in front of the seat opposite her.

“Uh, hi,” Delaware said, clearing her throat awkwardly as she glanced back down at her notes from her Government & Politics class. There was a smear from her pen that streaked across the one corner of her notepad and she rubbed at it.

Harry took notice. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, motioning to her paper.

“No, you’re fine,” Delaware said, managing what she hoped was a smile.

Truth be told, she still wasn’t over the embarrassing episode from that morning in Calculus class, and wasn’t at all expecting to see Harry Styles again until the next first period on Monday morning because Calculus was the only period they shared. She had been counting on at least 72 hours to regain her composure. Delaware took it as a sign that she needed to stop trying to count on things to turn out the way she wanted them to.

“Did you need something?” she asked, wincing as she realized it might have sounded a bit harsh.

Harry just smiled. “Yeah, actually. You, um, you left your pen with me this morning.” He started patting down his pockets before reaching for the messenger bag that was slung around his shoulder and digging through it. He produced her blue pen with a flourish and a small, “Aha!” that Delaware might have found downright adorable if she hadn’t been concentrating on taking it from his extended hand without actually touching him.

She failed. Delaware felt like she’d just stuck her fingers in a light socket rather than brush them with Harry’s, but he didn’t seem to even notice and just smiled as she gained sudden interest in the cap of the pen.

“I would have given it to you after class but you rushed out of there so quick,” he said. “It’s a good thing none of my track guys were in there, they would be roasting me for getting outrun by a little thing like you.”

Indignation rose up in Delaware and she couldn’t help but blurt out, “I’m five four!” even though she barely scraped five two.

Harry laughed and whatever animosity arose deflated immediately, Delaware even checking to make sure she hadn’t floated right up out of her seat at the angelic sound. “Sure,” he said, eyes squinted up in a smile.

Delaware huffed and leaned back in her chair, trying not to notice how good he looked. He must have just come from practice, his hair was still wet and stringy, pushed back by a different headband then he had worn that morning, and he was wearing basketball shorts with a sweatshirt.

“But honestly,” Harry continued. “It’s too bad it’s already second semester of senior year. If I had known you could run like that, I would have encouraged you to go out for track and field.”

Delaware didn’t do anything but just shake her head and make a face. Anything that involved physical activity was not her thing. Plus, her parents would never approve of it.

“I’m surprised to see you here tonight,” Delaware said, trying to make conversation since Harry didn’t seem to be going anywhere and was instead very comfortable leaning with both hands on the back of the chair.

“I could say the same for you,” he replied easily. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a library all alone a Friday night?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Delaware’s face went hot. “Don’t you have a competition? Or at least something better to do on a Friday night?”

“Nope,” Harry said. “No competition, and my mum’s on night shift so it was either study here or in the break room at the hospital.”

Delaware knew that his mother worked as a nurse, but her face still screwed up in confusion. “Why can’t you do it at home?”

Harry grinned. “Gran has her bridge club on Friday nights. They’re a pretty unruly bunch.”

Delaware frowned. “Oh. Well, can’t you do it in your room or something?”

Harry scoffed, smiling a little bit. “No, that would be ‘rude when we have company!’” he said, raising his voice to a falsetto, mimicking his grandmother.

Delaware shrugged. At least it couldn’t be as bad as trying to be in the same room as her grandparents, much less her parents, for a simple family dinner. Harry seemed fond of his Gran, and she imagined that while the older woman probably got on his nerves, he would drop anything for her if she needed him to.

“You could always take up bridge,” she offered.

He made a face for real this time. “Not on your life. Those women may look like your average cookie baking grandmothers, and Maura Jean does make a mean lemon pound cake, but you set up a folding table and throw ‘em a deck of cards and they turn into savages.”

Delaware couldn’t help it, but she giggled. Giggled. Like she was in middle school. “Oh, come on, it can’t be that bad!”

“She pinched my bum!” Harry all but yelped, his hint of a British accent becoming more prominent with his distressed tone.

“Shh.” Delaware put a finger to her lips, grinning widely up at him from her seat. “I believe you, I believe you.”

Harry smirked. “Good, because not even Gran did, and I was practically assaulted in my own home.”

Delaware was still cherry cheeked, but this time it was from laughing, and she just sat there for a minute, staring up at Harry from her seat fully enraptured before she realized he was waiting for her to say something.

“Oh, um, you can sit down if you want. That is, if you aren’t leaving because you’re already done.” She knew sounded like a bumbling idiot, but Harry just smiled at her, dimples indenting his cheeks a bit.

“No, I actually just got here,” he said.

Delaware took that as a yes and scrambled to move her laptop bag from in front of the chair he had been leaning on. Her elbow sideswiped a notepad and sticky notes went flying as it fell to the floor. “Shit,” she said, dropping to the floor.

Harry knelt too, pushing his bag to the side to pick up a few notes from the floor in front of him, turning them all the same way before handing them back to her.

“Thank you,” Delaware said, taking his offered hand up without thinking about it as she let go to shuffle through them. For once, common sense had won out over her hormones.

“No problem,” was all Harry said, bending down to grab her jacket to lay across the back of her chair. Not realizing where he was, Delaware turned around and nearly ran right into him, looking up from her notes to catch his green-eyed gaze as he smirked. “You’re sure my writing won’t bother you this time?”

If she had thought that her cheeks couldn’t get any hotter, Delaware had been wrong, and it turned out to be a very long night.

They didn’t converse much. Actually, they didn’t talk at all after Harry sat down and buried his nose in his studies, and Delaware was fine with that. In fact, she was certain that if Harry had said another word, or if she had to stutter out another sentence, she would die from overheating. Because it wasn’t just her face that was warm, it was her whole body. She was tingling from head to toe and even had to shrug off her cardigan after a moment or two, causing Harry to look up when she turned around to drape over the back of her chair. He looked back down before she could do or say anything embarrassing, so she had been able to breathe a sigh of relief.

By the time that Delaware checked her phone for the time to get in before her curfew, it was past nine o’clock. She had almost forgotten Harry was there as she reached to start packing up her things, and when he spoke the first words, breaking their mutual silence over the past few hours, she nearly jumped right out of her skin.

“You headed out?” His voice seemed deeper than it had been a few hours before, and he blinked up at her, looking somewhat tired.

Delaware cleared her throat. “Yeah,” she said.

“Oh.” Harry stood up, dropping his pen to the table. “You need a hand with anything?”

“No, I got it. Thanks.” She wasn’t really sure if there was something else she was supposed to say. ‘Thanks for studying with me’ didn’t sound quite right and ‘Thanks, it was fun’ made her sound like a one night stand.

Harry, of course, always knew what to say. “Well, thanks for sharing your table with me.”

“Yeah, sure,” Delaware said, waving it off. “Anytime. I don’t think a lot of people know it’s back here. No one really looks behind the German Philosophy shelf. I don’t even know if it gets used.”

Harry nodded, sitting back down slowly.

Delaware shrugged her backpack on. “How long are you going to stay?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Gran’ll be in bed with the telly on by the time I get in anyway and my mum’s working a twelve hour shift so it’ll be midnight before she’s home.”

“So to sneak in now or to sneak in later, that’s the question?” Delaware asked, a hint of a smile playing on her face.

Harry grinned, point a finger at her as he leaned back in his chair. “Exactly.”

Delaware shouldered her bag, trying to ignore the warmth coiling in her belly at the sight of his dimples. “Well, they close the library at ten, so you might want to find some other place to loiter.”

Harry just laughed. “Will do.”

Delaware gave a little wave. “See you around, I guess.”

“Yeah, see you!”

Delaware couldn’t keep the smile off her face as she left.

‘See you around’ apparently wasn’t limited to just second period Calculus class. Delaware found that out the next Friday night when she was sitting hunkered over her books in the library. Harry seemed to appear out of nowhere, carrying the same beat up messenger bag he had the week before. He took a seat, one she had left clear in a hopeful naivete she would never admit to herself, offering her just a soft smile. She returned it with one of her own and a nod and, well, that was that.

By the third week, when he breezed around the German Philosophy row, letting his bag slide off his shoulder to the floor with a thump, she didn’t hardly think anything of it until he started ripping off his jacket while exclaiming, “Jesus, that was close!”

Delaware looked up from her books, frowning. “Harry?”

He looked up with a smile, offering a cheery, “Ah, Del! Hello!”

That was something new as well. She was pretty sure he only ever called her Delaware twice. How he knew her name in the first place she wasn’t sure, but the nickname itself was something to get used to. She’d tried to tell him her name was just plain Delaware, if not just for the fact that she liked the way the syllables rolled off in his accent, but also because she’d never had a nickname before and wasn’t quite sure how she felt about it.

“Here.” The next thing Delaware knew was a napkin being shoved in her face, and she pulled back, looking from a slice of cake to Harry Styles. He wiggled his eyebrows, leaning further over the table. “You’ll like it, I promise. If there’s one thing Maura Jean knows how to do – god knows it isn’t bridge – it’s how to make a good lemon pound cake.”

“Oh.” Delaware pushed his hand out of her face and looked back down at her Physics assignment. “Thanks, but I’m not really a cake person.”

“Not a– What?!” Harry exclaimed. “Not a cake person? Are you kidding me?”

Delaware shrugged, trying not to think about how cute Harry looked all wide-eyed and rosy cheeked from just coming inside, absolutely beside himself over her not wanting a piece of cake.

She was doing pretty well until he suddenly grabbed her hand and stuffed the piece of cake in it. “Listen, Del, I did not get my bum squeezed and my ears petted just so you could refuse Maura Jean’s legendary lemon pound cake that wins a ribbon at the fair every year – I’d be damned if she didn’t remind us every time. You will eat it and be thankful!”

“I mean, you do have nice ears,” Delaware offered. She mentally slapped herself when she realized what she said.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Harry rolled his eyes before switching to falsetto as if to mimic Maura Jean and adding, “And you might be able to see them for once, Harry, dear, if you’d just trim that unseemly shaggy hair.” Delaware snickered and Harry glared down at her in mock offense. “Aren’t you supposed to be eating something?”

Delaware huffed before taking a teeny, tiny bite off the edge.

Harry scoffed. “You can’t taste it properly that way,” he said.

Before she knew it, he had broken off a corner of it himself and shoved it in her mouth, making her eyes widen as she fell back in her chair, surprised and startled at having Harry Styles’ fingers in her mouth.

“Well?” Harry asked, standing back as she chewed.

Delaware finished chewing. “That’s surprisingly good,” she said, reaching for the rest of it.

Harry smirked, taking his seat. “What did I tell you?” he said. “See, I used to be a baker, I know these things.”

“You don’t know shit.” Delaware sneered, not willing to let him win the battle quite that easily.

Harry murmured in agreement, taking a bite of his own piece of cake as he flipped open his textbook. “That’s the truth.” Suddenly he looked back up. “Say, do you have a pen I could borrow? I escaped with the lemon cake but without my pen.”

Delaware rolled her eyes as she dug through her bag. “Speaking of which.” She extended the blue pen he had borrowed from her before out to him. “How’d you even manage to get it in here, anyway?” she asked. There was a strict no food or open drink policy enforced at all times, and yet he’d seemed to have walked right in.

“I gave Betsy a piece on the way in.”

“Betsy?” Delaware frowned. “You mean Ms. Schroeder?” At Harry’s distracted nod, she shook her head. Of course he seduced the head librarian.

Shaking her head and deciding it must have been the dimples, Delaware looked back down at her Physics assignment. They were both quiet, even the sounds of the library muted from behind the German Philosophy shelf that walled in their fortress. Frowning at her book, Delaware reached for the last corner of the lemon pound cake slice without looking up, and incidentally grabbed Harry Styles’ hand instead.

Looking up, startled, she met his smirk, apparently having caught him trying to sneak the last bite himself. “You can have it,” he said, but didn’t attempt to remove his fingers from her grasp.

Dropping her hold like his hand was on fire, Delaware blushed, cursing herself inside. “Thanks,” she managed to mumble.

Harry nodded and dropped his gaze, his bright green eyes seeming to zone in right away on a certain paragraph or line that they traced, moving methodically from her right to left as he scanned the text.

Popping the last bit of lemon pound cake in her mouth and holding back a moan of ecstasy – it was that good – Delaware watched him. She really hadn’t ever thought she’d tolerate the idea of a study buddy. With all of her parents’ expectations riding on her and the stress to be better than the best, better than the two of them put together, somewhere coming out of middle school, Delaware realized that she’d have to be tough to survive. Ever since then, she’d been no nonsense, strict, and disciplined with herself.

The one study group she had ever been roped in didn’t end particularly well. Most girls were loud and distracting, always snapping their gum or complaining about the work load. The one person that Delaware had ever been able to get along with was the foreign exchange student from Junior year and Lana had the habit of whispering to herself in German. Nevertheless, she’d been the one that introduced Delaware to the forgotten table tucked behind the German Philosophy section, so she’d learned to tolerate it. She’d also picked up on a little German, and that was definitely a plus with her parents, though they still encouraged her to stick with French and later Latin.

But Harry, Harry was a little different. He sat there biting at his pen, a cute and focused little furrow drawing his eyebrows together over his nose, his eyes narrowed and his long eyelashes blinking slowly as he soaked everything up. And Delaware seemed to realize for the first time just how quiet he was. Except for the occasional sniffle, he was always silent. In fact, he was almost like a ghost, making hardly any noise at all. He didn’t click his pen like a maniac, he didn’t shuffle his papers around, and he didn’t fumble when turning pages in his book.

He was even nice to the nose. Sometimes when he had just come in, he smelled like the cold outdoors and his shower gel, a scent that when Delaware was hunched over the table invaded her senses and overpowered the stuffy, dusty air of the library.

Harry was just nice, and Delaware kind of hated him for it.

“You okay?” He was looking up at her, the right corner of his lips smudged with blue ink from where he’d been unconsciously tapping it with his pen, and Delaware flushed, suddenly aware that she had been staring.

