Those Maudlin Days

“Erin, I love you like you were one of my own, but darling, you cannot make a fruit bowl to save your life.”

Laura was nearly running around the kitchen, but she had paused to place her hands on her hips and criticize the one job I was set to do upon coming downstairs and seeing all the commotion. A few friends and colleagues were coming over for dinner to celebrate my father’s new found health. It was Laura’s idea. But after all, the tumor hadn’t been cancerous and what other way was there to celebrate the news? A small dinner seemed right and to be honest, I was too happy to protest; I figured my father, who was resting upstairs in bed, felt the same way.

“What do you mean?” My puzzled expression moved from the mother figure in my life to the fruit I had in each hand. The bowl had grapes, apples, oranges – I thought I was doing a great job.

“You’re doing it all wrong,” she sighed, walking over and grabbing the oranges in my hands. Dumping the bowl, I gaped at all my work rolling across the kitchen table before she began to explain. “The oranges go on the bottom, apples in the middle, grapes and strawberries on top.”

In two minutes flat, the arrangement was done, in a perfect pyramid of juicy fruity delight. Laura stood back and smiled at her masterpiece. I rolled my eyes; she was always so smug in her skill to make a house a home. So in hopes to wipe the smirk off her face, my eyes wandered to the clock and I gasped. “Laura, the guests are going to be here in fifteen minutes and you’re not even ready!”

That shook her.

She looked to the clock before realizing I wasn’t lying and was suddenly barking orders like a mad woman. “Oh dear! Alright, I’ll go get done up, but can you just make sure what’s on the stove doesn’t burn? And keep an eye on what’s in the oven. Also, if anyone comes to the door—“

“Laura, Laura, I’ve dealt with guests before. Just go,” I laughed as I grabbed an extra orange and began peeling it to appease my rumbling tummy. Spending an hour in a kitchen that smelled of her wonderful cooking without a single bite to eat was pure torture.

She gave me a kiss on the cheek before rushing upstairs and I had managed to get a shot of citrus in my eye when three knocks came from the door.

“Fucking hell,” I grumbled. Whoever it was had managed to come ten minutes early, but as I rubbed my stinging, watering eye, I stumbled to the door as to not keep them in the cold.

Harry had his fist raised, ready to knock again when I answered, and we stood in a confused silence for a good moment. I squinted at him with one eye, unsure of why he was on my parents’ doorstep.

“Are you winking at me?” He finally spoke.

“Does it look like I’m winking at you, you nub? I haven’t opened my eye the entire time we’ve been standing here. Come in, you’re letting all the warm air out,” I shot back at him, before turning on my heel and wandering back to my orange.

It took him a moment to meet me at the table, but when he finally sat down, I had a moment to take him in as his eyes scanned over the kitchen and living room. All I had seen Harry in was loose tees and tight jeans with holes in both. He was a multi millionaire pop star and his attire always looked like bad thrift store finds. But now, sitting across from me in the home I grew up in, he had on a nice button up with the sleeves rolled and while his jeans still seemed a size too tight, at least he wasn’t wearing the boots that had been worn down to nearly nothing. He looked nice.

Of course I didn’t say that. Instead, with a mouth full of orange, I spat out, “What are you even doing here?”

He flinched and wiped presumably a bit of my fruit saliva from his cheek. My cheeks grew hot, but I kept my eye(s) on him as I waited for the answer.

“I was invited to the dinner.”

“No, you weren’t.”

His eyebrows pulled together, “Yes, I was.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Erin, I was.”

“I didn’t invite you.”

“I know,” he said finally, his confusion being swept from his face in a second. He leaned back in his chair and picked a few grapes from their stem in the fruit bowl. “Laura invited me.”

“Laura invited you?”

“You’re quite the conversationalist,” he cheekily commented as he shoved the fruit into his mouth and chewed. His cheeks blew up like a squirrel storing nuts for the cold winter to come, but I was too caught up in my own thoughts to make fun.

“How did Laura invite you?” I grabbed the peels that I had littered on the table and walked towards the trash can under the sink. Since when did Laura and Harry have a relationship outside of me? My thoughts escaped me before I could stop them in a soft mumble as I threw away my trash. “Or a better question is why.”

