Boyfriends - Where Harry hasn’t been the most present boyfriend. Based around Boyfriends by Harry Styles
Chocolate Hearts *- Based off CVS by Winnetka Bowling League
Ceilings- Based off Ceilings by Lizzy McAlpine
Too Sweet*- Based off Too Sweet by Hozier
The Alchemy*- AU where Harry is the star quarterback at his college and y/n is an English major.
Chapters- Where Harry stumbles into a book store and finds more than just his next read.
Alone Together- On a chilly New Year’s Eve, Y/N, seeking an escape from loneliness, finds herself unexpectedly swept into a night of warmth, fireworks, and romance when longtime crush Harry shows up at her bar table.
My Boss's Son Part Two*- Y/N, an assistant to Anne Twist, forms an unexpected connection with her son, Harry, when he comes home for the holidays.
I Want to Kill Her* Part Two* -Au where Y/N and Harry are neighbors who find out their spouses are cheating with each other.
Meet Me in the Hallway*- where y/n and harry cross paths in Paris. a quiet hotel. a hallway. a second chance.
One More Round (Then You)*- Where Y/N and Harry get bored, get drunk, and get each other.
Pillow Wall- Where Harry wants to blame the cold or the mattress or her gravity, but the truth is, he just sleeps better wrapped up in her.
You Found Me Here- Where Harry is a librarian who leaves notes poetry books.
Let's Call it Even- Where Y/N is an interviewer who pushes Harry Styles too far.
The Sound of My Voice- Where Y/N and Harry were once bandmates until a bitter fallout ended everything. And where, years later, a forced reunion puts them back on stage.
White Lie*- Where Y/N tells Harry a lie and she gets in trouble.
For the Both of Us- Where Y/N trains for a marathon with Harry, but an injury leaves her waiting for him at the finish line.
Like Us- Where Y/N and Harry thought they had lost each other, fate gives them a second chance.
A Real Good Doctor, part 2, part 3 Where Y/N is running and hurts herself but there happens to be a doctor who can help.
It's You*, part 2- Where Y/N never asked for anything, and Harry gave her something that meant everything.
House Tour*- Where Harry makes too much food and y/n finally gets invited over to his house.
Hands On You*-Where y/n is a massage therapist and makes a house call.
Picked Up Anyway-Where Harry drinks too much and costs him the things he loves most.
Pleased to Meet You*- Where y/n is a product designer for Pleasing and they’re launching a new product.
#1 Fan- Where y/n is Harry’s #1 fan and he goes along with it.
Trouble*- Where harry’s a soft TikTok streamer and y/n happens to find his stream.
It Was Enchanting to Meet You- Where y/n is on a girls trip and meets a man who belongs to the sea.
American Girls- Based off American Girls by Harry Styles
No Boats Involved- After a brutal breakup, your influencer best friend hands you a Raya invite code as a distraction, and somehow you end up matching with the one person you never expected to see on a dating app.
Die With A Smile- Y/N and Harry reconnect while surviving in a world overrun by a humanlike infection, slowly building a fragile life out of routine and trust. But as the dangers of this new world creep closer, Y/N is forced to confront how far she’s willing to go when survival and loss begin to blur together.
Extra Thick Icing- It is Harry’s birthday, and Y/N is doing everything she can to keep the surprise she planned from slipping out before the big moment.
All Eyes On You- Grammys
Friends Or Lovers- Based off Friends Or Lovers by Hayley Williams
Nice to Each Other- Based off Nice to Each Other by Olivia Dean
No One Would Believe You- where Y/N slips into Berghain alone, only to end up on her knees
Waking Up In Vegas- where harry and y/n are in vegas and the joke turns into the truth
Caught Looking- you spend twelve hours on a music video set trying very, very hard not to stare at harry in tiny red shorts. unfortunately for you, he notices every single time.
Box of Junk- While cleaning his house, you find a box of what looks like junk under his bed, and he tells you the story behind every single piece.
Man of Stone- Where you travel to England alone and find a statue of a man cursed to be unlovable, waiting for a true love’s kiss to break the curse.
Off Key*- watching him at the piano was your first mistake. sitting in his lap was the second.
the Week You Were Gone- After a brutal week alone with their newborn, one small broken rule leads to a fight that forces them to admit new parenthood is harder than they thought.
Exhibit B: Two Coffees- The world is trying to figure out who Harry Styles is dating, and you’re in a hotel room next to him reading the theories out loud.
I Know What You Like- where Harry studies the way Y/N reacts to music and writes a song built around it (based off Carla’s Song by Harry Styles)
We Were Never Just Friends- where Y/N sees Harry again at a wedding and realizes some loves were never meant to become friendships
Series
Honey & Venom* ,2,3- Where Harry, a serial killer, believes he’s found someone exactly like him.
Not Here to Be Nice, 2, 3- Where Harry is a surgeon with a god complex and zero patience, and Y/N is the nurse who finally gives him a reason to lose control.
Pencil Me In- When you land a job as the personal assistant to Harry Styles, the calm, charismatic CEO of Fine Line Enterprises, you quickly learn the role is much more than managing a calendar. From early morning calls to last minute flights and being the gatekeeper to one of the busiest men in the industry, your lite becomes completely intertwined with his.
Raya Harry- After a brutal breakup, your influencer best friend hands you a Raya invite code as a distraction, and somehow you end up matching with the one person you never expected to see on a dating app.
Patreon Exclusives
Assignment: Harry Styles- Where you are terrible at being a paparazzi and somehow end up on the other side of the camera with harry styles
Hopefully Soon- Mother’s Day brunch with Harry’s family gets a lot more serious when the two of you finally admit you want a baby together.
The Love Club has a simple arrangement. The girls go backstage, someone gets chosen, everyone goes home. She’s been doing this eight months and the arrangement has never included her…Until now.
I love that fact that they haven’t had sex yet in the raya story, now i love stories with smut but it’s nice to see it not happen so fast very cute ! LOVE the story
A few chapters back there was a little hint of something happening between them, but I kept it pretty closed door and that was fully intentional. I don’t want to rush into anything explicit when they’re still figuring each other out. It just wouldn’t feel right for them to barely know each other and already be going at it. The slow burn is doing its thing. 😊
A soft Saturday morning, an unexpected brunch, and a best friend meeting the man who’s changed everything.
word count: 6.1k
authors note: cover photo by @zclhes
The ceiling is wrong.
Too high, too white, and for a second you just lie there while your brain works out where you are. The sounds are off. Muffled in a way your apartment never is, the city present but distant, like it’s outside a room you’re not quite in yet. The duvet is heavier than yours. The pillow smells different.
His breathing is slow and even behind you. Still asleep.
You don’t move.
You just lie there and let the morning come in slowly, the thin line of light through the curtains, the low hum of the city doing its Saturday thing below, and you think about last night. Not in a rushing way. Just the way you think about something when you have nowhere to be and no reason to hurry and the whole morning is sitting in front of you like something you’ve been given.
The diner. The red vinyl booths and the laminated menus and the coffee that went lukewarm while you were talking. The walk back after, his hand finding yours somewhere around the second block, loose and easy, like it had always just been there. The room. The city through the window. The conversation that went on for a long time in the dark, the kind that moves slowly through the real things, the things you’ve been carrying around and not quite saying, and he listened without rushing it or fixing it, just letting it be what it was.
Manchester. February. You said yes and you meant it and you fell asleep with it sitting in your chest like something finally put down in the right place.
I love you. Twice now. Once by accident on a curb outside LAX with the morning sun and your defenses completely gone, and once last night quietly in the dark, and both times it landed the same. Clean. Certain. Not like a revelation but like a confirmation. Like something that had been true for a while and was only just being said.
You are not scared this morning.
That keeps catching you off guard. Last night you told him you were scared, which is not something you say easily, and he didn’t try to argue you out of it or tell you not to be. Just said scared means it matters and held on, and something about the simplicity of that, the complete absence of performance in it, made you feel like maybe it was going to be okay. Not because he fixed anything. Just because he didn’t try to.
Now it’s morning and the fear has gone somewhere and what’s left is just this. The warm weight of him behind you. The light through the curtains. The city moving quietly far below.
You lie still and look at the thin line of morning and think about February.
You think about a market bigger than the one in LA. A pub he’s been going to since he was eighteen. Streets he walked down before he was anything to anyone, before any of it, when he was just a person from a place, which is all any of you are underneath everything else. He showed you the studio because you asked to see something real. Now he wants to show you where he’s from. The actual place. And you said yes, and you meant yes, and somewhere between the diner and falling asleep you stopped being scared of that and started being something closer to excited, which is not a word you use lightly.
You think: this is a good morning.
You think: I could lie here for a long time.
Outside a car passes. A door somewhere. The particular sound of a city waking up slowly on a day it doesn’t have to rush.
His arm tightens slightly around you in his sleep. Not waking up, just shifting, pulling you a little closer without knowing he’s doing it, and you put your hand over his and stay very still and don’t do anything to disturb it.
You stay like that for a while.
Then your phone lights up on the nightstand.
You reach for it carefully, shifting just enough to see the screen without waking him.
Cami: good morning are you alive
Cami: hello
Cami: okay I’m going to Claudette at eleven with or without you they just changed the menu and I need the butternut squash thing before it sells out
Cami: also I need to talk to you
Cami: also I have content to make and I need a witness
Cami: please respond I’m spiraling
You look at the messages for a moment. Then you look at him, still asleep, hair doing several things at once, completely unbothered by the world.
You type back.
You: I’m here. I’m with Harry.
You put the phone face down on the nightstand and wait.
It buzzes almost immediately. Then again. Then several more times in rapid succession.
You pick it up.
Cami: WHAT
Cami: WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE WITH HARRY
Cami: as in WITH with?
Cami: as in he’s THERE?
Cami: okay I need you to bring him
Cami: Claudette at eleven. both of you. do NOT be late they stop walk ins at eleven thirty and I have a look planned and I will not be standing on the street in November
Cami: also hi harry 🫶🏼
You press your lips together to keep from laughing.
“Good news or bad news?”