“Yeah, fine,” she said, clearing her throat as she drew her eyes away from his very nicely proportioned lips. “I was just wondering, um, you never did tell me why you were late for class that one day and forgot your pen.” Yes, Delaware, I applaud. For once you don’t sound like a total dipstick.

“And my paper?” Harry added, his eyes twinkling.

“And your textbook,” Delaware tossed in, smiling.

Harry shrugged as if it was no big deal and he hadn’t been the most unprepared nebula to ever walk the earth that morning. “I overslept.”

“Seriously?” Delaware asked.

Harry glanced up again. “Why is that so hard to believe? I was up late the night before filling out college applications.”

“Sure,” Delaware said, pursing her lips in a teasing manner. “Mr. Harry Goody-Two-Shoes-Always-On-Time-For-Class-And-Always-Sitting-Ready-And-Prepared Styles overslept. You probably have three alarms set every morning.”

“Hey,” Harry protested, pouting adorably. “It’s two. One on my alarm clock and one on my phone.”

“Case point made, your honor,” Delaware said triumphantly, leaning back in her chair.

Harry grinned and they both fell silent, just looking at one another with goofy smiles on their faces from opposite sides of the table. The moment was broken as the lights in the library flickered overhead, and Delaware jumped.

Harry chuckled. “Ten minutes ‘til they close.”

“Yep,” Delaware said, popping the ‘p’ as she went to stack her books up.

Harry did the same, slinging his messenger bag over his shoulder and standing to the side as Delaware zipped up her backpack and pulled it off the back of her chair, walking past him and around the German Philosophy section.

They were quiet as they passed the main desk, Ms. Schroeder glaring at them from where she stood flipping light switches, the fluorescent bulbs going off behind them at a rapid pace, almost faster than they could walk.

Delaware assumed they must have been the last people to leave, and as Harry took a quick extra step to pull the door open for her, the last light went off, Ms. Schroeder only a silhouette from the back office lights as she watched to make sure they made it all the way out.

“You going straight home?” Harry asked, standing by as Delaware pulled out her lanyard and held it up to the parking lot light as she looked for the right key to unlock her car.

“Yeah, I have to be in by ten-thirty.” She stuck the key in the door and turned it before looking back up at Harry. “Are you or do you have more loitering to do?”

Harry chuckled, leaning over her door as she tossed her backpack in. “No, I’m headed home.”

Delaware nodded, climbing into her little Honda and twisting the key into the ignition. “Well, have a good night, then.”

“You too.” Harry waved, stepping back as she pulled her door closed and put the car in gear, pulling out of her parking space and rolling slowly up to the intersection.

Delaware glanced back in her mirror to see Harry walking away from her on the sidewalk next to the street, his hood pulled up to guard against the cold, and she frowned. Hitting her window tab to roll it down, she called out, “Hey! Harry!” He stopped and turned around, but she couldn’t make out anything but his silhouette from under the street light. She waved him closer, and as he jogged up, stooping a bit to lean in the window, she asked, “Where’s your car?”

“Oh, my mum had to work the late shift tonight,” he said. “So she’s using it.”

“But how are you going to get home?” Delaware asked.

“I’ll take the bus.” The street light shone right down on her face, so when she frowned, Harry said, “I’ll be fine, Del.”

“But it’s cold!” Delaware exclaimed. “And are you sure they even run this late at night?”

“They run ‘til midnight, I’ll be fine,” Harry repeated. “If it’s too cold, there’s a shelter I can wait in.”

“Harry, you’re already shivering. All you have on is that stupid hoodie! Do you even have gloves?” Harry sighed but didn’t say anything, and Delaware hit the unlock button. “Get in.”

“Del–” Harry started to protest.

“Harry, just get in!” He didn’t say anything but still hesitated, so Delaware sung out, “I have heated seats!”

Harry huffed, the cloud of air visible for a moment in the streetlight before melting away. “You play a mean game, Delaware McKenzy.”

Delaware smirked victoriously, rolling up her window as he walked around to get in on the passenger’s side.

“You know you didn’t have to do this, right?” Harry asked as he climbed in. “I’ve survived much worse than this.”

“Seatbelt,” was all Delaware responded with. “Which way?”

“Left.”

Delaware glanced both ways before pulling out of the drive, and a comfortable silence took over the car, broken only when Harry gave her directions on where to go. When he reached over to start fiddling with the radio, she cleared her throat.

“I normally just leave that off.”

Harry looked over at her and dropped his hand, sitting back in his chair. “Yeah, that’s fine. Sorry.”

“No!” Delaware could see him raising an eyebrow at her in the glow from the dashboard lights so she quickly continued, “Um, I mean, it’s not you. It’s something my parents had me promise to do. Something about undistracted driving.”

“That’s probably a smart idea,” Harry conceded.

Delaware let out a nervous giggle. “Yeah, they’re pretty smart,” she said, dropping the statement with a small sigh.

Something in her tone must have given something away, because Harry shifted in his seat to look at her, and Delaware quickly set her eyes on the stop sign ahead and pulling precisely right up next to it. Darting a quick look at Harry after she’d pulled to a complete stop, she found he still hadn’t looked away. “Is this your street?” Delaware asked before he could say anything.

Harry stared at her, his eyes illuminated like a cat’s in the dashboard glow, before he just said, “Yeah. It’s two doors down to the right.”

The neighborhood was less than modest. If Delaware had to guess, she’d say most were rentals. But sandwiched between a house that was leaning on its foundation and a duplex with paint peeling was a small house that glowed a bright yellow under her headlights as she pulled into the drive. Delaware put her Honda in park and glanced at Harry. She immediately had to bite back laughter as she watched him struggle to unfold his legs from where they were wedged between the seat and the dashboard as he got out.

Before he shut the door, he leaned back in, wiggling his eyebrows a little as he said, “Thanks for the ride.”

Quite aware of the innuendo, Delaware blushed but rolled her eyes in good humor. “Goodbye, Harry.”

“Bye, Del.” The door started to shut before it was wrenched back open again. “Hey, text me when you get home, okay?”

Delaware laughed. “I don’t even have your number, Harry.”

“Well, shit, is Delaware McKenzy asking for my number?” Harry asked, pressing a hand to his heart dramatically. “Cheeky,” he added with a wink.

“Shut up,” Delaware said, her cheeks flushed in the interior light.

“Here, I’ll write it down for you.” Harry fumbled around in his bag before looking up, humble enough to look sheepish. “Say, Del, do you happen to have a pen?”

Delaware sighed, and it only made Harry grin wider as she dug through her bag, flinging the blue pen he always managed to need to borrow at his head. He caught it mid air and then grabbed for her arm.

“Hey!” Delaware protested as the cold blue pen tip met the palm of her hand. “What are you doing?”

“Hold still,” Harry said, Delaware complying if only because his hands were warm. “There we go, all done.” He turned her hand around in his own, and Delaware pursed her lips as warmth shot from her head to her toes. “Not bad for my first tattoo design.”

Snatching her hand away she snarled, “Get out of here!”

Harry chuckled, capping the pen and holding it out to her.

“I’m sensing a pattern here,” Delaware huffed. “You might as well keep it.”

“Cheeky,” he repeated to himself as he shoved in his bag. “Bye, Del.”

The door slammed and Delaware watched as he slung his bag over his shoulder, circling around her car to hop up the stairs between a pair of well-groomed bushes. Before Delaware put the car in reverse to pull out, Harry opened the door of his house, and silhouetted against light he raised his hand in a wave.

Delaware waved back, even though she knew he couldn't see her, before pulling out of the drive.

The first thing Delaware noticed when she got out of her car at her house was that her father’s space in the four-car garage was empty. The second thing she noticed was the empty red wine bottle sitting in the recycling container. Those two things meant one thing -- he father was out and her mother was home – albeit one bottle down.

Careful not to let the door slam behind her, Delaware crept through the silent, stainless steel and granite kitchen towards the stairs, when her mother’s voice broke from the sitting room.

“There’s no use sneaking around, Delaware, I know you’re home.”

Delaware sighed inwardly, stepping into the doorway a bit hesitantly. “Hello, Mother.”

Her mother was sitting in her large chaise longue chair, remote in one hand, wine glass in the other as she drew her gaze away from the TV long enough to flick up and down her daughter once before returning to the late night television host.

“You’re late,” was all she said, swishing the wine around in the bottom of her glass before taking a healthy sip.

Delaware’s eyes flicked to the clock on the wall. “Only by a few minutes.” Not true, it was just a little past eleven.

Her mother made a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat before swallowing. “Where were you?”

“At the library.”

“The library closes at ten.”

“I had to take a friend home.”

This caught her mother’s attention and Tiffany Burnside-McKenzy looked up from her glass with raised brows. “Oh? Anyone we know?”

It was a silent warning, the edge to her voice making Delaware choose her words carefully. “Just someone from my study group.” There. Not a complete lie, but hopefully it would pacify her mother.

Tiffany frowned. “I wasn’t aware you were in a study group.”

You aren’t aware of a lot of things about me, Delaware thought bitterly. She cleared her throat. “It’s not really formal, just some people from AP classes.” Again, not a complete lie. Lara from Junior year had been in an AP art history class, and from what she’d seen of his notes, Harry was in AP Chemistry, and Delaware had studied with both of them before, just not all together at once.

“Mm,” was all her mother said, already drawn back into some meaningless skit.

“Where’s Dad?” Delaware couldn’t help but ask.

Tiffany let out a rueful laugh and tipped back another swig from her glass. “I don’t know. He said he was working late and then taking some ‘associates’ out to dinner.”

So he was out with the ‘boys’ as he so fondly called his coworkers at the firm and his periodic drinking buddies. Delaware bit her lip as the room filled with a tense silence that Tiffany didn’t seem to recognize, she probably had forgotten her daughter was even still there – a point was made when Delaware finally braved the silence enough to say goodnight and her mother just hummed, hooded eyes focused on the TV in front of her.

Delaware heard when her father came home that night, heard when the garage door opened and heard when it closed, heard when he opened the door and when he kicked his shoes off in the kitchen. She heard her mother as she tossed the first insult, and then Delaware turned on the water and left it running as she brushed her teeth, and left it running until she could turn her floor fan on, collapsing into bed, pulling out her phone.

Home now

Goodnight Harry

Sleep tight, Del xx

Maybe it wasn’t wise to get that close to Harry before they both graduated and went off to college, but while Delaware was smart, that was maybe one fact she chose to ignore.

In addition to their Friday night study dates, Harry started showing up at the library when he had a free night. Sometimes they met each other coming and going, and one Thursday Delaware arrived to see a yellow sticky note in the middle of the table. Where were you? was scribbled in blue ink, accompanied by a frowny face.

With a smile, and knowing that Harry had track and field that day, Delaware flipped the note over and scribbled back, Latin lessons every other Wednesday. Sorry! Other times they just left a note to let the other know they’d been there, or Harry left a stupid knock knock joke that took ages to learn the answer to.

Today, though, they were both there, seated across from one another in their usual spots. Harry was per usual unknowingly coloring the corner of his mouth blue with the pen she’d given him, and Delaware was elbows deep in an essay.

Suddenly Harry looked up. “What’s nine times three?”

Delaware blanked for a second before answering, “27.”

“Thanks,” Harry mumbled, jotting it down in a spare corner of his notebook. “You know, I think by the time they get you into all this Advanced Trig and AP Calculus, you forget all basic forms of the maths that you’ll actually need to use on a day-to-day basis.”

Delaware nodded distractedly, and it was quiet for a few minutes.

“Shit.” Harry started rubbing at a mark he made, presumably a wrong answer. “Who ever thought Chemistry would be more than memorizing the periodic table.”

He had muttered it to himself, but Delaware perked up. “You’re having trouble with Chemistry?”

Harry snorted. “Well, I wouldn’t call it trouble,” he said. “More like a misunderstanding.”

Delaware popped up from her seat to round the table and look over his shoulder, if not just for a chance to smell his cologne. “What is it? Maybe I can help.”

“Are you sure little Miss Government and How the Infrastructure of Foreign Delegate Offices Shape the–”

Delaware cut him off before he could poke fun at the title of her essay. Again. “I’ll have you know I’m in AP Physics.”

Harry raised an eyebrow, looking up at her. “AP Calculus, AP Physics, Latin lessons, is there anything you can’t do?” he asked.

Delaware blushed. “Shut up and show me the text.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

March

Delaware hated Sunday dinners. Sunday dinners meant her parents making snide remarks over the wine and buttered bread rolls and Delaware forced to sit there until that weeks ‘family time’ was deemed over by either her father getting up without a word or her mother’s wine bottle going empty.

“Delaware.”

She jerked at her mother’s voice, her knife slipping on her steak and clattering to her plate. She cleared her throat as Tiffany stared her down disapprovingly. “Yes, Mother?”

“I asked you a question.”

“Oh.” Delaware collected her cutlery and sat a bit straighter in her chair. “I apologize. Please go on?”

“I asked you how your studies were going. Did you receive a grade on your Government essay yet?”

“Um, no actually, it isn’t due until Monday,” Delaware said.

Her mother’s eyebrows raised from behind her wine glass. “So you have not completed it yet?”

“Pass the salad please,” her father cut in.

Delaware reached for the salad bowl, avoiding her mother’s stare. “I completed it on Friday night.”

Tiffany frowned, swishing the wine in the bottom of her glass. “Isn’t that the day of your study group? I’m not too sure those are very good for you. All of those distractions? Why, I could never focus! And this essay counts for nearly half of your grade–”

“Tiffany,” Dad broke in, giving his wife a pointed look. “I’m sure she’ll do fine.”

“Robert,” his wife replied, giving him a look all her own. “I’m simply concerned for my daughter’s wellbeing.”

“You’re nagging again, dear.”

“Well, maybe,” Tiffany said through gritted teeth. “If you would step it up and do your part, I wouldn’t have to nag so much!”

