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ROSEMARY | hairdresser/ex-boyfriend!Harry

The one where Y/N gets drunk, cuts her hair, and Harry fixes it (feat complimentary gut rearrangement)

HI WOO this is the whole hairdresser/ex-boyfriend fic! It was originally a mini series on patreon, but since I’m no longer uploading on patreon and it’s been up long enough, I wanted to just bring it over here. I’ve combined all three parts into this, so the whole thing is conveniently in one place (and nobody has to wait to read any future parts). If you like this and would like to see anything else brought over from patreon, please reblog and/or send an ask <3 Feedback is what keeps people posting on tumblr <3 OKAY BYE titz out

CONTENT/WARNINGS: oral (m to f & f to m), ball worship <.< .... >.> (who said that?), p-in-v, dom/sub undertones ISH, praise kink

WC: 29K (she's long)

Between four watered-down vodka cranberries and a questionable phone call, there’s a very specific point where self-awareness takes a smoke break and good judgment decides to clock out for the night altogether.

A universal benchmark that lives like a quiet, sneaky premonition in the moment and has an impressively uniform posthumous legacy of deep, deep regret the morning after. A string of incoherent text messages, a pounding headache, and inevitably, amnesia with a side of consequences. It’s that muddy gray area society collectively experiences after one too many lemon drops or enough green tea shots— a stage of insobriety that people, despite the consequences, actually, purposefully continue to chase (even after shit may have gone sideways only two weekends prior), and it often occurs after a selfie in the type of jaundiced glow only a packed bar bathroom can emit, when one stares into the mirror for too long.

It’s a clarity. A lifted veil. It tells someone all the things the sober variant of themselves is too cowardly to admit: the next door neighbor is a fucking cunt and it’s time to stop pretending to be friends-by-proximity; it’s also time to stop being ashamed for liking that one hat everyone else called ugly; capitalism is the root of zoochosis, and by default, evil; love is probably dead, but sex— sex— is alive and well. Thriving, frankly, according to modern-day hookup culture. And an ex boyfriend’s jawline doesn’t exactly become any less sharp just because one stops sleeping with him.

Those types of thoughts are muddled and strung together. Louder and somehow more important-seeming than usual, soaked at the edges with liquid courage like wet paper. Some people get melancholy— they need their hair held back by a fist as they crouch over the toilet and sob over their breakup (a wound that, while a month old, cracks open and stings like liquor is raw salt being poured into it). Others become philosophers, briefly convinced they've unlocked the secret to human connection through the bottom of a shot glass and the lyrics of whatever Top 40 hit is screaming through the speakers.

And Y/N?

Well— her thumb scrolls over her smudged phone screen, through the list of her contacts, the other’s nail trapped between her teeth as she squints at the brightness of the LED— Y/N gets horny.

Ravenously so. A caliber that contends with that insatiable stretch of days right after her period, where everything feels hungry, and wild, and, for lack of a better term, intense. It's trapped in that stretch of space mirrored by that one meme— the video of Barbie Rapunzel ogling the blacksmith she passes on loop, fittingly captioned This Barbie is ovulating. Only, liquor laced thirst is riskier— more dangerous. Where a sober state maneuvers with a bulwark of inhibitions around it, this disposition navigates on social lubricant and a distinct sense of naked impulse— or the impulse to be naked. A little of both, if she’s being completely candid with herself.

And in this moment, standing there in her high-waisted jeans and vaguely ironic crop top, clutching her phone and blinking down unevenly at the screen, Y/N is possessed by the sloppy confidence only poor lighting and moderate intoxication provides; the firm conviction that she has never looked better in her life and her ex-boyfriend needs to know about it. Immediately. Now.

Harry is a comfortable ex. Comfortable in the sense that the duo had stayed on good terms after the fallout of their relationship, and good terms in the sense that he’d occasionally spend a night slotted between her sticky thighs. The shape of the morning spilling through the blinds always generated an unspoken awareness that this lewd rendezvous didn’t mean anything, and they left it there. The breakup wasn’t messy. The pair dated for a year and a half before life had ultimately set in and popped the rose-tinted bubble of bliss that had coated the inceptive honeymoon stage of their relationship. The two just had goals of their own, really— alternative paths that forked rather than crossed, and eventually, the thinly-veiled scaffolding of their really great sex and really fun fun became just that; a thinly-veiled excuse to keep nursing something that didn’t inherently have the ability to progress. And when it came to their impromptu flings? More or less, there was a sentiment of surface-level regret there, a sort of shouldn’t-have-done-that afterthought that always seemed to happen when one hooked up with an ex-romantic partner. Yes.

But they’d slept together four times over the course of six months, and Y/N had been left very satisfied on all occasions, so there’s less to regret and more to reminisce, really.

And now, here she is, with a cataclysmic idea masquerading as ingenuity. It’s that last thought in particular that sticks out from the mess cobwebbing her alcohol-soaked mind as she stands out by the front door of the bar. It was probably one of the things she missed the most from their relationship— constant, unrestricted access to his artillery of bedside prowess. He was so good with his tongue, and his fingers, and his words; the dirty ones that’d spill against the shell of her ear from behind when he was in to the hilt. The memory, despite most recently occurring only a month ago, teems her with a particularly wistful longing. One recollection from their lineup of hookups scratches at the surface through the others; an echo of a night they’d spent together nearly half a year ago. He’d come over to take back a cardigan the girl had still been harboring at the back of her closet; one that he’d spent three entire days searching for before discovering she was holding it hostage— and to make a long story short, the pair had ended up on her bed, Harry sprawled on his back with her thighs bracketing the sides of his head. One of her palms fisted around the base of his cock, mushroomed tip stuffed between her puffy lips, chest swelling flush against his fluttering tummy with each drag of his tongue from the hood of her clit to her seam. When her own tongue had resorted to lazy shapes around the ridges of his head (in response to his lips suctioning over her clit), she remembers he’d reached his arm down, fingers twisting into the hair at the back of her skull, and (not gently) coaxed her into swallowing more of him down. She remembers the way her scalp had tingled with a pleasant, welcome ache at the filthy ministrations, the way she’d instinctively gagged at the intrusion, her soft throat helplessly flexing around him as he nudged up off the sheets with his hips to slip even deeper. The groan that’d spilled out of him against her cunt when she’d screwed her eyes and sunk to the base. The raunchy reflection throws a streak of lightning down the knobs of her spine as her thumb hovers over his contact, and she shudders.

With drunken determination lacing her hazy features, Y/N taps the call button and presses the phone to her ear, wobbling on her feet. As the speaker trills, the door behind her pries open, and a trio of giggling, scantily clad women hobble out into the direction of the parking lot, their heels clicking over the front steps. One nearly trips, catching herself on the railing with her hands as the other two burst into a peal of laughter. Y/N foggily watches the interaction before she peels her gaze away, slumping against the coarse masonry like she might physically merge with it if she thinks hard enough. And she is thinking— quite hard, actually, mentally patchworking together the finer details to her scheme. She’s going to tell him she looks good— she looks so good; the kind of good that warrants a double-take, a breath hitch, maybe she’ll drop a hint on how someone else told her that, or how she didn’t come out looking like this for no reason. That it would be a crying shame, truly, to waste it, and when he hears about it he’s going to want to fuck her again. Obviously. Why wouldn’t he?

A plan doesn’t get more foolproof than that.

The moment the dial tone clicks and the line connects, though, the young woman’s tongue sticks to the bottom of her mouth like it’s gone numb and the plan has quietly exited through the window altogether.

“…Hi,” Y/N starts, her mouth nearly pressed to the speaker as she leans one shoulder against the brick, grappling the phone to her ear with two hands.

The unmistakable shuffle and the distinctly worn note lacing his tone, pitching it a touch deeper, denotes that he’s probably in bed, and— given the hour— either still half-asleep or freshly recovering from a rude awakening.

“Well, well, well,” Harry clears his throat, hoarse and sleep-groggy, “to what do I owe this pleasure?”

In the long beat of silence Y/N provides, she basks in the loose softness slipped across her limbs and the warmth coursing over her body, courtesy of the last vodka something-something she had finished before deciding to call him. It thrums through, entangling with her blood and forging a warm syrup under her skin. Her head feels dizzy— that inimitable cloud that infiltrates as an effect of inebriation, curling along the edges of her skull and airbrushing all her thoughts into oblivion. The phone in her palm emits a crackling sound through the speaker, and his blunt interception— wryly amused— is what peels through the muzzy layers that’ve condensed over her mind and thrown her original mission off.

“…Bit ominous, that,” Harry murmurs pointedly at her lack of retort, “Alright?”

“Mhm.”

Instead of immediately expanding, Y/N only hums the affirmative in response and settles back into a silence that can only be described, from an outside, sober perspective, as semi-troubling. A typically sobering coolness clings to the night, but the young woman still feels warm and just as buzzy as she’d felt indoors. She rocks against the wall, the gritty texture of the masonry grinding against the cheap fibers of the thin, acrylic-based leather-knock off she’d thrown over her sleeveless top to curb the chill. Despite the way the bar door is closed, some loud, trending pop song still spills from indoors, muffled and almost incoherent. Her eyes slip shut and she weakly bobs her head to the melody, less rhythm and entirely more feeling.

“—Right. Do you need something or are we just practicing our breathing?”

As if half-asleep herself, Y/N’s eyes flash open, lashes fluttering, and takes a deep inhale through her nostrils. The world feels soft like it’s been melted with a sickly Instagram filter, and her skull feels about fifty pounds and simultaneously weightless all at once. A little ruckle of concentration chisels in between her brows as she threads the words together in her head.

“Yeah. Hey. Listen. I need you to listen, okay,” symbolically, she raises her palm up in a universal stop motion, teetering forward (though the man can’t see it), “…You ever just— think about, like, how soft your balls are?”

There’s a quiet moment that stretches comically long— the kind of bemused pause that, in a sober state, would cause Y/N to double-check if he was still on the line. Instead, her insobriety only causes her to duck her chin nonchalantly as she picks at the brick with her pointer nail. When Harry finally answers, he sounds a tad bewildered.

“…What?”

“Like. Your balls,” Y/N blurts matter-of-factly, eyelids half-mast. “They’re soft. Like, squishy. I was, I mean… I’m, like,” she takes a long, deep breath, and the tail end of her confession rides on the exhale that slips past her chapped lips, “…thinking about them.”

On the other end of the line, the man in question is lying supine in bed with his ankles crossed and his topsheet half-kicked off, one forearm laxly slung behind his head against his deflated pillow as if the unscheduled phone call is an audiobook meant to be consumed for midnight entertainment. Across the room, the electric clock on his dresser reads that it’s nearly three in the morning, though he’d caught that detail over the top of his screen when her ringtone has roused him awake. He’d been asleep, or somewhere close to it— drifting, half-listening to a 6-hour medley of rain noises he didn’t even remember putting on, donning the same pair of boxers from the start of the day and a mild simper that had dimpled sleepily somewhere between the words “listen” and “balls.”

With full transparency, Harry would be lying if he said he hadn’t expected the phone call (given it was her, given the hour) to consist of anything less raunchy. He’d have bet good money— genuine, foldable currency— seeing her name light up his screen, still wearing that silly otter emoji he’d branded her contact with ages ago, that this late night chat was going to involve an invitation to spend the night with another warm body under the sheets. Since the duo had called it quits on their label, loose, shamelessly indulgent interludes seemed to become a common theme in their situationship. One-offs that never quite managed to stay a one-off after the first time. It was just too addicting, for the both of them. Familiar. A déjà vu stitched into the seams of his pillowcase. He thinks a fitting slogan for their flings is a more accurate spin on a well known saying— “if it ain’t broke, why actually break it?”

Sex had never been the root of their issues or anything remotely in the territory of a topic of concern. In fact, quite the opposite. Both parties were consistently left thoroughly satisfied, and after the first fling, the pair had decided to indulge in ultimate free will and continue the pattern. Sex with exes almost always inherently carried the risk of curdling and becoming messy— but not with Y/N. No, in this particular arrangement, there was an unspoken agreement. Neither party necessarily had interest in rekindling the spark, and the pair was satisfied to leave their casual encounters as just that; entirely casual. No strings, no feelings, nothing beyond a slot of time when tensions bubbled and inhibitions slipped. The key, he supposes, was infrequency. Consistency builds habits; habits build dependence; dependence builds longing when it’s missing. Routine (in the context of stringless sex) braids a noose. And with Y/N? Twine didn’t even exist in the picture with what they had left. It was entirely inconsistent, entirely hedonistic, and neither partner minded, because there was no room— no time— for fallout.

It’d been a while since the two had seen each other in that context (or at all, really), and the only calls he ever receives from her nowadays are in some way related to their noncommittal affair. So yes, in theory, he wasn’t surprised to receive a call trying to lure him into her sheets.

He just hadn’t entirely expected to get such a ridiculous, honest ode to his testicles. Or their texture of all things. Granted, it was going to either be this or a long-winded string of erotic half-thoughts in a voicemail, and when given the choice, Harry has always far more enjoyed live action entertainment.

With his brows furrowed curiously over his narrowed, drowsy eyes, the drawn out pauses in her speech, the distinct way she struggles to string consonants together, and the altogether seemingly aimless ramblings she gives him (sweet nothings whispered into the receiver with the energy of someone who doesn’t entirely recognize the planet they’re on), Harry recognizes that she must be alcoholically impaired. That, or she’s suffering a serious concussion and really should seek medical assistance.

An incredulous, amused scoff garbles his speech through the speaker, and it’s obvious enough (though, not to her) that he’s muscling down snickers, “…Are you drunk?”

“No,” Y/N argues, drawing the word out, but the slur to her speech gives away her drunken demeanor before she admits the truth. “Yes. Maybe. A little. But like— not bad, like— festive.”

“Festive?” Harry repositions back against the stack of pillows he’s settled on, the edges of his mouth peaking.

“Yeah. Like, normal.”

He sounds half-convinced through the speaker as Y/N slumps back. “Define normal for me then, party girl.”

Y/N chews into her lower lip to stifle the edges of her mischievous grin by the root, voice soft and purposefully lust-laden, “Normal enough to want your balls in my mouth.”

In the darkness (the only source of light in the room being the vague glow of streetlights through the closed blinds and the soft spill of neon wash off the clock), Harry rolls his eyes up to the ceiling in amusement, and he blinks slowly. His own plump lips purse as he contemplates the cheeky nature of her reply. He thinks she might be outside; there’s a breeze fuzzing through the speaker, and given her condition, he imagines she’s leant up against a wall. He suspects brick. She’s always been a lean-on-the-wall kind of drunk, not a sit-on-the-curb. Dignified, in a way. At least, until she erupts into a monologue on his anatomy and how exactly she’d like to interact with it. A soft, mirthy puff slips through his nostrils before his brows crinkle again.

“Where are you?”

Although the breath her ex-boyfriend expels sounds faintly (playfully) exasperated, Y/N twists to brace against the wall with her back instead, no longer able to bite back the seedy inklings of her smile. She tilts her head, blinking down at her nails casually as the pieces slip into place, all according to plan. A note of coy satisfaction coats her statement, “Hm. Okay. That easy? Hm. Interesting.”

“Am I guessing?” Harry drawls, mouth quirking teasingly, “I have two. Is this a clutching your shoes in an alleyway drunk or more of a sitting outside of a McDonalds because the moon is pretty kind of drunk?”

Y/N doesn’t immediately respond, but there’s a vaguely concerning-sounding shuffle on the other end of the line, like she’s either wobbled out from her stance against whatever she’s braced and nearly dropped her phone (like she’s checking out the state of the moon), that causes Harry to bite into the inside of his cheek out of sheer mirth-curbing willpower. Then, as the girl repositions her cellphone, a clearer, verbal response, “I’m— …ah. I have shoes on and the moon— isn’t out, so.”

Harry doesn’t have a chance to give her another quip.

“I was thinking— like— about you. And your dick,” the young woman admits, blinking rapidly as the less objectifying correction floats to the forefront of her mind, “Mostly your dick, actually. But you too, like, as a person."

The confession, though thick with intoxication and mildly entertaining, stirs a pleasant, familiar yearning in the pit of his belly— no less than it would from a sober mouth. It spills lauded warmth over his loose (sleep deprived) muscles and tangles in that hollow recess of his brain between midnight longing and rationality. A wryly amused simper curls his lips. Hearing such a shameless admission, of course, fluffs his ego— knowing he’s been on her mind, that she’s been thinking about him in that way, enough to call (despite the intoxication blatantly hazing her self-restraint) and let him know, saturates him in self-satisfaction. Despite this— Harry mulls as he rakes his fingers back through his partially sleep-mussed tendrils— he can’t give her the satisfaction off strict principle. The drunken declaration is just that; a truth cracked open over ice and spilled between sips. Although what she says is something she’s already divulged plenty of times in a sober state, he just can’t, in good faith, accept the invitation. Right now, judging by the sloppy articulation she’s giving him and the blurring coherence between her words, she’s in a fragile state that incredibly lacks self awareness and sense of consequence. Track record aside, the opportunity would just feel like he was taking advantage of her vulnerability, and her impairment only leaves room for regret the morning after. Besides, the idea of her failing to remember a night spent with him makes his stomach churn.

With this thought, Harry navigates his next course of action. He’d rather keep her on the line— both for the sake of encouraging her to sober up and the free entertainment— than shut her down altogether. Instead of biting the bait, the curly-haired brunette drums his knuckles back against his wooden headboard and muses, "That's sweet. Really warms the heart."

