I'll Fight My Corner

"Come on, Emma. It's one party. You'll be fine! I'll take care of you."

My cheeks burned. I was always blushing around him.

"No, you won't. How can you take care of me when you're drunk?"

"I won't get drunk!"

My eyebrow raised and I smiled. He held his hands up, palms facing me.

"I swear!"

"I don't believe you."

"Emma, I promise you. I'll take care of you. I'll drink a little bit, but I'll make sure you have fun."

He held his pinky out and I laughed.

"Don't you have practice to get to?"

He grinned. "No practice for me today."

I linked his pinky with mine and held on tight.

"Take care of me, Styles. Don't break your promise."

He let go of my littlest finger and stood up, gathering his things. I started to do the same when he chuckled quietly. I looked up at him and saw that his gaze was fixed on the front of my binder.

"You still have the note I gave you?"

I directed my eyes toward the ceiling and took a deep breath. I knew what was coming. He was going to poke fun at it and never let it go as he had done many times since I started tutoring him. For example, there was the apparent predicament of our caffeine preferences. He liked tea and I liked coffee and whenever he so chose to pick me up from home in the morning, he always made a point to comment on my "stinky" coffee.

"I-I forgot to take it out. I was going to keep it on my desk at home-"

His smile grew. "Even better!"

"No - Harry - gosh! I hate you. You know that? You're so -"

"Adorable? Hilarious? Charming? Devastatingly handsome? A poetic letter writer?"

I simply carried on with clearing the table of my belongings. Before I knew it, a smile fought its way onto my face and I bit my lip, trying to stop it from growing.

"You love me, Emma."

I said nothing and made my way out of the tutoring room, standing at the door so he could catch up.

"For a kid with such long legs, you sure are a slow walker," I told him once he reached the door.

He just shook his head and grinned. "I do it to make you mad."

I stopped walking in the middle of the hallway. "Excuse me?"

"I know that you don't like taking things slow. Well, most things. And you don't like staying in the same place for too long. You always want to leave a room that you're not comfortable in as quickly as possible. Which, by the way, will not happen tonight."

Instead of throwing a comeback at him, I was speechless. How could he possibly figure out all of those things after only knowing me for a couple of weeks? I didn't even know that about myself.

I was still frozen when he started walking again. "So, do you want to drop off your stuff at home or are you going to keep it in my car?"

"Wait, hold on!" I caught up with him and began to walk backwards so that I could face him. "You can't just say all of that stuff and not explain!"

We were standing on the edge of the sidewalk, almost at the parking lot. He and I both stopped walking and I crossed my arms, awaiting his response.

"You do know that I don't pay attention to what you're teaching me half the time, don't you?" he said with a furrowed brow.

I repeated my question from earlier. "Excuse me?"

"Pre-cal is boring, which is why I have a C in the class. Easy explanation. So when you're trying to teach me formulas and logs and all that, I just watch you instead. I'm still learning, and you're still teaching me. It's just not what you think."

I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out. My cheeks burned as bright as ever and my hands started to shake ever so slightly. He had been watching me this whole time? What if I had dumb habits that I didn't know about? What if I twitched? What if he thought that I was actually an idiot that he liked to obvserve like a science experiment?

His eyes widened and he moved to put his hand on my shoulder, grasping it firmly, as if he wanted to hold me still. As if he didn't want me to go anywhere.

"No, Emma, don't run away. I swear, I don't think you're weird or anything like that. I just find you really, really interesting. I like the way you observe your surroundings before immersing yourself in them. And the way you never really make yourself comfortable unless someone that you know, I think, is in the room. I like the way you relax when I walk in, or when Joey walks in after me for tutoring. I like the way you get a crease between your eyebrows when you're trying to figure something out, because I know you're putting all your effort into it. You never half ass anything. It's amazing."

I bit the inside of my cheek and tried to look at anything other than him. What was he talking about? Harry Styles had gone crazy.

"Are you high, or something, Harry? Don't feed me bullshit like that."

"No, listen. Emma, look at me." He placed his fingers on my chin and gently turned my face so that I was looking at him. "You're beautiful and intricate and I think you're made out of porcelain. You aren't like anyone I've ever met."

I tried my best to wrench my chin out of his long fingers and looked down at my shoes. "Can we go now?"

He took a step back, his jaw falling slightly. "Did you not hear anything that I just said?"

"Harry," I said, putting more force into my words. "Please, let's go."

He shook his head. "You're going to have to shed that skin sometime, Emma. You can't hide behind your punctual tendencies and sky high grade point average forever. There's more to life than being correct all the time."

I didn't say anything. Instead, I turned and started to walk towards his car.

He groaned. "Emma, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

Each word he said was a threat to my stability and my ability to keep from crying. I attempted to use a trick I had learned from a book that was said to keep one from crying. If I just mentally recited the colors of the things that surrounded me, eventually the tears would stop.

White car. Green grass. Blue sky. Gray-black gravel. White parking spot lines. Orange spots of sunset.

It wasn't working and I was still sniffling so I decided to go deeper.

Snow white car. Lime gummy bear grass. A sky as blue as periwinkle flowers, fading into lavender. Gravel that wasn't quite gray or black, but maybe better named charcoal. Painted lines between each car, colored a fading, greyish white. Tangerine bursts lined the horizon, signaling the coming darkness of night.

I wiped moisture from the corners of my eyes and turned around to face him. He simply sighed and looked at me with as much remorse as he could gather. I smiled slightly and said, "It's okay. I shouldn't have freaked out."

He just unlocked the car and we both got in, silent for a few minutes. He hadn't started the car yet and he was just looking at me. I was looking out the windshield, searching for some sense as to what had just happened.

"Emma-"

"No. Harry, I really am sorry." I took a deep breath and turned to him, preparing for what I was about to say. "In truth, no one has ever talked to me like that. And I haven't let anyone in far enough to allow them to. I don't know how it happened, but suddenly, you're the closest thing that I have to a friend. And our acquaintance is really weird as it is. I can tell that it's not like other friendships or tutoring relations either. It's not to say I don't like being around you, because I do. It's fun. But I'm just not used to it. So forgive me if I react in ways that you don't expect. I'm sorry."

He turned to me and smiled.

"I like being your friend, too."