Cease to Begin

She couldn't help but wonder what it had always been about him. He had this...thing, this ability to make his presence known before ever really stepping into a room. She assumed that's why he had made a good pop star, although that notion was probably silly.

It was as if the two of them had become so attuned to one another in all the time that they had been acquainted, she could feel him walking up the path towards her front door, or out in the garden while he was trying to be sneaky and throw a stone at her window like she were Juliet and he her Romeo.

That thought made her laugh, Harry Styles a Romeo. It wasn't because the thought was particularly funny, it was a sad reflection on how she truly viewed their relationship. Like they had been some star-crossed lovers fated to meet, and much like the Shakespearean reference, fated to end in tragedy. Granted neither of them had died, nor did their families have some long standing feud which somehow worked itself out because of the death of their children. Katie had just come out a little bit heart broken, okay…more than a little bit heartbroken. And he, well she had no idea where he really stood anymore.

Things had gotten so bloody complicated, especially after that phone call no less than a week ago. Had they turned a corner, were they mending fences slowly but surely? She didn't have an answer to that.

God, why couldn't he have just stayed away? It could have been so simple for the both of them, eventually she would have just filed him in the back of her mind, kept him a distant memory to pull out from time to time, a story to tell her friends about failed teenage love, omitting his name or changing it to something else entirely. He could have been a life lesson to her daughter one day, he could have just been a ghost.

She had gone to bed the previous night without much thought or care, things had relatively gotten back to normal since the infamous phone conversation. She had been rising with the sun, going to sleep with it too, filling the middle portions of her day with various activities. It had sort of stunned the rest of her family, this sudden emergence from her room like the old Katie, without a scowl on her face and some complaint grumbling off of her vocal chords.

She had been pretty quiet concerning the further communication between the two of them, especially since the snooping incident by her brother and sister when she had first arrived home. She hadn't really spoken to Charlotte either, a few quick texts here and there to keep in touch but nothing in depth. She had been dealing with this all on her own, and it had driven her completely mental, so she decided that she wouldn't allow it to any longer.

As the sun began to rise over the clouds hanging lowly above Cheshire, her body started to stir like it had been trained to. Slowly drifting back towards the land of the living, her foggy brain and still limbs buzzed as they regained feeling. But something else began to buzz within her, something she knew couldn't be stopped.

When she felt him, it always started in her legs. The slow drum of his finger tips on her calves, creating a beat that matched the one in her chest. It would move up to her hips, over her stomach, and then stop right at her heart. There would be a moment of peace, quiet, and then seconds later it felt like he had pushed his hand right through her skin, digging around to find the organ and then rip it out, leaving her feeling hollow.

It had scared her at first, took her breath right out from her lungs causing her to audibly gasp when he entered the room she was in. It always seemed like he had startled her, and in a way he had, but she would never tell him the real reason for the fright.

They had been lying to and about each other even before they began.

"He's here," she heard the voice in the back of her head hiss to her that morning. "He's here and there's nothing you can do about it now."

She wanted to run, get up and flee somewhere that he could never find her no matter how hard he tried. That, unfortunately, wasn't an option, except maybe the running part. That was it, she thought when her body and mind finally rose from a decent nights slumber, she would go for a jog.

Stretching her arms over her head, Katie scratched at her stomach as she walked across the carpet. She pulled open the closet, grabbed a pair of grey sweatpants and a simple black t-shirt that she had cut the arms off of to make a tank top of some sort. She fumbled to put all of it on over a sports bra, tied her hair into a ponytail, grabbed her iPod after almost forgetting it, and bounded down the stairs. Thankfully nobody was awake to question where she was going.

She slid her feet into an old pair of trainers, left her keys behind, placed the earbuds in her ears and was off, destination unknown. She would let her feet carry her, focus on the rhythm of the music pumping into her ears. Most importantly, she would forget all about that feeling, forget all about that menace and get on with her day.

But as usual, nothing was ever black or white in Katie's life.

She had been on the move for maybe ten minutes, waving to a few of the locals who were early risers themselves, winding her way through the streets of the familiar village. There was a sharp turn that she had to take to get along some of the more secluded roads, a blink and you'll miss it kind of thing. It was hard to see if anybody was ever coming around that corner, in a car or on foot, and as she quickly shifted to the left her body crashed into something, almost sending her flying backwards.

The arms wrapped around her, hugging her against the person's chest to keep her steady and on her feet. A mess of curly brown hair tumbled into her blurry vision, a flash of green eyes as she fumbled to get the earbuds out. The deep, sweet voice caressed against the side of her face when he lowly asked if she was alright, said her name the way he had always said it when they were alone and close like this after having spent so much time kissing, or laughing.

She could feel the slow drum of his finger tips.