Rather than acknowledging the dry sarcasm lacing his deadpan tone, she holds the phone to her ear with a little more intent. Through the lusty façade— the role of midnight seductress she’s taken on— inklings that give away her genuine desperation worm into her soft cadence. “Can I come over? I’m really good. I’ll— I’ll be so good for you.”

She just sounds so cute, is the thing. Cadence soft and deliciously cloying, all hopeful, like she actually believes there’s a shred of reason to her invitation, like he’ll actually lug himself out of bed to pick her up and fuck her tonight. He imagines her like that; perched back against a wall outside a bar somewhere, clad in something skimpy and pretty, phone loosely cupped in her fingers as she begs him to break. Lashes fluttering over her blown, dewy eyes, cheeks flushed despite the nip of the cold, lips chewed and wet as she hangs onto his every word. In a way, it’s adorable.

But it’s the honesty to her request that gives him pause. The earnest desperation lodged between the plea and the tentatively expectant breath she takes as she waits for his response.

She gnaws into her lower lip, brows pinching, “I wanna, like— I wanna sit on your face. And I really want your dick down my throat. Like, at the same time.”

Moral principles aside, the mental image has the outline of his cock pricking with intrigue through the briefs by its own volition. A lazy hunger pools low in his tummy and crawls along the underside of his balls, thickening him to a semi and coaxing the fabric to stretch. Scraping his tongue along the inside of his cheek and sluggishly stretching his legs, quads flexing, he swallows the urge to openly palm over himself as the urge to swells. Instead, he opts to distractedly drawl an answer as he adjusts himself, pulling his own hand back out of sheer necessity rather than letting it rest there, “Is that right?”

“I want you to make my throat sore,” Y/N confesses. A dirty thrill skates down her spine at the sordid recollection of the last time he’d done that— the way he’d twisted her hair around his knuckles and tucked his cock into her mouth to the root in unapologetic ruts— and morphs her volume a little lower (not because of any inhibitions as to who might hear her admission— more so due to the shy nature she’s always taken on declaring something so filthy), “Do that thing where you, like, you know— you, like, reach down and hold my head down.”

As the fan rattles overhead, Harry swallows the spit that’s been pooling behind his teeth, shifting onto an elbow and pointedly redirecting the topic of conversation. His brows crinkle and the edges of his mouth tick playfully as he reminds her of his earlier inquiry. “Where are you, exactly? You never did say.”

He sounds like he might be laughing. Maybe. This particular observation doesn’t dishearten her, but the change in topic throws her train of thought off enough for her posture to straighten out and her brows to pleat again as she chews over the answer.

“Oh— I’m, like. I’m at a bar,” she answers, blinking sluggishly, “With my friends. Well. My friends are inside. I’m outside.”

“Outside, where?”

“Just. Outside,” Y/N motions out with her hand in a sloppy motion. There’s a big parking lot ahead of her and a man out on the stoop in a charcoal blazer, smoking a cigarette. “In the front. There’s a guy smoking a cigarette.”

Though she doesn’t normally crave nicotine (not unless she’s heartbreak-adjacent or watching a European film), something about the cocktail of vodka-crans, body heat, and lack of inhibitions sparks the very specific desire to bum a cigarette off of the stranger. His misty exhale coats the backdrop of the sky in a plume, and her confession into the phone sounds mildly longing. “Fuck, I want a cigarette.”

“Don’t go ask him for one.”

The objection comes from a standpoint of preserving her well-being (mildly laced with the kind of blank concern reserved for babysitting an unruly, drunk friend currently contemplating defying the laws of stranger danger); it’s safety-flavored, technically. But it still causes the corners of her mouth to twist up slyly as her lids slip to that coy half-mast Harry’s not there to witness.

“Why? Are you jealous?”

“Incredibly,” he deadpans. “Listen, why don’t you go back inside and drink some water, yeah?”

This phrase, however, is a form of discouragement and incipiently derails the entire objective of her mission. The focus is slipping through her fingers, and quickly. With this thought, Y/N doubles down, a slur chasing the tail of her words as she rambles.

“Ha. No, okay, listen— listen, I wouldn’t just suck you off. I could lick your balls, like a popsicle. The way you like. Or— or those mochi things, you know? The soft ones with the—“

“Oh— Christ. We’re back onto this.”

"No, no— listen. I'm serious. I could— I could do it so good. Like, so good. I've been thinking about it. l've got…” her pink tongue slinks out over her lips, her voice colored in what’s aimed to be seduction, “strategies.”

"Strategies," there’s a beat of lull, like he’s truly digesting the ridiculous declaration, and needs to confirm, "For my balls."

"Yes! Like— I wouldn't just, like, shove them in. That's— that's too much, right? You gotta, like, ease into it. Like foreplay for balls,” Y/N explains, motioning out with her hand again for emphasis. She lowers her voice again again, picking at an area near the elbow of her jacket with the thumb on the opposite hand offhandedly, where the acrylic has started to flake. “I'd be, like, really gentle at first— just, like, kiss them a little. Maybe a lil' lick— just— just a taste, y'know? To warm them up. Like— like defrosting chicken."

Again, there’s a silence in response to her brazen words, but this one stretches longer than the last.

"...You're comparing my bollocks to frozen poultry?"

"No— no! I mean, yes, but no. Just the defrosting part. The care. The— the attention."

“Right.”

"And then— then l'd, like, suck them. Both. At once, probably,” her shoulders rise in a nonchalant shrug, “I've got range, I swear."

Although Y/N’s perception is incredibly distorted, if she’s not mistaken, Harry’s cadence takes on a lower note as he contemplates her statement.

"...Range?"

"Yeah, like— for you. I'm dedicated,” her lashes flutter, and determination forges into phrase as she asserts, “I'm a— I'm a giver, Harry."

There’s a sound on the other end of the line, something that vaguely resembles mirth and a hum of acknowledgment. The young woman gnaws into her lower lip again, coaxing her tone to be chock-full of teasing allure as she attempts to bait him once more, "I'd take care of you, y'know. Not just the balls. The whole... package."

"..Would you, now?"

"Mhm. I'd suck you off so good. You'd cry,” she sighs dreamily, nodding as she contemplates the scenario.

It goes like this: him, sat back on her couch with his meaty thighs split— her, slotted in between. Toying his sack gently with her fingers, her swollen lips stretched taut and slick with spit as she bobs her head and envelops him to the root. His own fingers tucked into her hair, the others scraping over the cushioned arm of the couch. His chiseled jaw set, dark brows furrowed, lids heavy as he cranes his neck back, hissing swears, and ruts up into the warm heat of her mouth—

“You'd, like, sob. Like— real tears,” Y/N blurts in finality as the fantasy unravels, “Ugly ones."

A laugh, low and rough, punctuates the statement she gives him before he murmurs, draped in wilting mirth, "Now I'm ugly crying?"

"Yeah, like— wrecked,” Y/N twists against the wall to brace with her shoulder again, “You'd have to, like, hold onto something. Brace yourself."

“Jesus Christ." It comes out low, a curl of sound dragged out from his chest— meant to scold, maybe— but she imagines his head tipping back against a pillow, jaw slack, eyes half-closed, and the mental image only spurs the young woman on.

"And I wouldn't stop, either,” Y/N shakes her head as she continues, hardly over a whisper now, “Even when you cum— l'd just keep going. Until you're, like— delirious. You'd forget your own name. You'd—"

“—Okay."

Slowly, Harry drags his palm through the curls along the top of his scalp, grounding himself on the tender sensation as his fingers catch and tug on the coils. His chest swells and he deliberately ignores the way his prick pulses, angrily rigid and fat, and the way the clinging fabric has grown uncomfortable over the duration of her ramble. Want pulses like a flaming heat, and the ache scruffs along the insides of his thighs as he draws his tongue over his lips. In all honesty, he’s not proud that he’s hard. Or— well, not proud in a noble sense. There’s nothing inherently dignified about the slow insistence blooming at the base of his spine and threading like static along his nerves, or the (frankly, embarrassing) hiss he has to gnaw down as his cock thrums, no less to a fantasy of a nature that has him so… fragile. And it’s not the fantasy itself that does him in, not really. Not as much as it is her insistence, the heady pining that brands her vocal cords as she mumbles how badly she needs him, how badly she craves to please him. It’s the claim that she’s so needy she’d lap at his cock until he was overstimulated, all for the sake of unspooling him across her tongue. His nostrils flare as he takes in another deep breath, and he tucks his arm back behind his head as a preemptive measure.

Y/N sways, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Over the course of the conversation and the filth she’s been drunkenly bread crumbing, the mettle on the other line has unraveled into something worn and aching. Amusement melts away— that much is obvious to her, given the roughness progressively funneling into his tone, the ache there as the casual front erodes. The way his voice has grown more hoarse. Lower. Less mirthy in his responses.

She’s fraying him.

The silence on the other end morphs, stretches into something elastic and grainy, like warm taffy left too long in the sun. Harry clears his throat, and the breath he lets out isn’t a laugh, not really, but it’s shaped like one, wrapped around the edges of something more raw, quieter. It skims along the line in a low thrum, thick with something that wasn’t there before— or if it was, it hadn’t been this. Y/N can’t see him, but if she could, she imagines his jaw might be flexed, one thumb pressed into the corner of his mouth like he’s trying to anchor himself somewhere, to not spiral off the hinge she’s just unlatched with a sigh and a sentence and the image of her mouth wrecking him slow. Imagines his phone tucked between his shoulder and his cheek, the way he’s tenting in his briefs, imagines his palm sprawled over it, lazily squeezing at the outline as she grants him sultry pledges.

Y/N purses her lips to bite back the wicked little grin threatening to slither out as she weighs his response and announces the conclusion she comes to, “Hm. You’re into it.”

Now, Harry laughs. Really laughs, chuckling boyishly as her smile breaks through the way she clamps her top teeth over her lower lip.

"Mmm. Into the part where you're a deranged little ball-enthusiast? Or the bit where you're slurring through a fantasy about making me weep?"

The giggle she releases in response to the playful quip is tipsily syrupy, and sleepy, and simultaneously, a form of whiplash for the sultry latter fragment of her statement. “Both. Talk dirty to me.”

She practically hears the eye roll on the other end of the line when he takes a deep breath and instead instructs, “Drink some water and go home.”

It’s Y/N’s turn to roll her eyes. Irises lolling to the dark awning that hovers over her, she shrugs and muses, “You’re off your game.” She kicks out with the toe of her shoe. It’s not particularly a graceful motion given her inebriation. In response to her words, she’s granted another low chuckle, and instead of snickering back herself, her next words are spoken with complete seriousness. “Will you come over?”

Her ex boyfriend grants her another noncommittal, amused sound.

“Have you got a ride home?”

Hope threads into her body language— her spine straightens out a bit and she raises her eyebrows as it bleeds into her tone, “Is that a yes?”

On the other end of the line, there’s a crackle and what sounds like fabric shuffling (she assumes the man is rearranging), and then what sounds like another sigh.

“Are the people you came with going to give you a ride home?”

“Well. Like,” Y/N mulls the notion over, chewing into the smooth lining along the inside of her cheek, “Probably not. We, like, Ubered here, so.”

Before Harry has a chance to chime in with a response to this admission however, the girl twists onto her shoulder, sleeve scuffing brick. Her glassy eyes reflect the shimmering glow of the string lights attached to the posts on the patio along the side of the bar, but otherwise sit hollow behind the film in a way only too much liquor can coax. “Listen. Listen. Your cock’s so pretty, an’ you always taste so good. So big. I need you so bad. I need it.”

There’s a long pause. Unbeknownst to her— visually, at the very least— on the other end, Harry’s fingers, which had priorly only laxly combed through the curls on top of his head, now tighten and tug at the roots along his crown. His arm rests back behind his head against the headboard in what would otherwise be interpreted as a relaxed posture, if not for the way his lashes dust over the crests of his cheekbones as his eyes slip shut momentarily, the way his chest swells on the deep breath stretching his lungs. The way his throat bobs as he swallows thickly and attempts to mentally gather his bearings. Against his thigh, his cock gives a pitiful twitch under the fabric.

Truth be told, it’s been longer than the man would care to admit since he’d gotten laid— longer than the usual wait time. Since the pair had broken the official, label-defining aspect off with another, most of the man’s more lewd, physical fulfillments came in the form of brief flings. Nothing close to serious had bloomed in the time period until now; there'd been one woman he saw briefly for a couple of months, but the arrangement was never exclusive and never intended to flourish into anything beyond mutually beneficial fun. And given that it’s been longer than preferable since a one-night ego massage and a fresh set of scratches decorating his back, it’s really not his fault that his body responds in the way it does. Especially because the sex with her was always guaranteed to be good.

“Fuck me.”

“I’m— I’m trying to,” Y/N tells him, a pleat working between her eyebrows as she detaches the phone from her ear and slides her sloppy fingers over the screen. As her thumb swipes over the wrong digit in the numerical combination (from lack of coordination), she’s denied access and forced to try the password again with a wave of determination teeming her features. With the device finally unlocking on the third try, she squints down at the brightness of the LED and toggles into the Uber app. “...I think I'm gonna call you an Uber."

Despite the way the young woman had forgotten to switch the phone call onto the speaker mode, she still hears the way his muffled laughter spills through, and vaguely, she thinks she hears him say, "Oh, are you?"

For a moment, she doesn’t instinctually recognize the problem and wonders why the man on the other end had gone so quiet, the evidence of this painting her expression into one of bemusement as she’s simultaneously forced to contemplate the onslaught of information in the new tab and the unresolved reasoning for his voice coming out half-sized. When she finally realizes the issue (admittedly, after a lengthy, hushed pause) she flips back into the ongoing phone call and alters the setting. Finally, Y/N nods, as if he can see her, and declares, “Mhm. You need one. For me."

“…You're buying me an Uber so I can come over, and then, what? Pit stop to pick you up and go back to yours? So you can... suck on my balls?"

A tipsy, triumphant giggle bubbles out of her at the suggestion, “An’ other things. Basically. Exactly. I’m generous like that.”

She’s in the midst of scrolling through the Uber app and trying to decipher between all of the options (Comfort, XL— and at one point her finger slips to Uber Pet; she’s not sure what that means or if Harry counts) when his voice cuts in once more, this time brimming with mock-affection. "Alright, sweetheart. Why don't you share your location and I'll buy the Uber, yeah? You can owe me."

Although Harry is sure Y/N will be greatly disappointed once she realizes the destination is her own home and not his, the sound of her voice lilting, “Owe you with my mouth,” causes the edges of his lips to jolt in disbelieving amusement.

A noncommittal hum spills from his mouth as he drags the phone from his ear, sets her onto speaker, and shifts into their messages a few moments later to locate the pin she’s dropped, squinting at the brightness of the screen despite the way he’d lowered the setting in precaution before dozing.

“We’ll see.”

Waking up on the wrong side of the bed is (mostly) usually an idiom. But as Y/N cracks her heavy lids and discovers she’s somehow managed to sprawl diagonally across the mattress beneath her, she wonders if the sleeping position falls under the umbrella of the expression.

When completely bereft of memory, shame is an odd thing to find in the empty place of said memory. Emotions— specifically, those ugly, sticky ones that clot up in her chest— tend to suit tangible circumstances. Sadness, for example, sitting like a dusk behind her ribs, tends to suit an overcast stretch of a day, or an especially heavy moment. Anger is one of those uncontainable itches that mushrooms under her skin when something grates over the surface, be it her surroundings, a person, or just something that was said. Embarrassment— that fits when recalling a notably awkward situation, and it makes sense as an uncomfortable heat between her ears when recollecting something mildly mortifying. Feelings can usually be traced back to a palpable circumstance.

Shame, however, in the hollow space of the night before (a cavity that feels more like a stained shadow than anything with corners), is, Y/N would argue, strange. It’s like a lamination to the echo, sort of. Residue left on an imprint where she can’t quite iron the fuzzy edges, or the… core. It all feels like a very uncomfortable ghost and sits on her chest like a fat anvil.

That part comes third to the nausea, which comes second to the confusion. In that order.

Y/N wakes up with her topsheet tangled over her legs and her back sticky in sweat. As she struggles to adjust to the gilded sunbeams sifting through the cracked blinds, she recognizes that she’s managed to either fall asleep with her head on one corner and her feet on the opposite, or twisted across the mattress mid-REM cycle. Part of the reason her lower half is currently ensnared has to do with her jeans being only half kicked-off, dangling from her calves. Her bedroom door is cracked open and there’s a false eyelash stuck to the pillowcase.

Truth be told, she doesn’t entirely remember the night before. It’s all an indistinct blur of cheap vodka and bright lights. She remembers going out to the bar, yes. Getting ready in front of the mirror, folded over over the bathroom sink as she applied her lipliner. She remembers her friends coming over and the way they’d all shared an Uber, and she remembers thinking the price was steeper than expected, even split between the four of them. She remembers sitting down at the bar, and she thinks she might remember shots (granted, the educated guess takes less memory and more dot connection to be sure about that one), and then…

Things get hazy and smudged from there. Every detail after a few drinks (how many had it been? seven? eight?), down to her finding her way home melts into a smear, and she can’t quite seem to pull the colors or the shapes apart into anything reasonable.