You turn over. He’s awake, or mostly there, propped up on one elbow, watching you with that unhurried attention he seems to have regardless of the time of day or how recently he’s been asleep. His hair is doing several things at once. He looks completely unbothered by all of them.
“Camille,” you say. You hold the phone out so he can see the messages.
He reads through them slowly. Something moves in the corner of his mouth.
“She wants to meet you,” you say. “Claudette at eleven. You really don’t have to come. I can just go on my own and—”
“I want to come.”
“You don’t have to feel—”
“I know I don’t have to.” He looks at you over the phone. “I want to meet her.”
You look at him for a second. “She’s a lot.”
“I know,” he says. “You’ve told me.”
“I’m just saying. She’s going to have her phone out the whole time and she’s going to be taking photos of everything and she’s going to ask you questions that are slightly too personal for a first meeting and she’s going to pretend she’s not starstruck when she absolutely is going to be a little starstruck even though she’ll die before she admits it.”
He’s watching you with an expression somewhere between amused and fond.
“What,” you say.
“You’re nervous.”
“I’m not nervous.”
He just looks at you.
“I’m a little nervous,” you say.
“I know.” He hands the phone back. “It’s going to be fine.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.” He sits up. “What time is it.”
You check. “Quarter past nine.”
He nods and reaches for his own phone on the nightstand and you lie there and watch him and feel the morning sitting on you, warm and slightly impossible, because three weeks ago you were lying in your own apartment with an alphabetized bookshelf and a very clean bathroom cabinet and a planning committee meeting on Thursday and now you are lying in a hotel room in your own city on a Saturday morning watching Harry Styles check his phone and trying not to be nervous about brunch.
Your life, you think, is genuinely something else lately.
“I’ll get ready here,” he says, without looking up. “And I’ll get an Uber to swing by yours on the way. You don’t need to worry about the car.”
You look at him. “You don’t have to do that.”
“I know.”
“I can just drive—”
“You don’t need to.” He glances over. “Go home. Get ready. I’ll come and get you.”
You open your mouth.
He gives you a very patient look.
You close it. “Okay,” you say. “Thank you.”
He nods. Like of course. Like this is just what you do.
You find your clothes on the chair in the corner and change quickly, pulling yourself back together as best you can, which is relative. You haven’t looked in a mirror yet but you’re aware of the general situation. His shirt from last night, which you’ve changed out of. Your hair, which has made several overnight decisions you haven’t had the chance to negotiate with yet. Your mascara, which you did not take off because you were busy agreeing to Manchester and saying I love you and eating pancakes at midnight, and which has almost certainly done something interesting while you were sleeping.
You find your bag. Your coat. Your keys.
He’s still in bed, phone in hand, completely at ease, sorting out the logistics of your morning like it’s nothing, because for him it probably is nothing, and you stand in the doorway for a second just looking at him.
“Text me when you’re ready,” he says, without looking up.
“Okay.” You pause. “Don’t let me be late. Cami will genuinely never forgive me.”
“Go.” He glances up then, just briefly. “You have mascara—” He gestures at his own eye.
“I know about the mascara.”
He smiles. Goes back to his phone.
You point at him. He doesn’t see it but somehow that’s fine.
You leave.
The corridor is quiet, carpet thick enough that your footsteps disappear. The elevator is already waiting. You ride down alone watching the numbers change and think about the key card at the bottom of your bag, handed over last night without ceremony, just given like of course you should have it, in case you want to stop by, just so you have it, and you think about how that is such a perfectly him thing to do that it still makes something warm happen in your chest.
The lobby is quiet at this hour, just the morning staff and the particular hush of a hotel before the day fully starts. You push through the front doors and the November air hits you immediately, cold and sharp and completely indifferent to the fact that you are in yesterday’s clothes with last night’s hair and a heart that is very full of things you haven’t quite finished processing yet.
The valet from last night recognises you and brings your car around without being asked. You tip him and get in and sit there for just a second with your hands on the wheel.
You pull out into the street.
Your apartment is exactly as you left it.
That’s always the strange part. You come back after something significant and the place just sits there being itself, completely unaware, the bookshelf and the desk and the kitchen and the window with its view of the street, all of it exactly where it was when you left yesterday afternoon forty minutes early to go to an airport. Nothing has moved. The apartment waited for you the same as it always does and you came back and it’s all the same and you are not, and that gap between the place and the person is something you feel every time but don’t usually have words for.
You drop your bag and your keys by the door and go straight to the bathroom.
It’s about what you expected. The mascara has migrated. Your hair has done what hair does when you sleep in a hotel room after an emotional evening and don’t think to do anything about it first. You look like someone who had a very significant night and is only now catching up with the physical evidence of it.
You turn the shower on and stand there while it heats up and look at yourself in the mirror for a moment.
You think about him in the hotel room right now. Getting ready. Moving through it without any apparent stress, because that’s how he moves through most things, like the logistics of living are just minor details that sort themselves out if you’re calm enough about them. Ordering the Uber. Timing it so you arrive together.
You think about Cami at Claudette right now, because she is definitely already there, definitely early, definitely has a whole look planned and a shortlist of questions and her phone fully charged.
You get in the shower.
You give yourself forty minutes and you mostly stick to it. The hair takes longer than you’d like. You stand in front of your wardrobe for a while, which you knew you would, because it’s brunch in the West Village with your best friend and the person you love on a Saturday morning in November and you want to look like yourself but the right version of yourself, the version that suggests you woke up in your own bed feeling well rested and completely together, which is not the version you currently are but is the version you are aiming for.
You settle on something. It works. You’re putting your earrings in when your phone buzzes on the bathroom shelf.
Harry: fifteen minutes. how are you doing
You look at yourself in the mirror.
Mascara resolved. Hair sorted. You look like a person. A real one.
You: good. ready when you are
You: nervous
You almost delete that last one. You don’t.
His reply comes back quickly.
Harry: don’t be
Harry: she already likes me. she said hi
You laugh out loud in your bathroom alone at nine fifty on a Saturday morning and think that this is somehow one of the better moments you’ve had in recent memory.
You: that’s not how that works
Harry: I think it is
Harry: ten minutes
You put your phone in your bag and do one last check. Keys. Wallet. The small lip thing you always forget and then miss. You look around the apartment, at all the familiar ordinary things of your life that have been sitting here being the same while you were out becoming a different version of yourself, and you think about what he said last night.
You don’t have to blow your whole life up. You just have to start.
You lock the door behind you.
He’s already outside when you come out of your building, the Uber idling at the curb, and you can see him through the window before he sees you. Cap on, dark coat, looking at his phone. Just a person sitting in the back of a car on a Saturday morning. Then he looks up and sees you coming down the steps and he puts his phone away and something in his face just settles, quiet and warm.
He leans over and pushes the door open from the inside.
You get in.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” you say back.
He looks at you for a second. Just taking you in. “You look nice.”
“Thank you.” You pull the door closed. “You too.”
He smiles and the car pulls out and you settle back into the seat beside him and the city moves past the windows and neither of you says anything for a moment, just sitting together in the back of a car on a Saturday morning in November with the West Village twenty minutes away and Camille already there with her whole look and her fully charged phone and her list of questions.
“She’s going to take a lot of photos,” you say.
“I know.”
“Of everything. The food, the table, the light. Us, probably, if you’re okay with that. She’ll ask first.”
“That’s fine.”
“And she’s going to ask you things. Not rude things. Just.” You pause. “She’s thorough.”
“Okay.”
“And she’s going to pretend she’s completely unbothered by you but she’s going to be a little bothered. She’ll never say so.”
“Obviously.”
You look at him. “You’re very calm about this.”
He glances over. “Should I not be?”
“No, it’s good. I’m just.” You look back out the window. “I’m glad you’re coming.”
He doesn’t say anything. Just reaches over and puts his hand over yours on the seat between you, easy and unhurried, and you turn your hand over and let him and watch the city go past and feel the nerves in your chest start to settle.
The West Village on a Saturday morning is its own specific thing. Slower than the rest of the city, leafier, the streets narrower and older feeling, the kind of neighbourhood that has always known what it is and doesn’t feel the need to announce it. People move at a weekend pace. A couple with a dog. Someone with a paper under their arm. The particular quality of a Saturday that belongs to the people who have nowhere to be except exactly where they are.
You’ve been coming to this part of the city since you moved here. Before Camille, before any of it, back when you first arrived and used to walk for hours on weekends just learning the shape of the place. You know which coffee shop has the best light in the morning and which wine bar gets too loud by nine and which block smells like bread on Saturday afternoons from the bakery on the corner. It’s yours in the way that the parts of a city you’ve loved longest are yours, not because you own any of it but because you’ve spent enough time in it that it knows your face.
“I used to walk down here when I first moved to New York,” you say. Not to him specifically. Just out loud.
He looks over. “How long ago was that?”
“Six years. Nearly seven.” You watch the buildings go past. “I didn’t know anyone. I’d just gotten the job and I had this tiny apartment in the East Village and I used to spend whole Sundays just walking. Learning the streets.”
“Did you love it straight away?”
You think about it. “No,” you say. “It took a while. New York takes a while. It doesn’t care if you love it or not. It just keeps going and eventually you either find your place in it or you don’t.”
“And you did.”
“Eventually.” You glance at him. “What about Manchester?”
He looks at you. “What about it.”
“Do you love it.”
He’s quiet for a moment. Not avoiding it. Just thinking about it properly. “Yeah,” he says. “I do. It’s not a pretty city. It’s not trying to be. But it’s honest. It doesn’t put on a show. What it is, it just is.”
You look at him. “That sounds like you.”
He looks back at you. Something in his expression shifts, just slightly, when something lands. He doesn’t say anything. Just looks at you for a second and then looks back out the window.
The car slows.
“This is it,” you say.
Claudette is on a corner, small and warm looking from the outside, the kind of place you’d walk past and immediately want to go into. A chalkboard on the pavement. Window boxes. A small queue of people on the step.
And there, standing slightly to the side of the queue with the particular posture of someone who has arrived early, scoped the situation, and is currently composing a caption in her head, is Camille.
