Graphite

My knees hit the ground with a thud muted by the carpet, and the soreness in my muscles makes me hiss air through my teeth. I turn slowly to face Harry.

“What. The hell. Are you. Doing. Here.” I spit, trying to keep my voice quiet out of consideration for the others, because unlike certain people, some of us have some fucking manners.

Harry’s eyes are clouded with sleep, a dimming film over his green eyes as he sits up against the wall, looking dazed and confused. Of course, I’d try to stand up, but my body feels like there’s fiery acid licking each and every individual vein in my body. These over the counter pills are doing me no good.

“Hello? Anyone taking up residence in that head? Or does Louis owe me twenty dollars for assuming correctly that your brain was removed to make room for your hair?” I snap my fingers a few times in front of his eyes. My eyes dart around at the closed grey doors. I feel like they have eyes, watching each and every interaction with silent judgement.

Harry snaps to attention, rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes and returning to the world of the semi-conscious.

“What the hell are you doing sleeping outside my door?” I ask again, ignoring the twisting feeling in my stomach. He pulls a hand through his disheveled hair, tugging on curls that appear to be softer than silk.

Stop. I need to stop.

“What the fuck are you doing leaving at five a.m.?” He shoots back, his voice heavy and rough with sleep. God fucking damn it.

“You don’t get to ask questions, okay? I thought I was tripping over a dead fucking body, alright there, mate? So why don’t you tell me before I take something a little bit worse than a pencil and make it a permanent part of your body. Like an eyeball.”

Harry’s face darkens with anger and he flexes his formerly impaled hand. The muscle in his jaw ticks.

“We have shifts, alright? Every night one of us keeps an eye on you so you don’t do something fucking mental. That seems to be your forte, isn’t it?” He sneers, pulling himself up into a standing position. I have to stare up at him to glare and I don’t like being at the disadvantage. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime and then some.

“How many times,” I say, pretending like the pain doesn’t exist as I stand, “do I have to tell you guys,” Is this what being old is like? If so, I’m never getting fucking old. “That I don’t need to be babysat? What am I? Twelve?”

An infuriating smirk spreads across Harry’s face. I contemplate slapping it right off.

“Holly, do you really want me to answer that question?”

Instead of giving him the satisfaction of a reply, I turn on my heel head for the back flight of stairs. The fluorescent lighting is harsh and makes everything appear as if it were sharpened.

The neon red exit sign glows above my head as I push through the door, Harry’s footsteps heavy behind me. Why won’t he leave me the fuck alone?

The stairs let out to a path behind the building that’s beaten and worn with age, a dusty road lined with tall, soft grass and white budding flowers with yellow centers. The sun peeks over the line of trees, starting off a brilliant orange and fading to watered-down yellow, then a red the hue of blood spilt on snow, and illuminating the entire sky with the color of a lilac crushed on pavement.

I let out a peaceful sigh, the early morning chill kissing my face and turning my cheeks pink. For just a moment, I feel like everything will be fine.

The door shutting lightly behind me gives away Harry’s grand entrance, his shoes crunching on the gravel. I turn slightly, catching him staring unguarded for a moment of raw honesty and verity. In that moment, that singular, secular moment, every nerve ending in my body feels like a live wire exposed in a hurricane. There’s that glint in his eye, the glint that makes my stomach drop down to my toes (which are in terrible need of a manicure) only to pull back up again.

When I speak, his guard goes back up. “I’m going for a run. This track is two miles and ends up across the quad from the Training Center.” I have to physically work to keep my calm voice, instead of telling him to stop staring at me like and to go fuck off somewhere.

The purple light casts a light on Harry’s eyes, contrasting so sharply with the green he looks inhuman. He squints, eyebrows furrowing together. “And I’m going with you.” He states simply, all illusions of grandeur and whatever qualities he had before gone.

I blink at his frankness. “No. You’re not. No one runs with me. Not even Liam. He waits at the end to time me.”