Sluggishly, the young woman lifts her head, only to discover a cobwebbing pulse across her temples that splits across and murmurs along the back of her skull. Planting the palm of her hand to brace and lug herself onto all fours only furthers the mystery; three of her press-ons (right pointer, ring, pinky) are missing. Her tired joints crackle as she clambers, denim pant legs still drooping over the foot of the bed before she clumsily kicks the jeans off. For a moment, she just crouches on her bed like that, sweaty, nauseous, and entirely too groggy to even feel the same caliber of pathetic she’d feel were she in a better state of mind. It’s not often that Y/N goes out (beyond brunches and trivia nights that end before 10 PM), and the last time she’d muffled her memory with intoxication to a mirroring degree must’ve been all the way back in college, so the disorientation is not only unfamiliar, but something the girl had grown to be entirely unaccustomed to.

The consequences— although untraceable— seem to hit a little too close to the TGIF music video, although the young woman doesn’t have any particular memories of dancing on a tabletop or kissing anyone. And given that there’s no stranger to be found beside her in bed (or the floor, on account of her bed-hogging, full-body sprawl), she doubts she’ll be finding anything close to hickeys. Bruises, however, aren’t out of the question just yet, and there is, in fact, a pounding in her head. As she stretches her shoulders and crawls up onto her haunches, she discovers that she’s also managed to nail the smells like a minibar line— it sticks to her skin, her hair, and it’s really no wonder considering that she’s still half-clad in the clothes from the night before.

The shame starts prickling on her hobble to the bathroom. With her tired muscles aching around her joints, her legs wobble as if she’s a fawn taking its first, uncoordinated steps, but she’s too muddled with the soporific sludge still sitting in her veins and way too dazed by the entire situation to really care how graceful she looks. It comes like an afterthought and creeps into the liquidy recesses of her brain as she aimlessly reaches out for the shower handle, not bothering to peel the curtain back and hardly cracking her eyes. If she can’t even recall what had occurred the night prior, she can’t imagine what she’d done in that frame of mind. Although she’d left her jeans strewn in a pile somewhere beside her bed, she still has the rest of her outfit to disrobe, and Y/N starts by tucking her fingers under the hem of her top and pulling it over her head. The motion causes her to stumble slightly off balance, and she grips the top of the toilet for purchase with one arm pulled free of the article and the other half still bunched under her armpit. A quiet groan spills from her mouth as she disentangles the tee, and then she shimmies out, discards her bra, and slips her panties down her thighs before stepping out.

Getting into the shower is a feat of its own. Utilizing her palms for guidance and support along the tiles, she manages to clamber over the wall of the bathtub without slipping and cracking her skull. Although whatever had transpired the night before vaguely haunts her (and leaves her in a current general state of carelessness), the thought of someone discovering her in her bathtub, naked and unconscious, is mortifying enough to warrant a special degree of caution.

The scalding water pelting against her back and flooding down her clammy skin, her tired muscles, works favors for the knots she’s managed to work in, but ultimately does little for the tender throb along her temples and the creeping sense of nausea curdling under her diaphragm. As she cranes her neck to let the heat batter her scalp and spill across her heavy eyes, dousing her lashes, Y/N expels a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. She stretches her hand up to run it back along her crown through the matted tangles she’s sure have been left to decorate the back of her skull, and as her fingers cut an unusually short circuit through the sopping bundles of hair, she foggily squints her eyes open. Under the flood, her gaze screws. Scrubbing the heels of her palms against her weary, aching sockets— surely further smudging the sloppy remnants of the makeup she’d painted on the night prior— and pursing her lips to blow through the water cascading across her airways, Y/N reaches to tug her wet hair over one shoulder. A cold, gut-wrenching seedling of doom burgeons between her ribs as she rakes her fingers through once more and is met (this time, with full, unignorable certainty) with a jagged, uneven drag of ends. The hair she touches is indisputably shorter than she remembers. It’s irrefutably, considerably trimmed down from what it was only last night. This haircut doesn’t belong to her. It shouldn’t.

Despite her grogginess, the sudden shock provides enough clarity for her eyes to snap open under the warm stream as her fingertips comb frenziedly. While Y/N may be confused, she’s quite positive she’s not crazy— and if she’s not mistaken, there’s a significant chunk of hair missing from her head. The uneasy seedling blooms apart into alarm, and the longer she spends desperately tugging on the locks, hoping to find more where there are none, the further she spirals. Frantically, the young woman twists over her shoulder to turn the water off, and she nearly topples forward on her slippery feet as she steps out of the tub. On her drowsy beeline to the shower, she had bypassed the mirror entirely, but as she takes the first look of the morning into the direction of the sink, her discovery dislodges a startled squawk from the back of her parched throat. Messy chunks of hair decorate the top of the sink— little trimmed dustings pool in the bowl, while lengthier, more concerning bundles lay surrounding it. Some had even fallen onto the floor, and she risks a glance at her wet feet, the girl realizes she’d somehow managed to drag stray pieces into the shower with her. Or picked them up on her hasty way to the mirror. In all honesty, she can’t decide which is better or worse.

In the mess of severed hair on the sink, there’s a pair of kitchen shears that’d been left behind, its destructive arms still open like an omen. With the short burst of relief the shower had granted her (and, unfortunately, her hasty exit), the mirror hadn’t had enough time to fog over. A thin, incipient coat of residual steam clings to the surface, and what Y/N finds staring back at her when she blinks up at her own reflection, eyes already dewy, horrifies her.

Really, the connection between the soggy severed ends coasting her fingers and their obvious evidence wouldn’t take any astronomically impressive detective work, but the connection still plucks a sharp sound of dismay from her tired vocal cords. Her hair isn’t necessarily gone— probably only about half of it (which, in hindsight, is a sort of relief)— but Y/N gains no ease from this. Ducking her chin as she surveys, threading her fingers through the choppy remains, the young woman feels her pulse hammering up from her chest, into her throat, and settling into her panging temples. The longer she investigates, the more the horror amplifies. She’s managed to hack something close to a bob, just resting over her shoulders, with one side being slightly longer than the other and a long, rattail-like strand sticking from the midst of the shorter side. There’s a distinct lack of blending, and the ends more resemble the DIY-sliced end of a hair-tied ponytail than anything socially acceptable. And although the front isn’t nearly as unsalvageable as the tresses embellishing her bathroom sink (and floor) suggest, it’s the back of her head that’s the problem. As she twists her chin and leans over the counter, still bare and dripping into the bowl, Y/N finds that the back is significantly shorter than the front. Not only that, but as she strokes the shaking pads of her fingers up along the back of her scalp, patting to gauge the damage, she unearths an enormous, tufting bundle she’d managed to clip nearly to the root. Another stunned noise climbs up her throat (swallowed by a sob shortly after) as she wildly tugs at the sheared clump.

If not for the dread Y/N feels blooming apart in her chest and the sickly sense of nausea crawling up from her stomach, the view in the mirror would be comical. And it almost is, in a horror-movie sense— with her naked skin still coated in sweat, a thin layer of (now lukewarm) shower water, (and probably spilled alcohol), her mascara-smudged, red-rimmed, aching gaze, and a haircut that looks more like a hazing ritual than a new, chic look to debut for the season, the girl looks like something straight out of an M. Night Shyamalan motion picture. For a moment, all Y/N manages is a long blink at her reflection. Her lips quirk deliriously as an airy, maniacal string of huffs escape her mouth, then downturn sharply before she buries her face into her hands. The deep breath she coaxes does little to soothe the tremor in her shoulders or the belly-pulsing racket behind her ribcage.

She doesn’t know how to mend this. And in this moment, saturated by the consequences of her own misremembered actions, Y/N believes there is truly no way to mend this. How could she be so insanely stupid? How did she not only allow herself to drink into a stupor, but to somehow justify such a horrible idea? What is she supposed to do? Step outside, go to a nearest salon and flippantly try to explain the rat’s nest garnishing her scalp? She can never go outside again.

She has work tomorrow.

The revelation siphons a fresh wave of sobs. It’s already nearly impossible to think with the throbbing along her forehead, nevermind try to navigate the cataclysm her drunk self had left behind. Once more, she groans into her palms as she tries to build a bit of her composure from the puddle it’d welled apart into, sniffing as she lifts her face and wipes her nose. There’s no sense in self-pity, and despite the way shock still thrums through her bloodstream and leaves her limbs jittery, this reaction does nothing close to problem-solving. Disgusted with the view of her own appearance, Y/N grimaces and reaches for the scissors. She twists her fingers into the longer strand peeking from the tousled, wet mess, which brushes against her skin like a grating irritant, and gingerly snips at the cluster to, at the very least, remove the unsightly piece and blend it into whatever disarray she’s left. The alteration does little to repair the wreck, but the bundle of strands— landing by the drain as she wriggles her digits— no longer tickle her skin.

Chewing into the gummy lining along the inside of her cheek, Y/N contemplates possible solutions, the urge to get sick still igniting along the column of her throat and causing a salty tang to well under her tongue. When a possible course of action sparks between the rusty cogs of her brain, however, the girl feels as though it’s smacked her between the eyebrows. She’s not entirely sure why this thought wasn’t one of her first, and it’s a long shot given… well, everything, but it’s worth a try nonetheless. With the heel of her palm pressing to the tip of her nose to stifle her sniffling as she blinks the residual wetness off her gaze and her clothes still left in a haphazard pile beside the chaos of her sundered hair, Y/N nearly trips over her own slippery feet on her way back to the bedroom in search of her phone.

The silver lining to her morning, thus far, is that she at least had her head screwed on well enough to leave her phone somewhere accessible (the nightstand, where she hadn’t bothered to reach upon waking)— though the victory is only a small one. Swiping the lockscreen open, thumbing in her passcode, and sifting through her contacts, Y/N opens up her conversation with Harry. She’s not sure that he’s even available to be of aid, but if his work schedule has remained the same—

heyyyyygdg

liften lidten. i eant you

plsz like. i ab so hotny

whu asm i at my houee?????

helo’n!!!nnb

u try hiufh i was toubd tk yours???,

will yoj okeae cobe over !?’m

plsdssss

i want yoi ao bad rn. wanns sucj uou

At the view of the text messages, labeled with a variety of time-stamps ranging from midnight to three in the morning, another mortified sound bubbles out of Y/N, and her brows furrow as the wisping horror calcifies. She doesn’t remember sending these, not one of them— and frankly, given that she was typing in some sort of liquor-induced code language, the girl is hardly able to decipher what any of it actually means.

The majority of what she’s able to interpret is either some variant of her practically begging the man to come over or, notably, a last ditch admission on how she wants to suck him. The messages, to make things worse, have no response (fittingly, of course, considering their nature), but when she scrolls through her phone history, she discovers three outgoing calls, limned in red (indicating that they were never answered), and another (the first) that’s visibly evident had lasted seventeen minutes. Y/N scrubs a palm over her face. She has no interest in imagining what topics of conversation this seventeen minute call entailed, but given the unseemly content of the messages she had sent out, she thinks she might be able to reasonably deduce the general genre.

With the incriminating onslaught of texts, Y/N hesitates over his contact, her thumb hovering over the screen. Despite the way she can’t remember what was said, she’s self-aware enough to know that whatever words were drunkenly exchanged would be enough to dismantle her sober dignity, and judging by the way her ex-boyfriend hadn’t responded, he probably had no interest in speaking with her for the foreseeable future. It’s probably better, Y/N thinks, to let whatever had occurred settle with silence and grace. And then in the corner of her periphery, she catches the reflection of herself in the full-body mirror nestled into the corner of the room; denuded, trembling on a simultaneous kick of adrenaline and residual exhaustion, soaking hair still chiseling at her fragile sanity. Y/N presses the call button.

With the speaker pressed to her damp ear and her teeth apprehensively gnawing into her thumb, the young listens to the line trill, indicating that the call is ringing. It’s a positive sign— it indicates that he hadn’t blocked her contact altogether after the illegible slew of texts, and he wasn’t immediately ducking her call, either. To her dismay, however, he doesn’t pick up, and as the call gets directed to his inbox, Y/N contemplates hanging up. However, after the lengthy tone, Y/N hesitates. Her brows pleat pensively as she tries to dislodge into some form of coherence, internally kicking herself over her lack of preparation. How is she supposed to explain this eloquently, exactly?

“Hey, Harry,” she starts, clearing her throat and cringing at the way her voice wobbles, “Um. You’re probably sleeping, which is understandable. It’s… kind of early. Or… you’re ignoring me, which is… also understandable, probably. I don’t really—? I don’t remember what I said last night, so… I’m sorry. I was pretty drunk, so I was probably really annoying. Um. Sorry. Anyways, um. If you’re not ignoring me, I could really use your help, actually. I kind of…”

Y/N shifts her weight from foot to foot, pausing to chew into the short press on nail (still clinging, by miracle) on her middle finger nervously, “Well, I don’t even know how to explain it, really,” a sardonic, empty laugh spills out of her and a shudder rolls across her shoulders as she takes a deep breath to stifle the obvious quiver working into her tone, “because I don’t remember, but… I cut my hair last night, I guess. Like, myself. And, um, it’s bad. Like, really, really bad. But anyways, I was hoping, if you weren’t busy, maybe you could help? Or if you work today just tell me to fuck off, I don’t know. …Or if you’re ignoring me, then you probably won’t listen to this now, anyways. Um. Okay. That’s it.”

With the blunt conclusion to her voicemail, Y/N pulls the phone away from her ear, ends the call, and sighs. The weary silence clinging to the room hugs clings to her skin, and the draft that brushes against her from the air vent reminds her that she’s still ridiculously naked and still soaking wet, practically dripping water onto the shaggy carpet like a wet dog. She flings her phone onto the mattress with another huff. It lands face down, and the availability of both hands allows her to sink them into her hair once more, pulling at the strands by the root in frustration.

No. She can’t let herself become waterlogged by a fresh wave of these feelings, she reminds herself, because she’ll never reach a resolution in this state. Granted, no amount of brainstorming can allow her to find a quick fix in the confines of her apartment, besides maybe a genie lamp that will miraculously bind her hair back onto her head. And summon some caffeine, she thinks wryly. Wistfully, she casts her gaze onto the abandoned cellphone. The probability of her ex not only listening to the call before noon (given how late she’d kept him up with her inebriated nonsense), having the day off from work, and simultaneously agreeing to go out of his way to her this favor is just about as much of a long-shot as an ancient wish-dispenser. The details falling into place feel like the kind of perfect storm only wishful thinking and a teapot from Aladdin can dream up. Still— the young woman reasons, palming over her face and stroking back through the roots along the top of her scalp, where her hairdo feels the most comfortingly familiar— sulking and rotting in her own negative emotions isn’t a productive approach, and the very least she could do to start her day is to complete some skincare and stop pacing in the nude.

By the time Harry arrives— unannounced— Y/N has managed to pace a handful of circles beside the foot of her bed, properly rinsed the remnants sticking to her skin from the night before, brushed her teeth (and the taste of cheap liquor off the back of her tongue), changed into a sweatsuit with the hood pulled over her head and tied around her mildly crestfallen face, chugged a couple packets of liquid-IV, and paced a few more times around the living room. In that order. The nausea is still sitting like a wadded warning in the pit of her stomach, and checking her phone after her shower to find no response from Harry had only intensified the sensation tenfold, so she’s yet to put something in her stomach. She’s got her teeth lodged against her knuckles and she’s contemplating the the layout of her living room furniture (a pointed distraction, lest her emotions bubble back up and surge her into another inconsolable state) when a casual knock thrums from the other side of the front door. A furrow works between her brows. She hesitates at the sound, and she digs her phone out of her pocket to check for any missed announcements. Just as her notifications had been fifteen minutes prior, the screen is empty (besides a new pop-up reminder from a game and a Facebook alert pointing out the birthday of someone she hasn’t seen since high school), so whoever is at her door isn’t an anticipated guest as far as she’s aware. Y/N wracks her brain— she doesn’t have any deliveries scheduled to arrive today, and she hadn’t ordered any takeout. She can’t imagine facing a stranger in this state. Although her hair is covered (tightly, might she add, courtesy of the way she’d tied the draw string around her face— a precaution despite her lack of guests), she looks as if she’s been run over by a bus (and then reversed over, for good measure), and her somersaulting nervous system causes her to jitter like she’s going through an extreme bout of withdrawals. To put it bluntly, she sort of looks deranged.

With these thoughts clouding her mind, Y/N doesn’t immediately answer the door. Another knock doesn’t immediately come, but a firmer— though, still relatively relaxed— rap hums through the wood a few moments later. Cautiously, the girl makes her way over to the door, fingering at the chainlink and unslotting the lock before she cracks the door open, dewy irises brimming with worry.

As the door pries open under the tug of her fist (the other hand planted flat against the heavy wood), through only a slight gap, she can immediately make out that it’s Harry on the other end. The view surprises her, considering he had given no notice of his impending arrival (or even spared any acknowledgement towards the message she’d left in his inbox), and although his face is one she’s relieved to see (under the shock)— one she intended and openly invited to see— rather than immediately opening the door the entirety of the way and letting him in, she lingers in the small rift. Like this, with the hood pulled taut over her head and the comical way she ogles him from behind the door wordlessly, the interaction is ridiculous.

The thing is, despite the way there’s no immediate need to impress the man (he practically knows her inside and out, and she has no interest in rekindling anything serious with him), the full weight of what this means— of the way Harry will inevitably see what she’s done with her head and probably laugh— settles and solidifies the longer she stares at him. It makes her stomach squirm and intensifies the uncomfortable static that the combination of liquor, anxiety, and her empty morning stomach had caused.

Despite the way she can idly pretend this man has seen her at her worst, there’s probably nothing in their past that can top the appearance she shrouds under the loungewear. And to make things worse yet, with the memory of her obscure (blatantly sexual) texts, slight regret prickles within her at the fact she’d asked him to come at all. She still doesn’t remember what she’d told him, but the implicating texts cause embarrassment to buoy up. Because of this, Y/N doesn’t immediately invite him in— she saturates in the onslaught of unfavorable emotions and takes a second to collect herself.