She’s wearing a camel coat you haven’t seen before, dark jeans, the kind of boots that are technically practical but are doing a lot aesthetically. Her hair is down and has clearly been done, not in an I spent time on this kind of way but the Camille kind, the kind that looks entirely effortless and absolutely isn’t. She has her phone in her hand and she’s angling it slightly upward at the restaurant front and you know without being able to see her screen that she’s getting a shot of the sign.
She looks up as the car stops at the curb.
She sees you first. Then she sees him.
Her expression does several things very quickly. Delight. Surprise. A very fast recalibration. Then the particular composed warmth of someone who has decided to be completely normal about this and is deploying it immediately.
You get out of the car.
“Hi,” you say.
“Hi,” she says. Her eyes go briefly to Harry getting out behind you, then back to you, then back to him. She smiles, the full one, the one that is genuinely Camille and not the camera version. “Hi,” she says again, to him this time.
“Hello,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Infamous,” you say, under your breath.
Camille looks at you with an expression that says she heard that and will be addressing it later. Then she looks back at Harry and holds out her hand. “Camille,” she says. “You can call me Cami. Everyone does.”
He shakes it. “Harry.”
“I know,” she says pleasantly. “I’ve also heard a lot about you.” She glances at you. “Some of it very recently.”
You look at the restaurant. “Should we go in?”
“I already put our name in,” she says. “They’ll have a table in ten minutes.” She holds up her phone. “Can I get a photo of the front? For context.”
“Context for what,” you say.
“The post.” She’s already stepping back, framing the shot. “Just the front. Autumnal. Very cosy. I’ve been wanting to come here for weeks and now I’m here with,” she lowers the phone briefly and looks at you both, “a lot to talk about, so.”
Harry glances at you.
You shrug. This is what you warned him about.
Cami takes three photos of the exterior, considers them, takes two more at a slightly different angle, then puts her phone in her pocket with the decisive air of someone who has what they need.
“Okay,” she says. “Let’s go in.”
The inside of Claudette is everything the outside promised.
Small and warm and lit in that particular way that makes everyone look like they’re in a film about their own life, the morning light coming through the windows and landing on white walls and pale wood and little vases of dried things on every table. It smells like coffee and something buttery and faintly of the candles burning on the bar even at this hour. The kind of place that takes brunch seriously without making a production of it.
The hostess takes them to a table by the window, small and round, the three of you slightly closer together than you would be at a bigger table, which feels very deliberate on Camille’s part. She slides in across from you both and picks up the menu and opens it and then immediately holds it up toward the window.
“The light in here is incredible,” she says, mostly to herself. She’s already reaching for her phone.
“Cami,” you say.
“I’m just documenting.” She takes a photo of the menu. Then the candle on the table. Then the window. Then she puts the phone down and actually looks at the menu. “Okay. The butternut squash thing is on there. I need it.”
“What’s the butternut squash thing,” Harry says.
“It’s a hash. With poached eggs and this whipped ricotta situation and I cannot explain it you just have to have it.”
“I’ll get that then.”
Camille looks up from her menu. Something in her expression softens, almost imperceptibly, and you clock it and she clocks you clocking it and she looks back at the menu.
“Good choice,” she says simply.
The waiter comes. You order coffee, all three of you, without discussing it, and Camille orders a juice as well, something with ginger in it, because she saw someone make it on her feed last week and has been thinking about it since. The waiter writes it down without comment and disappears and Camille puts both elbows on the table and looks at Harry.
“Okay,” she says. “I have questions.”
He looks back at her, completely at ease. “Alright.”
“Not scary questions,” she says. “Just.” She tilts her head slightly. “You seem normal.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean that as a genuine compliment. I was prepared for something more.” She waves a hand vaguely.
“More what,” you say.
“I don’t know. More produced. Like someone had done a lot of work on how to seem normal.” She looks at Harry. “You just seem like a person.”
“I am a person,” he says.
“I know. I’m saying it reads.” She sits back. “She talked about you a lot. After LA.”
“Cami,” you say.
“She showed up at my apartment at midnight in your crewneck,” Camille says to Harry, completely unbothered. “I think that gives me the right to say whatever I want.”
Harry looks at you. You look at the table.
“She mentioned the crewneck,” he says.
“She mentioned nothing,” Camille says. “She showed up looking like that and I had to get everything out of her over two glasses of wine.” She pauses. “It took a while. She’s not exactly forthcoming.”
“I know,” he says. “She takes her time with things.”
“Exactly.” Camille points at him like he’s just confirmed something she suspected. “Exactly. She sits with things. Turns them over. Doesn’t say them until she’s sure.”
“I’m right here,” you say.
“We know,” they say, at almost the same time.
You look between them. Camille has the expression of someone who has just found an unexpected ally and is very pleased about it. Harry has the expression of someone who is trying very hard not to look too satisfied.
“This is already a disaster,” you say, but you’re smiling and they both know it.
The coffee arrives. Camille wraps both hands around hers and looks at Harry over the rim.
“She said you have a piano,” she says.
“I do.”
“She said you taught her five notes.”
“C D E F G,” he says. “She picked it up quickly.”
“She’s like that,” Camille says. “Once she decides something is worth learning she’s very committed.” She glances at you. “About most things.”
“I’ve noticed,” he says.
You take a sip of your coffee and say nothing because there is nothing to say that won’t make this worse.
“Okay.” Camille sets her cup down. “Manchester.”
You look at her.
“She told me,” she says simply. “Last night. She texted.”
“At what time,” you say.
“Late. I was awake.” She looks at Harry. “February?”
“February,” he confirms.
“Two weeks.”
“Minimum.”
Camille nods slowly, with the air of someone receiving a business proposal and finding it acceptable. “And you’re going to show her the city properly.”
“That’s the plan.”
“The market.”
“Saturdays.”
“The pub.”
“Best pie you’ll ever eat.”
Camille considers this. “She doesn’t eat a lot of pie.”
“She will,” he says simply.
Camille looks at him for a long moment. Then she looks at you. Then back at him. Then she picks up her coffee and takes a sip and says nothing, which from Camille is its own kind of verdict and you know it and she knows you know it.
“Good,” she says finally.
The food arrives and it’s everything it was supposed to be. The butternut squash hash is exactly what Camille promised, the ricotta light and the eggs perfect, and Harry eats with the focused appreciation of someone who takes food seriously and knows when something is good. You order the French toast because you always order the French toast at Claudette and Camille gets something with salmon that she photographs from three angles before she touches it.
“For the post,” she says, to no one in particular.
“What’s the caption going to be,” you ask.
She thinks about it, genuinely. “Something about autumn menus and good tables.” She tilts the plate slightly. “Maybe something about the light.”
“The light is good,” Harry offers.
She points at him. “The light is so good.” She takes one more photo and then puts the phone down and picks up her fork. “Okay. I’m present now.”
You eat and the conversation moves without a fixed direction, drifting from one thing to another and back again. Camille tells a story about a brand event she went to last week where someone tried to get her to promote a supplement she’s fairly sure was just crushed vitamins in expensive packaging. Harry listens with genuine interest and asks questions at the right moments, which Camille responds to by becoming approximately twenty percent more animated, because she is Camille and she feeds on an engaged audience.
You sit between them and watch it happen and feel something very quiet and very good settle in your chest.
They like each other.
Not in a performed way, not in the way people sometimes like each other when they’re both trying to make something work for someone else’s sake. Actually like each other. Camille is laughing at something he said, the real laugh, the one that comes from somewhere genuine and not the one she deploys at events, and Harry is watching her with that quiet attention he gives people when he’s actually interested in them, and you think about how you lay in a hotel room this morning being nervous about exactly this and how completely unnecessary all of it was.
“She used to call me from city council meetings,” Camille is saying. “Not during. After. She’d come out and just stand on the pavement and debrief me.”
“They’re interesting,” you say.
“They are,” Harry says.
Camille looks at him. “You think city council meetings are interesting.”
“People making decisions about the places they live,” he says. “Yeah. I think that’s interesting.”
Camille stares at him for a second.
Then she looks at you.
You look at your French toast.
“Okay,” Camille says. Under her breath. Just to herself. She picks up her fork and goes back to her food.
You refill your coffee from the small pot the waiter left on the table and look out the window at the West Village on a Saturday morning, people with dogs and pastry bags and that particular weekend looseness the city gets when it’s not in a hurry. Harry is beside you, his shoulder close to yours, listening to Camille tell another story, something about a trip she took to Copenhagen for work last spring and the hotel that had no mirrors, which is either an artistic statement or a practical oversight and she still hasn’t decided which.
Your phone buzzes face down on the table.
You flip it over.
AirDrop from Camille’s iPhone.
You look up. She is looking entirely at Harry, completely engaged in her own story, both hands moving, absolutely not looking at you.
You accept it.
It’s a photo.
Harry, caught in profile, not looking at the camera, looking at you. You’re saying something, you don’t remember what, and he’s just looking at you with that quiet particular attention he has, and it’s. You stare at it for a second. You didn’t know that’s what it looked like from the outside. You don’t know exactly what to do with the fact that it does.
Your phone buzzes again.
Another one.
This one is both of you. You’re looking at each other across the table, mid conversation, and something about the angle and the light makes it look like the rest of the room doesn’t exist, like the table and the coffee cups and the little vase of dried flowers are all just peripheral to the two of you looking at each other.
You flip the phone over.
You look up.
Camille is looking at you now. Story apparently finished. She has her coffee cup raised halfway to her mouth and she is watching you with an expression that is trying very hard to be neutral and is not succeeding even slightly.
You feel the heat rise in your face before you can do anything about it.
She raises her eyebrows. Just slightly. A tiny, private, I told you so, delivered entirely without words.
You look at the table.
“You okay?” Harry says.
“Fine,” you say. “I’m fine.”
Camille takes a serene sip of her coffee and says nothing.
You are going to kill her. Warmly and with love but you are absolutely going to kill her.
“What did I miss,” Harry says, looking between you.
“Nothing,” you say.
“Nothing,” Camille agrees, in the exact tone of someone who means the opposite.