It had only been a few days since my father’s surgery, but after weeks of talking nonstop to Harry through petty text messages and the like, three days without any contact was quite the deal. Not that we had been ignoring each other – he had sent me a whopping three texts, one each day to check in, as he did. I replied to none of them.

I had spent the last three days back in my old room in my parents’ home, which I was rather happy about. If Abigail had caught me tossing my phone across the room every time it buzzed, she would have put two and two together easily. Luckily, she was spending a lot of time caught between Niall and an essay for her class, so avoiding her wasn’t a problem. She hadn’t called after the first night from the hospital and I had somehow played it cool when I mentioned that Harry spent the entire day and night there with me. But the more time went on, the harder it got to keep quiet and I was beginning to wish Abigail wasn’t such a smug person, because she was the only person I could think to tell.

I had feelings for Harry.

I refused to accept it as anything more than that – a fuzzy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I blamed it entirely on the fact that he was flirty and only so handsome because he had a stylist on call any moment he needed. But for me, even a mere smudge of emotion for a boy was the end of all. Upon moving to Wolverhampton when I was twelve, I was still the shy, dorky girl with poofy hair and four eyes, I fell easily for all the cute, new accents that surrounded me. Jeremy Jenkins had big blue eyes and crumbs from his breakfast sitting on his face in the mornings, but we sat right next to each other in our first class and I not so slyly doodled his name on by notebooks.

Long story short, the girl behind me told him she had seen me staring at him during silent reading time and he refused to make eye contact with me in the hallways with his friends. He asked if he could change seats the next day.

My track record with guys was short and dismal. If I liked someone, I’d always end up really, really liking them. So throughout secondary school and beyond, I kept boys at arms length.

And now here I was, crushing on an international pop star. The irony of it was almost humorous; I couldn’t even dream of getting a jock back then but now that I was beyond secondary school, I found myself reaching out for someone even more out of my league.

“What was that?” Harry questioned.

“I asked how she invited you,” I quickly covered. “Becoming best friends with my father’s girlfriend, Harry?”

“What can I say? Your father has great taste,” he countered with a half grin that made my cheeks burn one too many times in the three minutes Harry had been within my home. I turned on my heel to avoid any further embarrassment that could be written on my face, to play the housewife I promised Laura I would temporarily be.

“Ha-ha,” I let out dryly, but attempted to distract myself with the boiling stew on the stove. Picking up the big wooden spoon, I was hardly a master chef. But the girl who ate grapes for lunch decided to take on a new role as she tasted the broth to seem as if she was being productive rather than avoiding her guest.

Too bad her guest had his own ideas.

I heard Harry let out a frustrated sigh, but before I could move onto the next distraction, he was coming up behind me and lifting my hand to feed him. Towering over me, he bent his head down to taste whatever I had left within the utensil and after smacking his lips too close for comfort, he decided, “Needs more salt.”

His cologne was hardly suffocating – just the right amount, sprayed presumably against the nape of his neck, which when I turned my head was the only thing I saw; his neck and the vein that looked so inviting, I could hardly keep myself from leaving a trail of kisses down it and wherever that would lead me to. He had left a few buttons of his collared shirt undone, where his inked skin peeked out, his summer tan still yet to fade completely. I was flustered, cornered, trapped and I quickly dropped the spoon into the stew, wiggling away before I made a fool out of myself.

“I’ll tell the cook,” I grumbled as I headed towards the fridge for no apparent reason other than to put distance between us.

I could have sworn Harry growled. “Erin.”

“What, do you want some water, too?”

“No,” he said cautiously, walking over to the fridge and closing it from behind me. I turned to gape at him, to say something hardly clever about dehydration and the sort, but he cut me off. “I want you to stop whatever it is you’re doing.”

“What is it I’m doing?” I asked innocently, cocking my head to the side to complete the act. It was a game I played when I was little with my father. In the mornings before class, when I wanted a rest day and he refused, I’d take double the time getting ready and he’d ask me what I thought I was doing. Playing coy was a specialty that my father learned to see through over time.

Harry saw through it right away. “This – this game. You didn’t respond to any of my text messages, you’ve made it clear I’m hardly welcomed here by your standards, and now I’m playing chase with you in your own kitchen.”