He’s leant against the outer edge of the doorframe, on the same side where she’s peeled the door back, and although she can’t see much of him with the close proximity and the limited range of the door blocking him out, Y/N can tell he looks significantly better than her. Physically, mentally, …amnesia-wise. His burnt umber curls aren’t even sleep-mussed— he’d obviously taken the time out to style them (which is no surprise, really)— and she thinks she can make out the logo of a Rolling Stones graphic tee. The jet strap of a duffel is slung over the same shoulder he leans on, and the dark bands of his lashes shift as his irises pore over her …interesting appearance in miniscule motions. A crinkle worms between his eyebrows at the strange behavior (in particular, the way she’s hiding behind the half-cracked door like he’s a stranger knocking in the middle of the night), and when they relax back into place the edges of his pink lips twist up softly, dimples folding into place beside his grin.

“Morning, sunshine.”

Y/N blinks slowly, her shoulders slipping at the soft-natured sarcasm and casual glee lacing his words. After another moment with only her hooded head peering and blinking silently through the slim space, the young woman takes a step back and pulls the door open the rest of the way. A grogginess is still hooked to her vocal cords and prompts her to clear her throat before she returns the greeting (granted, considerably less cloyingly chipper), “…Morning.”

As she finally allows him the room to enter her apartment, Y/N is fully graced with the sight of his apparel and what he’s brought. Alongside the vintage band tee pulled over his shoulders, he’s sporting a pair of brown corduroys. His baby blue converse, one foot casually tucked over the other (toe down), are a slightly battered pair she vaguely recalls being in better condition, once upon a time. Just as she had suspected, the strap slotted over his shoulder belongs to a large duffel, which dangles against his hip. But perhaps what’s most surprising is what he holds in his right hand. His left (the arm he’s distributed his weight against), is tucked into the front pocket of his trousers. The right, however, is holding a cardboard drink carrier with two beverages stacked into it. It’s balanced on his palm, and the broad size of his hand makes the task look significantly easier than it would be if the girl was attempting to do it herself. Between the drinks, a little paper bag is nestled, and Y/N imagines it’s a pastry of some sort. One of the drinks is an opaque, cardboard cup (a smidge smaller than its counterpart, and she believes it’s probably that black coffee concoction he’d frequently opted for in the mornings), while the other is a plastic, iced variant that suspiciously resembles her usual recipe of choice. The sight alone (and the reminder of just how exhausted and hungry she is) causes her stomach to grumble.

As the curly-haired brunette kicks off the doorframe to his full height and steps over the threshold into her home, he takes his hand out of his pocket and plucks the little bag out from between the beverages, holding it out into her direction.

“Sweet treat,” he nudges with his chin, then raises the carrier a bit in emphasis, “and a bit of caffeine for you.”

Accepting the breakfast offering and peeling it open to find a croissant inside (the same one she had always ordered from the cafe), Y/N feels a warmth spiral and pull apart in her chest pleasantly at the soft kindness. In this state, the unexpected (though practically gravely necessary) delivery is incredibly considerate, and chips at her initial guardedness. She tugs a bit of the flaky dough from the corner and sticks it past her lips as her counterpart sets the carrier onto the kitchen peninsula, dislodging the drinks and setting hers out onto the tile as she chews.

Y/N covers her mouth with her hand. “I’m— thank you.”

Harry takes a sip from the cardboard cup as he kicks off his chucks and toes them against the entryway, “You’re welcome.”

“That’s really—” Y/N swallows and sets the crinkling bag onto the counter beside her designated beverage before she picks up a straw from the carrier and tears its wrapping off. She tucks one end into the open lip and churns the end along the bottom, blending the darker shade that’s sunk there, “Nice. …Of you.”

Although her brain still feels as though it’s crumbled apart in her skull (leaving her thoughts choppy and the speech flowing out of her somewhat graceless), she is grateful— and far more enthusiastic over the kindness than her body language and tone suggest. In all honesty, she’s still sort of reeling over his sudden arrival more than anything, but instead of pointing it out, her eyes become too caught up on him to multitask. Because at the moment, shamelessly ogling him and forming a lighthearted comment on his lack of communication takes a level of concentration she can’t muster. She’s not trying to ogle him— there’s no need for it. He’s been inside of her countless times, she used to wake up next to him almost every morning, and the pair have a past that doesn’t warrant this kind of special attention. The fact of the matter though, is that Y/N hasn’t seen him in probably well over a month, and this morning, he looks good.

Actually, he always looks good, so there’s nothing particularly jarring about it. But the way the chiseled musculature stretched across his inky, bare arms flexes, the view of his sharp jawline as he ducks his chin to direct his attention toward the task of discarding his shoes, the way little curls sit around his ears, and the way his eyelashes sit over the crests of his cheekbones and his vibrantly forest-like eyes…

Well, it’s a lot to visually absorb in a morning. Especially in such a haze. Of course, what snaps her out of the trance are his words.

His hands settle on his hips and his dark brows furrow in contemplation as he turns to face her,“Is your heater broken again?”

Last she’d checked, it wasn’t. No. But the prompt causes her to ward off a pseudo chill, and Y/N sets her beverage onto the counter, wrapping her arms around herself. Once more, she clears her throat, “No. Why? Is it cold?”

Slowly, Harry sets one foot in front of the other into her direction, “No. But.” Then, the next, until their proximity has decreased enough for him to reach out and gently, jestingly tug on the drawstring tied taut under her chin. A lopsided half-smile tugs up the corners of his mouth before he schools it down and lets his eyebrows climb his forehead, “You’re about one layer short of a snow storm, there.”

The pointed comment at her wardrobe choice— and the reminder of what hides beneath— dampens anything fuzzy within her, and instead kindles inklings of the same unease she’d been struggling to swallow since she’d cracked her eyes open. The evidence of this teems into her tone as she plants her hands onto the fabric coating her head, and trepidation swirls her irises before they skirt to the side. “It’s so …bad.”

“Mm. So I’ve heard.”

He cocks his head before he takes a deep breath, hints of teasing working into his tone as he shrugs the duffel into a more comfortable position, “Come on, then, Spears. Can’t be worse than the meltdown I’m imagining, now.”

A little frown tucks down the corners of her lips as the playful taunt settles in. Truth be told, the young woman is already wary to reveal what decorates her head, and the mocking nickname, while good natured, implies that Harry doesn’t quite grasp the gravity of the situation. She’s sure he’s going to make fun of her once he sees what she’s done, and she doesn’t think she can handle the ridicule on top of the way her stomach is already churning.

“It’s not funny,” Y/N declares indignantly, arms crossing over her chest defensively, “I’m serious.”

While Harry had listened to her voicemail with a wry sense of amusement unspooling within him and had come to her rescue (both physically and metaphorically), he had deemed it only fair that he got in a bit of ribbing as compensation for his troubles. He had anticipated she wouldn’t feel well (given her slurred serenading the night prior, the hour, and his general knowingness of the way she rarely let herself drink enough to fall into that sort of state), so he’d stopped by the café the two used to frequent in order to grab a set of bonus supplies for the unexpected bonding experience. And, upon letting his gaze briefly assess the sunken, slightly darkened touch to her eyes, the sickly tinge staining her usually lively skin, and the way she had swayed on her bare feet and shuddered under her sweatsuit the moment he stepped into her home, he had recognized that he was right.

Instead of rocking now, though, her soles are planted flat with resolute determination, and her otherwise tired face is laced with a pout. Her eyebrows furrow in slight irritation, and her arms are tucked over her chest like she’s not only trying to stay warm, but has taken a protective stance as a bulwark over her dignity.

Still though, Harry knows Y/N, which in turn means that he knows the girl is prone to dramatics, and, if he’s going to be entirely candid (though he’d never admit it to her— bless his restraint), exaggerated reactions. This is the same woman that had once claimed Niall hated her because he’d been too focused on a particularly intense, timed round of imessage anagrams to acknowledge her when she’d showed up to Harry’s place once. So yes, he knows better than to underestimate her capacity for spiraling, and yes— as he takes a step closer once more and drags his thumb over her drawstring-snug hood— he’s anticipating that he’ll have to do some trimming, and some blending, and some consoling.

“Yeah, alright. What’ve you… fucked your fringe? Everybody always fucks their fringe,” Harry muses, and then he tries to wriggle his thumb up under the head covering with a teasing grin curling his mouth (only for her to bat at his hand and wiggle away), “Or have we got a bit of a Pen15 under there?”

As Y/N wordlessly leads him to the bathroom (rather than unveiling the massacre in the middle of her living room) and unceremoniously flips on the light switch, the mirth that’d buoyed in result to her flustering begins to meld with a sense of confusion. The discovery he makes there, although perhaps less shocking to Harry than it had been to Y/N, has him realizing something: judging by the sheer amount of hair both on the sink and the ground (the length of the strands, to be particular), Harry needs to reassess his expectations.

For a moment, the man doesn’t say anything, the only sound in the space being Y/N’s quiet breaths, coupled with the automatic fan whirring alongside the switch being flipped on and illuminating the small space. Slowly, he drags his socked toe through a particularly hefty pile. Some of it sticks to his foot.

“Have you actually shaved your head? …I was only kidding about the Spears shit.”

Truth be told, Harry hadn’t anticipated the …crime scene. He had chalked up the hair emergency she had drowsily described to be a set of butchered microbangs, or perhaps a drunken, DIY-trim in which the back inevitably resembled an abstract staircase. He’d anticipated potential face-framing on the schedule, and maybe a talk to convince her that layers would be necessary to soften whatever shape she’d left behind mid-blackout.

What he hadn’t assumed, however, was that a sizable portion of hair would be littering the floor tiles and garnishing the porcelain in little, fuzzy tufts. A furrow chisels his brow bone as he leans around behind her to set her beverage onto the ledge of the tub (he had tailed her with the drinks in hand), and then he dusts an empty spot off in the corner of the counter with his knuckles for his own cup.

In response to the comment, the soft noise of a slap— skin on fabric— teems the space when she allows her hands to fall against her thighs and dangle at her sides. Then, she raises them into a gesture emphasizing the severity of the situation, “A lot of it is gone.”

“Yeah, well,” Harry nods, his eyes lingering on the sink before he motions out with his own palms, “I can see that, yeah.”

He sets the duffel onto the sink and picks his beverage up to take a long, languid sip. Y/N takes a preemptive seat back onto the closed toilet lid, crossing her legs, uncrossing them, and ultimately pasting her clammy hands to her knees as if curbing the unease slowly beginning to unravel inside of her. Her fingertips dig into the cotton fabric and twist when he sets the drink back down and turns his attention onto her. As he reaches for the double-knotted drawstring, though, the young woman leans back out (hardly out of reach, really).

Her voice is adamant as she protests, and her eyebrows pinch, drawing a wrinkle in-between, “I told you! It’s bad! Don’t look.”

The motion, paired with the uncompromising panic shading her tone, coaxes bemusement into the man’s features. Slowly, he retracts his hands, and he ducks his chin down at her. “How can I fix it if I don’t look?”

“I don’t know. Just,” Y/N raises her hands (only to smack them down against the tops of her thighs again), and she screws her eyes, shaking her head, “Close your eyes and work your magic!”

In response to her dramatics, Harry muscles down the full capacity of his eye roll, only letting his gaze filter up to the poky ceiling briefly (while her own stays averted), before he lets the sigh that’s been nestling in his chest spill out.

“As flattered as I am by your faith in my abilities,” the curly-haired brunette raises his eyebrows pointedly, “my eyes, unfortunately, are a pretty necessary asset to this process. So.”

Y/N cracks one eye open. Then, the second. Her shoulders slump in resigned defeat as her ex-boyfriend smooths his thumb along a bit of her temple that peeks out, then she shakes her head up at him, chewing into her lower lip pensively. “You can’t laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“You can’t. Don’t.”

“I won’t laugh,” Harry repeats, crossing his muscly arms over his broad chest.

Y/N reaches for the beverage Harry had so thoughtfully set onto the waxy edge of the bathtub for her, ice cubes clinking against each other and the plastic walls of the cup as she tips it for a drink. After a moment, she adds, “If you laugh, I’ll start crying.”

A short burst of air slips past his nostrils in a sardonic half-chuckle as Harry shifts his weight, fingers flexing over his inked forearms as he keeps his limbs tucked, “Is this genuinely how little you think of my self-restraint? I’m getting a bit offended.”

After a final sip (for the time being), slowly, Y/N sets her cup back onto the ledge. She wipes the chilled layer of condensation that’d migrated onto her palm off against the leg of her sweats, dampening and darkening the fabric under her touch. Then, with hesitation welling along the edge of every little motion, she reaches for the knot of the drawstring. Her fingertips undo the first loop in a gingerly fashion, irises skating off to the shower tile with the demure of a disrobing maiden shedding a corset rather than a hungover twenty-something exposing an unsightly haircut. Once the first of the two knots is undone, however, rather than tugging at the length of the threaded drawstring to loosen the base, she toys the cord between her fingertips apprehensively. The sound of mock-exasperation braided into his words, alongside the way his arms unclasp for his hands to settle on his hips instead, causes her gaze to flash from the stained caulk lining the base of the bathtub beside her feet.

“Why are you edging me with your head covering?” Harry shakes his head, obviously playfully impatient in response to her slow reveal, “This is edging.”

Her expression sharpens into one of contempt and her fingers stiffen along the edge of the lace before she chastises (more of a whine than anything), “It’s not funny. Stop.”

Harry regards her carefully. Although he can’t physically see the damage, he can gauge from her obvious apprehension— the way that she tenses and the way her voice slightly wobbles on this last, repetitive reminder— that it’s a sensitive topic. This is something she’s seriously upset about, he recognizes. And while he personally believes he’s earned himself some leg room to yank her own, given the nature of his good deed, the last thing he wants to do is tip her composure off enough into an overspill. Granted, she’s not far from it and (frankly, if his observational skills are worth anything) probably wasn’t when he’d first arrived. In the frame of her puffy, dark circles, the bloodshot edges of her misty eyes are more pronounced. The tip of her nose is still somewhat tinged, and her lower lip, inevitably downturned as the edges wilt, softens into a tremble as she tells him off. The last thing he wants to see, as he fixes whatever she’s left behind, is her, soppy and sobbing; he’s here to clean up her mess, and to some extent he had anticipated to see her upset, but the view (and the thought) causes his chest to strain uncomfortably out of sheer sympathy. Funneling as much sincerity as he can muster into his otherwise jesting features (and the same softness into his tone), Harry plants his hands over the tops of her somewhat split knees, and bends his own until he’s squatted ahead of her. He meets her eye, explaining softly so as to ward off the blatant flare of emotion steeping beneath the surface.

“Right. Listen to me. M’just teasing. I understand you’re upset, but if you don’t let me fix it, I can’t fix it.”

Y/N blinks, the palms she’d set onto her lap now twisted together nervously as her wet inkpools skirt off to the side. With one hand, he pats over the two of her own, prompting her attention, and when she lets her eyes settle on his face, she comes full-tilt with the earnestness that’s thrumming there. The pilling discomfort clotting up under her skin sits thick, but as she looks down at him like that, an open quality of genuineness pooling along the vibrantly-hued textures of his gaze, and the slow, gentle note to his voice, beckoning her trust, Y/N pulls in a careful lungful of air through her nose. She does trust him— she wouldn’t have called him otherwise and subjected herself to an empty form of torment. She knows she can rely on him, and as he ducks his chin to readjust his balance and peers back up at her with the same comforting consolement, Y/N knows that the issue isn’t Harry.

“So, you’ve got to let me fix it,” he squeezes her hands— clasped together— softly under his own large palm, his pink tongue peeking out briefly to wet his lips, “And I have to see, hm?”

It’s this soft honesty that eases out her fear, and while to his ears (and her own, when she speaks the words aloud) they sound seemingly silly, the edge of vulnerability in her tone as he stands back up to full height causes the man to pause.

“What if—“ Y/N blinks up at him through her lashes, gnawing into the inside of her cheek as Harry patiently waits for her to finish the question, “you… can’t fix it?”

She finishes the statement lamely, and as much as she’s aware the worry is insignificant (given the way there’s ultimately, always some form of solution, and the fact that the man owns one of the most trending salons in the nearest fifty-mile radius), she still slides the heel of her foot along the tile anxiously. In all fairness, Y/N shouldn’t expect any less of the cockiness that Harry grants her in his response, but the lighthearted nature of the retort slices some of the distress she’s felt fermenting along her psyche.

“That’s highly offensive,” he scoffs, blurring her worries by their sharp, little edges as he preemptively unzips the duffel (full of supplies) and shakes his head down at the contents in feigned displeasure. One of his shoulders climbs up nonchalantly, and a degree of self-satisfaction laminates the latter fragment of his declaration, “I can fix anything. I’m brilliant.”

Y/N snorts.

“So little faith,” Harry clicks his tongue softly, sticking his hands into the bag and retrieving, first and foremost, a comb, a spray bottle, and a set of haircutting shears, “And here I was, thinking we had something strong going.”

“I thought you were flattered by my confidence in your abilities.”

“Well I was, and then you—“ he waves out at her with the plastic comb, shaking his head once more, this time directly at her, in a display of disappointed disapproval, “tore me down. Bit rude, that.”