He looks at you for a second. Then at Camille. Then he seems to decide this is something he is not meant to be part of and picks up his own coffee with the patient expression of a man who has learned when to stay out of something.
Camille waits until he’s looking away and then looks at you and mouths something.
You mouth back: stop it.
She mouths: he looks at you like THAT.
You look at the ceiling.
She mouths: I’m just saying.
You mouth: I know you’re just saying.
She grins into her coffee cup, the full grin, the one she gets when she’s right about something and knows it and cannot help herself.
Harry looks back at you both.
You both look at him with completely normal expressions.
He looks back out the window.
Camille puts her phone in her bag with a small decisive click, which means she has what she came for and is now fully present, and she settles back in her chair and looks at you both with the warm satisfaction of someone who has just eaten a very good brunch and had a lot of very good information confirmed.
“Okay,” she says. “I like him.”
“Cami—”
“I’m telling her, not you,” she says to you. Then she looks at Harry. “I like you. For the record. I was prepared to withhold judgement but I’m not going to.”
Harry looks at her. “Thank you.”
“She’s my person,” Camille says simply. “So that’s what that means, coming from me.”
“I understand,” he says. And something in the way he says it makes it clear that he does, actually, understand. Not just the words but what’s underneath them. The weight of what she’s saying and why she’s saying it and what she’s asking for without quite asking for it.
Camille looks at him for a second.
Then she nods, once, and picks up her fork and finishes the last of her hash, and that’s it, that’s the whole thing, that’s Camille giving her verdict, and you sit there between them feeling something very warm and a little overwhelming in your chest and concentrate very hard on your French toast so your face doesn’t do anything embarrassing.
“Right,” Camille says, fork down, sitting back, reaching for her phone again. “Can I get a photo of the table? Just the table. The cups and the plates and the light. Very editorial.”
“Go ahead,” Harry says.
She stands slightly and angles the phone down over the table, moving a coffee cup two inches to the left, adjusting the little vase of dried flowers, tilting a plate slightly. She takes four photos. Studies them. Takes one more.
“Perfect,” she says. She sits back down and starts typing. Then she holds the phone out to you.
autumn menus and good tables and the kind of saturday morning that makes you remember why you live here 🍂
“That’s good,” you say.
“I know.” She posts it. Puts the phone face down. “Okay. I’m done. I’m present. What are we doing after this?”
You look at Harry.
He looks at you.
“Whatever you want,” he says.
“We could walk,” you say. “It’s cold but it’s not bad cold.”
“The market on Bleecker is on today,” Camille says. “Very autumnal. Very content-able.” She catches herself. “I mean. Nice. It’s just nice.”
You smile. “We can go to the market.”
Camille reaches for the last of her coffee and looks between you both with the expression she gets when she’s happy about something and trying to be moderate about showing it, which she has never been particularly good at and which you love about her.
“Good,” she says. “It’s settled then.”
Outside the West Village keeps going, slow and golden in the November light, and inside Claudette the three of you sit at a small round table with empty plates and full coffee cups and the particular ease of a morning that has gone exactly right, and you think about the hotel room ceiling this morning and how nervous you were and how completely, entirely unnecessary all of it turned out to be.
Camille’s phone buzzes on the table.
She flips it over.
“Forty seven likes in four minutes,” she says, with deep satisfaction. “The light really was incredible.”
I’m going to have this posted later this week! I wrote something and scrapped last minute because it didn’t feel right. Raya Harry deserves better than words that feel forced. Bear with me 🤍
Hi! I am absolutely obsessed with your writing and have a dark, messy concept I think you’d kill:
A small-town AU centered around the annual county fair. Harry and the reader have an intense, emotionally dependent relationship where Harry holds all the power. He starts calling her "Piggy"—at first as a teasing nickname, but it quickly evolves into something darker and more obsessive. The specific scene: It takes place in a private room away from the fair, just the two of them. Harry is lounging on the bed wearing a pair of denim overalls with only one side buttoned and the other unbuttoned—giving total Rob from Love Island vibes. He’s doing some highly suggestive, slow sexual gestures, completely driving her crazy. The turning point: Nervous but desperate to prove her absolute devotion, the reader fully leans into the role right there in front of him. Harry watches her submit, completely enthralled by his control, and calls her a "slam pig" for the first time. What started as a joke nickname suddenly becomes an intensely charged, dark private game between them. Lots of angst, jealousy, and that toxic push-and-pull between cruel manipulation and fierce possessiveness. Please make it as dark and beautifully messy as you want!
i have a request for a one shot where y/n and harry have been dating for a couple months and he gets back home after the studio or something and catches her listening to one direction & singing along !!! like a fluff thing where he finds out she used to be a directioner 😭😭 pleaaaaaaseeee
Pencil me in update is so good!!! I love them 🥰 your description of Harry's house (ha) is so warm and detailed- I want to move in 😭 also he has a dog 😍
Awww! Thank you. I thought it would be fun to give him a pup. He’s intense at times so a little weenie dog seemed like a fun way to make him softer.
Rule number one: do not fall in love with your boss.
Rule number two: do not forget rule number one.
Rule number three: when he looks at you like that, pretend it doesn't mean anything.
Summary: When you land a job as the personal assistant to Harry Styles, the calm, charismatic CEO of Fine Line Enterprises, you quickly learn the role is much more than managing a calendar. From early morning calls to last minute flights and being the gatekeeper to one of the busiest men in the industry, your lite becomes completely intertwined with his.
Rule number one: do not fall in love with your boss.
Rule number two: do not forget rule number one.
Rule number three: when he looks at you like that, pretend it doesn't mean anything.
Summary: When you land a job as the personal assistant to Harry Styles, the calm, charismatic CEO of Fine Line Enterprises, you quickly learn the role is much more than managing a calendar. From early morning calls to last minute flights and being the gatekeeper to one of the busiest men in the industry, your lite becomes completely intertwined with his.
Word Count: 5.7k
Warnings: Power imbalance, eventual smut, drinking, cursing, mentions of throwing up (no throwing up).
Two minutes early. Of course two minutes early. You’re already standing at your window watching the street below when the black car appears at the end of the block, moving slowly the way cars move when they’re looking for a specific address, and you grab your bag off the counter and do one last check in the mirror by the door before you can talk yourself out of going.
You look fine.
You look more than fine actually, which took the better part of two hours and is nobody’s business but yours.
Comfortable but not pyjamas. You landed on dark jeans and a soft cream top that sits off the shoulder just slightly, simple enough that you didn’t try too hard and nice enough that you tried a little. Your hair is down. Your shoes are the kind you can actually walk in. You put on the earrings you save for occasions that feel like they count and then took them off and then put them back on again.
You are ready.
You are also terrified but that is no longer new information.
You lock your apartment and take the elevator down and step out into the Saturday evening air, and the car is already pulled up to the kerb waiting, the driver stepping out when he sees you come through the door.
“Evening,” he says, opening the door.
“Hi,” you say. “Thank you.”
You slide in and the door closes and the car is warm and quiet and smells faintly of the same subtle air freshener as every other time you’ve been in it, and you sit back against the seat and look out the window at your street moving past as the car pulls away.
Your building disappears behind you.
You look down at your hands in your lap and then back out the window.
You are going to Harry’s house for dinner.
He is cooking.
This is your life now apparently.
You watch the city move past as the car navigates through the Saturday evening traffic, streets busier than during the week, people out and living their weekends, and you sit there in the back seat feeling like you exist slightly outside of normal time again, the way you felt on the plane and in the restaurant, like you’ve stepped sideways out of your regular life into something that doesn’t quite have a name yet.
Your phone buzzes.
Harry: driver should be there
You: already in the car
Harry: good
You stare at the screen for a second waiting to see if he’s going to say anything else. The three dots appear briefly and then disappear. Then appear again.
Harry: you ate didn’t you
You smile before you can stop it.
You: I had a small snack
Harry: y/n
You: it was very small
Harry: what was it
You look at the cereal box in your memory and make a quick executive decision.
You: crackers
Which is technically true because crackers are what you ate after the cereal.
There are a few seconds of silence.
Harry: I’m not even going to ask any follow up questions about that
You: probably wise
Harry: just get here
You put your phone down and look back out the window, still smiling, and the city continues moving past and the car moves deeper into a part of it you don’t know as well, the streets getting quieter and wider, the buildings changing character, and you sit up slightly as you start to pay attention to where you are.
Of course.
Of course he lives somewhere like this.
The car slows as it turns onto a street that is somehow even quieter than the ones before it, lined with townhouses set back slightly from the pavement, warm light coming through tall windows, the particular hush of a neighbourhood that has always been expensive and knows it without needing to announce it. You look out the window and watch the buildings pass and try very hard to look like someone who has been driven to addresses like this before.
The car stops.
You look up at the building in front of you and take a breath.
It’s a townhouse. Three storeys, red brick, the kind of place that has clearly been here for a long time and has been well looked after without being aggressively renovated. The windows are tall and warm with light coming from inside. There are plants by the front door that look like someone actually tends to them rather than pays someone else to, and the door itself is a deep green, slightly worn at the edges in a way that makes the whole thing feel lived in rather than decorated. A light above the door glows soft and yellow against the evening air.
It’s big. Bigger than anywhere you’ve ever lived or probably will live for a very long time. But it looks like somewhere a person actually exists rather than somewhere designed to impress people. It looks like a home.
The driver opens your door.
You get out and stand on the pavement and look up at it.
You are absolutely going up those steps and knocking on that door.
In just a moment.
You are just standing here for one second first.
You go up the steps.
You knock before you can overthink it, three times, and then immediately regret the number of knocks like that’s a thing that counts, like Harry is going to open his front door and think wow three knocks, red flag.
You stand there and wait.
You hear movement from inside. Footsteps. Then the sound of the latch.
The door opens.
You were not prepared for this.