The coy master was caught and instead of attempting to stumble with an excuse, I just stared at him with my mouth hanging slightly ajar as if I was going to explain. But what could I say?

“What’s going on, Erin? I thought we were – I thought we were good,” his voice was nothing above a whisper. We stood in front of each other, stuck in the tight space between the fridge and the island countertop. But I was saved by the bell.

“Erin, honey, could you get that for me? I’m in my knickers!” Laura called from upstairs.

“That’s my cue,” I breathed out before Harry could stop me from rushing to the door to greet the new guests who would need my undivided attention.

I entertained the couple that had arrived for a full two minutes before Harry caught their attention – and nearly all the other guests who walked through the door within the next fifteen minutes. It wasn’t until my father came downstairs with Laura that uncomfortable talk of tours and interviews and screaming fans was subsided for an applause from the few coworkers and friends that had gathered around the living room.

“Oh, stop, I’m blushing,” my father gently joked, which forced the night to move forward. People gathered around him once he sat, to ask about how he was feeling, what his plans were now that he was a healthy man, etcetera, etcetera. Harry seemed to be interested in the conversation, but he still managed to steal a few glances my way.

Meanwhile, I stared shamelessly at the boy across the room. I had no time for fake conversations between friends who were tiptoeing around the former patient in the room, especially when I had heard the genuine answers from my father himself. When he told his colleagues and drinking mates he was feeling refreshed, he was lying through gritted teeth. What he felt was relief, but he couldn’t say that to a room of people seemingly more fragile than him. So I tuned it out and kept my eyes locked on that stupid mop of curled hair.

I thought we were good.

What did that mean? What was Harry’s definition of ‘good?’ Did ‘good’ for him, in every friendship, entail daily text messages, heart-to-hearts, inside jokes, and spending all day at a hospital for them? Because if that’s what he needed to cement that we were ‘good,’ then maybe I wanted to be bad. Maybe I wanted us to be terrible, horrible, nearing nothing. If friendship for Harry Styles meant the kind of treatment that kept my heart aching, I wasn’t sure I could keep it up and he couldn’t blame me for that. I watched as he politely laughed at all the right times, let his brows knit together when he was listening carefully, rest his elbows against his bony knees and engaged as much as he could. And I realized that the more I fooled myself into thinking that we were just friends, the more attached I got. And the more attached I got, the less I wanted that friendship. I wanted more.

I refused to delude myself into thinking I had a chance.

So just before dinner, I made up my mind. If Harry thought we were good, I would show him were nothing of the sort. I was thankful for all he had done for me with my father’s illness, being there for me and what not, but after all, my father’s illness was in the past and there was no reason to carry on those daily texts. The inside jokes would grow old. There’d be nothing taunting either of us to have heart-to-hearts. It’d dry out and so my weeks with the pop star would fade into nothing but a bad memory.

“Well, dinner must be ready by now. Why don’t you all settle around the table and Erin and I will fetch the food?” Laura was up and towards the kitchen before I could even look up from the mimosa I had been sipping carefully on all night. I caught Harry following the herd to the dining room out of the corner of my eye but quickly dashed in the other direction where I was expected.

I leaned against the island and glanced at my chipping nail polish before Laura scoffed, “You’re as obvious as an elephant in a tiny room, Erin.”

I felt my nose crinkle. “That’s not the right expression.”

Laura gave out an exasperated noise, but I lifted myself from my position to help her gather the hot biscuits for the stew into a basket. “Anyway, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, don’t you? You’ve barely said a word all night and the daggers sent Harry’s way – you’d think the boy placed the tumor in your father’s head himself,” she let out a sarcastic laugh, shaking her head as she piled the side dishes into little platters with speed and precision incomprehensible to me.

“Nope,” I shrugged, sticking a biscuit in my mouth and spoke through crumbs, “No idea what you’re on about this time.”

I was sure she was giving me a disapproving look; whether it was for my lack of cooperation or the fact that I was eating before getting food to the table, I wasn’t sure. But I already had my back to her and was carrying mashed potatoes and bread to the table before she could smother me in motherly nonsense. I called over my shoulder to buy more time, “Harry says the stew needs more salt!”