With the easing jest, a bit of the young woman’s unease thaws away, and she rolls her eyes playfully. As his own pillowy mouth forms a teasing crescent, she clears her throat and channels some of her own candor into her quiet tone. She touches his forearm gently, wrapping it over his warm, softly sun-kissed skin so as to harvest his attention, and when he blinks over at her, she clears her throat sheepishly.

“I’m sorry. I trust you,” she asserts, motioning out with her other hand, “It’s just that… I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t fathom how it could be saved.”

“And you’ve,” the man ducks slightly as her touch retracts, lifting his hands and wiggling his fingers playfully in emphasis, “Not got these magic hands. So I wouldn’t expect you to.” He nudges his chin, prompting her to finish removing the hood— a task they’d paused for a round of emotional regulation. “Go on, then. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

And just as Y/N sets her fingers back onto the tip of the drawstring, all momentum collapses as she falls back into the same warning she’d already given him so many times. It must be the fourth time, now, Harry thinks dryly. Five, maybe, if he were to tally her it’s-not-funny comment, and six if he kept score of that initial protest out in her living room.

“...You can’t laugh.”

“Nothing… could possibly be more ridiculous than—“ he can’t help his genuine sigh this time, stretching his arm out a smidge to tap at the top of her head with his index finger, signaling to the taut way her hood has been pulled on, “this. Yeah? Am I laughing?”

To underscore his point, the man lets his pink lips slump into a silly, exaggerated pout, which by his standard, is the antithesis of amusement (though, as intended, it gets the corners of her own mouth to jerk). She waves him off with her hand and dampens her mirth at the stupid expression with a half-snicker, coiling the string around the pointer digit on her other hand.

“You did that thing with your mouth.”

“The thing with my mouth?”

“At the door,” Y/N maintains (the allusion, of course, is linked to the telltale purse his lips settle into when he’s obviously biting back a grin), “When I opened it. You can’t hide the thing.”

What Harry can’t smother, this time, is the amused sound of semi-confusion that hitches the start of his disagreement, “Right, I’m not sure what this thing is,” he crooks the fingers on his left hand— a universal symbol of air quotes— and he twists back to grab his coffee before he cheekily allows the innuendo to melt into the double-meaning of his statement (no fault of his own, he thinks, and fitting given the circumstances), “but I certainly didn’t do it with my mouth, because I’d reckon I’d remember doing something with that part.”

For a beat, as he brings the rim of the beverage to his lips and siphons a drink, there’s no response to his argument, and given the lewd undertow of the phrasing, he would have at least expected her to retort with a scoff. Although the mirror over the sink provides him with the view of his own reflection, it doesn’t stretch quite far enough to encompass the girl, and with the combination of his slight pivot away and her low stature on the toilet lid, she’s just low enough to evade his periphery. Curiously, Harry turns his chin, and in the process, just about spits out the liquid he’s drawn. It’s notable discipline and remarkable self restraint that curbs this, and as he sets the drink down, coughing over his swallow to stifle his initial reaction, Y/N blinks up at him, her gaze suffusing with alarm. He knocks over his chest once with his fist, subduing the rampant urge to express his disbelief with a string of softer, forced coughs, pinching his face into a pained expression and motioning out with the other arm.

“Sorry— wrong pipe.”

As he’s able to absorb the visual, with time— and in turn dampen his shock— he clears his throat, lacing his fingers through her hair and examining the work there. While the curly-haired brunette had busied himself with a casual sip, the young woman had ripped the bandaid off in the background, pulling the hood down to rest against her nape and present the haircut she’d been so unyieldingly hiding.

It’s… rough. Harry doesn’t tell her that, of course, all for the sake of sparing her feelings on the matter, but the makeshift hairdo is textbook regret and obviously the handiwork only intoxicated coordination can execute. Still, he forges his features into something as close to neutral as he can manage, narrowing his gaze into concentration as he picks through the disheveled, brutally leveled ends. The front is messy— messier than anticipated, and he imagines the back would be no better. Given the wingspan and the angle required to cut evenly, probably worse.

“Turn around,” he instructs, and as she slides around on the lid, Harry finds that his suspicions prove to be correct.

The back is… well in arguably candid terms, heinous. It’s not only lobbed unevenly, which is to be somewhat expected— it looks as if the girl had bundled strands from the back of her head upon a whim and hacked at varying lengths. Her hair is still wet from the shower he assumes she’d taken, and as he combs through the damp locks with his fingertips, he contemplates the route they could take with this foundation. Although general areas of her hair rest just over her shoulders, he finds layered pieces that sit too close to her scalp to naturally blend into anything too generous of a length. In the tense silence that’s begun to plume the room, he can practically hear her overthinking.

To fill the vacancy, he threads through her part and evaluates the pieces lying closer to her nape, “Fun night?”

The prior ease that’d warmed her tone is waterlogged by what’s obviously apprehension as he scans the back of her skull (for good reason, he supposes), “No. I’m hungover and my hair’s gone.”

Harry hums. His fingertips grasp a distinctly shorter chunk closer to the top along the back, tugging on it gently, “This bit’s fucked.”

“Thank you,” Y/N narrows her eyes at the shower tile.

“Pleasure’s all mine…” he pauses, and though Y/N can’t see him— or necessarily hear a bark of laughter or a peal of snickers in the process of the assessment— his next comment causes irritation to twist in her chest and hotly surface across the apples of her cheeks. He sounds nearly awed, “This is almost avant garde.”

“Fuck off,” she bites flatly, picking at her cuticles absent-mindedly as the annoying nature of his jest settles into her bones.

“No, really. Scissor-Seizure chic. Back’s a fucking mess, but it’s business in the front, party in the back, right?”

Y/N doesn’t say anything. Slowly, Harry cards his fingers through her hair, then bundles the strands and cups them between both palms, symbolizing the length as he envisions it. He doesn’t intend to make fun of her, not really. It’s just… there’s no better way to cope than with humor, and considering the bird’s nest he’s been tasked to work with, it’s the most instinctual form of communication he can manage.

“Gonna have to take this short,” he admits.

Crestfallen notes— though, impressively muted, Harry decides— color the girl’s tone as she weighs his confession. “Short?”

“Pixie. Nineties Winona Ryder. Or,” he shrugs, letting the jagged tresses fall free and cupping her rigid shoulders instead, massaging them, “Mia Farrow, if we’re feeling biblical.”

“Biblical.”

“Mm. Old testament. Vengeance. Sacrifice. Demon baby,” Harry purses his cushiony mouth. Then, he pulls on another distinctly shorter piece along the back (one that she’d missed in her evaluation the first time), “This bit’s giving— how do I put this delicately… evidence bag.”

“You’re such a dick,” Y/N scoffs (though she lets his hands stay on the locked up stretch of her shoulders). With the panging vexation that heats along the underside of her skin and the playfully, somewhat derisive quips he’s been sprinkling over her crisis, the full gravity of his analysis doesn’t have the room to settle in. Instead, the conclusion gets lodged somewhere between the gnarling limbs of her frustration and floats along the surface, unprocessed.

An amused sound of astonishment spills off his tongue before the words flow out, “I’m literally salvaging your head. For free. In my off-hours. And I brought you a sweet treat.”

“I told you not to laugh,” Y/N cries, her shoulders jumping under his palms as she raises her hands, even as he thumbs into a tender spot along the base of her nape to soften the blow, “You promised you wouldn’t laugh. Multiple times.”

“I’m not laughing. This is an assessment,” Harry argues, neutralizing his features with mock-seriousness, “It’s a— very delicate process.”

“And the shitty little comments are necessary, why, exactly?” she twists over her shoulder, pointedly directing a scathing side-eye up at him.

He’s not laughing. In fact, his features are possibly the most neutral she’s seen them all morning, and the nonchalant way his shoulders climb is, maybe, most infuriating of all. “Live entertainment. Obviously.”

“You know what, I really forgot what an ass you were,” Y/N grumbles, stretching forward— out of his grasp— to cradle her drink and take an exasperated gulp of the liquid past her teeth. The notion of this beverage being a thoughtful token by the man does little to soothe the seeding flicker of her temper. Before she takes her second mouthful, she tacks on, “You’re very good with the… distractions.”

“That’s alright pet, I’d hardly consider that one a top-three descriptor,” Harry returns smoothly, pursing his cushiony lips and letting them melt off into the filthily-fueled smirk the memory incites, “Besides, you seemed to remember the important bits last night. Are we opting for the Winona then?”

As her ex-boyfriend— begrudged, she reminds herself, simultaneous knight in rusty armor— cards his fingers through her hair once more, the depth to his offhand statement (and its true meaning) registers as a white-hot streak of an ache. Although an itchy curiosity scratches along the forefront of her mind and prompts her to question and decipher what exactly these important bits are and what her remembering them entails, it becomes dulled under the weight of the casual inquiry.

“Wait,” Y/N deadpans, the range of her irritation dampening as the words sink in, “The Winona is practically a Jamie Lee Curtis.”

Harry hums. If not for the mild, reignited sense of panic clawing up her esophagus, the sensation of his fingertips scraping along her scalp would be comforting. “Mm. Sort of. We can do a Linda Evangelista, too. The blonde nineties verse. Heavy fringe. Or— hear me out, here, darling. Alice Cullen.”

“With the… spiky bits?” Y/N swallows weakly. She’s suddenly very lightheaded.

“Yeah… that’s not gonna sit like that,” Harry muses. Knowing her general styling routine, best opt for the simpler route, “If you wanna style it every day, sure. Or…” he bobs his head, the notes to his tone implying that he’s aiming for realistic, “y’know. Breaking Dawn is also an attainable option.”

This is all… a lot of information to process. Abruptly. Y/N takes a deep breath, though the stretch of her lungs scarcely quiets the maelstrom of emotion threatening to surge, prickling along the backs of her eyes and the few bites of pastry churning in the pit of her tummy.

“Wait,” the young woman screws her eyes shut, taking another deep breath and holding it behind the crevices of her teeth as she attempts to gather her composure into something semi-controlled, “Okay. I need a second.”

“Sure,” Harry chimes, his words carrying an ease that insinuates he’s unaware of the current internal struggle taking place beneath his hands, “Take your time. Listen, I know we didn’t want to go the demon baby route, but if it’s any consolation, you’ve got the face for a Mia Farrow.”

It doesn’t happen immediately.

Actually, it’s a gradual decline somewhere between Take and demon, and then a steep drop-off at Mia. With all the effort Y/N had pressed upon maintaining her calm steadiness, despite the unfavorable circumstances, the resolve of the metaphorical dam harboring her emotions whittles, and it sags before it collapses. The blend of her hair predicament, the confusion molting the shape of the night before, the way her body still has a ways to go to recover (despite the two liquid-IV packets she’d chugged, the shower she’d taken, and the caffeine coupled with a portion of the croissant), alongside the revelation that she’ll have to near-shave her head just to look like a semi-presentable fragment of society, finally causes her nervous system into upheaval, and the second bout of tears she’d worked so hard to repress bubbles to the surface as the back of her throat tightens scratchily. It starts as a welling sting behind her tired eyes, and as the wetness crystallizes in beads along her waterline, one slips over, traversing her cheek, and pearling over her clenched jaw. Then, an ache that feels too close to an incipient sob curdles along the back of her tongue. She tries to swallow it— she really does. But as the back of her throat works over the blooming emotion and the weight of the morning crumbles her front, the girl can’t help the hitch in her breath or the way her shoulders tremble. As her shoulders jolt and the breath she takes burns along her chest, she squeezes her eyes shut and tips her chin to cradle her face in her palms.

And as Harry draws a circle with his thumb over a particularly tight area along the right side of her trapezius, meandering under the fabric, he doesn’t immediately recognize that the young woman’s emotions have begun to pool over. It’s only when he hears a sharp sniffle and looks down, concern etching a wrinkle between his progressively furrowing brows, that he realizes the girl is practically quaking with the way she tries to smother her sobs. Instinctively, a dull seedling of his own unease roots apart behind his ribcage, cobwebbing its tendrils out as the hand that’d settled along her shoulder slips to the side of her upper arm instead, grasping gently when he steps to the side and ducks to assess her side profile. Just as he’d thought, the girl sits crying into her hands, blatantly sucking down hiccups with the majority of her face eclipsed by the shape of her palms. Worry slopes his mouth and sharpens the crease between his eyebrows, and as he kneels beside her, he squeezes at the top of the limb comfortingly. He stitches a calm gentleness into his tone, brushing along the backs of her raised, cotton-coated forearms with the opposite palm.

“Hey. Hey. C’mon,” Harry soothes, shaking his head as she allows her sounds to intensify with the acknowledgment, dislodging a broken sob that echoes off the wall tiles, “S’just hair. Hey. Look at me.”

She allows him to twist her on the toilet lid with minimal protest— no protest, really, besides the stutter-y hum of dismay she makes into her palms, though Harry assumes that’s more directed at the circumstances than him, really— and then her wet hands. He blinks up at her, ducking his posture to fit into her eyeline with the way her chin is dipped downward.

“Hey,” he shakes his head again.

“It’s my hair,” Y/N sniffles, shaking her own from side-to-side as she mirrors the action in devastation, “And— and it’s gone.”

“Well. Now it’s my problem,” the curly-haired brunette declares. Another nonchalant shrug jolts his shoulders, and a soft grin quirks his mouth as he repeats his self-assured claim, “Lucky for you, m'brilliant.”

At the very least, this comment lures something between a laugh and another sob. A couple of tears bead and dangle from the tip of her nose, and aggregate along her soaked, bunched lower lashes. Reflexively, the man reaches for them, thumbing the ones hanging threateningly from the tip of her nose first, then under her lashes. Playfully, he curls his expression into one of dramatic disgust, sticking his tongue out as he pretends to gag and wipes the pad of his thumb against her pant leg. The theatrics (as intended), pry another— although tearful— giggle that suggests an incremental boost in her spirits. She raises her chin, scrubbing at her face with her palm, and then the back of her sleeve, sniffling once more for good measure to clear her sinuses of the build-up that’d ensued.

“Sorry,” she sounds sheepish.

“Don’t be,” Harry shakes his head, hands now planted against her knees, “S’a big chop, and I get it. It’s an emotional moment.”

He gives her another moment to compose herself, petting at her knee comfortingly as the bout of despair passes and her mood shifts, before he frowns up at her once more in a teasing, faux assertion of stern instruction. “Now, chin up, crybaby. No tears in my chair.”

“I’m on the toilet,” Y/N protests weakly, waving out with her hand as he stands and picks up the spray bottle.

He brandishes it threateningly, pointing it into her direction as if he’ll spray it anywhere besides her scalp. Then, he flicks the tip of her nose with the fingers on his other hand in reprimand, “Use your imagination, then.”

As the young woman lets him re-moisturize her hair with the spritzer, she ogles the shape of his toned tummy under the tee with the limited range of motion. His prior comment (the one he’d shared right before her barrier had deteriorated), sits in the dell of her foresight, and she chews into her chapped bottom lip as he ruffles her hair out with his fingers to soak the layers beneath.

“Do you really think I could,” Y/N blinks up at him from the sopping tendrils that had flopped over her forehead messily, “…pull it off?”

The question makes Harry pause. He sets the spray bottle back onto the cheaply marbled countertop beside him and combs her hair back off her face with his fingers, drawing her chin up with the soft tug along her wet roots. As his fingers stay tangled into the hair along her scalp, the other hand cups her jaw, the pads of his fingers gently digging into her cheeks. They chisel indents into the soft spaces beneath bone as he seemingly examines her. Although the motion is entirely platonic, the amalgam of the tender-strengthed pull at the base of her hair, the sensation of his digits squeezing into her skin and holding her face angled, and the serious expression painting his contemplative features, causes a warm flutter to ripple along her underbelly. The tip of his pinky lingers too close to her thundering pulsepoint, and her throat bobs as she wordlessly swallows.

“Yeah,” Harry murmurs, irises briefly edging to her mouth, then riding back up along the column of her nose to her eyes, “Yeah. I reckon Mia Farrow for sure.”

Y/N swallows once more. Despite his taunting comments, she knew the man only had her best interests at heart— even if they were no longer together— and she was glad she’d called him. Not only that— he was right. He was doing her a favor, going out of his way to fix her mistakes on his day off, and he’d gone as far as to console her when she broke down. Beyond everything, the duo were friends; she knew she could count on him, and for that, she was grateful. It’s with these thoughts that Y/N lets his declaration sink in, slipping her eyes shut as he releases her face and cracking them open a moment later. She waves out with her hand, clearing her throat and shimmying her shoulders as if to shake off the accumulating nerves. She was fine. She just had to hand over the reins, but ultimately, Y/N recognized that she was in good hands.

“Fine. Yeah. Just,” she sighs, simpering up at him, “Whatever you think works best. I… trust you, Harry.”

A bright beam displays his pearly teeth when his lips curl around them at the confession, and dimples bury in beside the corners of it as he picks up the comb, “Thank you. Don’t worry, I’ll make it good. All y’have to do is trust me.”

As Harry begins cutting her hair, sectioning the hair off and combing through the saturated strands before snipping at the strands, the first wet piece that lands onto her lap reignites the instinctive urge to cringe. She eyes it distractedly, only diverting her attention when the man pointedly redirects her face with his fingers on her chin as her posture starts to sink. Casually, she fingers the strand off onto the floor besides her feet with her pointer.

“I’m glad we don’t hate each other.”

A mild sense of disinterest laces his voice, although Y/N knows that it’s really concentration as he drags another piece up between two fingers and chips at it with the shears, “Why’s that?”

A little close-lipped smile curls her mouth and sheepishly suffuses her tone with the silly thought as the young woman shares it, “You’d probably give me a shit haircut just to spite me if we did.”