She tossed her wine back, and Robert McKenzy cleared his throat, looking over at his daughter. “Delaware, why don’t you promise your mother that you’ll go over your essay once more before you turn it in tomorrow. After all, it does count for nearly half your grade.”

Tiffany harrumphed from across the table and Robert rolled her eyes, but Delaware just kept her eyes focused on the plate in front of her. Her hands were starting to sweat and she grabbed for her napkin. That proved to be a wrong move.

“What’s that?” her father asked, pointing to the ink stains on her right hand.

Delaware looked down at her palm where Harry Styles had scrawled his phone number into her skin. Now a few weeks old, all that remained was a smudge and three barely visible numbers.

“Oh, just part of a Calculus formula.” Delaware tried to say it nonchalantly but she had never been a very good liar. Things always seemed to backfire. Like now.

“A Calculus formula?” Her mother grabbed for her hand, pulling it toward her. “For the test that was last week? Delaware, did you write down a formula to cheat?”

“Our daughter would not cheat!” Robert growled out.

Tiffany glared at him. “No, but she would lie.” She turned back to her daughter. “Delaware, you know we agreed no boys!”

“What?” Robert asked, looking between his wife and his shamefaced daughter.

“Right here!” Tiffany said, holding Delaware’s hand up like a trophy. “This is someone’s phone number, not a Calculus formula!”

“What!” Robert roared. “Delaware, why would you lie about such a thing?”

Delaware opened her mouth to say something in her defense, but her hand was suddenly dropped as Tiffany sat back, harrumphing loudly as she glared at her husband.

“What is it now?” Robert asked, exasperated.

“I don’t know, maybe we wouldn’t have this problem if you’d just sent her to the all-girls school I attended like I said we should,” Tiffany said.

“I went to her high school and I turned out fine!” Robert fired back. “Delaware will be no different!”

Delaware winced. Another expectation.

Tiffany sniffed, shrugging as if she could care less as she filled up her wineglass.

“There you go again!” Robert bellowed.

“There I go again with what?” Tiffany yelled back.

Delaware just shrunk down in her seat. By the time her father threw his napkin down on the table and stalked off, her mother was upending what was left of the bottle into her wineglass.

“Delaware,” she said, standing up. “Whatever you do, do not marry a lawyer.”

Sadly, that might have been the only piece of advice Delaware could remember her mother giving her, but it just felt like another restraint as she was left alone at the table in silence.

That night, Delaware’s father knocked on her door.

Shoving the phone she had been using to text Harry underneath her study notebook, Delaware called, “Come in!”

Robert swung the door open a bit, glancing around the room before stepping in. It was then Delaware realized he probably hadn’t been in her bedroom since it was Barbie pink with frilly curtains and matching white furniture.

“Um, Delaware,” he started hesitantly, looking down at her from where he stood at six foot two,and she sat on her bed.

“You can sit down if you want,” Delaware broke in.

Robert nodded, pulling the matching chair from her oak roll top desk out and sitting down, eyes scanning over her bookcase, one shelf for reference and law thesis, and the other for her science commentaries. Delaware saw when his eyes caught on his own book, The Ethics of Cause Lawyering: An Empirical Examination of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Cause Lawyers, once displayed proudly now sitting to collect dust.

He turned to face her and cleared his throat. “I just wanted to, uh, apologize, for all that has been happening lately. I know I haven’t been around much and it hasn’t been very easy on any of us.”

He seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Delaware said, “Sure, yeah. It’s all good.”

Robert looked at her for a few moments. Delaware looked a lot like him. In fact, while she had inherited her mother’s short stature, everything else had come from her father. She didn’t share her mother’s wavy blond hair, instead it was a reddish brunette, and her eyes were a deep hazel instead of blue. They even shared the same personality in some things it seemed, and out of the two of her parents, if Delaware was forced to choose, she would say that she was closest to her father. The man that had asked a judge to change a court date so he could take his daughter to Disney World for her sixth birthday, the man who took it upon himself to come home from the office and go right back to work at the kitchen counter, hand writing personal notes and commentary in the margins of his book that he addressed to her for her twelfth birthday. The man who she had naively said she wanted to be like when she grew up.

“I just–” He seemed to be searching for the right words. Finally, leveling his gaze with hers, Robert said, “Delaware, I just want you to know, no matter what happens, I still love you.”

They were silent for a minute before Delaware finally said quietly, “I know.”

“If you ever need anything,” Robert said. “All you have to do is ask, and I mean that.”

“Okay.”

Robert nodded, and they sat looking at one another for another minute before he clasped his hands together. “Well, I’ll let you get back to work.”

Delaware nodded, watching her dad get up from his chair. He reached out to ruffle her hair like he did when she was little and she couldn’t help but smile a little.

“I’m proud of you, Delaware.”

Delaware managed to keep a smile on her face as her dad left, closing the door behind him. Then she let it slip. Her phone dinged from beneath her notebook, but she didn’t even grab for it to see the answer to Harry’s stupid knock knock joke.

She only wished she felt the same as her father, but then she didn’t have anything to be proud about.

The following Friday, Harry wasn’t in Calculus class and he didn’t show up to the library that evening either.

Their schedules that week had seemed to be hit and miss anyway, but when Delaware checked the note on the table, she found it was her own reply to his question when she was in Latin on Wednesday, which meant he hadn’t shown up at all on Thursday either.

Pulling out her phone, Delaware debated texting him about it for a good five minutes, and even wrote three drafts of what she could possibly say, but ended up erasing each one after much deliberation. Finally, she just shot him a simple text that got straight to the point.

Hey Harry, saw you weren’t in Calc class today. Everything alright?

She didn’t have to wait long for a reply.

Sick today :( Sorry I can’t make it to the library.

That’s fine. Stay in and rest up.

Delaware sighed, exchanging her phone for a black pen as she attempted her homework. But she kept glancing up to the empty seat across from her. Delaware was used to studying on her own. Even though Harry joined her periodically now, there were quite a few days of the week that she spent sitting at this table alone. She didn’t know why it should feel any different, but it did.

She missed him.

The realization made her heart drop to her stomach, and Delaware squeezed her eyes shut. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t just a schoolgirl crush anymore. She was falling, and falling hard. And the worst part might be that she just didn’t know what to do about it anymore.

She couldn’t focus after that, and finally, after a good hour of clicking the home button on her phone every few seconds to check the time and see if Harry had texted, Delaware started loading things back into her bag before slinging it over her shoulder. She left the library, not knowing where she was going. But her heart seemed to know.

She stopped off at a whole foods store that her mother used to shop at before she found herself pulling up in front of a little yellow house, parking out front behind an Oldsmobile and two Buicks. Harry’s beat up little rattrap of a car wasn’t in the driveway, so Delaware assumed that his mother was working a late night shift at the hospital again.

Grabbing both her backpack and the little paper bag that she’d picked up from the store, Delaware trudged up to the house, knocking on the door before she could think twice.

There was a small commotion on the other side of the door for a minute, and when it finally opened, Delaware was eye to eye with a small white haired old woman who just blinked at her. Delaware hadn’t felt this kind of anxiety since she’d had to go door to door selling girl scout cookies back in the fourth grade, except this was worse. Much worse.

But before she could get a word in, the old woman lit up. “Oh, come in, come in!” she sang out, ushering Delaware forward as she almost tripped over the threshold, surprised by the strong grip the woman had in her as she took hold of Delaware’s arm. Turning to look over her shoulder, she bellowed out, “Harry! Door’s for you!” and nearly shattering Delaware’s eardrum.

The woman took a step back to look her over, grinning all the while. “I knew you’d turn up sooner or later. Girls!” she called over her shoulder. “Look who came for a visit! It’s Delaware, Harry’s girlfriend!”

Delaware hadn’t even noticed the card table, which was actually hard to miss once she realized how it strategically it had to be placed in the small living room. Three women were sitting there, cooing at Harry’s grandmother’s declaration, and Delaware felt her face heat up.

“Oh, I’m not–”

“What do you need, Gran?” Harry asked, Delaware freezing at the sound of his tired voice as he rounded the corner into the living room.

“You have a visitor!” the older woman sang out, a grin spread from ear to ear.

“Delaware?” Harry asked, his eyebrows raising as he sniffled a little, his nose red. “What are you doing here?”

“I, uh, brought you something to help with your cold.” Delaware fumbled for her paper bag, but before she could give it to Harry, his grandmother grabbed it, peeking inside.

“Oh!” she squealed. “I’ll go set the kettle.” She brushed past Harry, pushing the bag into his hands before disappearing around the opposite corner he had come from, calling back, “Why don’t you show her your room or something?”

Harry crumpled the bag up in his hands, starting to say something before glancing at the ladies at the table. Grabbing Delaware’s arm, he tugged her through a door at the end of the hall, closing it softly behind them. As he turned back around, Delaware took him in.

If she thought he sounded tired, he looked even worse. The bags under his eyes looked like dark bruises and his hair was greasy, tied up in a half-bun at the top while the rest of his usually curly locks hung limp. It was a bit different from the usual persona he gave off of put together and self assured, and Delaware even blinked, but he was still there. This was Harry. Not Harry Styles the track star or Harry Styles the straight A student or Harry Styles first chair clarinet of Freshman year. This was just Harry. Harry in baggy sweatpants and a Kiss band tee, Harry with a red nose and tired eyes.

And before Delaware could help herself, she’d stepped forward and wrapped her arms around his waist, giving him a hug. His arms came around her after a second, and she heard the paper bag crinkle as it pressed against her back.

He was firm but soft at the same time and smelled of fabric softener and . . . Harry. He smelled like Harry. Delaware pulled away, drawing into herself as her face colored, suddenly aware that she’d invaded his personal space.

“What was that for?” Harry asked, twisting the top of the paper bag in his hands.

Delaware shrugged. “You looked like you needed it,” she said.

“Oh.” Harry looked down, releasing the grip on the bag and smoothing it out a bit.

“Are you okay?” Delaware asked.

Harry looked up. “Yeah. ‘M fine. Just a cold.”

Delaware frowned. “You look like you have a fever.”

“‘M fine,” Harry repeated like a two-year-old.

“Are you sure?” Delaware asked, reaching forward to feel his forehead. “Your face is all red.”

Harry ducked to the side, grabbing her hand and stopping it. “Del,” he said. Then, dropping her hand, he continued quickly, “What’d you bring me, anyway?” He opened the paper sack, pulling out a box. “Tea?” he asked with a raised brow.

“It’s the kind my mother used to make for me when I was little,” she explained, blushing a little bit. “I don’t know, it used to be a comfort thing for me. I thought it might help you. Plus, you’re British, so. . .”

“So I’m supposed to like tea,” Harry finished for her, smiling. “Lucky for you, the stereotype is true in my case.” He dropped the box back in the bag. “You know, you didn’t have too, Del.”

Delaware met his gaze straight on. “I wanted to.”

“Right,” Harry said.

They were quiet for a moment.

“Well, I should probably go,” Delaware said, stepping around Harry to the door.

“Wait,” Harry said, grabbing her arm. He cleared his throat. “As long as you’re here, I was having some trouble with my chemistry. Do you think you could maybe help me? Only if you have time, I mean.”

For some reason, it felt like a weight had been lifted from her heart, and Delaware nodded, maybe a bit too eagerly. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m free for the evening.”

Harry smiled. “Great. Oh, um, it’s over here.” He grabbed the textbook off of his desk that was pushed up in the corner of his tiny room, handing it to her.

Delaware glanced at the topic and smiled. “Chemical Equilibrium?”

Harry sniffled and nodded, reaching for a tissue.

“It confused me for a bit, too,” Delaware said. “Here.” Looking around for a place to sit down but realizing that his desk chair was covered in assignments and not wanting to be too forward as to sit on his bed, Delaware just plopped down on the floor, putting her back to his bed frame. “What part are you having trouble with?”

Harry sat down next to her, looking over her shoulder, and Delaware had to remind herself to breathe normally as his familiar scent overcame her and his body heat radiated off him in waves. It was hard to hold her focus, and she ended up fidgeting a lot, something that was probably annoying Harry, but she couldn’t help it. While she had come a long way in being comfortable around him in the past few weeks, Delaware was still the same awkward schoolgirl, and Harry was still the same attractive boy that she’d been crushing on for four years. How he still managed to have this effect on her with a hacking cough and a smattering of acne over his right eyebrow, Delaware wasn’t sure, but it was definitely there and wasn’t going anywhere whether she wanted it too or not.

Delaware had just finished explaining what happens to the movement of molecules when they reach equilibrium, and had Harry writing down notes, when his grandmother breezed in, carrying two mugs. “Break time!” she announced, shoving a warm mug in each of their hands. She had tried to sneak in earlier to get the tea, but her stealth movements were a little rusty – she’d had both hips replaced, it turned out – and it’d caused more of a disturbance as she commented on how cute they were huddled up on the floor together. Delaware’s cheeks could have burst into flames. “I must say, Delaware, you have most excellent taste in tea. Wouldn’t you agree, Harry?”

Harry nodded, reaching for a tissue to blow his nose.

His grandmother tsked. “Boy’s pulled a few too many all nighters,” she told Delaware. “Concerned about his GPA one minute, asking his mother to look over a college application the next. Back to his GPA and all the numbers and percentages and then he’s banging on his mother’s door again.”

“Gran,” Harry said before a coughing fit overcame him.

His grandmother just patted his shoulder and continued. “I don’t know how you young people do it these days,” she said. “What with all the financial aid you have to apply for now? And the scholarships are in name only anymore, just another trophy! They really don’t do anything at all to help you! Why in my day–”

“Gran,” Harry broke in, his voice raspy. “Thanks for the tea.” He glanced over at Delaware, but she skillfully avoided his eyes.

They both knew that there was a stark difference between them. Delaware drove a brand new Honda Fit, one of the most practical but expensive cars on the market, while Harry shared a second bought Nissan with his mother and took the bus when she needed to use it. Delaware lived in a gated community, and Harry lived in a rental neighborhood. Delaware’s father was responsible for one of the scholarships given out through their school, and Harry was applying for financial aid. Delaware was unhappy, and Harry was not.