The dining room was loud. The chatter among the once-acquaintances had grown less polite over the night; small talk was a thing of the past. Now that everyone was new friends, it seemed no topic was off-limits and laughter rang without boundaries. Harry even seemed to be enjoying himself, getting along with men and their wives twice his age. I placed the mashed potatoes on one end of the table and noticed that two seats were open beside my father, who sat at the other end. One was between him and his boss’s wife, who wore a horrible perfume that I could only assume had been replaced with skunk juice without her knowing. And the other, between him and Harry. With biscuits in hand, I made my way over to the skunk lady with my head held high but before I could sit down, Laura placed the stew on the table and smiled at me as she took my spot.

“Erin, could you get the veggies? I left them on the countertop by the stove.” Her eyes dazzled in smug victory and I almost sneered openly at her. “Thanks, love.”

I rolled my eyes behind my glasses, but nevertheless, she had won. I marched into the kitchen, grabbed the side that would undoubtedly go mostly untouched, and came back to the table to take my seat beside the boy I had banished in my head.

Harry didn’t regard me, besides wordlessly passing me the biscuits without me asking once when I had finished my first two rolls. I debated chucking it at his head, but Laura’s sweet bread was one of my favorite things in the world – he wasn’t worth wasting it anyway.

The table had discussed a number of things I could barely remember – stocks, my father’s job, Harry’s entire life from the day he was born to that night – but as everyone was rubbing their bloated stomachs and contemplating dessert, the topic eased into the night at the hospital.

“How was it?” The skunk lady’s husband glanced to my father as the table fell silent. They were all wondering – was it scary? How was the pain? All the gory details were on their mind, despite the fact that my father had answered their questions with cheerful thoughts of being healthy now.

I hardly thought it was polite, but my noble dad just put on a smile and shrugged, “As horrible as you’d think it was. But I had good people by my side.”

My hand had been fingering my fork but when I felt my father’s warm embrace, his calloused fingers on my cold, pale skin, I smiled back at him. Laura looked near tears but she nodded, “Erin and Harry were there all night with us.”

“Harry was there?” George, a man who shared too many drunken tales with my father, perked up. He was sitting on the other side of the famous pop star and over the mop of curls, he looked to me, “So is that what’s going on here? What a supportive boyfriend! Nice lad, you are then; not all caught up in those celebrities and such. Can’t wait to tell my nieces, they’ll be in bits when I tell them about tonight.”

The table erupted into coos and questions about a dating life Harry and I didn’t share and as my father, Laura and Harry sat quietly, I cringed with every congratulatory word about my dating a pop star over my father’s recovery.

“Oh my god, we’re not dating,” I finally cried out, shutting everyone up instantly. The silence that followed was expected, but definitely proved to be more embarrassing than I had anticipated – if I had thought at all before my outburst. I felt Harry’s eyes follow me as I grabbed my dirty plate. Under his gaze, I tried to cover up my burst by nonchalantly explaining, “We’re friends.”

But as I walked to the door that separated the kitchen and the dining room, thoughts from earlier haunted me. Before I could stop myself, I muttered, “If that.”

And with that, the door swung shut behind me.

It took a moment, but eventually, conversation behind the door that separated me and the party struck up again and the voices faded into the living room. I set my plate down in the sink and placed my head in my hands, feeling guilty. The night was supposed to be in celebration of my father’s ‘new head’ as Harry had called it, and yet I had twisted it into the Harry Styles show featuring my high school crush. I had embarrassed myself, my parents and definitely the boy who had stood beside me through a hard time in my life.

I was attempting to find a solution – should I lock myself away in my room for the rest of the night or make a public apology? – when the door from the dining room opened and I expected Harry to be there with a pink frown and curious green eyes. When I turned around, I realized it was Laura with a handful of dirty dishes and a sad look written across her face, and I tried to mask my disappointment.

“Before you say anything, I know. And I’m sorry,” I sighed.

Laura placed the dishes in the sink with a loud clank but as she turned the water on, she didn’t look up at me. She just shook her head. “I don’t think it’s me that you should be apologizing to.”

I stood there for a moment, wondering what my next move was. Obviously locking myself away was out of the question, but Laura was right. The guests and especially my father deserved the apology. So I walked towards the living room, where coffee and pie had been evenly distributed and luckily, conversation didn’t stop for my presence. I was just about to make my public announcement when I realized the spot that had been filled earlier across the room was empty. Harry was gone.