He’s in black lounge pants that sit low on his hips and a white t-shirt that is doing absolutely nothing to hide the fact that he is built in a way you had some sense of but not this specific level of sense of. The fabric pulls slightly across his shoulders and chest, soft and worn in, and his arms are bare from the bicep down, tattoos covering every inch of skin from his wrists up, dark ink against warm skin, the swallows across his chest just barely visible at the neckline of his shirt. His feet are bare. His hair is slightly pushed back like he’s been running his hands through it. He looks completely at ease and it should be illegal given the current situation.
You stand there on his doorstep and stare for what is probably one second but feels considerably longer.
He looks at you.
Then at your outfit.
Then back at you.
“What are you wearing?” he says.
You look down at yourself, mostly just to have somewhere to look that isn’t him. “Clothes,” you say.
“I told you to wear comfortable.”
“This is comfortable.”
He gives you a look that says he does not agree. “I said pyjamas.”
“I thought that was a joke,” you say.
“It wasn’t a joke.”
You stare at him. “I’m not showing up to your house in pyjamas.”
“You’ve seen my tattoos,” he says.
“You keep saying that like it will magically solve everything.”
“It does,” he says, and steps back from the door to let you in.
You walk past him into the hallway and he closes the door behind you and you stop and look around because the inside of his house is not what you were expecting and you need a second. You also need a second because you just walked past him at very close range and the white t-shirt is even more problematic from that angle.
The hallway is warm. Wooden floors, worn in the middle from years of use. A coat rack on the wall with actual coats on it, not decorative ones, real ones that get worn. A stack of books on a small table by the door. A plant in the corner that has clearly been there a long time.
It smells like cooking from somewhere deeper in the house, warm and good, and the whole place has a quality you weren’t expecting. Not a showroom. Not a magazine spread. Just somewhere a person actually spends time.
“Come on,” he says, already heading down the hallway.
You follow him and try very hard to keep your eyes at a reasonable level, which is difficult when he’s walking in front of you in a white t-shirt with his arms on full display and the lounge pants sitting exactly where they’re sitting.
You look at the ceiling briefly.
The ceiling is lovely.
He leads you into the kitchen and you stop in the doorway because this room requires its own moment.
The kitchen is big but not cold. There’s a large island in the middle with stools along one side. Pots hanging from a rack above the stove. Actual cookbooks on the shelf, not the kind that sit there for decoration, the kind with cracked spines and folded corners. A dog bed in the corner by the back door that you notice immediately.
“You have a dog?” you say.
“I do,” he says, already back at the stove, stirring. “He’s around somewhere.”
You look around for the dog and then back at him standing at the stove, and you notice his arms again because you cannot seem to stop noticing his arms. The way the tattoos shift when he moves, the muscle visible underneath the ink, all of it so much more apparent than it is under dress shirts and jacket sleeves. You’ve seen his forearms at the office. You’ve seen the full picture at the hotel. But there’s something about him standing in his own kitchen in a worn white t-shirt that makes it feel different. More human.
The warm kitchen and the worn cookbooks and the dog somewhere in the house and Harry cooking on a Saturday night like this is just what he does. Your chest does something tight and quiet that you weren’t prepared for.
It’s so normal.
He’s so normal like this.
You weren’t prepared for how much you’d like it.
“Sit down,” he says, nodding toward the stools at the island. “Do you want a drink?”
“Sure,” you say, climbing onto one of the stools and setting your bag down. “What are you making?”
“Pasta,” he says.
“You’re making me pasta,” you say.
“I’m making us pasta,” he corrects, not looking up from the stove.
You watch him move around the kitchen, opening the oven briefly to check something, stirring the pot, reaching up for something on the shelf above the stove. When he reaches up the hem of his shirt lifts just slightly and you see the top of the laurel tattoo above his waistband and you look immediately at the cookbooks on the shelf across the room like they’re the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen.
They are not the most interesting thing in this room.
Not even close.
“You actually cook,” you say, mostly just to give yourself something to do with your mouth other than stare at him.
“I told you I cook,” he says.
“I know,” you say. “I just didn’t fully believe it.”
He glances at you over his shoulder. “What did you think I did for dinner every night?”
He shakes his head and turns back to the stove. “I like cooking. It’s the one part of the day where I’m just doing one thing.”
You sit there on the stool and watch him and think about that. For someone whose entire life runs at the pace his does, you understand immediately why that is.
“Can I help with anything?” you ask.
“No,” he says simply.
“I could chop something.”
“You’re a guest,” he says.
“I chop things all the time,” you say.
He looks at you over his shoulder again, amused. “Sit down.”
You sit down.
He turns the heat down on the stove and wipes his hands on a kitchen towel.
“I’ll be right back,” he says, and disappears out of the kitchen before you can ask where he’s going.
You sit on the stool and look around the kitchen and listen to him moving around somewhere above you, footsteps crossing a floor, a drawer opening and closing, and then footsteps coming back down the stairs.
He comes back into the kitchen with a small pile of clothes in his hand and sets them down on the island in front of you.
A t-shirt. A pair of shorts with a drawstring.
You look at them and then up at him.
“Put those on,” he says, already turning back to the stove.
“Why?” you say.
“Because.”
“That’s not a reason.”
“I told you to wear pyjamas,” he says simply, lifting the lid on the pot and checking whatever is inside. “You didn’t. So I’m providing them.”
You look down at the pile of clothes again. The t-shirt is soft and old and worn in a way that suggests it gets used regularly. The shorts are clearly his. You look back up at him.
“Why does it actually bother you what I’m wearing?” you ask.
He sets the lid back down and turns to look at you properly, leaning back against the counter with his arms crossed loosely.
“Because you came here tonight and you still look like you’re going somewhere,” he says. “And I don’t want you to feel like you have to do that here.”
You look at him.
“I want you to be comfortable,” he continues, his voice easy and direct. “Not work comfortable. Actually comfortable. And I think it’s hard to do that when you’re dressed like that and I’m dressed like this.” He gestures vaguely down at himself. “I want you to see me as a person tonight. Not your boss. Just a person who invited you over for dinner.”
The kitchen is quiet for a second except for the low sound of the stove.
You look at the pile of clothes.
You look at him.
“Where do I change?” you say.
The tension in his shoulders drops just slightly.
“Bathroom’s at the top of the stairs,” he says, turning back to the stove. “First door on the left.”
You pick up the clothes and slide off the stool and head out of the kitchen, and as you’re walking down the hallway toward the stairs you hear him say, without looking up from the pot,
“I told you pyjamas.”
“You did,” you call back.
“Next time just listen.”
You stop at the bottom of the stairs and look back at him over your shoulder.
Next time.
You turn and go upstairs before he can see you smile.
Just listen.
You think about that as you climb the stairs, the small pile of clothes tucked under your arm. The way he said it. Easy and certain, not unkind, just completely sure of himself in that way he always is.
It was a little bit hot if you’re being honest.
You find the bathroom, first door on the left exactly like he said, and you change quickly, folding your jeans and your top and setting them on the edge of the sink. The t-shirt is black and soft and when you pull it over your head you see the Rolling Stones logo across the front, faded from years of washing, the kind of worn in that takes a long time to achieve. It falls past your hips, a little oversized, the sleeves hitting mid arm. The shorts have a drawstring which is the only reason they stay up at all, his being considerably larger than yours, but once you tie them they’re fine. More comfortable than your jeans were, even though you would never have admitted that downstairs.
You look at yourself in the bathroom mirror.
You look like you borrowed clothes from someone.
Which you did.
You look like you belong here a little more than you did five minutes ago, which was probably the point.
You head back out into the hallway and start down the stairs when you hear it.
Small footsteps on the wooden floor.
You reach the bottom, stop and turn around.
A dachshund is trotting toward you from the end of the hallway, ears flopping slightly with each step, tiny and serious looking, regarding you with the energy of a dog who has decided you’re probably fine but reserves the right to change his mind.
You immediately crouch down.
“Oh my god,” you say quietly. “Hi. Hello. Who are you.”
The dog reaches you and sniffs your hand thoroughly before deciding you pass inspection and pressing his small head against your palm.
“What’s your name?” you ask him, scratching behind his ears. “What’s your name little guy.”
“Oscar,” Harry shouts from the kitchen.
Your heart does something completely unreasonable.
Oscar.
“Hi Oscar,” you say, in a voice that is several pitches higher than your normal voice and you don’t care even slightly. “Hi sweet boy. Hi.”
Oscar accepts your attention graciously, tail moving, leaning into your hand like you’ve known each other for years.
You are crouched in Harry’s hallway in his Rolling Stones shirt talking to a miniature dachshund named Oscar and you have never felt more at home anywhere in your entire life.
You hear footsteps from the kitchen and look up.
Harry comes around the corner, dish towel over his shoulder, and stops when he sees the two of you on the floor. He looks at Oscar. Then at you in his shirt crouched on his hallway floor. His expression does something warm and unguarded that he doesn’t bother hiding.
Then he comes and gets down on the floor next to you, sitting with his back against the wall, legs stretched out.
Oscar looks at him.
Then launches himself directly into Harry’s lap with complete and total disregard for anyone else in the hallway.
“Traitor,” you say.
Harry wraps one hand around the dog and scratches him with an ease that says this is a nightly routine, Oscar immediately rolling slightly to give him better access, eyes closing in contentment.
“He does this every time,” Harry says, not sounding remotely sorry about it.
“Every time you bring someone home?” you ask before you can stop yourself.
He looks at you sideways.
“Every time I sit on the floor,” he says.
“Right,” you say. “Obviously that’s what I meant.”
He smiles and looks back down at Oscar, and you sit there next to him on the hallway floor with your back against the wall and his shirt falling off one shoulder, and the whole thing is so far from conference rooms and private planes and French restaurants that you almost can’t believe it’s the same week.
He looks down at Oscar for a second and then picks him up carefully with both hands and holds him out toward you.
“Here,” he says.
You hold your arms out automatically and he lowers Oscar into them, settling the dog against your chest.
“Hold him like a baby,” he says, already pushing himself up off the floor. “He likes that.”
You adjust Oscar so he’s cradled on his back against your chest, his little legs in the air, and he just lets you. Completely boneless. Staring up at you with enormous eyes like this is exactly where he planned to be all along.