The sound of the scissors slicing through hair fills the room once more in the silent gap, before Harry hums. “Mm. Well, you’d have done most of the work for me.”

Y/N swallows, folding her hands together in her lap. The clusters collating haphazardly along the tops of her thighs are reaching a point of hopelessness, and she restrains the urge to brush them off, knowing the action would be a useless motion.

“That was the last one,” Harry tacks on quietly, an obvious tinge of mirth coloring his words. With the emotion that’d been mounting within the girl drained, the jesting nature of the quip doesn’t land as derisively as it had the first time, and another small simper graces her lips as she huffs. There’s another snip and another cluster of hair that tumbles before he speaks again. “How’s your mum?”

“She’s good. She, uh—“ Y/N twists her fingers together, resisting the reflex to absent-mindedly nod as she mulls, “she’s still always asking about you.”

Harry’s lips quirk crookedly at the mention, and he takes a more sizable section of her between his fingers before he knicks at it. Mums, he always was good with them.

“Did she ever finish that garden?”

“No. I think she gave up, honestly,” Y/N snorts, bobbing her head knowingly before her counterpart quickly corrects the motion by stilling her head with his hand along her jaw and his fingers against her cheeks again, “I guess cucumbers weren’t her calling.”

Harry hums, stroking his tongue along the inside of his mouth pensively, “Is she still seeing that guy with the toupee?”

“Bill is nice,” Y/N defends.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t nice,” Harry snickers, countering noncommittally, “Why do you assume me mentioning his hairpiece insinuates that he’s not nice?”

Y/N stretches her fingers, folding them together and straightening her arms out before following the direction of his fingers once more (this time, two alongside the edge of her jawline as he manhandles her to face him). “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get me to matchmake.”

“As much as I love Carol,” Harry drawls, combing another portion out and snipping at it with deft precision, “I think a full family tour would make family holidays a bit awkward.”

The insinuating joke summons a scowl to twist at the young woman’s mouth, and the implication behind the words pitch her voice into disgust, “You’re vile.”

“Yeah, alright,” His lashes flutter and his shoulders swell softly as he sighs, grinning slyly, “You said it. I’m just asserting that I don’t have the emotional fortitude to simultaneously fulfill the role of stepdad and ex-boyfriend.”

“Ugh,” Y/N groans, shifting as Harry halts his actions to guide her head back up, “I meant Bill.”

His eyebrows crinkle with humor, “Bill? Why would I wanna fuck Bill?”

“Why would you wanna fuck my mother?”

“I don’t. Hence the no-go on dual-duties.”

Briefly, the sound of the scissors working saturates the air as the duo’s half-hearted bickering reaches a halting threshold. It’s no surprise, really, that Harry is the one to shatter the lull, and no surprise either that his groundbreaking reinstigation is a wisecrack towards her mother’s lover.

“…His hairpiece is such shit, though,” Harry muses snidely, “you can be honest.”

“I’m not going to refer Bill to you.”

“S’a shame,” Harry tuts.

As her counterpart switches sections and focuses on the other side of her head, wordlessly milling around her to stand beside the bathtub, Y/N drums the pads of her fingers against the tops of her thighs.

“What about you, um,” she angles her head as Harry directs, “How’s your family?”

“Good. They’re good,” Harry exhales, blinking down as he tries to siphon recent updates to the forefront of his mind, “Gem’s good. Mum went to Majorca a few months ago.”

“Oh. That’s nice.”

Nice was an understatement judging by the variety of pictures that had been sent his way, but Harry hums an agreement.

“Yeah, she did that thing where she, like, built a beach in a bottle?” his face creases, then a wry grin shapes his mouth as he tousles his fingers through the bundle he’d focused the scissors in his hand on. The memory coaxes him to shake his head as the story unravels off his tongue, “Like those DIY-souvenirs, I guess she saw it on Facebook or something. She took a mason jar and filled it with some sand, and some water, and whatever. And then she mailed one to me.”

Her voice lilts sweetly at the endearing idea, and she pauses the insistent drum pattern her fingertips had settled on to gush, “That’s so cute.”

Cute, Harry contemplates, is perhaps not the first word that comes to mind as he recollects the splintered, grit-layered debris he’d unearthed in the middle of his living room. Bewildered, maybe, would be a better term. He’d received the overly-duct taped package weeks prior, gingerly prying it apart under the pretense of the souvenir his mother had called to hint about. Given the battered corners of the parcel— ink-stamped fragile in blocky, red letters— he really should’ve anticipated no different, but imagine his confusion when he’d pulled apart the cardboard flaps, expecting a parchment-hugged mug (or something reasonably within its vicinity), only to stare down at a jagged heap of what looked to be coastal scraps.

“Right,” Harry nudges his chin, “Sweet, little idea, in theory. I opened a box full of broken glass and sand.”

“No.”

“Yeah. I didn’t have the heart to tell her, she kept calling and asking about the piece of Majorca she shared with me,” Harry purses his lips to choke down another string of snickers, “And I think she would’ve expected me to show it displayed up on my window sill if I told her I got it, so I’ve just stuck to the ‘lost in transit’ bit.”

Although Harry had done a decent job of restraining his own, Y/N can’t exactly share the victory, clamping a hand over her mouth as an airy cascade of giggles crawls through the cracks of her fingers, “That’s horrible.”

Harry hums, mirth slathering his syllables as he repositions her head unceremoniously, “Yeah. M’still not sure why she didn’t just opt for a postcard.”

As Harry encourages Y/N to turn towards the tub to tackle the back of her scalp and its offensive remains, Y/N opts to wriggle her toes against the porcelain ledge of the basin instead.

“Did you hear Carson and Jen split?” she mentions offhandedly, picking at a loose thread along her knee.

“What?” Harry murmurs, although the inquiry is only half-hearted with artificial disbelief, and she imagines his eyebrows furrowing in that fabricated, hollowed-interest way they do sometimes when he had seen something coming from a mile away, “But they had a joint Pinterest board.”

“I know. Tragic,” Y/N sighs theatrically, focusing on her cuticle when the thread snaps, “All that effort arranging rustic charcuterie aesthetics for nothing.”

“Goes to show,” his speech wavers as his attention permeates with focus; he stretches around the counter carefully, bending at the waist to target a section along the farthest area of her scalp, “artisanal cheeses can’t save a relationship.” His actions halt as he considers, “Weren’t they going to start a business?”

“Oh, they were,” Y/N confirms, perking up as the opportunity to shed light upon the most interesting aspect of the latest hot gossip between their mutual acquaintances, “And she did. Took the name and everything.”

This time, Harry sounds genuinely piqued, notes of incredulous scandal blanketing his response, and Y/N smirks, “She didn’t.”

The patter of her heart rabbits up in pace when he fondles her by the throat nonchalantly— loosely, only hardly gripping— in an effort to adjust her posture. It’s not a motion that’s intentionally meant to incite anything lewd, however the sensation of his chilled rings grazing along the soft skin of her neck, coupled with the way he clasps over her windpipe— not pressing, just lingering— causes the organ behind her ribcage to thrum with a little more heat as the telltale warmth of her body’s reaction sinks low in her tummy and peels apart between her thighs. Y/N inhales carefully, mindful of the way his touch is pressed so close to her. She’s not entirely sure when her nervous system decided to fire on all four cylinders and absorb these touches as advances, but she needs to get a handle on herself.

A waver rides along the edge of her voice as she starts to speak, but she swallows thickly and muscles it down by clearing her throat and pressing her thighs together in a way she hopes is imperceptible, “She— she did. Board Haus, on Tiktok. She has, like, 17K.”

“Oh, that’s cold,” Harry shakes his head, the same traces of entertained shock lacing his voice as he removes his hand, “He was so proud of that name, too.”

With the offending hand no longer stretched across the column of her throat, kindling a prickling in her tummy and coaxing a scorching heat to suffuse the apples of her cheeks, Y/N feels the inklings of lust that’d begun clouding her train of thought dissolve. Instead, she’s able to stay as purely amused with the story as she had been when she’d begun sharing it.

“He was,” the girl agrees, and her nose crinkles on the latter fragment of her statement, “…It’s kind of a shit name, though.”

Harry pauses. This time when he speaks, there’s a pointed, suspicious quality to his tone, “You said I was being a dick when I pointed it out.”

At the callback, Y/N stiffens. She had implied something of the sort at the time, she remembers, yes, but in all fairness, the admonishment was linked to the way he’d disclosed his criticism towards the topic at hand. Biting back the nervous laugh that threatens to skate up her throat, she winds her fingers into another loose thread she’s discovered, “Well, you didn’t have to say it to his face.”

Instead of continuing with the haircut, she finds that Harry has pulled his hands away altogether in what seems to be indignant offense. “All I said was that I thought Board Haus was a little stiff.”

Despite the way her face is averted from her counterpart, Y/N restrains her eye roll, “You told them that if you saw Board Haus on a storefront, you’d assume they were selling plywood or pussy.”

“They asked what I meant by stiff,” Harry shrugs, as if the borderline insulting critique had been justified all along. For a moment, he narrows his gaze at the back of her head and purses his mouth as he mulls. Eventually, the man focuses back onto the task at hand, gathering a cluster of hair and trimming at it as he muses, “Funny. Somehow I was mean for saying it out loud, and here you are, months later, echoing my exact opinion as if it’s an original thought. That’s some hypocrisy.”

“How am I a hypocrite, exactly?”

“You’re plagiarizing my honesty,” Harry deadpans.

“How am I—“ Y/N curbs her headshake, huffing as he combs the prior section out and focuses on another, choosing to reason bluntly with the childish antics the trip down memory lane had incited, “we can agree the name is bad. That’s allowed.”

“Sure. But you didn’t have my back that day, and now you want to hop on the bandwagon,” Harry notes stubbornly, “Turn back around.”

“There is no bandwagon,” the girl argues as she slides back around to face him on the toilet lit, motioning out with her hand emphatically, “It’s objectively a bad name for a charcuterie business.”

“And that’s what I said, but you—“ Harry taps on her forehead with the pad of his index finger for emphasis, “chewed my ear off the second they went to the bar.”

“There was a nicer way to say it.”

“Oh, like not saying anything at all? At least I tried to help them.”

“Well, maybe we can agree now that we were both wrong,” Y/N resigns, huffing. Though there’s no genuine animosity to the childish back and forth (considering that the argument is both insignificant in nature, and long-expired), she opts to compromise, “17K must mean the name isn’t all that bad, right?”

“Oh, I’m not wrong,” Harry declares resolutely, a scowl shaping his features at the notion alone, “Tiktok is an illiterate cesspool, have you seen those comment sections? I’ve never seen such a flagrant lack of grammar. People probably aren’t reading the name at all.”

And, well. Y/N can’t exactly disagree with him there. She lets her eyes slip shut as he works on her bangs, nostrils flaring softly with each breath she takes in. Finally, she breaks the silence. “It’s a shit name.”

“Fucking awful.”

The vehement agreement behind his answer causes a soft huff to slip from her nose in amusement, and a lopsided smile to snake its way along Harry’s mouth. For a few, uncharacteristically quiet moments, the only sound in the jaundiced bathroom, once again, is the whisper of the scissors and the telltale crisping noise of hair strands shedding from her head.

Harry finds he enjoys this. Not the silence, necessarily— but the inherent domesticity to their squabbling. The soft way it fills space, and the way they spill into it with a comfortable, longtime familiarity. It’s intimate in a way he’s recently lacked. Not that he has any inherent interest in opening that Pandora’s box, but. He quietly regards her soft face as her eyes stay shut, smoothing his hand back through her wet hair in mulling content. It’s a branch of connection that doesn’t need second thoughts. It’s just… there.

“Is Niall still dating that girl that tried to sell me mushrooms at your birthday?” Y/N ponders aloud. Her eyes are still closed.

The prompt coaxes him to wrack his brain as his brows pleat. “Mushroom girl… Jacqueline? No. No, they broke it off ages ago. She moved to France.”

“Oh?”

“He’s seeing some… ex-amish girl now, I think.”

“That’s… interesting.”

“No,” Harry corrects, combing his fingers through the strands, shaking his head softly as he surveys his work, “That’s not right. Mennonite. She’s alright.”

“Better than Jacqueline?”

“Any and everyone is better than Jacqueline.”

Her next inquiry, though, catches him slightly off guard.

The young woman crosses her feet, hands tucked over her knees, as she clears her throat and asks, “What about you?”

Although she forges as much nonchalance as she can muster into the question, the true nature of her curiosity is obvious enough (given the phone call he’d shared with her last night, whether she’s willing to acknowledge it or not), and the thought causes the edges of his lips to twist up smugly.

“What about me?”

“Are you,” her tongue peeks out from between her own set to wet them, “seeing anyone?”

“Why?” his eyebrows climb his forehead as he lobs her own words back at her, “Jealous?”

As Y/N cracks her eyes open and discovers the self-assured look glazing his face, her cheeks simmer and she averts her gaze to the baseboard off to the side as she scoffs, “You wish.”

“No. I’m not,” Harry answers her question. Now, with the scissors discarded off to the ledge of the counter— and she assumes, the haircut mostly completed— he tucks his hand into the duffel and fishes out a styling product, “There’s this girl at this juice bar that keeps offering me complimentary ginger shots, but I think it’s more customer service than courting ritual.”

He takes the little bottle and pumps a dime-sized portion of product out onto his palm, then rubs his hands together to spread and heat it before raking his slick fingers through the hair along her scalp. Even without a glimpse of the new look she’s debuting, nor the feel of the hair against her own digits, the girl can feel that her hair is significantly shorter. While the thought initially pains her, she focuses on the sensation of his hands carding along the top of her head to muscle it down.

“What about you?” Harry volleys back.

“No.” Even with her eyes slipped shut, she detects the self-satisfied inklings no doubt shaping his lips. “Stop smiling.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. You’re doing the thing again.”

“What thing?”

“That smug little thing with your mouth.”

As Harry finishes distributing the product throughout her hair, he turns towards her sink and kneels to be eye-level with the cabinet, prying it open and retrieving the hairdryer he knows she’s always stored there. Standing and slipping the plug into the socket under the lightswitch, he stretches the cord out to reach her with the blow dryer, before he toggles it onto the lowest setting and lets the heat of the air cascade against the top of her head. He waves the tool in small, practiced motions.

The same cheeky innuendo litters his tone as he crudely jokes, “I’ve got a lot of things I can do with my mouth. You’ll have to be more specific.” The man rakes his hand back through her hair, letting his tongue glide across the smooth, gummy lining along the inside of his cheek before he doubles down, “But for the record, next time, a simple ‘I miss you’ will suffice. If you want to take notes, that is.”

With the styling tool toggled to the lowest setting, despite the whir and the burst of warm air hitting her head on and muddling her hearing, she can still make out what he’s saying, and the self-satisfied addition causes her to scoff, “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve no need for that,” Harry casually concedes. A knowing smirk prickles at the edges of his lips, “You did a stellar job all on your own around…” he casts his gaze to the ceiling in fabricated contemplation, pretending to wrack his brain, “2:38 AM.”

At the mention of the phone call Y/N still retains no recollection of, the knobs of her spine straighten and an uncomfortable chill settles into the pit of her stomach.

Bewildered notes tinge her cadence as she crinkles her eyes, unable to open them fully with the insistent stream of air trickling over her face, “I— what?”

A look of synthetic concern washes over his features as Harry draws the blow dryer over another area, this one focused along the side of her scalp. With the new angle, he makes sure he’s being heard by angling himself slightly towards her other ear, clicking his tongue in mock-disappointment, “Don’t tell me you don’t remember, darling. Honestly, I had no idea how passionately you’ve bonded with my balls. What was it you said—? You wanted to…” he nods, a slow, honey-slick smile seeping across his mouth as he pretends to let her prior words dawn on him, and he briefly retracts the fingers that’d been pulling along her scalp to snap, “Warm them up? Like defrosting chicken. That’s it.”

As her own expression sours, he bats he lashes, ducking his chin as he forges his tone into a raunchy spiel of exaggerated, girlish moans, “Can I come over, Harry? I want you to make my throat sore, Harry. I’ll— I’ll be so good for you, Harry. Poetic, really. That’s Shakespearean, that is. Proper romance.”

Mortification twists into her initial appall, and the crass mockery causes a begrudged grimace to paint its way over her face. “You’re disgusting,” Y/N spits, her voice pitched slightly higher with irritated shock, “I didn’t say that.”

The protest, particularly coupled with the way she sits still and lets him finish blow-drying her hair, lures a string of boyish giggles out of the man before his eyebrows climb. He swallows them down and tells her in full seriousness, “I’d never lie about this. You spent fifteen minutes talking about choking on my cock.”

The universe is out for blood. More specifically, Y/N’s, which feels incredibly excessive, all things considered.

But it is the only viable explanation for the way every apparent, haunting mishap feels like a very slow attempt at dismantling her.

The unsightly haircut, her mysterious, inconvenient amnesia. And now, to her horror, the disgusted annoyance she’d originally felt in response to his obscene admission very suddenly begins to twist in her chest. It creeps into a disturbed sense of embarrassment, and the dawning realization (as it confirms his candor) hits her over the head like an anvil. The memories all still feel vague and fuzzy, as if they’re half-dreams tucked to the edge of her consciousness, but it all starts coming back to her. Everything.