And as I heard the front door click shut behind someone, Laura’s words clicked in my head. She didn’t need the apology. Neither did my father or his friends. It was Harry who needed it.

I was moving towards the door and stepping through the dewy grass in a flash, goosebumps rising automatically against the cold Autumn air. The night sky was covered in gray clouds, hiding the stars and the moon, but the street was illuminated by lamp posts and between orange rays, I spied Harry strutting to his rental car.

“Harry, stop.” I ran after him, mostly so the dew of the grass would stop seeping through my tights. But once I reached the pavement, he turned to me and I noticed he was shaking his head.

“Why?” He stood in the middle of street with me on the sidewalk and didn’t dare to take a step forward. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, Erin, but if it involves temper tantrums in the middle of family dinners, then I don’t know that I want to be a part of it.”

“It wasn’t a temper tantrum,” I tried. “We’re not dating. I was just informing them.”

I couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but hurt expression within them was clear as day as he softly said, “Yeah, and apparently we’re not friends either.”

My lips pressed together. My eyes traveled to my bare feet as my big toes fiddled against each other. I hadn’t realized how loud I had muttered the last part of my ‘tantrum,’ but apparently it was loud enough for the boy across the table to hear. I didn’t know how to explain myself, but I felt justified in what I felt. I had made up my mind that the friendship was more damaging than helpful now. But letting it out that way wasn’t the plan, so the guilt was still there. “Look, I didn’t—“

“I mean, honestly, Erin,” he interrupted. “I thought we’d at least be friends. The text messages, the nightclub, the night at the hospital – I don’t know what else to call it.”

“Exactly, Harry!” I half screamed. His face contoured into something of confusion, but I didn’t dare let him interrupt me again. “Text messages and nightclubs and my father’s tumor – not even Abigail has been such a presence in my life. You say this is friendship, but it doesn’t feel like it.”

He paused and his tone was more gentle than I had ever heard before, more precarious, as if he saw the mirror of our relationship breaking and the last thing he wanted was his words to cause it to shatter. “Then what does it feel like?”

It felt heavy. Whatever we were, it felt like a mask to cover up more, though that was probably one-sided. It felt like I had spent my life with very few people and didn’t think twice about how I kept them all at arm’s length. It felt like I was caught up in a routine and once Harry strutted into Costa, in Wolverhampton, into my life, I was shaken awake from a trance. It felt like, if my world was shaking and the foundation of everything I had built was crumbling, Harry could be there to make sure I wasn’t collateral damage. Unlike everyone else, he fought to get closer. Unlike everyone else, he had been there every step of the way, despite the times my shoulder grew cold and I cowered away from him. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t a friend. He was more. It stung.

“It doesn’t feel like anything real,” I decided. “And who cares about friendship anymore? My father’s fine now. I’m fine now. You don’t need to play caring Prince Charming anymore.”

“Who says I was playing?” Harry asked quickly, but when no reply escaped from me, his eyes burned holes into me and he seemed to catch onto all the gaps in my previous response. “If you don’t want friendship, what do you want?”

There was a list of lies on the tip of my tongue. I could have said a whole series of things, one of them being that I didn’t want anything from him. But the pact I had made with myself just hours earlier suddenly didn’t sit so well. I looked at Harry and I realized if I said that I wanted nothing, this would be the last time I’d see him. A scared apology through his bandmate wouldn’t work this time. He wouldn’t come find me and set me straight again. He had fought enough. I didn’t want to lie. But I was too afraid to tell the truth.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry I’ve kept you,” I said softly, taking a step backwards.

He took a step forward, looking determined, looking like he understood more than he let on and had an agenda of his own. “Erin—“

But I didn’t let him go on. “I hope the rest of your night goes well. Goodnight, Harry.”

If his intuition was spot on, he didn’t let me know. He didn’t come after me. But I knew he was watching the entire walk up the still dewy lawn, because there were no footsteps echoing mine. I felt his gaze on me all the way up to the door but I didn’t turn around to close it behind me. I let it swing shut and let him linger out there however long he had.

The last thing I wanted was to make a fool of myself a second time in one night and walking away felt like the only way to avoid doing so. Yet even after walking back into the dinner party, I still felt like I had lost.