Delaware just stared at her toes as Harry’s grandmother left the room, even though she could feel Harry still looking at her. “Have you finished writing yet?” she finally asked, tipping back her mug to take a drink. Harry shook her head and Delaware motioned at the blue pen in his hand.

To the sound of his pen scratching against his notebook, Delaware shifted so that she was lying on her stomach, her legs kicked up to lean against Harry’s bed frame while resting her elbows on the floor. His room was so small that she could have reached out and touched the opposite wall had she wanted to. Overall, probably about as big as her parents’ walk in closet. He had a few band posters on his wall, and there were a couple of trophies on his desk, acting as a landing place for his familiar headscarves. It looked like a teenage boy’s room, and it looked like Harry.

Looking down into her mug, Delaware asked, “Harry, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

The question sounded childish, almost naive, but the scratching noise stopped behind her, and there was silence for a few moments before Harry replied, “A doctor. Or a nurse, like my mum. I’d just like to help people.”

Delaware hummed, tracing the rim of her mug with a finger.

She heard Harry shift before he asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Delaware stilled. “I’m gonna be a lawyer.”

“Oh?” He sounded closer to her ear, and when Delaware turned to look over her shoulder, he was right there, leaning over a bit to be right next to her face. “Gonna? Or wanna?” he asked, his voice deeper and gravellier because of his cold and his eyes holding her gaze intently so that she couldn’t look away.

Delaware stared at him, stared at his lips as they formed those syllables, pretty and curved and shaded in pink, just like a prince’s from her old picture fairytale books. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

There were a few moments of silence as Harry searched her face, and Delaware finally looked away, clearing her throat.

“Who’s that?” she asked, pointing to an older picture of Harry with a girl on his lap, his arms wrapped around her waist and both smiling for the camera.

“That’s my sister Gemma,” Harry said, sitting up.

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

“She’s back in London,” Harry said, a soft half-smile gracing his face at the mention of her.

“I bet you miss her a lot,” Delaware said.

Harry laughed fondly. “That sneaky little shit? She was always getting me in trouble with mum,” he said. “But yeah, I guess I do sometimes. When my parents split up and mum moved back home here, Gemma already had a place in university and we couldn’t make her leave that. Not willingly at least.”

Delaware knew that Harry’s mother was American and had moved back home to help care for her mother four years ago when he showed up Freshman year. She didn’t, however, know that his parents had split, but that wasn’t necessarily surprising. They had always run in different circles and never shared the same friends so she wouldn’t know how she would come by the information.

“So your parents are divorced, then?” Delaware asked.

Harry nodded.

“My parents will probably end up divorced.” Delaware wasn’t sure why she said it, all of her walls seemed to come down around Harry, and he was probably the closest friend she’d had since Georgina Reynolds back when she was seven, and that girl had ripped Delaware’s favorite pink dress at the time during a temper tantrum before quite forcibly removed her Barbie doll’s head from the body. Harry’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, and Delaware cleared her throat before he could say anything. “Did you finish it yet?”

Harry nodded slowly, and reached for his notebook, handing it to Delaware. She had asked him to write out what chemical equilibrium was and how it occurred in his own words. It was one of her favorite study methods and she knew it would help cement the material in his mind.

Reading over the paragraphs he had down, reading one of the last ones aloud, “When equilibrium would be reached, we would see no further change to the level of water in the container–” A hiccupping sob cut her words off before she could finish, and Delaware suddenly realized that she was crying, tears falling and snot rolling ugly crying as she buried her face in her hands.

She felt Harry shift behind her before he gingerly pulled her to him, leaning back against the side of his bed frame and just holding her. It took a minute or two, but Delaware finally quieted down, leaning back into Harry as he petted her hair a little bit. When he leaned away for a second to grab the tissue box, she should have been ashamed to say that she mewled a bit like a wounded kitten and clung to him a bit tighter, but she probably didn’t even realize it at this point.

“There you go,” Harry murmured as she wiped her eyes. “Feel any better?”

Delaware shrugged, and Harry gave her arms a little squeeze. She didn’t want to move but she was suddenly aware of how close they were, skin to skin, in fact, and Delaware found it in her to sit up a bit.

“There’s mascara on your shirt,” she said, staring at a spot on Harry’s chest that was damp from her tears, smeared black in places.

Harry looked down. “I don’t mind,” he said. “It’ll wash. Besides, you should have seen what havoc Gemma wreaked on my favorite t-shirt back when she was in sixth form and her boyfriend broke up with her.”

He was trying to cheer Delaware up, a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth, but her eyes were fast filling up with tears again.

“Why do I have to ruin everything?” she wailed suddenly. “God, I am such a fucking mess, why am I such a fucking failure?! All the time! That’s all I ever–”

Harry cut her off by kissing her, kissing her straight on the lips.

He kissed her.

It couldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds, but when he pulled away, he was a little breathless and she was a little stunned and they just sat there looking at each other for a minute. Delaware reached up to touch her lips as an afterthought, the effect of all the thoughts whirling around in her brain.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said, making Delaware freeze. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Delaware just stared at him. “You – I, what?” She couldn’t form a coherent sentence, too much was fighting to get out as she blinked at him, leaning away.

But she was kind of sitting on his lap, so Harry just grabbed her arms, pulling her back to him. Delaware tried to twist away, but he held her a bit firmer. “That came out wrong,” he said. “I mean, I shouldn’t have done that because I’m contagious. I’ll probably get you sick.”

Delaware stopped struggling and just sat there, looking at him. There were so many things swirling around her head that she didn’t even know what she wanted to say. She stuttered for a moment before getting out, “I don't mind.”

There was a brief second that they just sat looking at one another, and then, like they had each felt a gravitational pull from the other, they moved to meet in the middle, Harry’s lips finding hers for a slower but desperate kiss that made something in Delaware’s lower belly somersault as his hands on her hips pulled her closer. Delaware wasn’t quite sure what she was supposed to do with her hands, her left one falling to his bicep as she hesitantly reached up to hold his face with the other. His lips were cracked and dry, and were rough against her own, and he tasted like his own blend tea, warm and minty, and a bit salty from her fallen tears. And somewhere, in the middle of that, Delaware realized she was kissing Harry Styles. She was kissing Harry Styles.

Delaware’s eyes flew open and it all came down on her as too much at once. Just as she started to pull away Harry wheezed and leaned back away from her, hitting his head on the bed frame with a resounding thwack! as he broke into a fit of coughing.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Delaware asked, reaching out to touch his face but retracting it again when she realized the position she’d been in when doing that only seconds before.

Harry nodded, coughing again before clearing his throat. “But seriously, though, I could get you sick,” he said.

At least he didn’t apologize that time, but Delaware had to agree.

“Yeah, I know, it isn’t much fun.”

Harry ticked an eyebrow up at her, much closer than she’d care to admit since she was still sitting on his lap. Shit, that was another thing she had to fix.

“I mean, the cold,” Delaware stuttered. “A cold is never very fun. Um, what were we talking about, uh, before–?”

“Before we snogged?” Harry asked, a cheeky smirk on his face. Delaware was sure he was just doing that to make her blush.

Ducking her head and scrambling off of his lap with a little less finesse than she would have liked, Delaware grabbed for the notebook she had abandoned on the floor, sitting down cross legged with her back to Harry. “Right, chemical equilibrium.” She started to scan the first paragraph before she noticed the smear caused by one of her teardrops in the middle of a word. Frowning, she tried to rub it off with her thumb, but it had already dried.

“It’s okay, you know?” Harry’s voice came from behind her, Delaware freezing as he moved to lay a hand on her shoulder. “To be upset about your parents?”

Delaware didn’t move. “I’m fine,” she finally said. “Just really stressed out and maybe sleep deprived.” Tapping her pen on the notebook, she looked back down, but Harry squeezed her shoulder prompting her to turn her head to look at him.

“It’s not you, Delaware,” he stated. “Don’t ever let them make you feel like you’re the cause of this.”

Delaware pressed her lips together. “I mean, I sort of am, they can never agree on anything when it comes to me and with my grades and the pressure of making sure I follow in their footsteps, down to the acceptance letter from Harvard–”

Harry cut her off, but this time with a finger pressed to her lips. She had a fleeting thought that she wished it’d have been with his lips, but this was safer for both her immune system and her heart.

“It is not you,” Harry repeated, slowly and certainly, as if talking to a five-year-old. “They’re only using you as a way to get to the other one. They want to tear the other person down by using your name as a wrecking ball, but they don’t realize that the only one feeling the blows is you. In the end, they’re the only ones that can walk away, and you’re the only one that can get hurt. You need to realize that before they split you in two because that’s the only way that they’ll ever make each other happy.”

There was so much pity and sincerity in Harry’s green eyes that Delaware could have started crying again right then and there, her eyes beginning to fill with tears.

“Let’s just get back to work, yeah?” she whispered against his finger.

Harry bit his lip, giving a curt nod as he pulled away.

Delaware cleared her throat and leaned back over the notebook. “The "shift" occurs so that the two rates gradually come back to be equality,” she read. “An equilibrium can be viewed similar to a balance beam where the reactants are on the right hand side and the products are on the left hand side. When the system is balanced, the forward and reverse rates are equal.” Delaware nodded. “Good example, Harry. But,” she started as she clicked her pen, circling something. “You misspelled ‘gradually.’”

“What?” Harry exclaimed, leaning over her shoulder.

“See?” Delaware said, tipping her head to look at him, one of his curls brushing her cheek he was so close. “It’s supposed to have two L’s, not one.”

“Well, love,” Harry said, smirking down at her and making her heart skip a beat as he deepened his accent dramatically. “I’ll have you know I didn’t misspell anything. That’s considered top notch spelling where I come from.”

“Well, it could get you failed where I come from.” Delaware was probably being a bit exaggerative, but trying to distract from the fact her cheeks were blazing hot from Harry calling her ‘love’. Turning back to the notebook, she said, “Make sure you fix it.”

Delaware had given him back his notes and was trying to study herself when she was aware of Harry shifting around behind her, winding up with his left leg stretched out to her side and the other folded up underneath of him. She tried not to think too much of it, he was probably just looking over her shoulder because he was bored or something.

But then she felt the pen press into the fleshy part of the back of her shoulder where her sweater had slipped off to reveal just her bra strap and bare neck and shoulder blade.

“Hey!” Delaware complained. “Harry, what are you doing?” She tried to twist around, but Harry reached up to grab her other shoulder, stopping her in place.

“Hold on,” he said, gaze focused solely on the blue ink pen that he was pressing against her skin. “Keep doing what you’re doing, I’ll be done in a second.”

Delaware huffed just to let him know she wasn’t happy, but she could practically feel him smile from behind her and his hands were warm, so she let him be, going back to her textbook. Even if he did draw something obscene, her sweater would cover it up until she got home and she’d just scrub with extra soap in the shower.

Harry nudged the sweater a bit farther down with a fingertip, his pen moving slowly and surely along her skin, and Delaware was unable to help the shiver that ran down her spine.

“Almost done,” Harry murmured. “Sorry.”

Delaware made a noise at the back of her throat that sounded like a dying cat. She wasn’t quite sure what it was supposed to mean, but she felt Harry chuckle behind her as he capped the pen. Still dragging the edge of her sweater down with a finger, he leaned in a bit and blew a soft, warm breath on her shoulder.

“There you go,” he said, going her sleeve up as Delaware reached up to adjust her sweater, their hands brushing and sending a spark of electricity through them both.

It was the only reminder to Delaware that this wasn’t a normal thing. Harry wasn’t her boyfriend and this whole study session felt so domesticated, so normal, that it left her with a sick feeling in her stomach. But she wanted to cherish it while she could.

Harry walked her to the door soon after, both of them tiptoeing past his Gran who was asleep in the living room, the television light making Harry glow a blue silhouette as Delaware got in her car to head home.

She was so tired that night that by the time she got past her parents and up to her room, she dropped her bag and went right away to change for bed. It wasn’t until after she brushed her teeth and was changing into her pajama shirt that she caught the edge of blue writing in the mirror, and turned so she could look at her left shoulder.

There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out, was written in Harry Styles’ careful hand around a crude but somehow artful rendition of a little bluebird.

Delaware just stared at it for a few minutes before pulling her shirt over her head, somehow not even minding that it was written in blue ink.

April

“Knock knock.”

“Harry, I said not right now.”

“And I said knock knock.”

Delaware looked up with a glare from where she was hunkered over her homework, but the party across from her just flashed his dimples innocently.

“You know, in the time that you’ve spent denying me and glaring, you could have heard two knock knock jokes,” he pointed out.

Delaware sighed. “Fine,” she said, putting down her pen. “One knock knock joke and then you shut shut up.”

Harry rolled his eyes, already having made a comment about her pissy attitude earlier. “Okay, knock knock.”

“Who’s there.”

“Beryl.”

“Beryl who?”

“Beryl and Lium,” Harry said, cracking up.

Delaware just frowned. “I don’t get it.”

“Sure you do,” Harry said, still laughing. “Beryl and Lium – Beryllium! Get it?”

Delaware sighed. “Sure, Harry, I get it. Can I get back to work now?”

Harry eyed her, finally just nodding.

“Thank you.”

But then her pen stopped working.

Cursing loudly, Delaware started shaking the black ink pen, trying to get it to work, but it had given up the ghost with the last of its ink and she squeezed her eyes shut, pushing back tears.

“Here.”

Delaware opened her eyes to see Harry extending the blue pen he had been using towards her. “I don’t want it,” she said, sounding like a four-year-old refusing peas.

“No, it’s fine, I have another one in my bag somewhere, I think,” Harry said, misunderstanding what she meant and starting to dig around in his satchel.