“He’s so trusting,” you say, looking down at him.
“He trusts everyone immediately,” Harry says, heading back toward the kitchen. “No instincts whatsoever.”
“That’s very relatable Oscar,” you tell the dog.
Oscar blinks at you.
You follow Harry back into the kitchen, carrying Oscar like a small loaf of bread against your chest, and climb back onto the stool at the island. Oscar stays exactly where he is, entirely unbothered, one tiny paw resting against your forearm.
Harry goes back to the stove, stirring the pasta, checking the oven, moving around the kitchen with the same ease he does everything else. You sit there holding the dog and watching him and it occurs to you that this is the most relaxed you’ve felt in a long time. Just sitting in a warm kitchen in borrowed clothes holding a dachshund while someone cooks pasta on a Saturday night.
It’s a very simple thing.
You like it more than you know how to say.
Oscar wiggles after a few minutes, a full body squirm that means business, and you lower him carefully to the floor and he trots off purposefully toward his bed in the corner, circles it twice and settles down like he has places to be and this was always the plan.
You watch him go.
“He’s incredible,” you say.
“He thinks so too,” Harry says.
You smile and rest your elbows on the island, watching Harry move around the stove. He opens a bottle of wine without asking, pours two glasses, and slides one across the island toward you without breaking stride.
“Thank you,” you say.
He nods.
You take a sip and look around the kitchen again, at the cookbooks and the hanging pots and the little details that make the room feel used and lived in. There’s a list on the fridge held up by a magnet, handwritten, groceries probably. A bowl of fruit on the counter that’s slightly past its best. A small ceramic dish by the sink where he’s put his rings.
His rings in the little dish by the sink.
You look at that for a second longer than you mean to and then back at your wine glass.
“How long have you had Oscar?” you ask.
“Four years,” he says. “I got him when the company was going through a bad period and I thought a dog would help.”
“Did it?”
“Enormously,” he says, glancing over at Oscar in his bed. “He has no idea what a meeting is. It’s grounding.”
You laugh quietly. “I can see that.”
Harry turns the heat down on the stove and leans back against the counter, picking up his own wine glass, and for the first time since you arrived he’s not actively doing anything. Just standing there looking at you in a comfortable easy way.
“Are you glad you came?” he asks.
“Yes,” you say, and you mean it completely.
“Good,” he says.
“Your house is not what I expected,” you tell him.
“What did you expect?”
You think about it honestly. “I don’t know. More. And less at the same time. More impressive but less actual.”
He tilts his head slightly. “Less actual.”
“Like a hotel lobby,” you say. “Nice but no one really lives there.”
He looks around his own kitchen for a second like he’s seeing it through your eyes. “I’ve had this house for six years,” he says. “I needed somewhere that felt like mine. Not like the job.”
You nod slowly, turning your wine glass between your fingers. “Do you find it hard?” you ask. “Switching between the two versions.”
He looks at you. “What two versions?”
“The one I see at work,” you say. “And this one.”
He’s quiet for a second, considering that.
“They’re the same person,” he says. “Just different volumes.”
You sit with that for a moment, looking at him standing there in his lounge pants and his white t-shirt with his rings in the little dish by the sink and Oscar asleep in the corner, and you think that’s probably the most honest thing anyone has ever said about themselves to you.
“I like this volume,” you say quietly.
He looks at you for a moment and then smiles, small and real, and turns back to the stove.
“Good,” he says. “Pasta’s almost ready.”
“This is where I find out,” you say, watching him stir.
He glances over his shoulder. “Find out what?”
“If you’re actually just that good,” you say. “At everything.”
He turns back to the stove and is quiet for a second, just moves the pan slightly on the heat, and then without looking at you says, “I’ll show you how good I am at everything later.”
Your face goes warm immediately and you look down at your wine glass and say nothing because there is nothing to say to that. He doesn’t even look up from the stove. Just lets it sit there in the kitchen between you like it’s a completely normal thing to say while making pasta on a Saturday night.
You take a long sip of wine.
He plates the food a few minutes later, setting a bowl in front of you that smells extraordinary, tomatoes and fresh herbs and what you think might be a cream sauce underneath it all. Simple looking but the kind of simple that takes actual skill. He’s still standing on the other side of the island finishing his own plate when he reaches over and twists a small forkful and holds it out toward you.
“Try it,” he says.
You lean forward and take the bite off his fork.
The sound that comes out of you is not entirely intentional.
It’s just so good. Genuinely, unreasonably good, the kind of food that makes you close your eyes for a second without deciding to.
“Don’t do that,” he says immediately.
You open your eyes. “Do what?”
He gives you a look.
“I didn’t do anything,” you say.
“You made a sound,” he says.
“It’s good pasta,” you say. “I was expressing appreciation.”
“Express it differently,” he says, picking up his own fork and sitting down on the stool beside you, his eyes back on his bowl like he didn’t just say that.
You stare at the side of his face for a second.
“Why?” you ask.
He picks up his wine glass and takes a sip and looks straight ahead.
“Because we’re eating dinner,” he says, “and that was a dangerous sound.”
You look back at your bowl and press your lips together and say nothing, but you’re smiling and you both know it and the kitchen is very warm and Oscar is asleep in the corner and the pasta is the best thing you’ve ever eaten in your entire life.
You eat for a while in a comfortable quiet. Just the two of you at the island with the wine and the food and Oscar making small sleeping sounds from his bed in the corner. You ask him about the cookbooks on the shelf and he tells you about the first one he ever bought, nineteen years old and completely clueless, and you tell him about the one meal you know how to make properly and he listens like it’s the most interesting thing he’s heard all week.
The wine gets lower.
The bowls get emptier.
At some point he puts his fork down and pushes his plate away and turns slightly on his stool to face you. Not urgently. Just a shift in direction that tells you the easy part of the evening is giving way to something else.
You look at him.
“I want to talk more about what we talked about on the plane,” he says.
Not a question. Just a statement, calm and direct the way he always is when he’s decided something needs to be said.
You put your own fork down and push your bowl away and turn to face him, pulling one knee up onto the stool.
“Okay,” you say.
He looks at you for a second, unhurried, like he’s deciding where to start.
“I meant what I said up there,” he says. “All of it. And I want to make sure you understood what I was actually offering.”
“I think I did,” you say.
“Tell me then,” he says simply.
You look down briefly at your wine glass and then back up at him.
“You want to take care of me,” you say. “Show me things. Share your life with me. But you also still need me to do my job and you need to be able to trust me the same way you did before any of this started.”
He nods slowly. “And does that feel like too much?”
“No,” you say honestly. “It doesn’t.”
“Good,” he says. “Because I don’t want you to feel like this changes what you are at work. You’re still my assistant. I still need you to be good at it.”
“I know that,” you say.
“But outside of work,” he continues, his voice a little quieter now, “I want this. Whatever this is. I want to keep finding out what it is.”
You nod slowly, turning your wine glass between your fingers.
“I want to take you places,” he says. “Not just work trips. Real ones. Places you haven’t been. I want to buy you things. Not because you need me to but because I want to. Because I have more than I need and I’d rather share it with someone who actually appreciates it than just have it sitting there.”
You look at him for a second.
“So basically,” you say carefully, “you want to pay my bills and take me on holiday.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “That’s not what I said.”
“It’s a little what you said.”
“It’s really not,” he says, and now he’s almost smiling.
“So I’m like a sugar baby,” you say. “This is a sugar baby situation.”
He laughs then, properly, and the sound of it fills the kitchen and loosens something in your chest.
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re not a sugar baby.”
“The bills though,” you say. “You mentioned bills.”
“I said I want to take care of you,” he says. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yes,” he says, and his voice is easy but his eyes are steady in that way they get when he actually wants you to hear him. “A sugar baby is a transaction. That’s not what this is.”
You look at him. “Then what is it?”
He holds your gaze for a moment, completely unhurried.
“If this goes well,” he says, “and I think it’s going to go well, there won’t be bills. There won’t be a cracked tile in the bathroom and a check engine light you’ve been ignoring for months.” He pauses, letting that land. “If this goes the way I think it’s going to go, you’ll be with me. Here. And all of that other stuff stops being relevant.”
The kitchen goes very quiet.
You stare at him.
“You’re talking about moving in together,” you say slowly.
“I’m talking about where this is heading,” he says simply. “I’m not asking you to pack a bag tonight. I’m just being honest with you about what I want so you know what you’re saying yes to.”
You sit there on the stool in his Rolling Stones shirt with Oscar asleep in the corner and the wine almost gone and Harry looking at you like he’s already made up his mind and has simply been waiting for you to catch up.
And the thing is you believe him.
That’s what gets you. Not the house or the private plane or the restaurant with no prices on the menu. Just the fact that he says things and means them and has never once in the time you’ve known him said something he didn’t follow through on.
He told you he’d call about the job. He called.
He told you he wanted to take care of you. He’s been doing it since the day you started.
He told you to stay and you left and he was annoyed about it in the specific quiet way of someone whose word actually counts for something.
“You’re very certain,” you say.
“I’m always certain,” he says. “You know that by now.”
You do know that.
“And if it doesn’t go well?” you ask.
“It’s going to go well,” he says.
“But if it doesn’t.”
He picks up his wine glass and takes a slow sip, looking at you over the rim of it.
“Then you still have your job,” he says. “That’s separate. It always will be. But I’m not entertaining the idea that this won’t work out because I don’t think it won’t.”
You look down at your hands for a second and then back up at him.
You think about your apartment. The heating that takes twenty minutes. The ceiling fan bulb you finally replaced today like a tiny act of self sufficiency that now feels faintly comic. The cracked tile you’ve been meaning to fix since you moved in. The passport with two stamps. The car with the check engine light. The life that felt complete enough before all of this and now just feels like a waiting room.
You look at him sitting there completely calm and completely certain and completely unbothered by the fact that he just told you he expects you to eventually live in his house like it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say over pasta on a Saturday night.
Which for him it probably is.
“Okay,” you say finally.
He raises an eyebrow slightly. “Okay?”
“Okay,” you say again. “I’m saying yes to whatever this is. I’m not packing a bag tonight but I’m saying yes to where it’s going.”