Well— not everything, in retrospect. The big picture still has gaps as if pieces have been knocked under the couch like a balding jigsaw puzzle, but her rusty memory kicks into mode just enough to amplify her nausea. Harry very calmly continues blow drying her hair. Bits and pieces of the shameful flashback rattle the walls of her brain. They stick to the inside of her skull like a slow-curling rot, causing her cheeks to boil. She remembers the bar— that horrible decision that’d seemed so ingenious at the time, stepping outside as she tucked the phone to her ear and—

Y/N clears her throat. The exact details of whatever she’d slurred into the speaker remain ambiguous by recollection alone (though it seems Harry has no shame divulging), but the traces from the night before are enough to intensify the throb at her temples. Most of it stays a mystery— she doesn’t remember getting home, or even stepping back inside the bar, for that matter. She does know that she called him three, no— four times all within the space of six minutes later in the night, which only makes matters worse. Honestly, from the moment Harry had arrived at her apartment, the girl had entirely expected him to share his interpretation of the blacked out night, especially considering some of the missing chunks had involved him. At the very least, her phone logs had preserved that much.

She just hadn’t anticipated that the truth would be… that.

To combat the way her cheeks are flushing hotly, speckling color over the tip of her nose, she pretends it’s a byproduct of the hot air from the styling tool and folds her fingers together in her lap. Her tongue suddenly feels very numb.

“I’m… sorry,” Y/N clears her throat again. She muscles down the urge to shake her head, despite the way the man rakes his fingers through whatever he’s created along the top of it. The soft motions nudge her head under the stream of warm air, and Y/N discovers that she’s never been more grateful to be faced with her shower tile, rather than his reflection in the mirror. She doesn’t think she could meet his eyes right now, at least not without the burn in her face stippling into a heatstroke. She can’t even begin to imagine…

Technically, she doesn’t have to imagine anything, courtesy of Harry’s very open confession. Although difficult to stomach, his side of the story paints a far better picture than that blurry fragment of her brain can. The young woman is just about to apologize again, assuming he hadn’t heard her over the loud noise from the blow dryer, but his response causes her the pending follow up to sink back into her throat.

“Oh, don’t be. Wasn’t anything I haven’t already heard,” Harry raises a shoulder casually. He pauses then, prodding his tongue against the inside of his cheek (if only to curb the seedy grin threatening his pillowy lips), “Well. It was an… interesting rendition. But I enjoyed it.”

Shame mushrooms back into annoyance under the wave of his cockiness, and the only thing that stops Y/N from rolling her eyes back into her skull is that ever-present trace of humiliation. She purses her lips indignantly, squinting when the air starts to hit her forehead from the angle it takes him to brush at her fringe with his fingers.

“I’m sure you did,” Y/N mutters under her breath. She chews into her cheek for a moment, curiosity peaking. There’s still no explanation for the seemingly insistent series of phone calls that’d gone out much later in the night, and the girl begins to pick at her cuticles as she contemplates this. “What, um… did we talk about anything else?”

“Besides your inclinations to deep throat me?” Harry’s musing airbrushes a fresh wave of warmness onto her face, and he basks in the way she squirms tellingly, “No, not really— Oh, you were very verbal regarding a particular interest in sitting on my face.”

Y/N chooses to spend the rest of the time staring at the shower tile. There’s a plethora of reasons for this visual focal point. It’s unthreatening, for one. The grout between the tiles (still stain-splotched from the last time she’d used a hair color mask) draws her eye enough to remind her that it needs to be cleaned. But if Y/N is being entirely candid, the real reason she stares at it is because it doesn’t remind her of the series of misjudgments she apparently committed last night. The ceramic is still patchy with water droplets and post-steam condensation that’s not at all conducive to introspection— this is exactly what makes it ideal. The mindlessly inspiring element allows her to pointedly redirect her brain from the cycle of self-destructive spiraling it’s slipped into. Although, given her plentiful array of bad decisions, the task is easier said than done. It’s not until the hair styling tool shuts off that his words beckon her attention elsewhere.

“You,” Harry clears his throat, fluffing at her hair for good measure, “are all done, darling. Look at me?”

Slowly, the young woman twists on the toilet seat, rolling her shoulders as she shuffles her feet against the floor in an effort to turn straight. When she blinks up at him, she finds a little ruckle of concentration chiseled between his brows. As he picks at the hair on the top of her head, seemingly examining each aspect of the cut and mentally assessing the way the pieces hew together for the final look, the crease melts, and he raises his eyebrows in satisfaction.

“This… might be some of my best work, yet,” the curly-haired brunette declares, every syllable draped in the same cockiness she’s become so well-accustomed to.

Despite the nervous flurry of butterflies scraping their wings along the inside of her tummy— and the excited anticipation, given that she trusts his judgment and creative direction wholeheartedly— Y/N characteristically rolls her eyes, an easy simper curving her lips as he plucks at her scalp in a way that draws sensory chills down the nape of her neck.

“You always surprise me with how …humble you are.”

“M’serious,” Harry contends, dark brows climbing up his forehead, “Transformation of the century. Those before-after pictures would do numbers on social media. The least you could offer me at this point would’ve been participation in a promo.”

Y/N has never been more grateful that she hadn’t allowed him to take a snapshot of the unsightly before he speaks of. The thought alone has humiliated dread reemerging in the pit of her chest. She sits up a little straighter, unable to thaw the frantic conviction that worms its way into her tone when she argues, “Absolutely not.”

In response to her panicked dramatics, Harry’s own eyes roll in mild amusement. Honestly, it barely takes a nudge to fluster her, and the playfully annoying pastime he’d grown to enjoy so much during their time together is just as satisfying at the current moment, if not more. Instead of feeding into her minor fussing, he angles her chin up with a finger along her jaw, pursing his lips thoughtfully.

“Honestly, wouldn’t look this good if your face wasn’t made for it,” the tip of his pink tongue peeks out from between his pillowy lips, and he meets her gaze, “You look hot.”

The earnest admission causes Y/N to bat her lashes as if attempting to blink off the warmth that migrates to her face, though she can only hide the way the corners of her own mouth twitch up, so much. Heat speckles at the bridge of her nose and the crests of her cheeks, and a pleasant buzz peels inside of her at the compliment. The confession isn’t outright saturated in desire, but it plucks at something deep in the pit of her belly, and she can’t help the way his words only intensify her already brewing anticipation.

Her voice is soft like she’s unraveling a secret for the first time when she prods, brows quirking, “…Actually?”

The tender note of slightly awed excitement to her tone, although purposefully dulled down, coaxes the edges of his lips to turn up fondly. To give her room to stand, Harry sidesteps and gestures invitingly with his hand towards the mirror hanging over the sink. “Look for yourself.”

The hair that’d decorated the floor in haphazardly severed chunks has multiplied, but it soothes the girl to know that half of the assortment has come from a purposeful alteration rather than an impulsive, drunken idea. Finely trimmed pieces cling to the fabric along her shoulders, and her counterpart dusts them off with his palm as she stands, some of the longer pieces slipping across the tile and sticking to the soles of her feet as she navigates over them. This time, what meets her in the mirror is far less nausea-inducing. It’s a drastic deviation; one that Y/N knows will take longer to adjust to than the ten or so seconds she spends ogling herself. Even with this thought in mind, however, the young woman struggles to wrap her mind around the fact that the rounded-eyed reflection she’s face to face with is her and not just a stranger on the other side of the glass. It’s her face— her nose, her cheeks (stained with a flushed hue that brings more life to her visage than the sickly bleach-tinge that’d originally colored her skin), her mouth, crooking lopsidedly as she examines the unforeseen haircut.

While the cropped style is, admittedly, much shorter than Y/N had intended on receiving when she’d originally contacted Harry (futilely hoping the man would be able to mend the irreparable damage she’d inflicted upon her head), she’s surprised to feel no traces of disappointment as she analyzes herself. Despite the way she was prepared— readily wouldn’t quite be the proper word to use— for the tapered restoration, she can’t deny that she’d anticipated the transformation to shock her unpleasantly, at least at first. Really, it had nothing to do with Harry, or the suggestion of a shorter do in and of itself, but rather the substantial shift— at the end of the day, Y/N treasured her hair, and watching freshly snipped tresses collect around the porcelain base of her toilet did very little to quell her consistently resurfacing waves of emotion. It was a sudden, intense overhaul of her physical appearance, and while she had accepted it and trusted Harry to do her justice, she had simultaneously predicted that her initial reaction wouldn’t mirror these facts.

Despite this, Y/N doesn’t inherently hate the look. It’s a stark contrast to the hairstyle she’d donned as recently as yesterday, but just as Harry had earnestly claimed, the style compliments her. It’s still a shape she’ll have to learn how to fill, but her incipient lack of disdain only causes her to regard herself with interest coloring her— still somewhat bloodshot— gaze.

“…Wow.”

Maybe, it’s Harry at her side that makes the view more palatable, Y/N contemplates. He stands half-tucked behind her, one ring-adorned hand planted onto the strand-smeared countertop, and for a moment, Y/N is drawn to the way he looks at her profile rather than her reflection. Jade bands downcast under the daintily curling canopy of his dark eyelashes, given the discrepancy between their heights, almost as if he were admiring her. He cocks his chin, and meets her eye in the mirror. His work, Y/N mentally corrects, the cotton stuffing her head limiting her ability to curb her flush upon being caught— admiring his work.

“What d’you think?”

“It’s… very short,” the young woman answers honestly, turning her head to inspect the sides and the way little tufts tuck around her ears delicately, “I look so… different.”

“It’s different, yeah,” Harry bobs his head once more, and again, her inkpools become lured to the way he casts his gaze onto her— the way he reaches up and taps the pad of his forefinger against the bone peaking along her cheek symbolically. The soft touch is contrastingly chilled to the hot surface of her skin and is so delicate it may as well be a feather-brush, “But I think it brings out your features.”

Pensively, Y/N chews into her cheek. Although she can’t entirely remember what she’d shared with him over the phone last night to confirm her intentions, what she does feel is the static-like sparks fizzing behind her ribcage as she observes him. The gentleness behind the motion of his digit and the subtle sultry-like quality to his half-mast eyes— when he looks at her directly again, in the mirror this time— paired with his next declaration don’t dull this sensation.

“I think it’s sexy.”

It’s not until the duo are stood at her entryway, Y/N with her three-quarters of the way empty beverage and Harry with his duffel slung over one of his broad, toned shoulders, styling equipment all tucked away, that this simmering tension reaches a heated boil. There’s a pregnant pause stretched between them, like the lingering curl of a heat, and Harry is still barefoot despite his obvious intentions to leave. Because of his unanticipated rescue, the horror Y/N had started her day with has considerably diminished, and her spirits are drastically bolstered. The general wave of lethargy the young woman had experienced earlier has also ebbed somewhat, courtesy of the caffeine he’d brought her, the pastry, and the combination of liquid IV and Tylenol she’d chugged prior to his arrival finally kicking in.

Because of this, a smile tugs at her lips as she loiters beside the peninsula, instinctively drawing closer to the curly-haired brunette as if his body heat is a flame and she’s a freshly-groomed moth.

“You are,” Y/N brings the rim of the cup to her lips, taking a gulp of the lukewarm drink, “the best.”

She’s well aware that the comment feeds into his inclination for praise, and while he visibly soaks in the affirmation, his next, teasing comment causes her (considerably less wet) irises to loll up to the ceiling in playful exasperation.

The man ducks his head forward, cupping his large palm behind his ear emblematically, eyebrows climbing enough to dent three little ruckles along his forehead as his lips cheekily twitch, open-mouthed and expectant.

“Thank you, Harry,” he cues, self-satisfaction draping his voice.

“Thank you, Harry,” Y/N mirrors, setting the plastic cup onto the granite ledge beside her and folding her arms over her chest. Batting her lashes theatrically, she tips forward, “However could I repay you?”

For a long moment, Harry only watches her, the heady note to his otherwise expressionless features serving as a pending telltale before he even opens his mouth. The proposal isn’t a longshot by any means per se, given their loosely intimate history and the seed she herself had planted behind his skull the night prior— albeit, while she was inebriated— and at the very least, the notion could receive a little crease of her features, a scoff, and she could bat the lewd idea off offhandedly. The girl in front of him could discourage any of his advances and deny the soft pitch as simply as she’d lured him into coming over in the first place; with very little effort on her part. He’d respect her answer entirely regardless of the outcome, and in theory, this could be where the afternoon ends; with her hair salvaged and him halfway out the door, only to receive another midnight phone call he’ll paw at his cock with, weeks down the line.

But right now, the visual of her lapping at his cock isn’t one he’s unwilling to at least float, and his prick twitches behind the confines of the corduroy fabric hugging his lower half like it’s still echoing its intrigue from the night prior, and she’s leaning in close enough for the sweet fragrance of her body wash to cloud over him, and—

“I can,” Harry licks his lips, jade irises flickering from her own eyes to her mouth suggestively as he leans against the wall at her entryway, “think of a few ways.”

The insinuation is openly raunchy; he doesn’t outright detail all the ways in which she could repay him for his altruism, but the implication is enough for her cheeks to smear with color. If not for the desirous delivery and the way conspicuous hunger slathers his cadence, the way his gaze flirtatiously glues to her lips depicts more than words could. Without the long face-framing that’d priorly existed to shroud the sides of her countenance, Y/N can’t cover the heated flush that tips into her features.

“You wouldn’t…” the girl pauses, feigning performative scandal, “you’re not soliciting.”

“I’d never,” Harry returns, mock-serious, and places one of his open palms over the center of his pectorals, right against his sternum where his heart is slowly, very evenly thudding (unlike Y/N’s), “What kind of a man do you take me for?”

Y/N muscles down her snort, rattling her head with the same artificial seriousness that coats his air, “Of course.”

“Unless…” Harry pauses, letting his hand slip and inching one shoulder up nonchalantly as his expression twists into something undeniably lascivious, “You’d like me to.”

The young woman scoffs. Or rather, she tries to. The sound lands so flat and so forced that it only pitches the corners of his cushiony mouth higher.

“Like what?” she breathes, ignoring the throb in her chest (and more pointedly, the throb between her thighs) when he casually reaches a hand up to twist at one side of the drawstring pulled through the lowered hood of her sweater, “…Venmo?”

Harry coils the end of the fabric around his pointer playfully, tugging gently and cinching the fabric along the base of her throat just a tad before he meets her eye, “I was going to say your mouth, but sure. That works, too.”

This time, Y/N can’t contain her eye roll. Despite the way her pulse has thundered up into a storm, amplifying her headrush as he plays with the thicker piece of cloth, the cheeky comment warrants enough leeway for her to chip at the tension.

“Just say you want a blowjob,” Y/N quips, feigning that she’s unimpressed.

“I wouldn’t be opposed to that,” Harry bobs his head, unraveling the drawstring from around the tip of his digit and letting it fall flat against her chest. Instead of letting his hand hang by his side, however, he focuses on the material along her neckline, brushing the wrinkled fabric with the tips of his fingers and drawing precariously close to the bare base of her throat. Y/N swallows thickly as her skin leaches his heat from the negligible proximity. Momentarily, his top teeth lodge into his lower lip as mental snapshots of her tongue licking at his cockhead plague him. He meets her eye, lips jolting, “But don’t worry. You wouldn’t have to do all the work. I’m very… accommodating.”

“Is that right?” Y/N raises a brow. Her fingertips— arms still crossed over her chest— twitch when the tip of his pointer inadvertently brushes naked skin. “And what are these… accommodations?”

“Well. Per your prior request, if it still stands of course,” Harry cheekily gives her a pointed look, before focusing his attention back onto the way he’s making her pulse point throb with the tip of his finger on her neck, “I’d be willing to offer some… hands on assistance.”

“Right.”

“And perhaps we can arrange some oral. Very hand-in-hand, I’d say.”

Y/N ignores the way he cunt teems with heat at the mention.

“Oh?”

“And—“ he pulls his hand back this time, raising the same finger that’d aimlessly wandered to her clavicle ahead of her face, instead, “If you act in the five minutes and thirty-two seconds, you are eligible to receive a bonus, proper shag with your package. Don’t wait, act now.”

The goofy offer, obviously meant to mirror those insistent, product-pushing commercials her cable reruns had been interspersed with as a kid, causes her to scoff in amusement as her nose wrinkles up.

“Are you— selling?”

Among the green hue of his irises, a twinkle dances along the surface of the polynya-like depths of his pupils sordidly. “Are you buying?”

It’s practically routine— or, should be, at the very least, given how easily it feels to slip onto her knees in the middle of her living room. The ease with which he lets his duffel slump off of his shoulder onto the floor by the front door with an unceremonious thud, the way his fingers pluck at the buttons and the zipper holding his corduroys together, before he basks in the visual of her coyly fluttering her lashes up at him, fingers loosely clasped over her lap as she wets her lips. It’s such an innocent maneuver— like an anticipatory fidget, but it makes his thoughts curdle depravedly. He tugs one side of the opening to his trousers and folds it down, palming at his cock with the other hand. He’s already half-hard, all rigid under the weight of his palm, and when he squeezes at himself, his dick throbs appreciatively and a mild headrush teems between his temples, chiseling a wrinkle between his brows as he ducks his chin to properly look at her. With one palm still fondling at himself in preparation, he strokes the knuckles on the opposite along her cheekbone. The skin-on-skin contact causes one of his rings to gently bump against the crest, and her lashes flutter over her pretty eyes as his knuckles meander to her lips. They’re so warm against the backs of his fingers; so pillowy soft, and the thought of them wrapped over his throbbing cock finally begins to satiate the itch she rooted into his skull last night.