It was her old blue pen that she’d ended up giving to him, and Delaware sighed, turning it over in her hands. She really hated blue ink, but desperate times called for desperate measures and so she tried to start again.

She only lasted a few words before the blue ink bleeding into the paper got to her and she dropped the pen, burying her face in her hands.

“You’re upset.” Harry made the observation of the year, and if Delaware had been thinking straight, she probably would have laughed. “What’s wrong?”

Delaware looked across the table at Harry. Harry, the boy she’d had a crush on for four years now. Harry, the boy who might’ve – might’ve – told his grandmother they were dating. Harry, the boy who kissed her (twice!) and then never said another word about it. Harry, who, at the moment, she was getting very mixed signals from.

And she did not have the time nor the patience for it anymore. She didn’t know what he was playing at and she couldn’t read his mind. She’d never been good at anything concerning boys and that was nothing new, but she was tired. Tired of the constant tug of war between her parents, tired of their expectations of her, tired of her heart speeding up every time she laid eyes on Harry fucking Styles or he even so much as turned a page across from her.

But he was the one person she could stand to have around. And he was also the one person that seemed to understand what she was going through.

Delaware’s eyes traced over Harry’s face before dropping to the table.“I didn’t get a very good mark on my Government essay,” she mumbled, squeezing her eyes shut. “It counted for almost half of my grade.”

Harry nodded. “That’s tough,” he sympathized. “But you did so well on your Physics exam, surely that counts for something?”

“Not in the lawyering business,” Delaware said sadly. “I enjoyed Chemistry last year and did well so my parents considered it an extracurricular activity for me. They basically let me take it this year for fun.” At Harry’s screwed up face at the thought of Physics being fun, she let out a rueful laugh. “Yeah, I was supposed to keep my focus on the main things that would prepare me for law school.”

Harry frowned, his thoughts showing in the draw between his brow.

Delaware sighed, flipping the blue pen over in her hand. “Did I ever tell you why I hate blue ink so much?”

Harry shook his head slowly. “No.”

“It’s because when I was little, I wanted to be just like my father. Sometimes I would go do homework in his office while he was working on a case, and sometimes he even took me with him when he went to the office on weekends. And you know what I saw there?” Delaware asked. “All I saw were documents and important papers all written and signed in blue ink. One time, I was going through them while I waited for him to get home, it was maybe when I was in fourth grade, and I found the papers my mother had filed for divorce against my dad. When I went to them and asked them about it, I was pretty upset and it turned into an absolute mess. The house was in uproar for days before my dad finally packed a bag and moved to a hotel for a couple of weeks. But before he left, I made sure to steal all of the blue pens from his briefcase, and I also stole all of the ones from his office because I knew that if he did sign those papers with blue ink it would be permanent. They would be divorced for good and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.” Delaware gave a wry laugh. “I still have a shoebox full of blue pens stuck up on a top shelf in my closet.”

“But they worked it out?” Harry asked.

“No,” Delaware said. “Not completely. My mother let my Dad move back in because the first thing they managed to agree on since I was four was the fact that I was an innocent party in all of this and deserved a two parent home for a sturdy upbringing.” She snorted. “They never did know how to settle anything outside of a courtroom.”

“They’re both lawyers, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, they both graduated Harvard, practically tying for top of the class. Dad won by about half a point I think. He used to say that my mother never forgave him, and I think that’s true now more than ever,” Delaware said.

“But they’ve had their success, yeah?” Harry asked.

“Oh sure,” Delaware said. “Dad was valedictorian and my mother was on one the board for a while. He built his own law firm from the ground up and she was District Attorney for nearly a decade.”

Harry was quiet for a minute. “You know how the scholarship offered through Harvard isn’t specified to law school because your father wanted others from his school to be able to be whatever they wanted to be at the best of their ability?” Delaware nodded. “Then maybe they should be content with their own success and stop trying to make you their trophy piece, allow you to follow through with your dreams like they’ve encouraged of others,” Harry said.

“They only want what’s best for me, Harry,” Delaware said, an edge her voice. “You don’t know anything about it, so why don’t you just shove off. Besides, you don’t have any room to talk. You’re letting yourself become a clone of your dear mommy.”

“No,” Harry said slowly. “I’m not. I grew up being told that I should be me, no matter how hard it is. It isn’t about being whatever you want to be or whatever your parents want you to be, it’s about just being you. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up until I started watching my mum and I realized how much she helped people. She’s one of the strongest people I know and I want to be just like her, even if I know I’ll never quite match up.”

“I have to make them happy,” Delaware said feebly. “I have to do what they want.”

Harry leveled his gaze with hers as he searched her face. Then, grabbing her blue pen, he uncapped it and reached for her arm, pressing the tip it into her skin as she watched without protest, one letter turning into four to form a word and one word turning into nine to form a sentence.

Find what you love and let it kill you.

Delaware pulled her arm from his warm grasp to get a better look at the scrawled words, already drying on her skin as Harry capped the pen and set it back down.

“Just do you, Delaware,” he said.

Delaware shook her head a little, making a noncommittal sound in the back of her throat. Clearing her throat after a moment, she looked back up. “Didn’t you say earlier that you needed help with chemistry again?”

Harry nodded slowly and pulled out his book, deciding to let her get away with the subject change. Delaware was dreading when it came up later, though. She supposed he was only trying to help, but she really thought that Harry had no idea.

By the time the library lights flickered, Delaware had helped Harry revise all of his Chemistry assignments, and as they began to pick their things up, he asked, “Have you ever thought of going into a science degree?”

Delaware stilled. “What would make you ask that?”

Harry shrugged. “I don’t know, you just get very animated when talking about my chemistry homework or you’re explaining your physics assignments. And you’re definitely better than me, which is a bit concerning since I’m the one going into medicine,” he added with a grin.

Delaware actually had considered it before. In fact, when she was in seventh grade, she had even brought it up to her parents, but her mother squashed the idea immediately, reminding her that she’d wanted to be like them since she was little and they’d already been banking on Harvard Law School for her. Her father was the one that was able to convince Tiffany to let Delaware to take the Chemistry and Physics courses beyond what was required for high school, so long as she promised not to let it distract her from what was considered more important.

“My success in sciences has already cause enough trouble,” Delaware finally said. “I haven’t even shown them my Government results because they’ve assumed it’s even better than my Physics exam.”

“But you got an A in Physics,” Harry said.

“Yeah.”

“Hey.” Harry grabbed her into a hug, smooshing her face against his chest. “Cheer up, I’m sure it can’t be too bad.”

Delaware sighed into the fabric of his shirt, inhaling him and his spicy cologne, closing her eyes for a minute. “I was trying for the scholarship, though, and that’s out the window now since that essay counted for almost half of my final grade.”

Harry pulled away suddenly, looking at her with a frown. “The scholarship?” he asked. “You mean the one that Harvard offers to the school because of your dad? You were trying for that?”

Delaware nodded, confused by his sudden change in mood. “Yeah, I thought that maybe if I could get the scholarship it would prove to my parents that I could make it on my own, let them know that I was capable of doing this and I didn’t need them pulling strings for me.” She searched his face as his frown deepened. “Harry, what’s wrong?”

Snapping out of it, Harry shook his head, stepping away. “Nothing, nothing, I just remembered I promised my Gran something.” He grabbed his bag off the table and pulled out his car keys. “I have to go.”

“Wait, Harry!” Delaware called as he rounded the German Philosophy section, disappearing.

Delaware shoved her things in her bag, things falling in helter skelter as she picked it up and ran, not even noticing as Ms. Schroeder glared at her for running in the library. But by the time Delaware hit the parking lot, Harry was already gone, and she could just barely hear the old, noisy muffler on the beat up tin can he drove somewhere farther down the block.

Delaware hadn’t spoken to Harry in more than a week. Well, there was a text she had finally broken down and sent on Sunday that said simply, are you okay? but he’d texted back with a curt fine and she hadn’t spoken to him in person since.

Harry was suddenly the last to show up to Calculus class and the first to leave. The first day that happened, Delaware smiled at him when he came in, but he only nodded at her before sitting down. She was mildly hurt, but she figured he was just tired and grumpy because he had overslept or something. But the second day it happened, Delaware knew something was up. And then to make matters worse, she was quite rudely reminded of why Harry was the school’s top track athlete when she tried to catch up with him after class.

Friday night came and went with Delaware sitting alone at her table in the library, checking her phone every two seconds, her pride keeping her from texting him, but one side of her desperately hoped Harry would just say something. Anything. She would have even taken a stupid knock knock joke at that point.

But he never showed and he never texted, so Delaware finally just went home. She ended up just locking herself in her room, sitting in her window seat with the sleeve of her sweater rolled up to stare at Harry’s handwriting. She felt like a stupid character from a rom-com.

By Sunday, Delaware almost felt like her life was back to normal. At dinner, her mother bitched at her father, her father shot it right back, and Delaware was the case evidence for each opposing side. She just stared longingly at her mother’s bottle of wine until she could escape back up to her room.

Delaware sat at her desk, head buried in a study, when her phone rang from the locked drawer in her bedside table. Spinning around to stare across the room at the table, Delaware just watched it as if afraid it would explode. She’d put it in there to avoid looking at it every two seconds like she’d been doing ever since Friday. She hadn’t gotten anything done the entire weekend and today she’d promised herself she was going to forget about Harry for a little while.

But that apparently wasn’t going to happen.

As soon as the phone stopped ringing, Delaware turned back to her desk, pressing her palms flat against the top as she tried to reason with herself. There was no reason to think that was Harry anyway. He hadn’t wanted to talk with her all week, what made her think he would call now?

Shaking her head, Delaware picked up her pen just as her phone started ringing again. Throwing the black pen down, she rushed over to the drawer, grabbing the key off the top and digging it into the lock. Pulling her phone out, she looked at the screen.

Harry.

Sliding the green arrow, she put it up to her ear.

“Hello?” Her voice was breathless and she hoped she didn’t sound desperate.

“Delaware!” Harry’s voice sounded oddly chipper after avoiding her for a week.

“Harry?” she asked cautiously, like she wouldn’t recognize his posh British accent anywhere.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Harry said. “Are you all right? You sound funny.”

She might have still been breathing a bit abnormally. Whether it was nerves or the fact that Harry’s voice sounded a tone deeper over the line, she wasn’t sure. Probably a combination of both. “I’m fine, I’m fine. What do you want?” It might have come out a bit blunt, but if it was Harry deserved it.

He cleared his throat a bit awkwardly. “Um, well, I was wondering if you’d want to go to senior prom with me?”

Delaware just stood frozen, staring at her blank beige walls.

“Del? Are you still there?”

Snapping out of it, she said, “Fine, fine. But why ask me now? The prom is only a week away.”

Most girls she knew at school had been asked at least a month ago and their dates had more often than not recieved an elaborate proposal. She didn’t know of any who had been asked over the phone, much less after a week of being ignored.

“Yeah, about that,” Harry said, seeming to choose his words carefully. “I probably won’t be able to make it to the library much this week either. This past week has been a bit...interesting.”

“You can say that again,” Delaware said.

Harry ignored that, and she guessed that she should be used to it by then, but Delaware still felt something dig into her chest.

“Come on, Del, you’d be doing me a favor,” he said. “Unless you already have another date.”

Delaware could tell by the tone of his voice that was something that he’d just thought of, and while she wished she could say yes, it’d be a whopper of a lie. “No, I wasn’t even going to go.”

“What? A pretty girl like you not even going to senior prom?” The charm was back on in an instant, and Delaware didn’t like it.

“No, I wasn’t going to go,” she repeated, this time a bit more firmly.

“You know, in all the years of high school, I don’t think I’ve seen you at a spring fling or Homecoming once,” Harry mused.

“That’s because I’ve never gone to one,” Delaware said.

“Never gone to one? Oh, Del, you can’t miss Senior Prom, then!” Harry said. “It’s a once in a lifetime experience. Tell you what, I’ll pick you up at seven, you wear something cute, and we’ll have a good time.” Delaware opened her mouth to protest, but he said, “Bye!” and hung up.

Delaware pulled her phone away from her ear and looked down at it, resisting the urge to hurl it at the wall as she sank down on her bed. What did this mean? And how was she supposed to break it to her parents? They certainly wouldn’t be happy about it. And what on earth was she going to wear?

Delaware ended up wearing an old pastel pink floral from one of her parents’ charity dinners that was held a couple of years before. She hadn’t grown an inch since sixth grade, so aside from the fact that it took her over ten minutes to do up the zipper, the gown fit.

The doorbell rang as she was touching up her makeup, and Delaware glanced at the clock. 6:50. Of course he was early. But that wasn’t a good thing with both of her parents in the house. And she could already hear her mother’s heels clicking in the foyer.

Flinging open her bathroom door she called down, “Be there in a minute!”

Quickly setting her hair with a bit of hairspray and putting her earrings in, Delaware took one last glance at her delicate and slightly alarmed features in the mirror before grabbing her shoes and racing down the stairs, skidding to a most unladylike stop on the landing when she saw Harry.

Standing just in the entryway, he was dressed in a simple black tux and black boots, his hair hanging in perfectly curled ringlets. It was the first time Delaware had actually seen his hair without it being tied up with a headscarf or tied half up in a bun. He looked like a prince.

Meanwhile Delaware was fairly certain that her lipstick was smudged. If she had even put any on. Had she? Surely she had.

“Delaware, ladies don’t run on the stairs,” her mother scolded like she was a six-year-old. “And put your shoes on, for heaven’s sake!” Delaware bent down to slip on her heels, trying to breathe away the nausea at her mother hanging off of Harry’s arm like a loose college girl when she was almost 45 and married. “Girl just doesn’t think a thing of her manners,” Tiffany purred, patting Harry’s arm. “You would have thought she never attended etiquette lessons!”

Delaware’s face burned as her father piped up jovially, “Harry was just telling us about his plans to go to into the medical field!”

Delaware stalked up to her parents, rescuing a squirming Harry from her mother’s hold with a tug on the arm. “Well that’s great, but we really have to be going.”