“It’s a good thing I’m not Liam, isn’t it, Holly? Someone has to make sure you don’t construct a noose in the middle of nowhere.” His smile throws down a challenge between us, a declaration hovering in the air.

I narrow my eyes. “My name isn’t Holly.”

“Do you think I care?”

I turn readjust my ponytail and stretch, setting up my stopwatch for the run.

“Fucking fine, then,” I say, looking over my shoulder.

Then I take off.

***

What feels like a millennia later (but what is in reality, only a few minutes), I reach the bend in the dirt path that opens up to a large clearing filled with wild flowers and sleepy butterflies with paintings for wings waking up for the morning.

I want to slow down, give my aching muscles a rest, but I’m hyper aware of Harry running beside me, completely undisturbed with exception of a bead of sweat tracing a line from his temple down to the curve of his jaw and the unkempt quality of his brown curls. His effortlessness pushes me forward, despite my lungs wanting to collapse.

Then I see a silhouette at the edge of the wood, a shadowy figure lingering in a copse of trees that thin out before they fade into grass. I stop dead in my tracks, my sneakers kicking up a cloud of dust. It chokes my lungs, constricting my throat, fear and shock rolling through my body because I know that silhouette, I watched it every day for three weeks torture me until I begged for death, begged for the burning end of a match pressed to my skin to be the last.

He can’t possibly be here.

No no no.

I turn to Harry, my eyes wild, grabbing for the place where his holster should have been. “Harry tell me you have a gun, tell me you have something I can shoot that fucking bastard with.” I pull on the fabric of his shirt, bringing his face closer to mine.

Harry roughly grasps my hands, engulfing them. “Holly, we are the only bloody ones here.”

“Are you fucking blind? That’s him! He’s there I swear to fucking God that I just—” I turn back to point, but the silhouette is gone. My heart beats like its racing to a finish line. “Where did he go? Where the hell did he go?” I pull my hands through my hair and the ponytail falls out, shaking uneven strands of light brown hair into my face. I sink down to the ground, breathing heavily.

Harry’s warm, calloused hands slip from my wrists to my shoulders, his face panicked and attempting to be reassuring. “Holly. Holly, love, look at me. We are the only ones here. You’re safe, all right? No one’s going to try to fucking steal you away in the night, okay?”

“I saw him, I saw him he was there he’s come back to kill me because I escaped—”

“Who? Who’s coming back to get you, Hol?” Harry shouts over my frantic worrying, failing to snap me out of my psychotic break. (I’m pretty impressed with myself that I managed to hold it off this long.) “Goddamn it, Sophia look at me.”

I shut up.

He smiles a bit when he realizes that he finally got to me. “Who’s coming to get you?”

My voice breaks, betraying me when I want it to the least. “Sebastian. Sebastian Gabriel. He tortured me.”

In an instant Harry’s jaw locks and his features become set in a grim determination. “He’s not here, he’s gone.”

I have to take a minute to process this, to really let the words sink into my brain.

When I try to stand, my legs become as useless as noodles, buckling beneath my weight as if they never held up a person before. Get your shit together, legs. I don’t run for you to give out on me.

Then Harry sweeps me, literally, off my feet.

“What the hell are you doing?” I snap, pushing my hands against his chest, preferring falling flat on my ass than to be so dependent on him, of all people.

“You can’t walk. You just had a hallucination. You need to see a damn doctor, Holly.” He begins walking in the direction from whence we came, a little over half a mile from our starting line.

“No, I really don’t. I’m perfectly capable of walking, Styles.”

He rolls his eyes at me. “For once, just please, once, could you shut up for more than five seconds and accept help when you fucking need it?”

I start to protest but then a wave of dizziness renders me mute. Damn logic.

“You don’t win this one,” I mutter helplessly.

“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” he remarks, smugness coloring every inch of him.

I really don’t think I’ll ever live this one down.