As the knuckle of his forefinger grazes her lips and nestles against the seam between them, Y/N parts them a little more, just slightly, to sponge a kiss to the joint. Her nostrils flare as she inhales, brushing the tip of her slick tongue along the knob of bone. Then, her teeth gently nip at it.

A hiss lips through the gaps of his teeth as Harry presses the heel of his palm against his cockhead, already dribbling weakly against the cotton fabric. His sharp mandible clenches before he hooks his thumb into the waistband of his briefs, stretching the fabric— but not freeing himself from the material. Rather than continue letting her slobber over his fingers, he retracts them, daubing her cheek with spit from his knuckle as he brushes it against her skin. Then, he traces the bridge of her nose with the dry pad of his pointer, one line down the slope.

“D’you want to suck on it?” the curly-haired brunette drawls, tugging the elastic out further teasingly. Dominance unravels in his cadence, a touch darkened by his desire, and his voice is low and syrup-thick with it.

Seeing the man like this, all hunger, with that appreciable air of authority threaded into his demeanor, makes Y/N’s feel fuzzy— the same way it always does. The way she bobs in her in agreement is sluggishly drunken almost in the same manner that her actions the night before had been, only this intoxication is fueled by this view of him and the heady imprint of his swollen cock, rather than any alcohol.

“Use your words,” Harry prompts, prodding his tongue against the inside of his cheek and raising his eyebrows subtly.

When Y/N swallows, she feels as though her mouth is sopping and the back of her throat is simultaneously dry— the words have melted on the back of her tongue, and the sensation along her throat resembles being stuffed with cotton, but the deluge puddling under her tongue is irrefutable and only heightens the hammer of her heart. And when she answers, finally, she’s forced to clear her throat to get the words out coherently, “I wanna suck you.”

His nostrils flare appreciatively as Harry siphons a deep inhale, relishing in the way she’s practically vibrating beneath him, all delicate and wanting with her hands together over her clenched thighs, just as he’d pictured last night. The view is so close to the pornographic visual he’d mentally crafted as he’d struggle against the urge to fist at his cock after their phone call had disconnected, that Harry can’t curb his instinct to soothe the pulse riding up his balls. Letting the waistband of his briefs snap back against his toned pelvis, he tucks his thumbs under either side of his corduroys and shimmies them lower, only to cradle his heavy sack and grant it a light squeeze. The action has her gaze snapping to his hand, and Y/N sucks in a quiet breath before her eyes flash back up to his bliss-stricken visage.

The relief, for Harry, is instantaneous, painting his underbelly with pleasure and chipping at the wad of hunger that’d been metastasizing in the trench since he’d started ignoring his wants. But it doesn’t compare to what he imagines her pillowy lips will feel like against the tender skin, what he imagined— remembered, really, pulling at lust-dusted, sex-hazy memoirs— when he refrained from tugging himself off in the shower this morning, letting the warm spray pelt his swelling abdomen as he pointedly dismissed his angrily swaying cock.

A pinch shades his brow bone darkly as he finally works himself out from beneath the damp cotton, settling the elastic under his balls as he cups himself by the root.

“Go on then. You were so eager and… imaginative last night. Show me what that pretty, little mouth can do.”

Inching forward on her haunches, Y/N licks out at her lips once more before blinking up at him. When she pastes her tongue to the slit along his ruddy cockhead, lapping at the pearlescent bead of precum that’s begun to weep as he squeezes at the hilt of himself, a disapproving click of his tongue against the root of his mouth lures her attention back up.

“That’s not what you talked about last night,” Harry hints, his voice somewhat gravelly with longing despite the teasing nature of the quip. A lopsided beam yanks at the corners of his mouth lightly, drawing the wicked shape as the cogs behind her skull turn.

His prior words soak over her; the mention of apparent allusion to his balls, and—

A fresh wave of heat washes over her, this one settling thick between the plush of her thighs. With the fingers cupped along the sateen underside of his heavy cock, he tucks it up, eyebrows quirking expectantly.

“What was it you said? Wanted to give them a little kiss,” Harry muses, rocking his hips forward ever so slightly in invitation. The angle of his prick grants her a view of the protruding baby blue vein riding along the underside of his prick and the delicate, hidden seam over his sack. “Give them a little kiss, then.”

The crests of her cheeks practically smart with the fiery flood that licks at them, but the heat is nothing in comparison to the zipline of lightning that climbs up his spine when she ducks forward and presses her lips to one side. It’s a feather-soft touch— one he’d hardly feel if not for the velvety skin along the nerve endings there being especially sensitive; a chaste peck, if anything, but it feels like a little spark of liquid bliss and spills into his veins in a way that gets his brows furrowing up. The maneuver would be cute if not for the way it makes his lungs clot, a brittle, low sound too close to a pant bleeding from the back of his throat as she peels back. It is endearing, at the very least, and it paints a borderline breathless, open-mouthed smirk over his swollen lips as he wags his upturned cock at her in his hand.

“Oh, c’mon,” Harry cocks his head, shuffling forward over the carpet as if an invisible lure draws him closer to her mouth, “You can do better than that, can’t you? Really show me how bad you’ve been wanting it. Or was all that just talk?”

This time, when she tips forward and glues her lips— mouth slightly pried, warm tongue lapping— to the same area of his sack, again, and again, a dark, little shiver rumbles out along his shoulders. She switches to the other side, tipping her head, and from beneath the shape of his pulsating cock, her eyes peering up at him for encouragement draws a ragged groan from the depths of his chest. She’s such a sweet, little thing, with such a sweet, little mouth on her.

“There you go,” Harry goads, letting the tip of his fat prick graze her forehead as he tongue slinks a little lower, coating him in sloppy warmth, “There’s a good girl.”

Feeding off of his increasingly graveling approval, Y/N suckles on the delicate skin testingly, reveling in the full-body shudder that causes his legs to quake. She draws her tongue along the side, brushing the coarse, neatly trimmed bristle of dark hair decorating the root of his cock, momentarily shifting to sponge sloppy kisses against the top of his thigh in the process. As her tongue teases at the seam, the bridge of her nose bumping his knuckles and nicking against the faces of his bulky rings, she manages to drag another ragged noise out of him. Although, nothing quite compares to the sound she draws when she hinges her jaw wide and envelops one side of his sack into her warm, wet mouth.

“Shit—“ Harry grunts, unable to curb the motion of his wrist as he twists up to the head of his throbbing prick. The words come out searing through his gritted teeth, almost as if he’s trying to bite down on them as they tumble out, “that’s fucking right, baby, just like— fuck—“

The girl hums appreciatively at the symphony of pornographic sounds, and the subtle vibrations bleeding against his tender nerves only unspool him further, coaxing another raw sound that sounds partway broken, even to his own ears. It falls in a string, and the noise that tails it is a gruff swear mottled in the crevices of his teeth. When Y/N peers up at him, nostrils flaring at the thick— but not unpleasant— scent of his clean musk, the view above only causes her own tummy to somersault. The man above has his head craned back like he can hardly take the overwhelm of the sensation, neck rolling for momentary glimpses of her slotted between his feet as she toys with him. His tummy swells unevenly as he pants, shallow breaths interspersing with deep, rumbling sounds that land like they’re being dredged from the trenches of his lungs. Perhaps what catches her interest most, however— and spurs her on to wrest more shattered noises from between his teeth-swollen lips— are the brief glimpses she gets of his face when he ducks his chin to get a better look at the visuals for the sensations that are unraveling him by the progressively fraying seams. His usually relaxed, so often playfully cocky expression has fractured, and what’s left is a crumble of pleasured-wrecked debris. His features are battered in a way that almost looks pained— but is so obviously, satisfyingly bliss-coaxed. His eyes are hardly open on the occasional flutter of his lashes, and the darkened bands are so saturated in sex beneath the sensually drooping mast of his lids that they’re entrancing. His brow bone flickers between a relaxed state and a furrow of desperation every time his features crease up, and his jaw is perpetually unlatched as harsh, ragged exhales seep out with the caging of his teeth pried. They meld with the ruined sounds that crawl from the back of his throat, and bathe her in pleasure.

It’s a series of sinful details to be especially appreciated, Y/N decides, because, while her intimate overlaps with Harry have become few and far between, this experience is almost new altogether. It’s rare for her; to reduce him to this kind of state. Even when she takes him down her throat, he is so seemingly in control of himself— still tinged with the same lusting unravel, but the altogether collapse she’s currently witnessing isn’t a common sighting. It reminds her of the brief moments she’s granted before he cums (across her swollen lips, on her tits, inside of her) with a similar crumble of his mettle, but it feels as though she’s tearing through his restraint with such a previously unfathomable ease.

And she is. When she grants him another hungry hum, peeling off of his spit-slicked balls with a pop and focusing her attention onto the other side, Harry's leg trembles. His limbs feel weak, knees jellified under her ministrations, and the knobs of his spine feel like they’re any moment from rattling out of place as he puddles altogether. She’s just so sloppy as the thing, drooling all over his sack, just as she’d implied she would, and the glances he takes down at her only whittle his resolve further. One of her hands is very obediently planted flat against the crest of one thigh, and the other has busied itself along his leg, blunts of her short nails lightly scraping at the skin along his quadricep and sending little lightning zaps coursing up the taut muscles to the underside of his balls. His inner thighs are riddled with tension because of this, muscles straining as he combats the urge to grind forward against her face and smear her nose in her own saliva. Her eyes are half-masted and innocuous beneath him, smeared in a sheen of dew from the unblinking attention she grants up at him. The concentrated attention would be unsettling if not for the way it makes his something desirous stir in the pit of his belly. The sensation is almost too much, coasting on that precipice of a fine line between overstimulation and a bliss he never wants to hamper— it makes him want to twist his knuckles into his own hair and writhe, but he settles on fisting harshly over the root of his cock and letting the crescents of his short, polished nails nip into the skin of his palm as he balls the other hand.

“God, you’re such a— fuck—“ he grunts through the cracks of his teeth, sanity flimsy as she bobs her head to slink her tongue lower. With some semblance of his mettle restored under the pretense of his next course of action, he angles his cock a little lower, resting the heavy shape of it against her face as he beckons, “Suck my cock— shit— suck—“

When she withdraws with another messy pop, sitting back on her haunches and fondling at his weak thighs eagerly, an involuntary spasm wracks his legs and he huffs, nearly tipping forward onto his toes as he steers his throbbing prick towards her mouth. There’s a brief relief that allows his hazy brain to clear somewhat as she detaches, but it’s short lived when she unceremoniously wraps her lips around the mushroomed ridges of his tip and sinks about halfway down. Another harsh sound wracks his vocal cords as he cocks his head up to the ceiling, basking in the way her cheeks hollow almost instantaneously. This time, the hand that’d laid neatly against the top of her thigh replaces his own palm, and the only place he has to sink his own fingers is the soft tufts of her hair. He presses the pads of his digits to her crown, gently guiding her as her tongue laves along his shaft. She looks so pretty like this, fingers loosely wrapped over the hilt of him and her puffy lips stretched taut. Her lashes flutter as he nudges a touch deeper, gnawing into his cheek as he muscles down the urge to bottom out and scrape at the back of her throat with his cockhead.

“Look— yeah, look at me. Look so pretty on your knees like that. Like you’re having the fucking time of your life. Pretty, little thing, aren’t you? Just for me?”

Y/N hums in agreement around him, and the rumble plucking at her vocal cords adds another note of pleasure to the already euphoric thrum that’s been nestling and pulsing along his shaft. It prickles at the gorge of his gut, coaxing him to shift on his feed as another guttural rasp spills from his mouth.

His words slur together, sounding lodged between his teeth again as he rocks his hips forward enough to graze as her gag reflex momentarily, “Yeah. Yes you are.”

The way the claim is drenched in condescension reintegrates her own arousal, and her lashes flutter as her eyes stay pinned up at him. The want feels like a white hot pool between her clammy thighs, and she squeezes them together tighter in an attempt to alleviate some of the unignorable pressure building behind the fabric. With the weight of his cock against her mouth, prying her lips apart wide and tinging her jaw with a pleasant ache, she tries to breathe through her nose to regulate the lightheaded thrill spuming between her temples and misting her skull. As Harry spews filth, however, the urge to snake her fingers between her legs only intensifies through the fog of want.

“Had me so hard last night,” the curly-haired brunette confesses, pumping forward a little more aggressively than she readily anticipates (and prodding a sloppy gurgle out of her in the process). His dark brows pinch together again, a breathy huff escaping his open mouth as he skews his angle and bumps along the inside of her cheek shallowly, “Begging me to let you come over and be all sweet on me. Nearly fucked my own hand after, just thinking about you like this. Fuck.”

With the unfiltered need lapping at his every fiber, he feels himself drawing closer and closer to the edge, and the way she messily moans around him only amplifies this. It feels as though she’s yanking on a string seated deep within him, and every little tug only hurtles him closer. Despite the urge to paint the back of her throat with hot, thick ropes of his cum, he can’t allow himself to bathe in the bliss much longer. He’d promised her a proper shag, after all, and he intends to deliver. What kind of an ex-boyfriend would he be if he didn’t hold himself off long enough to allow her to cum around his cock?

With this thought, Harry (regrettably) pulls out, splaying his palm over the top of her head in guidance to stay put as he rocks his hips back. Another hiss seeps through his teeth at the loss of her mouth, and a string of her spit dangles between the rubescent tip of his pulsing dick and her lower lip. It snaps as his cock bobs up. She’s still pawing at him, fingers loose at the root until he bats her hand away and replaces it with his own once again, nudging his chin as he teeters on his feet. His head thrums with a rush, every one of his limbs feeling sluggish, and the urge to shuffle back into her wanting mouth is one that’s difficult to resist. Especially in the moment.

With one fist sealed over his angry cock and the other held out for her to take— despite the urge to fall back against the couch cushions unceremoniously and let her clamber up on her own— Harry beckons, “Get up.”

His sudden withdrawal causes her chest to spume with disappointment, and her features stain with bemusement before she takes his hand and stands. She hardly has a moment to open her mouth for the question to fall from the tip of her tongue before he’s lugging her close— hard, hard enough for her to nearly collide with his chest— and the warm, rigid press of his cock against her tummy, even over the barrier of the fabric she’s still donning, nearly has her pawing at his cock again in frenzied desperation. The wetness of her saliva slicking it wets the cotton of her hoodie. He nearly slots his mouth against her own, although it can hardly be considered a kiss.

His lips graze against her own spit-slick, puffy pair, and his voice lands low against her tongue when he murmurs, “You’re gonna sit on my face.”

Y/N does sit on his face.

They make it halfway to the bedroom before their kiss gets half-tangled in their disrobe (particularly, in the way the young woman’s cinched neckline gets stuck around her head as Harry attempts to pull the article over her head, which momentarily shatters the tension enough for their conjoined laughter— and a bit of grumbling from Y/N as she wriggles— to stifle the space). The sweatsuit she’d been clad in gets haphazardly strewn off beside her outfit from the night before in a sloppy puddle of fabric by the foot of the bed, and Y/N tinges with such a pretty color when he has her knee her way around his shoulders on the mattress. His toned, ink-etched arms wrap taut around her thighs to keep her still as she squirms, and he bullies her clit between his lips until she’s twisting her fingers into the tendrils along the top of his head, mussing them and mounting a prickle into his scalp that has him groaning against her cunt. She rocks against his chin, clit bumping the tip of his nose as he drags his tongue along her pulsing rim and prods inside, only to make her wriggle harder as fragmented sounds slip from between her teeth in the same manner his own had. When she plants her hands back against his tummy for balance, she props her tits up to the low ceiling, so he tucks one of his forearms over both thighs instead, fingertips indenting into her soft skin, and plucks at her pebbled nipples with the fingers on the other.

She doesn’t quite make it to his cock, as he’d anticipated— at least not for the first one, grinding along his chin frenziedly until she’d gushed against his mouth, clit pulsating weakly between his teeth as he suckled to prolong the shocks wracking her body. Just until she whined and resisted against the cage of his arm enough for him to let up.

He fucks her on all fours, cheek smushed to the sweaty sheets as he grips her hips and hitches her higher, pummeling in with bone-rattling thunks that nudge her higher and higher along the mattress. Her fingertips twist into the pillow for purchase as the prod of his cockhead wrenches a string of incoherent groans from the back of her throat, only punctuated by the spill of his own. She cums again around his cock for a second time when he tips forward enough to coil his arm around her belly and mercilessly thumb at her clit. When he cums, it’s all over her ass— he pulls out just enough to twist his wrist over his slick tip and paint her pussy with thick, molten ribbons, angling up enough to daub her asshole and a bit of her asscheek with the milky spend, as well.

Harry can’t recall a time when he’s given a more rewarding haircut.

At least, not one that’d ended with claw-like crescents notched into the muscle of his shoulder and slick shining along the bridge of his nose. There’s still a hum ringing in his skull, all wet and guttural, that matches the echo of her voice when it’d cracked above him and her thighs trembled around his ears. It’s a kind of gratification he doesn’t often indulge in. Not the orgasm, because he indulges in those regularly enough, but rather the indulgence in giving. Or the thrill of being used, in a way.

He hasn’t cut her hair in ages, but as he cleans her up with the tissues from her nightstand, the man wonders if he’ll be scheduling some more …regular appointments with her. At the very least, he knows for a fact that he’ll never screen one of her midnight calls. Or ignore her invitation the next day, for that matter.

He doesn’t miss the softness in her eyes when she turns her cheek over her shoulder against the sheets, or the uncharacteristic shyness that creeps into her voice when she asks, “Do you wanna …grab lunch?”

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