Delaware didn’t care that she practically slammed the door in her parents faces, leading Harry down the walk to where she had left her car parked out in front. “Get in.”

“I brought my car,” Harry pointed out.

“No offense, Harry, but if I’m going with you, I’m driving, and I don’t know how to drive a manual,” Delaware said.

Harry shrugged, pulling his door open and sliding in. “I can see that. Just don’t tell my mum,” he added with a wink. “She’d have my head for making my date drive herself.”

Delaware noticed that Harry had parked his car in front of the Jedwards and felt some satisfaction in knowing that even if her mother did look out and see it, she wouldn’t think anything of it. She didn’t like the Jedwards much and hated their children, so it wouldn’t be odd for her to assume that one of their weird college kids were home for the weekend.

“Is everything okay?” Harry asked after she didn’t say anything for a while.

“Rough week,” was all Delaware replied.

“What’s wrong? Did your parents get on you about your essay?”

“You didn’t care about it a week ago, I don’t know why you’d care about it now,” Delaware said, spinning the steering wheel into a turn after looking both ways at the end of the street.

“Del–”

Delaware reached over and hit the radio button, a Metallica song blasting and cutting off whatever Harry was about to say.

By the time Delaware whipped the car into the parking lot and pulled the key out of the ignition, the silence left by the radio was almost more deafening than the music had been. Just as she went to open her door, Harry grabbed her arm. “Hold on a second,” he said. “Here, I was going to give this to you back at your house but you tore out of there so quick.”

Delaware looked down at the small white flower corsage he had handed to her, turning it over in his hands.

“I wasn’t sure what color you were wearing, so mum said to just go with white,” Harry said, smiling a little bit.

Trying to focus on something other than the fact that Harry had talked about her with his mother, Delaware slid it onto her wrist with a shrug. “Yeah, sure, it’s cool. Thanks.” Opening her door to get out, she said, “Come on, we don’t want to be late.”

They weren’t late, and it didn’t really matter because Delaware had pretty much attached herself to the back corner and wouldn’t move, despite Harry’s best efforts.

“Do you want to dance?”

“No.”

“Do you want to go sit down then?”

“No.”

“Do you want to–”

“No.”

She knew he was probably trying to figure out just why the hell she even agreed to come, but Delaware couldn’t even figure it out herself. Hoping it would get Harry off her back, she finally agreed to let him go get her some punch.

But after three whole songs of standing by herself in a corner, Delaware was actually starting to miss Harry standing there and annoying her to death. Now she was alone with just herself and her thoughts and she was realizing that not only did she feel out of place, but she was out of place.

Deciding to go find Harry, Delaware made her way along the wall around to the punch table. Harry was talking to Mr. Fogelman, the guidance counselor, and apparently one of the chaperones for the evening.

Walking up behind them, Delaware heard Mr. Fogelman ask, “Has any financial aide come through?”

Harry was shaking his curly mane, “Not a lot of it.”

“Well don’t give up quite yet, you’ve still got a lot of options,” Mr. Fogelman said. “Have you been working on your McKenzy Scholarship?”

Delaware didn’t hear what Harry said because reality hit her worse than a slap across the face. Dragging in a breath and stepping up between the two, she said, “Oh, Harry’s definitely been working on his McKenzy Scholarship.”

Surprise registered on Harry’s face, then guilt. “Del–” he started.

The girl didn’t give him a chance to finish. Grabbing one of the two punch glasses from his hands, she dumped the contents of it over his head, saturating the perfect curls and drenching the white shirt under his suit coat pink.

“What the fuck was – Del!” Harry called as she stalked away, cutting right through shocked onlookers and pushing past the people on the dance floor. “Del!”

One thing that Delaware was thankful for in her short stature was her sure ability to walk in heels, and she made it out the door in record speed, digging through her clutch for her car keys. Apparently, though, her new record speed was nothing against Harry’s giraffe legs, which were personally responsible for leading the track team to nationals.

“Del, wait up!” he called out, running his fingers through his hair, which was trying to plaster itself to his forehead. “Del!”

“First of all,” Delaware said, spinning around and grabbing him by the tuxedo even though she was still a good three inches shorter than him in heels. “My name is Delaware, not Del. Just Delaware.”

“Delaware, it isn’t what you think–” Harry started.

“Second of all,” Delaware continued, tightening her hold. “I don’t know when it was you took up mind reading but you sure as hell don’t know what I’m thinking right now, so fuck off,” she gave him a little push, letting go of his lapels, but Harry barely stumbled.

“Delaware, you don’t understand–”

“Oh I understand, Harry Styles, I understand perfectly well,” Delaware said, her voice rising. “I understand that you played me this entire time, I understand you were using me to get to my father, and I fucking understand that you thought you could earn your ticket to Harvard by charming my parents just like you charmed me!” Harry started to talk, but she cut him off. “What I don’t understand, something my 4.0 GPA has failed to educate me on, is why you would do it. Why would you do this Harry? Why would you string me along for two months? That’s what I don’t understand. I thought you were better than that, Harry.” She shook her head in disbelief, tears glistening in her eyes.

“You want know why I did this?” Harry asked. “I’ll tell you why I did this. It’s because kids like me never get a fucking chance.”

“Don’t start spouting that bullshit,” Delaware said, her voice cracking as she pulled open her car door. Harry reached out to grab it.

“It’s not bullshit.” Harry’s voice turned mocking. “Look at you. Poor little rich girl. She gets everything handed to her; her car, her clothes, her Harvard acceptance letter. But no, she has to prove something to the world, and it isn’t the fact that she’d go work in a soup kitchen.”

“Harry, shut up,” Delaware warned, her voice shaking.

“No, I won’t shut up!” Harry shouted. “You want sympathy, so I give you sympathy. You want a shoulder to cry on, I give you a shoulder to cry on. But with you it’s never enough. You could bow out of your parents plans at any time, but you’d rather play the victim and milk it for what you can. You’re selfish, Delaware. You’re nothing but a selfish bitch!”

“Shut up, shut up!” Delaware screamed, swinging at him with her clutch. “You have no idea what it’s like to be me!”

“I know it must be fucking miserable!” Harry said. “It has to be miserable to have the world at your feet! Because, after all, people like me are supposed to get a job at McDonalds or be the janitor at your fancy fucking law firms and never amount to anything! We’re supposed to keep living in your shabby rental neighborhoods and drive your traded in cars! And then we’re supposed to marry someone and pop out a few kids before we die to keep the cycle going! If you really wanted to make a difference, Delaware McKenzy, you would stop living in your miserable little self-focused bubble and use your position for good instead of for your own advantage!”

“Oh, says the boy who seduced me to get to my father, looking for some magical train ticket into Harvard!”

“Well it wasn’t like you weren’t eager to be ‘seduced,’” Harry said, making quotations around the word.

Delaware made a noise of outrage. “And just what’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you would have jumped me in the library if you’d gotten the chance, we both know that!”

“I would have done no such thing, you – you pig!” Delaware screamed. “At least I have some self dignity!”

“A stick up your arse is more like it!” Harry shot back.

“Well good luck finding your magical train ticket, Harry Styles,” Delaware said, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. “Once I talk to my father, you won’t even have a shot as the janitor at his firm! Go fucking die!”

Getting into her car and slamming the door shut behind her, Delaware cranked her car, pulling out of her parking space and coming dangerously close to Harry as the spun off. By the time she pulled up her driveway, things were permanently blurred, Delaware nearly knocking over her mother’s fountain before stumbling up the stairs and inside.

“Back so soon?” she heard her father call from somewhere, his voice coming toward her.

Kicking off her heels in a rush to get up the stairs, she bent down to pick them up and nearly ran right into her mother, who looked her up and down, horrified at Delaware’s disheveled state. “Well, what happened to you?” she asked, holding her wine glass up as if Delaware might break it or contaminate the contents. Really, though, she was lucky the girl didn’t grab it from her and down the entire glass.

“Delaware?” her father asked, coming from the direction of his office. “Sweetheart, what happened? Are you okay?”

“Of course she’s not okay, Robert!” Tiffany broke in. “Look at her! Why don’t you try to get to the bottom of this instead of asking meaningless questions!”

“I am trying to get to the bottom of this, Tiffany, you need to–”

“Would you both just shut up!” Delaware’s voice screamed an octave above theirs, silencing the both of them as they stared at her in shock. “This is not a criminal justice case you’re arguing over in court! This is my life! I’m not your client, I’m your daughter! Why can’t you both just be on the same team for once and stop fucking with my life? This is all your fault!”

Pushing past her speechless parents with a strangled sob, Delaware ran up the stairs, tripping near the top but not feeling the pain that shot through her knees as she pulled herself up and kept running. Slamming her bedroom door behind her, she collapsed on her bed and let it all out.

She cried herself to sleep that night, with her parents oddly silent for once, too far removed from their own daughter to know what to do. And Delaware didn’t know if it was her fault or theirs anymore.

By the time that Delaware got up the next morning, mascara streaked down her face and her formal dress permanently wrinkled, Harry's car was gone from in front of the Jedwards’ house. Like the chariot that turned back into a pumpkin at midnight in Cinderella, it seemed to have shriveled up into itself and rolled away. Delaware wished she could have done the same. Instead, she just spent over an hour in the shower, trying to scrub away any trace, visible or invisible, that Harry had ever marked on her skin.

Her parents for once weren't at each other's throats at dinner, though Tiffany did make some pointed glares from time to time and Robert was clearing his throat in various tones every few minutes as if about to acknowledge the elephant in the room before losing his nerve and instead asking for someone to pass a dish.

Delaware, though, was nothing but an empty shell. She threw herself into her studies, trying to distract from what had gone down over the past week and a half. Even Speech and Debate, something that she had pretty much been failing due to her passive nature, was now an outlet to vent her rage of things that she could have and should have said.

She wasn't selfish.

Delaware. Was. Not. Selfish.

But all of her excuses and explanations wouldn't hold water when she tried to reason them out in her head. It figured. She had never been very good at speech and debate, she didn’t know why she’d be able to win an argument with herself.

She had switched seats with one of the girls on the opposite side of the room during second period, the redhead not asking any questions since the entire school was well aware by now of what went down between Harry and Delaware.

Delaware felt a tug at her chest when she sat down for the first time, the new seat too close to the gum smacking cheerleader and too close to the window.

But maybe the real reason was that Harry hadn't even looked up when she'd walked into the room, and the heart that had been so forcefully ripped out of her chest was now ruthlessly shoved down her throat. Somehow even a glare, or a snarl, would have been better than complete dissociation.

Delaware didn't go to the library after school anymore to reduce chances of running into Harry and she'd replaced his name with a simple ‘x’ in her phone since she couldn't find it in her to delete his number, but couldn't stand the constant reminder of his name every time she looked at her phone.

By the end of that week, Delaware was emotionally drained. And the last thing she wanted to do was go see her Great Aunt Prudence who was in the hospital.

“No.”

Tiffany ticked an eyebrow at her daughter from over a book. “I don't believe I gave you the option. We leave in twenty minutes.”

She’d barely had time to change before her mother was honking the horn of her Mercedes impatiently, glaring over top of her Chanel sunglasses as Delaware scurried to get in the car and buckle up.

Robert met them at the hospital, showing up ten minutes late and leaving them to wait in the parking lot, but surprisingly Tiffany had little to say about it, her thin painted red lips pressed tightly shut as she scrolled through work emails on her phone until he arrived.

Delaware trailed behind them as they led the way to her Great Aunt’s room, finding a chair in the corner to slouch down in like a typical moody teenager as her parents each took a side of the bed.

“How are you doing, Aunt Prudy?” Robert asked with a toothy grin.

Delaware's Great Aunt Prudence was actually Tiffany’s aunt, but Robert was the old woman's favorite great nephew-in-law and they got along wonderfully. He was also the only one allowed to call her Prudy.

“Is Delaware here too?” Great Aunt Prudence asked, a look from her mother prompting to get up and gently hug the shriveled up grape that was her Great Aunt.

Thankfully, before her Great Aunt could go into anything about Delaware’s studies and Harvard, the nurse bustled into the room, all smiles and sunshine, allowing Delaware to melt into the background as introductions of the adults went around the hospital bed.

Delaware wasn’t paying attention, but caught her Great Aunt calling the nurse by her first name, Anne. Something about the woman was ringing familiar with Delaware, and she frowned, leaning back in her chair as her mother introduced herself and her father, seeming to have already forgotten Delaware was in the room. Really, though, that was fine by Delaware, and she just watched as the nurse moved to take her Great Aunt’s vitals, watching the woman closely.

It wasn’t until Delaware’s father cracked a half-assed Dad joke and the nurse laughed, the sound like music in the small room, that it hit Delaware like a bolt of lightning. She was Harry’s mother, the woman from the picture next to the one of him with his sister!

Knowing she had to get out of there and get out of there fast, Delaware ducked her head, letting her hair fall in front of her face as she got up from her seat and slipped out the door. Not sure where she was supposed to go in the huge hospital but knowing she couldn’t leave completely, Delaware headed for the elevator, pressing the up arrow. When it didn’t come after a few seconds, she decided to go ahead and take the stairs, trying to outrun her racing mind as her footsteps echoed in the concrete stairwell.

When that didn’t work, she pushed out the fourteenth floor door, having ascended seven floors in just a couple of minutes. Chest heaving as she looked around, Delaware noticed how eerily quiet this floor was. How, despite the same blank walls and linoleum flooring, this wing felt different, as if there were ghosts in the halls that you had to creep around, whisper around, as if they were watching and listening.

Stepping forward a bit, Delaware turned her head to the nurses’ station, hearing two women having a hushed conversation over a clipboard.

“She probably won’t make it into next week,” one of the nurses said.

The other spoke in a lower voice, and Delaware couldn’t catch what she said but the first one nodded.

