If You Told Me To

“Harry?” Sarah mused, leaning her head back so she could look up at Harry’s face from where she was. She had taken a huge chance by shifting closer to him and lying down, using his lower thigh as a pillow, but he hadn’t even acknowledged her, positively or negatively. She tried not to feel disheartened, but it did make her think that he just thought the position was natural, like they were friends who were comfortable touching one another without a second thought. “How old are you?”

Harry’s fingers stopped flying across the keyboard as he laughed. “You don’t know?”

“No. If you mentioned it before, then I forget.”

“I’m fifteen,” he replied. “I’m going to go into my sophomore year of high school.”

“Hm,” Sarah mused, adjusting herself to turn back to her sketchpad, where she was doodling a bunch of little drawings. “I figured you were older, actually.”

“Just because I act condescending doesn’t mean that I’m ten years older than you,” Harry laughed, accurately pinpointing the reason she thought he was sixteen or seventeen. “It’s only a few months, right?”

“Almost a year, I think,” she admitted. “When’s your birthday?”

“June tenth.”

“I turned fourteen April twenty-second. So it is almost a year.”

“But that’s okay.” Harry chuckled. “I’m friends with a kid in middle school back home, so it really doesn’t matter.”

Friends. The word sounded sour in her ear, but she knew that was exactly what they were. Unless she wanted to step up and say how she felt, which petrified her to the core, then their relationship clearly wasn’t going to go anywhere. Harry might have been sending signals here and there that he felt more strongly about her, but he made no moves to confirm what she suspected. Probably because Sarah had no experience with guys and was turning all of his openness and friendliness into acts of flirtation.

Instead of dwelling in her misery so long that he’d pick up on it, Sarah asked, “Did you want some lemonade? Because I can go get some.”

“Did you make it?” he asked with a small smile.

Sarah nodded, so he agreed. Without another word, she rose to her feet, leaving her sketchpad on the floor next to Harry, and went inside to ready the glasses.

When she returned to the barn a few minutes later, she caught Harry flipping through the pages of her sketchbook curiously, his laptop down at side. Sarah nearly dropped the glasses in horror, thinking of the picture she’d started sketching of him. She'd ended up abandoning it before it was finished because she hadn't managed to get his nose or teeth right.

“Harry, you have no right-” she started scolding before she froze in horror. Because he had landed on the picture of himself, with his own eyes staring back at him, the only part of the picture that she’d put in color.

She felt herself flush with embarrassment and readied herself to dart out of the barn and lock herself in her room like a dramatic teenager from every sappy television show ever. But Harry looked up at her with surprise and, shockingly, admiration. “Did you draw these? Like, for real? Not tracing?”

“Where would I get a picture of you to trace?” she replied sarcastically, shocked at her nerve as she handed him the glass of lemonade. He took it, but only briefly, because his mind was focused on something else.

“These pictures are incredible,” he told her, and she was shocked to hear nothing but total honesty in his tone. “And you drew me?”

She flushed bright red, trying to figure out what to say. She wasn’t sure what was more damning: her admitting that she’d tried it before they were friends or the fact that she abandoned the project because she couldn’t capture his likeness and beauty very well.

So she finally just sighed and said, “I tried to draw you. It didn’t come out well.”

“Are you kidding? This is fantastic.” He looked down at himself again and shook his head. “It’s almost like looking in a mirror, except in black and white. And the fact that you got my eyes exactly perfect…”

She took a sip of lemonade and tried her best not to blush, which proved entirely unsuccessful.
He seemed to take her silence the right way and looked up at her. “I’m sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable. But, just to be clear, I love this picture.”

“It sucks,” she replied calmly. “It doesn’t look like you at all.”

“Yes, it does!” he argued back, his eyebrows knitting together. “It looks exactly like me.”

She opened her mouth to argue back, and then she realized: the picture might have looked like him, but it didn’t look like how she saw him. It didn’t have the light behind his eyes, the hint of laughter always at the corners of his mouth, the way his entire face could convey when he was feeling mischievous. No matter how talented she was, there was no way she could depict the way she saw Harry Styles in a drawing. As long as he stayed on the pedestal she’d so carefully placed him on, her attempts would never be good enough.

“It doesn’t look like you to me,” she corrected softly, hoping to God that he wouldn’t ask what, exactly, she meant by that.

And he didn’t. He probably just attributed it to her overly-critical artistic mind, and he dropped the sketchbook back on the floor. “Well, since I invaded your privacy and looked at your pictures, it’s only fair that you see what I’ve been doing on my computer all day, every day.”

“Would it be bad if I said I was scared?” Sarah laughed, but she settled down next to Harry anyway, pulling the sweating glass of lemonade onto her lap and ignoring the growing circle of moisture that was left behind on her cutoff denim shorts.

“You shouldn’t be scared,” he assured her before typing in a web address and pulling up a blog. Sarah didn’t start reading right away, since she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what they said, but Harry quickly started explaining. “I’ve always loved to write, whether it was song lyrics or poems or blogs, whatever. So when I told my friends that I was going down to visit Aunt Tony for the summer, they all suggested that I keep them up to date with blogs that detailed my everyday life. It’s a way for us to keep in touch where I don’t have to be plugged into my phone all day and ignore everyone around me.”

Sarah was mesmerized as she scooted closer to Harry, their cheeks mere inches apart, as she read the blog post Harry had enlarged. The one he’d written the first day they’d journeyed to the lake, where she’d “introduced him to the beauty the otherwise desolate wasteland had to offer.”

“And it wasn’t just the lake that was beautiful; Sarah is definitely the most gorgeous girl that I’ve ever known in my life. Although her outside is pretty in the down-to-earth, girl-next-door kind of way, it’s her personality that really makes her shine. She has a way of being open and friendly to everyone, even me when I was being a total dickhead to her, and her innocent, shy nature makes her all the more endearing. How many girls you know would be so timid, but not self-conscious, to show off a body as perfect as hers?”

Sarah’s face was as hot as the Sahara, avoiding Harry’s questioning gaze at all costs. She had never been complimented so much in her life, and she wasn’t exactly sure how to take it. Knowing that those kinds of details about her were out there on the internet for everyone to see was humiliating and charming at the same time. Harry didn’t care if he gushed, if people labeled him as whipped or whatever dumb names teenage boys came up with to insult each other for treating a girl properly. He just cared about expressing his emotion through writing, truthfully, without barriers, and any backlash wasn’t his problem.

“Wow,” Sarah finally breathed when she finished the entry. “That…that was really nice, Harry.”

He shrugged and laughed a little, but it sounded shaky with nervousness. “It was basically my equivalent of that picture you drew of me.”

Sarah almost died with embarrassment at his confession that he understood what she meant when she said she couldn’t draw him properly. Then, a beat later, she realized that he was confessing he had feelings for her. Real, romantic feelings.

It was exactly the thing she’d been waiting for since the Fourth of July when he held her hand at the fireworks. She wanted to jump at the opportunity, to take advantage of the situation and make the first move.

But she chickened out and moved away from him, nodding toward his drink. “Your lemonade is going to taste gross if you let the ice melt.”