He looks at you for a long moment and then nods once, slow and settled, like you just confirmed something he already knew.
“And next time I tell you to stay,” he says, “you stay.”
Your stomach flips.
“Okay,” you say.
“I mean it,” he says.
“I know you do,” you say. “Okay.”
He holds your gaze for one more second, steady and warm, and then he picks up his wine glass and holds it out toward you.
You pick yours up and touch it against his.
The quiet clink of it is the only sound in the kitchen.
And you sit there in his Rolling Stones shirt with his dog asleep in the corner and his rings in the little dish by the sink and think that this is probably what it feels like when your life decides to change for good.
note: was literally obsessed with this request and had to get it out of me. Hope you love it.
The summer air hits you the moment you step out of the car at Southbank, thick and warm, pressing against your skin like a reminder that tonight is real. Harry’s hand finds the small of your back, steady and familiar, and you try not to think about how that gesture still makes you feel like you’re floating.
“You’re going to mess up your makeup if you keep doing that thing with your mouth,” he says, amusement wound through his voice alongside something gentler.
“What thing?” You know exactly what thing. It’s the thing you do when you’re nervous, a kind of half-smile that probably makes you look unhinged.
“That thing where you’re thinking too loud.” He guides you toward the entrance, and the evening light catches the side of his face. He’s wearing a floral collared shirt in soft greens and creams, tucked into dark slacks, and he looks impossibly gentle. Like he’s already somewhere else entirely. “He’s going to be fine, you know.”
You glance at him, and he’s not looking back at you. He’s watching the building ahead like he’s seeing it for the first time, which is ridiculous because he must have rehearsed here a hundred times this week.
“Who?” you ask, playing dumb.
“Harry,” he deadpans. “The bloke. Performing in forty minutes. The one you’ve been stress-eating about since breakfast.”
The thing is, you haven’t been stress-eating. You’ve been perfectly fine all week. But you let him think what he wants, because it’s easier than explaining the truth: that you’re nervous for him, and not the garden-variety kind. There’s something sitting too low in your chest to name. You’d feel this watching him do anything brave.
He pulls you closer as you walk, his fingers pressing gently into your back. The Royal Festival Hall rises up ahead, all clean lines and quiet purpose, and there’s already security waiting by the entrance. People with clipboards and earpieces give Harry a subtle nod. They know exactly who he is, even dressed like this. Even looking soft.
One of them gestures for you to follow, and Harry keeps his hand exactly where it is. It’s a small thing, but it steadies you. His steadiness is one of those things you’ve learned to lean on without ever planning to. He’s just there, and then you’re better.
The corridor backstage is all exposed brick and warm lighting. Your heels click against the floor, too loud in the quiet hallway. Harry’s shoes are silent. He moves like someone who’s done this a thousand times, even though you know he hasn’t. Not like this. Not with an orchestra. Not with his heart so openly on the line.
“Come on,” he says softly, already turning toward a door marked with a small star.
Inside, it’s smaller than you expected. A velvet couch the color of old wine sits against one wall. Large windows overlook the Thames, the light just beginning to turn golden as evening settles in. There’s a mirror surrounded by bulbs, a table with water bottles and tea, a few chairs. Nothing fancy. Nothing designed to make you feel like this matters more than it already does.
Harry releases you and runs a hand through his hair, and you watch the moment shift. The teasing drops away. What’s left is rawer, more unguarded. He looks very much like someone about to perform for two thousand people with nothing but an orchestra and his own voice. No backup dancers. No production. Just him.
“You okay?” you ask.
He turns to look at you properly now, his eyes soft but serious. “Better now.” He reaches for your hand and pulls you toward the couch. “Sit with me for a second.”
You do, and he doesn’t let go. His palm is slightly warm, slightly damp. Of course he’s nervous. He’s about to play songs he’s written, songs that mean something to so many people, stripped down to their bones with nothing to hide behind.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says quietly. He says it often, but it never stops landing. “I needed you here.”
“Where else would I be?” You squeeze his hand, and he looks at you like you’ve said something profound when really you’ve said something simple.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. You could be anywhere.” He shifts closer, his forehead coming to rest against yours, and you’re breathing the same air, and this is the most intimate thing you’ve done all week even though you’re sitting fully clothed on a velvet couch. “But you’re here.”
“I’m here,” you confirm, and you feel him exhale like you’ve just given him permission he’s been waiting for all day.
“Are you nervous?” you ask, pulling back just enough to see his face. His eyes are closed. His jaw is tight, held together by whatever he uses when he needs to hold himself in place.
He opens his eyes slowly, like he’s deciding whether to lie to you. He doesn’t. “Terrified,” he says with a small huff of air “Absolutely terrified.”
You’ve seen him perform hundreds of times. You’ve watched him walk onto stages that hold tens of thousands of people, watched him command a room with nothing but his voice and the certainty of someone who knows exactly what he’s doing. But this is different. This leaves him more exposed than any of those performances did.
“Why?” you ask, even though you think you know.
He stands up, still holding your hand, and walks to the window. You follow. Outside, London is turning golden, the Thames catching the last light like someone threw coins into it. He stares out for a long moment.
“Because there’s nowhere to hide,” he says finally. “With the orchestra, with the arrangements Jules did, it’s just the songs and me. You can’t hide behind production or noise or energy. It’s all…” He trails off, searching for the word. “It’s all there. Every choice I made when I wrote them, every feeling I was trying to capture. It’s all on display.”
You press his hand gently. “That’s the point though, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” He turns to look at you, and there’s something uncertain in his expression that you almost never see. Harry is usually so sure of things. So grounded. But tonight he’s caught between who he is on stage and who he is right now, in this room with you. “What if people don’t want that? What if they want the stadium version of me? The one with all the bells and whistles?”
“They’re here for you,” you say. “The real you. The one who cares enough about this to be terrified.”
He reaches up and touches your cheek, his thumb brushing along your cheekbone. Such a quiet thing, and yet it settles somewhere deep.
“I want to play something for you tonight,” he says quietly. “Before we go out there. Will you listen?”
“Of course,” you say, and you mean it with every part of yourself.
He nods, like he needed to hear you say it, and then he’s moving toward the corner of the room where there’s a piano. You hadn’t noticed it before, tucked away near the wall. Of course there’s a piano. This is his greenroom. This is where he comes to think, to prepare, to remember who he is when everything else falls away.
He sits down on the bench and pats the space next to him. You settle beside him, your shoulder brushing his. The room feels different from this angle. Quieter. Like it’s been waiting for this.
He doesn’t say anything else. He just places his hands on the keys and starts to play. It’s not a song you recognize. It’s slower, more searching, something that sounds like it’s being born in real time. His fingers move with that certainty he has, born from muscle memory and feeling, from knowing exactly what he needs to say even when the words won’t come.
You listen, and you understand. This is what he needed. Not reassurance or advice or someone to tell him he’s going to be fine. He needed someone to sit with him in the fear. He needed you to witness this part of him before he goes out there and gives it to two thousand strangers in the most intimate setting he could be in.
When he stops, the silence that follows feels sacred. Neither of you moves.
“Thank you,” he whispers, and you don’t know if he’s thanking you for listening or for something bigger. For being here. For loving him. For understanding that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is let someone see you when you’re afraid.
There’s a knock on the door. Soft but deliberate.
“That’s us,” Harry says quietly. He doesn’t move. Neither do you.
A second knock follows, firmer this time.
“Yeah, we’re ready,” he calls out. His voice has shifted. The uncertainty is still there, but it’s settled underneath now, beneath something he knows how to carry.
He stands first, and you follow. The room feels suddenly smaller with the door waiting to open. He turns to you, and his hands find your waist. Steady.
“Come here,” he says, and he’s pulling you into him before you can move, wrapping both arms around you. You press your face into his neck and hold on, breathing him in, trying to hold onto this version of him. The quiet one. The one that’s only yours.
He pulls back just enough to kiss you. Slow and careful, like a promise, like everything he needs to say without any words at all. When he breaks away, his forehead is still touching yours.
“Go find your seat,” he murmurs. “Next to Gemma and Mum. They’ll look after you.”
You nod, not trusting your voice yet. He’s still holding you, and you’re still holding him, and you’re not ready to let go even though you know you have to.
“I love you so much,” you say finally. The words come out small and fierce. “You’re going to kill it tonight. Absolutely kill it.”
He grins, that lopsided thing that still makes your chest tight even after all this time. “Yeah? You think so?”
“I know so,” you say.
“Because if I mess up, I’m blaming you,” he says. “I’m going to be out there thinking about you and completely forget the words to Matilda.”
You whack him lightly on the arm. “You’re such an ass.”
“Your ass though,” he says, catching your hand before you can pull it away. He brings it to his mouth and kisses your knuckles, and it’s so ridiculous and so sweet that you can’t help but laugh.
You turn back toward the door, trying to steady yourself, trying to let him go. But then you stop. You can’t leave it at that. You turn around and look at him, really look at him.
“I mean it,” you say. Your voice is serious now. “Harry, I love you. I really do.”
He watches you with those soft eyes, and the expression that crosses his face is so open and unguarded that it almost stops you.
He crosses the space between you in two steps and pulls you back into him, his hand cradling the back of your head.
“I love you too,” he says into your hair. “So much. Thank you for being here. For seeing me.”
You hold onto him for another moment. Then you let go. You step back. You straighten your dress and try to ignore the pounding in your chest.
“Go,” he says gently. “Before they send someone to find you.”
You nod, and you make yourself walk toward the door. Your hand is on the handle when he calls your name softly.
“Hey.” When you turn back, he’s smiling. “Watch me?”
“Always,” you say, and you mean it with everything you have.
The walk to your seat feels surreal. Your legs are slightly unsteady, and you know why. You just left him in that room and now you have to sit in a crowd and watch him perform and pretend your heart isn’t still back there with him. It feels exactly like dropping a kid off at preschool, that specific ache where you’re proud and terrified and so full of love you don’t know what to do with yourself, and you just have to let them go and trust they’ll be okay.