“Yeah, he knows. He’s with her now.” She sighed. “It’s sad to see it happen, especially since they’re so close now, but he’s probably the reason she’s held on for so long.”

Delaware moved away from them, heading down the opposite way towards the window at the end of the hall. So that’s why this hall was so eerie. This was the floor where people got sent to die. It was odd with no televisions blasting, no access to a chapel or prayer garden, no doctors running in a hurry to get somewhere. Because this was the last floor these patients would ever see, a floor filled with people waiting to die just like them, waiting for the machine to flatline and then simply be disconnected, waiting for their Do Not Resuscitate order to be put to use.

Coming up to the window at the end of the hall, Delaware shuddered, staring out at nothing but a brick wall. At the sound of voices in a quiet conversation to her left, Delaware tipped her head, taking a step toward the door.

“–and get that nasty green goo away from me,” a woman’s voice sounded papery thin through the open door, and Delaware took another step closer, trying to peer into the darkened room.

“Agnes, you have to eat something.”

Delaware inhaled sharply, pressing herself up against the wall. That was Harry’s voice. Harry was in there. But doing what?

“No,” the old woman said flatly as Delaware peered around the corner of the doorframe.

“I won’t leave until you eat something,” Harry sang out.

He was sitting in a chair pulled up beside the bed, shoving a tray of food at an old woman, who looked as though she was wasting away to nothing, just a bag of skin and bones about to drown in the hospital bed. But she sported one of the brightest smiles Delaware had ever seen.

“Well, then I guess you’ll have just be stuck with me all day,” Agnes replied before leaning forward as if to share a secret. “You might even have to change my bedpan.”

Harry snorted. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

He was an orderly. Suddenly the few days a week he missed at the library even when he didn’t have practice made a lot more sense, as did the Saturday that they met up to study together and he smelled like disinfectant.

“Come on, at least try the roll,” he prodded.

“And ruin this girlish figure with all of those carbohydrates?”

“Agnes.”

“Fine. Just a bite,” Agnes relented, picking it up, her frail hand trembling. “Did you make these?”

Harry shook his head. “I moved out of the kitchen, remember?”

“Oh, yes, that’s right.” Agnes took a tiny bite from her roll and chewed a minute, making a face “They really should hire you back, though, that old head hag down in the kitchen obviously doesn’t know a thing about baking!”

“I’m moving up in the world, though,” Harry said. “I’m an orderly now, I change bedpans instead of buttering biscuits.”

“Yes you are, and I’m so so proud of you,” Agnes said, her voice sure and determined. “Don’t ever forget where you came from or where you’re going. You’ll make it to being a doctor one day, and I know that you’ll be better than the best because you have the spirit for it, Harry. And eventually, you’ll be telling the orderly that comes to change your bedpan all about your life as a doctor and how you started out at the bottom and worked your way up. So don’t you ever give up, okay? You promise me?”

Harry cleared his throat, and Delaware bit her lip as she watched him nod. “I promise.”

“Good,” Agnes’s voice got instantly lighter. “And incidentally, hon, you can butter my biscuits anytime!”

The pair laughed and Delaware dropped back against the wall, squeezing her eyes shut. Agnes was dying, and Harry was just sitting there holding her hand, making sure she wasn’t alone. He looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept in days, but yet there he was, trying to make sure she ate something even though she could die tomorrow.

Delaware didn’t even realize she was crying as she tore away from the door, running down the hall and to the stairs as she flew down them, skipping over two or three at a time.

Harry had been right. She was nothing but a selfish bitch who bewailed herself and her own situation. She was just another poor, little rich girl who played games with everyone’s heads until she had bewitched even herself. She had everything she could ever want but wanted what she couldn’t have, deciding that if she couldn’t have it, no one else should either. But most importantly, and most heartbreaking, Delaware had the whole world at her feet but would do nothing for it.

Her phone started ringing as she hit the lobby, but Delaware ignored it, pushing past people who didn’t give a crying girl a second thought in a hospital. By some miracle, she spotted her parents through her tears, standing near the door. Her father looked concerned and her mother had a phone to her ear, which she promptly hung up upon spotting her daughter.

“What’s wrong? Why are you crying?” Tiffany asked, looking slightly alarmed.

Delaware shook her head, pushing her mother’s hands off of her. “I’m fine, I’m just–” Cutting herself off, she looked at her father. “Can I ride home with you?”

He nodded, and neither of them spoke a word until they reached his car.

Sliding into the passenger side, Delaware asked, “Did you really mean it when you said you’d be there if I ever needed anything?”

Robert McKenzy nodded, regarding his daughter worriedly. “Is this about that boy?”

Delaware didn’t answer, just pressed a napkin against her eyes, the pressure feeling good after days of little sleep and a lot of crying. “I need you to do me a favor.”

18 Months Later – November

Delaware should have been back into the swing of uni by now, it was early November and she was already wrapping herself in scarves and wearing mittens. Instead, she seemed to be in full summer mode, considering herself lucky if she was up and about by eight in the morning and ready to go for classes – she got bonus points if she actually remembered to dress for the weather. Delaware didn’t know why she was still functioning like she was still on her dad’s yacht back in the middle of August, but she knew she wanted it to stop. She also wanted the feeling in her nose back.

Stepping out of the elevator as the doors slid open to reveal her floor, Delaware hoisted her grocery bags and took a left, heading down to the end of the hall. The dorm she had this year was much quieter than the one she had occupied the year before, something that Delaware was thankful for. The elevator also didn’t lurch as much as the one in her last building and that definitely a plus.

Setting her things down to pull out her keys, Delaware heard her neighbor – Kelsey, if she remembered right – open her door and step out into the hall behind her as Delaware unlocked her own door and reached down to pick up her bags. Just as she did so, one of her plastic bags split open and her things went everywhere.

Dropping to her knees with a sigh, Delaware shook her head as she crumpled the useless bag in her hand, trying to decide what to pick up first and how to get it all inside. It was too early for this.

The person in the hall bent down next to her, reaching to pick up a few things.

“Oh, thanks,” Delaware said, a little surprised at the help. “These stupid plastic grocery bags.”

“Yeah, I know they’re pretty much worthless anymore.” The voice caused Delaware to still immediately with her hand frozen on a box of cookies, praying that she had misheard, and that when the male spoke again, she wouldn’t look up to see who she thought it was. Because it was definitely not Kelsey. “That’s why I take my own now. Plus, I like to think it helps the environment.”

Delaware swallowed hard, braving a look up. “Harry?”

He froze, his head turning to meet her gaze head on. “Del? Delaware?” He repeated her name twice, the second time as if correcting himself, and Delaware felt her heart drop in her chest at how familiar her name sounded rolling off his lips, even over a year later. “Is that you?” he asked, eyes scanning her face as if taking her in.

Delaware nodded. “Yeah, it’s me,” she said cautiously. It wasn’t like she’d changed much, her hair was still the same and she still hadn’t quite hit 5’5” yet.

Harry, though, Harry had changed a lot. He looked older and, fuck, he looked even more beautiful, if that was even possible. His hair was longer, tugged back in a full bun now instead of the half bun he had sported back in high school, and the shorter bits were curling around his face and at the back of his neck. She wondered if his green eyes had gotten a little darker as well or if it was just the lighting.

They just sat there for a minute, both of them on their hands and knees in the hallway, a few groceries still scattered on the floor.

Suddenly, Delaware cleared her throat. “Um, well, I’d better get these things in.”

Harry nodded, still staring at her as she ducked her head, letting her hair fall like a barrier between them as she grabbed the last few items and stood up, him doing the same. Pushing open her door, Delaware dropped her bag on the floor by the coffee table before dumping the groceries on the kitchen counter.

“You can, um, just sit those things down here,” she said to Harry, who was still hesitating a few steps in the door. “Or here, I’ll just take them.”

Delaware took a few steps forward and reached for the things in his hands, which turned out to be a bad idea considering Harry was holding everything very strategically in his abnormally large hands. Delaware managed to catch both cans of SpaghettiOs, and Harry saved the dry cereal, but an apple fell with a splat to its death. Delaware grabbed the box from Harry and spun around to put the things on the counter, closing her eyes, wondering, Oh god, why me?

Taking a deep breath as she turned around, Delaware managed a, “Thank you, Harry.”

“Yeah, sure,” he replied. His voice sure was deeper than she remembered. “Anytime.”

Delaware sure hoped not.

Clearing her throat a bit awkwardly, Delaware rocked back and forth on her heels. She really wasn’t sure what to do or say. She had meant her thank you almost as a goodbye, but Harry didn’t seem to be going anywhere, instead quite content where he was standing, looking around curiously with his hands shoved in the pockets of his obscenely tight black jeans. He suddenly looked right at her, and Delaware flushed at being caught staring.

“You been doing okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. I’ve been doing fine,” Delaware said. “You?”

Harry nodded. “I’m good.”

“Good.”

“Your parents?” Harry asked.

“They divorced last year,” Delaware said. Harry opened his mouth, but Delaware didn’t let him apologize – she knew that’s what he was going to do. “Your family?”

“Doing well.”

“Good.”

“Yup.”

Delaware nodded, her gaze fixed on him as Harry started looking around the room again. He seemed taller than she remembered him, too, and a bit better dressed in black skinny jeans that surprisingly didn’t have holes and a black trench coat, a simple white tee peeking out from beneath. Delaware dragged her eyes away from his obviously toned chest before he could catch her looking.

He was scanning the room, eyes snagging on the bookshelf over in the corner that she hadn’t completely finished setting up yet. Nothing was on it but a couple of pictures, an abandoned coffee mug and a few books, but he obviously took note of the one on display.

Gesturing at The Ethics of Cause Lawyering: An Empirical Examination of Criminal Defense Lawyers as Cause Lawyers, he commented, “Law school?”

Delaware shook her head. “No, actually. I’m, uh, Master of Science degree.”

Harry looked surprised. “Oh.”

“So do you...live in this building?” Delaware asked tentatively, somewhat afraid of the answer.

Harry shook his head. “No, I was just–”

“Harry?” a female voice called. “Harry!”

Kelsey, long, blonde and beautiful, popped her head in the dorm. “Oh, hi!” she said, giving a little wave to Delaware. “It’s Delaware, right? And you two must know each other, then?”

No, we’re complete strangers, that’s why he’s standing inside of my dorm room.

Harry let out a nervous chuckle, reaching up to rub the back of his neck. “Yeah, we went to highschool together.”

“Oh, awesome!” Kelsey chirped, sounding like she was a million miles away from the topic in her mind already. “Anyway, Harry, I just wanted to double check it’s next Saturday at seven, right?”

“Yeah, I can pick you up if you want,” Harry said.

“Oh, so chivalrous.” Kelsey pressed a hand to her heart dramatically. Dropping it, she said, “It’d be cute if I were that type of girl, but I think I can manage. Thanks anyway, though.”

Harry shrugged.

“Oh, and Harry,” Kelsey said, wiggling a finger to beckon him over.

Harry looked between Kelsey and Delaware, seeming reluctant to take a step in Kelsey’s direction as he searched Delaware’s face. For what she didn’t know, but she tried to keep it as blank as possible. Because of course. Of course Harry had a girlfriend. Delaware should have expected it. Even if his accent had faded a bit, his looks sure hadn’t.

Kelsey reached out to grab him as soon as he was close enough, whispering something in his ear. She had a smirk on her face as she pulled away, winking at him and Delaware had to turn around, pretending to suddenly be very interested in her package of ramen noodles when in reality she was trying not to vomit.

“Anyway, I’ll leave you two to your reminiscing,” Kelsey said. “I was just on my way out. See you later, Harry. And maybe you too, Delaware?”

Delaware felt like her name was only tacked on as an afterthought, but she turned around anyway, trying to offer a smile as Kelsey waved and left. Delaware and Harry were both silent as her footsteps faded off in the hall, Harry looked at Delaware and Delaware avoided his gaze by staring at the cheap carpet.

Just as they heard the elevator ding, Delaware looked up, beating Harry to speaking. “You should go.”

Harry’s brow furrowed. “But–”

“I have lots of...stuff to do and I’m sure you do, too,” Delaware said, putting a hand on his arm and trying to guide him to the door.

Harry pulled out of her grasp, twisting around to look at her. “Can we just talk for a minute? I mean, it’s been a while.”

“Yeah, it has,” Delaware said. “But I’m fine, you’re fine. Hey, it all worked out.”

Even Delaware could tell that her smile wasn’t convincing. That it was wobbling just a bit more than it should.

Harry frowned. “Delaware–”

“Goodbye, Harry,” Delaware said.

Shutting the door right in his face was probably one of the hardest things she’d ever done in her life. After over a year of thinking of what she’d say if she’d ever see his face again, if she ever so much as got the chance, the words first vengeful, turned to spite, before finally changing to to regret over time, failed her.

She stood there for a good five minutes, just staring at nothing.

And from what she could tell, on the other side of the door, Harry did too.

Knock knock.

The yellow sticky note was stuck to her door almost a week later. Delaware couldn’t believe it when she saw it at first, thinking that she’d gone half crazy from late nights and fitful sleeps, but when she pulled it off her door, she saw the familiar scrawl in blue ink.

Knock knock.

He didn’t have to sign it like he so tackily did – or used to do, at least. Delaware knew who it was, and it made her stomach twist up in knots in more ways than just over how he didn’t sign his name with that cute little H .xx anymore. Although she did think that, and immediately tried to shake it from her mind.

She didn’t sleep well that night, thinking about the note sitting on her kitchen counter, and finally at three a.m. Delaware got out of bed to go ball it up and throw it in the trash. The single tear that fell could have been due to sleep deprivation, but Delaware knew better. She only wished she could cleanse her heart and mind of Harry Styles just as easily.

Two days later, though, there was another note stuck on her door. With Knock knock, written in blue ink with a bold hand. Delaware ripped it straight down the middle and threw that one away, too.

But the third time it happened, Delaware had to resist the urge to scream in utter frustration.

Fine, she thought, staring at the blue inked ‘Knock knock’ as if her gaze alone should set the whole door ablaze. If he wants an answer an answer, he shall get one.

Ripping the sticky note from her door, Delaware crumpled it up in her hand before dropping it to the floor and grinding it beneath the heel of her shoe. Then she went into her dorm, slamming the door behind her even though no one was around to hear.

Nearly a week passed, and Delaware hoped that she’d sent a clear message to Harry that she didn’t want to have a hand in the game he was playing. Still, between the stress of her schedule and the feelings dredged back up with Harry’s sudden arrival back into her life, she still wasn’t sleeping very well, and by the next Sunday, Delaware was laying in bed with Grey’s Anatomy on her laptop, a thermos of coffee and a bag of little candy bars, and a box of Kleenex, telling herself the only reason she was crying was because it was the episode where Meredith found out about her mother. But she hadn’t been watching a second of it since she’d pressed play, instead staring at something beyond the screen.

It had taken her months to get over Harry Styles. They never spoke again at school after Prom, and Harry never knew that she had seen him at the hospital. Delaware had tried to distance herself from the mere thought of him, but it was hard even sometimes now. She always knew there was a chance she could run into him on campus, their two schools weren’t that far apart, but she always thought she’d be more prepared. But she was never prepared when it came to Harry Styles.

Someone knocked on her door, but Delaware ignored it. It was probably just the RA anyway, and she didn’t feel like talking today.

But the knocks grew more persistent. Delaware sighed, wiping the sleeve of her sweatshirt over her face as she got up from her bed, trying to wake herself up a little bit. She probably looked like hell, but she was sick and a college student and it was her day off, so the RA could just deal with it. He’d probably seen much worse before anyway.

The knocking stopped just as Delaware made it to the door, and she stood on tiptoe to look out the peep hole. But it wasn’t the RA.

“Harry?!” she exclaimed.

That was probably the wrong thing for her to do and Delaware realized that immediately as Harry turned back around, apparently having given up before she said his name.

“Delaware?” Delaware shrank back from the door, but Harry rapped on the door again. “Delaware, I know you’re in there now, you can’t ignore me forever.”

“What do you want, Harry?” she called.

“I want you to answer me something.”

“What’s that?”

“Can’t you just let me in?” Harry sounded tired and Delaware wondered if he was losing as much sleep as she was. Still, she had to stand her ground.

“No.”

“Fine,” Harry said. “But answer me this. Knock knock.”

“Harry, stop,” Delaware said, hating the way her voice broke.

“C’mon,” Harry prodded, saying just what he always said when she used to balk at his ridiculous jokes. “Please? Just for old times sake. Knock knock.”

“Harry–”

“Knock knock.”

Delaware sighed in resignation, her back pressed against the door. “Who’s there?” she finally asked.

“Iowa.”

“Iowa who.”

“Iowa you an apology.”

Delaware closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the door. She could just barely hear Harry breathing on the other side of the door as he waited. And then finally, finally, Delaware turned the lock and opened the door, pulling it open to reveal one Harry Styles, hair long and styled and wearing that same pair of black skinny jeans he always did. Was it just her or were they tighter than they used to be back in highschool?

He stared at her a minute, seeming mildly surprised that she’d opened the door, yet hopeful. As he scanned her face, though, his look dropped into one of concern. “Are you okay?” he asked, his brow furrowing as he stepped forward.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine,” Delaware said, stepping aside to let him walk in. “There’s a bug going around campus.” She sniffled as if to prove her point. It wasn’t like she was telling a lie, at least. A cough and sniffle bug had been going around and Delaware had been feeling poorly that week anyway, why couldn’t she chalk it up to being sick?

Harry, though, didn’t look convinced. He searched her face for a moment, and Delaware dropped her gaze. The next thing she knew he was pushing past her and to her kitchen, announcing, “I’m going to make you some tea.”

Delaware just stared at him. “Why?”

“Because you look like you need it,” Harry said, shrugging as he banged through her cabinets. Pausing to look back over at her he smiled a little. “Shut the door, Delaware.”

Delaware flung the door shut without looking, confusion furrowing her brow as she rounded the kitchen table. “What are you doing, Harry?”

He looked over his shoulder, frowning slightly at her upset expression. “I told you, making you some–”

“I mean, what are you doing here?” Delaware asked, waving her arms around. “What makes you think that you can just walk right back into my life and try and make me fucking tea, for god’s sake!”

Harry grabbed her arm as it swung too close to her face, holding her by the wrist. Delaware struggled for a minute, but he was still a head taller than her and she noticed after a minute he wasn’t looking at her, but instead at the small design inked on the inside of her wrist. The small, tattooed sketch of a bluebird.

Delaware could have sworn she stopped breathing as Harry looked at it, turning her wrist around in his hand as if the check that it was what he was really seeing. Delaware tugged her arm away and after a little resistance, Harry let her go, looking at her with a slightly confused expression.

Delaware cleared her throat. “There’s sugar in the cabinet by the sink. Don’t make a mess.”

Harry nodded, but Delaware was already turning away, going to sit down on the couch. They were both unnervingly silent, and in fact, they were so silent that when the tea kettle began to whistle, Delaware jumped. She pulled her feet up onto the couch in front of her, hugging them tightly to herself.

“Here,” Harry said, circling around the couch holding two mugs. “Near as I can remember you took your tea like mine, I hope it’s okay.”

At his lopsided smile, Delaware nodded, trying not to touch him as she accepted the mug. His stupidly long fingers still brushed hers, though, and she tried not to shiver.

“Sorry, it’s cold in here,” she mumbled.

“I was actually just thinking it’s quite warm,” Harry said. “Do you have a fever?” He reached out to feel her forehead, but Delaware ducked before his hand got anywhere near her, nearly spilling her tea and missing the slightly wounded look on Harry’s face at her actions as she focused on righting it.

“I’m fine,” Delaware said. “What did you want, Harry? Certainly you didn’t come all the way over here to make me tea and play doctor.”

Harry smirked and Delaware flushed, knowing immediately how he was going to interpret her words. “Are you asking? Because if you’re asking then–”

“Harry, just stop.” Delaware said, this time more firmly as she cut him off. “Besides, I don’t think your girlfriend would be too happy about that,” she murmured.

Harry picked up on it, though, and ticked his head to one side. “My girlfriend?”

Delaware sighed. “Harry, why?” One word, but it held so much depth. Delaware wanted to know why he was here. She wanted to know he was so concerned about her, concerned enough to make her tea. She wanted to know why he remembered how she had liked her tea after a year and a half when they’d only had tea together once and Harry’s gran had made it for her and put in a splash of milk no sugar, while Harry’s had both milk and sugar. The way they took their tea was in no way the same, but yet he still remembered. Why? Why, why, why?

Harry cleared his throat, taking a moment before saying, “Like I said, I wanted to apologize.”

“For what?” Delaware asked, not meeting his gaze as she stared straight into her mug.

“For what?” Harry asked, scoffing a bit. “For everything, really. God, where do I start.” He ran a hand over his face and Delaware dared a glance at him, her curiosity peaking. She looked away as he dropped his hand. “For calling you a selfish bitch, for starters,” Harry stated bluntly. “And a poor little rich girl, and for saying you were one of the most ungrateful people I’d ever met. It wasn’t true, and I’m sorry.”

He seemed to remember it in as vivid detail as Delaware did, both of them reliving it in their minds for a moment in silence.

“You were right, though,” she finally admitted. Delaware shook her head. “You don’t have to apologize because it was true. I was all of those things, and – and for that reason, I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’m sorry I treated you like any less than what you were and I’m so sorry that I threw where you came from in your face. It was so terribly wrong and what you’ve worked for, how far you’ve come, you should really be proud of that, you know? You should.”

Delaware met Harry’s eyes, only to find him frowning. “But I didn’t come all this way on my own. I used you Delaware, not the whole time, definitely not after I got to know you, but that still doesn’t change what my intentions were, you know? I thought you would just be some petty snob that I could just charm and you’d be okay, you’d move on to bigger and better things after we left high school, but after I got to know you I almost let myself think that maybe we’d have a real shot at something some day. And when you dropped that bombshell about going out for the scholarship,” Harry chuckled nervously, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I – I don’t know. I thought I knew you better than that, but I guess I didn’t see that one coming.”

“It was stupid of me,” Delaware said. “I tried to make my parents happy until I couldn’t even see that they weren’t happy and I wasn’t happy so why should I have even tried? You were right, you know? The whole time you were right. Out of anyone, I should have just made myself happy. And you have – you have so much potential, Harry, it almost scares me now what would have happened if you hadn’t made it through all because of me.”

“But I did make it through,” Harry said, putting a hand out to rest on her leg. “Because of you. I would have never won against you, Delaware, are you kidding me? You were up for valedictorian.”

Delaware winced. That was another loss that she’d felt hard in those months, and her parents had been devastated as well.

“But you know why you lost it?” Harry asked. “You lost it, and I won it, because you were so busy helping me with chemistry that you didn’t focus enough on your own work. You helped me with chemistry, and I passed flying colors, but you neglected your own work and your overall grade suffered. You were helping someone else, Delaware, and that’s why I know I was so wrong about you. You know, I never would have gotten into Harvard without the title of class valedictorian and your father’s letter of recommendation.” Delaware tensed, and Harry rolled his eyes. “And I know you got that for me. First impressions don’t do that. He never even found out I wanted to attend Harvard.”

They were both silent for a few minutes, Harry looking at Delaware and Delaware staring at the coffee table because she didn’t know what to say.

“So what now?” she finally asked.

Harry leaned over to put his mug on the coffee table. “We accept that we were both wrong and we move on,” he said, staring at her intently as he rested his elbow on his knee, tugging at his bottom lip.

“Forgive and forget?”

“Well, I mean, I don’t necessarily want to forget everything,” Harry said, an uncomfortable heat beginning to rise in Delaware’s cheeks at the intensity of his words and his unwavering stare. “I’d like us to be...friends.”

“Is Kelsey going to mind?” Delaware asked. “I mean, does she know about us and high school?”

Harry frowned. “Kelsey? No, Kelsey doesn’t know anything beyond what we told her the other day. But what does Kelsey have to do with this?”

“Isn’t she your girlfriend?” Delaware asked, a bit uncertain now.

Harry started laughing, and Delaware’s face went up in flames before he could even say anything. “No, no, not me and Kelsey. We have a couple classes together and I was dropping off some notes since she’d been sick with this ‘bug.’”

“Well then, what were you two conspiring about going to meet on a Saturday night?” Delaware asked.

“Oh,” Harry said, a look of realization coming over him. “That was for a party for one of our mutual friends. We were going to go early to set up. And that ‘conspiring’ as you call it was actually Kelsey trying to get me to invite you.”

“Oh.”

Harry pulled her over to him for a half hug, still chuckling.

“Well, you can’t blame me!” Delaware said, shoving at his chest. That was futile as he didn’t let go. “You’d make a cute couple, you’re both tall and have the long hair thing going!” She gave a not-so-gentle tug on one of his curls and he finally loosened his hold.

“Are you saying that you and I wouldn’t make a cute couple?” Harry asked, looking down at her with a smirk.

Delaware thought for sure her cheeks should have run out of fuel by now, but instead they were still flaming red hot. “I-I don’t know,” she sputtered. “I mean, I’m really short and–”

“So you’ve at least thought of it, then.”

Delaware was fuming. “Harry Styles, I am not–”

And then Harry was kissing her, full on the mouth with his soft but slightly chapped but pretty pink lips. The kiss reminded her of their chemistry lessons in school, when if the right elements were put together, they would explode, and Delaware was too caught up in the blast to do anything but hold on for dear life. His cologne was a bit different from their highschool days, but underneath it was all Harry and she melted into him as if it was second nature, her fingers curling around his bicep and the other reaching up to brush against his chin.

He pulled away slightly, all too soon, to murmur against her lips, “You have got to stop playing the victim in everything.”

Delaware just clung to his shirt for dear life, slightly dazed and delirious. “I don’t know, if it gets me this kind of treatment I might not.”

Harry laughed, low and deep, making Delaware smile into his shirt. “Where did my shy little Del go?”

“She grew up,” Delaware said, pulling away a little bit to see his face.

Harry smiled, but this time it was soft and genuine. “I noticed,” he said, before thoughtfully adding, “You know, I’d really like to take you on a proper first date.”

“I’d like that too,” Delaware said, ducking to hide her smile in his chest, her arms still wrapped around him.

Harry laughed, tracing shapes on her arm down to circle the small tattoo of a bird. Communication had obviously never been their strong suit. They had always seemed to prefer carving letters and signs in each others skin, hoping the other would interpret the code and understand them as a person just a little bit better. Delaware had sometimes even wondered if the ink prints Harry had left on her were still in her bloodstream somewhere, part of what had made her into what she was today, pulsing constantly through her system. On bad days, she had viewed the ink as toxic, a poison running through her veins to constantly remind her of how much she missed him. Other days she didn’t give it a thought, and then on another day, it was all that kept her going.

She still hadn’t told him about overhearing his and Agnes’ conversation that day at the hospital, though it was something Delaware had often played over and over in her mind in the time since. And now, with Harry right there, so close she could feel his breath on her neck, that as she grasped his sweater tighter, Delaware wasn’t certain that she ever would.

Instead, she tipped her head up to look at him, nearly hitting his chin with the top of her head. “You know I’m really not one to kiss before a first date,” she said teasingly.

Harry’s green eyes narrowed as they locked on hers. “You and I both know that’s not true.”

Delaware giggled, her cheeks pink. “I might get you sick, then,” she hummed.

“Nah, I don’t think so,” he said, his breath whispering against her lips.

Delaware raised an eyebrow. “And why’s that?” she asked.

“Because you’re not sick.”

“Oh? And just how do you know that?”

“Because you’ve always been black and white to me, Del. Even when you were writing in blue ink.”

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