The Royal Festival Hall is nearly full. You navigate through the rows, past knees and purses, and find your seat. Gemma is already there, Anne beside her, and they both turn as you settle in. Gemma leans over immediately.
“How is he?” she asks.
You smile despite yourself. “Nervous. But he was cracking jokes, so he must be okay.”
Gemma laughs, a soft sound that carries relief. “That’s Harry. Falls apart in private, jokes in public. At least he’s got you to see the falling apart part.”
You don’t know what to say to that, so you just nod and turn your attention to the stage. The orchestra is already there, arranged in careful rows, instruments gleaming under the warm lights. The piano sits center stage, small and somehow infinite all at once. Waiting.
The minutes stretch. You’re hyperaware of everything. The buzzing anticipation of the audience. Anne reaching over and pressing your hand. Your own breathing.
Then the lights begin to dim.
The theater goes dark except for a single spotlight, and the audience quiets. Your hands grip the armrest. This is the moment where everything becomes real. Where he stops being the person you held in that greenroom and becomes the person who belongs to everyone.
The orchestra begins to play, soft and beautiful, and then he walks out.
He moves slowly, deliberately, and the audience reacts immediately. A swell of sound rises, a collective inhale, and then the applause begins. He’s wearing that floral shirt and those dark slacks, and he looks so vulnerable and so brave that tears prick your eyes before he’s even sung a single note.
He sits at the piano. Takes a breath. And then he begins to play.
The first notes of Boyfriends fill the hall, but they’re nothing like the recorded version. They’re stripped back, reimagined through the lens of the orchestra behind him, and hearing it like this, watching his hands move over the keys with such intention, is almost too much. You can see every emotion he was feeling when he wrote it. You can see him, the real him, the one that only exists when there’s nowhere left to hide.
Your eyes are wet. You don’t try to stop the tears. Gemma reaches over and takes your hand, and you notice she’s crying too.
This is what heaven looks like, you think. Watching someone you love be exactly who they are, with no apologies and no performance. Just truth. To see him up there, raw and honest and completely himself, is something you know you’ll carry for the rest of your life.
His voice fills the entire space, and you swear the whole building is holding its breath. The orchestra swells and falls with him, Jules Buckley conducting like he’s handling something precious. You squeeze Gemma’s hand and she squeezes back. No words needed. She understands.
He makes his way through the set with growing ease. By the time he reaches Matilda, he’s laughing between verses, throwing little quips at the audience that land perfectly. There’s a moment where he jokes about the orchestra being his backup singers, and Jules gives him a look that sends the whole hall into laughter. This is the Harry you know. The one who can be both open and playful, who lets people in and still keeps something sacred.
You watch him settle into himself as the night goes on, the fear quietly transforming into joy. Gemma is beaming. Anne has her hand pressed over her heart. The entire hall feels suspended in something shared and private all at once.
Then the lights shift.
The orchestra quiets. A pause that feels deliberate. And then he begins to play something different. Slower. The opening notes of Bridge Over Troubled Water fill the hall and every thought in your head exits at once.
Your entire body goes still.
It doesn’t just stop the world. It reverses it. Takes you somewhere else entirely, and suddenly you’re not in the Royal Festival Hall anymore. You’re somewhere smaller. Quieter. Somewhere that belongs only to the two of you.
You were in his car. Late, maybe midnight, driving back from somewhere that doesn’t matter. What mattered was that you were together, and the radio was on low, and his hand was resting on your thigh. He was driving with one hand, completely at ease.
This song came on, and you weren’t paying attention at first. You were watching the streetlights blur past, thinking about how much you liked him, how terrifying that felt. But then something in the music reached you. The strings building, the voices coming in, so pure and gentle and heartbreaking that you had to sit up straighter just to take it in properly.
“Oh my god,” you said. “This is so good.”
He glanced at you, briefly confused. “What?”
“This song,” you said. “It’s incredible.”
He laughed, actually laughed, like you’d just said something absolutely ridiculous. “You’ve never heard Bridge Over Troubled Water before?”
“No,” you said, genuinely bewildered. “Should I have?”
He reached over and turned up the volume, shaking his head in mock disbelief. “It’s Simon and Garfunkel. It’s a classic. How have you never heard this?”
You listened to it properly then, really listened, and something shifted inside your chest. It was one of those songs that feels like it was written specifically for you, even though it wasn’t. One of those songs that makes you understand why people write music in the first place. Beautiful and sad and hopeful all at once, and by the time it ended you were crying.
He pulled over. Right there, on the side of the road, he just pulled the car over and turned to look at you.
“Hey,” he said softly. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” you said, wiping your eyes. “It’s just beautiful. It made me sad somehow. I don’t know.”
He reached over and took your hand. “Good sad or bad sad?”
You thought about it. “Good sad. Like I’m feeling something real.”
He brought your hand to his mouth and kissed it. “That’s my favorite kind of sad.”
After that, the song became yours. He played it constantly, sent you clips of different versions, sang it in the shower or while making breakfast. It became shorthand for everything neither of you could say quite as well with your own words.
And now he’s playing it here, in front of two thousand people, with an orchestra behind him. Playing it like a reminder. Like a declaration only you can decode.
You’re not just crying anymore. You’re sobbing, real and undignified, muffling it with your hand, but Gemma just pulls you into her side and holds you there. She understands. She knows this isn’t just a concert.
His voice is achingly pure, like he was born to carry this melody, to stand on this stage in this exact moment.
Gemma leans close to your ear. “He loves you so much, sweet girl. So much.”
You nod. You can’t speak.
He sings on, his face lost in the music. There’s nothing between him and the song. Not the orchestra, not the audience, not the weight of the evening.
Then he hits the high note.
The song breaks open. His voice climbs higher and higher, pure and clear, and you stop breathing entirely. He reaches for something the rest of the room can feel but can’t name, and he grabs hold of it.
The note hangs in the air. Then falls away gently, like a feather drifting down.
The final piano chords fade out. The hall goes silent.
Then the entire audience erupts.
People are on their feet, clapping and cheering, some of them crying too. Two thousand people who understand exactly what they just witnessed. Not just a performance. A moment. A real, true, tender moment.
You’re standing too, though you don’t remember standing up. Your hands come together automatically. Gemma is beside you, her arm around your waist.
His eyes move slowly across the seats, searching, until they find you. They lock on and the rest of the room disappears. He smiles, small and private and devastating, and then he wiggles his fingers at you in a little wave. Just that. Just the smallest possible gesture, one that no one else would even notice.
But you do. You wave back, your hand trembling, fresh tears on your face. Gemma tightens her arm around you and you hear her say something, but you can’t make it out over the noise in your ears.
He holds your gaze for one more beat, then turns to acknowledge the applause, bowing slightly toward the orchestra. That moment, though, was yours alone.
The rest of the set passes differently now. You’re still present, still watching, but there’s a lightness in your chest that wasn’t there before. He performs the remaining songs with an ease that only comes when someone has finally let themselves off the hook. By the time he reaches the final notes of Hommage, the hall is completely his. The orchestra swells around him, Jules conducting with quiet authority, and you understand that Harry has done exactly what he came here to do. He gave everyone in this room the truth. And it was enough. More than enough.
The final song ends. The applause is thunderous. He stands, bows, turns to acknowledge Jules and the orchestra. Then he’s walking offstage, and the curtain falls, and it’s over.
Gemma grabs your hand. “Did you see him? Did you see how comfortable he got out there?”
“I saw,” you say softly.
Anne turns to you with tears in her eyes and pulls you into a hug without a word. After a moment she pulls back, smiling. “Come on, love. Let’s go find him.”
A member of the venue staff meets you at the end of your row and leads you backstage. The corridors are narrow and humming with post-show energy, people moving quickly, checking clipboards, breaking down gear. Your heart is already racing.
The green room door is open when you arrive. Harry is standing near the window, still in his floral shirt, hair damp with sweat. The moment he spots Anne, he breaks into a grin and crosses the room to pull her into a hug.
“Mum,” he says. “Thank you for coming.”
“Are you joking?” Her voice is thick. “That was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen you do.”
Gemma goes in next, arms first, and you watch the three of them together for a moment before Harry looks over Gemma’s shoulder and finds you.
He untangles himself gently and walks toward you. The performer is gone now. What’s left is just him.
“Hi,” he says softly.
“Hi yourself,” you reply, and then he’s got you, arms around you, and you press into him and let out a long slow breath. He smells like sweat and the cologne you bought him for Christmas, and holding him feels like the most natural thing in the world.
“I was thinking about you the whole time,” he murmurs. “Especially during that song. I kept going back to that night in the car.”
“I know,” you say. “I could tell.”
He pulls back to look at you, and his thumb catches a tear on your cheek before you can. He leans down and kisses you, unhurried, like there’s nowhere else he needs to be.
When he pulls back, Anne is watching you both with a quiet tenderness that you’ve always loved about her.
A knock at the door interrupts the moment. A venue staff member pokes their head in apologetically. “So sorry, Harry. Jules and a few of the festival organizers are wondering if you have a few minutes.”
Harry exhales, nodding. He keeps hold of your hand. “Give me twenty minutes?” he says to you. “I need to thank Jules properly. Say goodbye to a few people.”
“Of course,” you say. You know how this works.
“Why don’t we get some air?” Anne suggests, already reaching for her bag. “Give him a chance to finish up. We’ll be just outside, love.”
Harry kisses your forehead before letting you go. “I won’t be long. Wait for me?”
“We will,” Gemma says, already steering you toward the door.
You glance back one more time as you reach the corridor. Harry is already turning toward the people filing in, shifting back into the gracious, grateful version of himself, the one that belongs to the rest of the world. But his eyes catch yours just before you round the corner.
One more second. One more small, private thing.
Then you let yourself be pulled out into the warm evening air. The Thames is dark and glittering beyond the Southbank walkway, couples and tourists drifting past, none of them knowing what just happened inside that hall.
You lean against the railing and look out at the water, and you think about a car pulled over on the side of a road, and a man who stopped everything just to hold your hand while you cried over a song you’d never heard before.
