Bloom

January

“Three days back and we’ve already got two labs, a summary, and a long fucking problem set,” Elliott sighed, walking alongside me out of the lecture hall. “Did you print out your problem set yet? It’s going to take ages to get done.”

I shook my head, paying more attention to my phone than the boy on my left. While in class, my phone on silent, I’d missed three texts and one call. The texts were all from Harry, who was dealing much better with the whole ‘let’s pretend we never kissed and everything is fine’ situation than I was. I typed out a quick reply, advising him to stop complaining about his hunger pangs and made some goddamn food, then switched back to the Recent Calls list. The top name, highlighted in red, stared glaringly back at me.

2014-01-15
Ciaran Talbott
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Never had I anticipated that Dad would be the one to call first. In the back of my head, I had a tentative plan to make the call some time next week, when I’d settled back into the rhythm of school again. It surprised me that he’d called so early into the start of term, because unless he wasn’t teaching any courses right now, he had to be even busier than I was.

“Imogen? Have you been listening to anything I’ve been saying?”

I blinked, clicking the top button on my phone and sliding it into my pocket, then looking at Elliott. “What?”

“Thought not. Did you want to start on the lab prep now? We’ve not got class until five, and we aren’t far from the library.”

“Uh, sure,” I replied, still a little distracted. “Can we get some coffee or something first? And food. Definitely food.”

“Eat.’s just there,” Elliott said, motioning to the cafe across the road. “I really want to get started on the Mechanics work, d’you mind if we just pick something up and take it to the library?”

Usually, I did my course work at Matt and Silas’s, but I didn’t know who was there, and things were still uneasy between Matt and I. Rather than text Silas to see who was at the apartment, I followed Elliott to Eat. and picked out a cinnamon roll to take to the library.

Elliott and I claimed a table on the top floor, spreading our notes and textbooks across the surface, and tried not to spill coffee or get crumbs on anything we actually had to hand in. Although not all of our classes were together, we still got the same work. When studying, I liked to keep my phone out of sight, but I also didn’t want to miss another call from my dad. It was okay to miss it the first time, but twice in one day might seem like I was intentionally ignoring him.

It turned out to be a bad idea, because I kept on getting texts from Harry. After the fourth one (he was giving me a play-by-play of his sandwich making escapades), Elliott looked up from his problem set and stared at my phone. “You’re popular today,” he said.

“I’ve just got a bored friend,” I said. I told Harry to go and bother somebody else with his thrilling tale, and breathed a sigh of relief when he didn’t text back with a bunch of upset emojis.

I had yet to tell Harry about Beckett, and since the latter hadn’t tried to contact me since I’d been back in London, I was letting it be put off. Harry and I had spent almost no time together since New Year’s, the combination of the aftermath of the kiss, his job, and term starting left us both busy and unavailable. In the two days I had seen him since showing up at his house, at brunch with Nick last week or the evening spent eating pizza at Matt and Silas’s on Saturday (which was more than a little tense, thanks to Matt’s suspicious glances), it never seemed like the right time to bring up Beckett. I needed to be alone with him, which I didn’t see happening for at least another week (and not just because I felt like I was going to explode when he was stood right there), and I also needed to stop thinking about his mouth and his hands and his hair and basically everything else.

Despite our agreement for things to go back to normal, now that Harry and I were talking again, there was nothing left to distract me. Instead of fixating on getting him to so much as text me, I had those few heated moments running through my brain on loop. Whenever his name popped up on my screen, I had to stop and breathe and remind myself that it wasn’t worth the trouble to keep on thinking about him like this. Actually seeing him in person was terrifying, but not because I sort of wanted to jump at him. It was how normal Harry acted that scared me — like nothing had ever happened. I guess he really took my joke to heart. We were just two friends who had made out.

“Imogen, you’ve been on that question for ten minutes,” Elliott said from across the table.

My hand jerked, pencil scraping across the paper and leaving a long, dark line. “Shit,” I muttered, scrambling to find my eraser. I tried to get rid of the mark, but it remained, a faint blur across the page.

“Do you, um, need to talk about it?”

“Huh?”

“Whatever you’re thinking about that has nothing to do with rotational motion. Do you want to talk about it?”

I looked at Elliott, with his pale skin and wide eyes, and didn’t think he’d be able to help much with my Harry problem. “Do you have a good relationship with your parents?” I asked instead.

The question surprised him. “I guess, yeah.”

“They’re still together? Your parents?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Lots of my friends’ parents split up when they were kids, but mine never did. I think it’s ‘cos they never got married. Marriage does things to people. Changes them. Are yours going through a divorce or summat?”

“No, they got divorced when I was two. My dad’s never really been involved in my life, but now that I’m living here both him and my mom — who started talking again when I brought up the idea of going to university in England — think I should go up to Manchester to visit him and his family. I was supposed to call him before winter break, and then when I didn’t my mom told me to do it as soon as I got back, but I haven’t yet because I don’t know what to say to the man who’s been no more than a postcard twice a year since I was a kid. I’ve only seen the man four times.”

Elliott put down his pencil then, and propped his chin on his clasped hands. “D’you think that seeing your dad would be a good thing? Or just a waste of time?”

“Well,” I replied, leaning back in my chair and folding my arms. “I think that if my parents hadn’t split when I was so little, and I’d been able to know him a bit better, we would probably be really close. According to my mom, and what I know from the few times I’ve been around him, we’re really similar, my dad and I. So in that way, seeing him would be great for me. I’d probably learn a lot about myself, and understand more about why I’m the way I am. But on the other hand, I hardly know this guy. I don’t know if I trust him, or want him in my life. He’s my father, sure, but he’s not really my dad. Y’know?”

Sometimes it’s easier to tell people who don’t know you all that well things that you wouldn’t normally say out loud. Elliott was a friend, but we hardly spent time together outside of class, so he was the perfect outlet. He was also sweet and understanding and calm, all the sort of things you wanted in the person you were going to bear your thoughts to.

“I know if I were you, and I had the opportunity to get to know me dad, then I’d do it. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe you find out that you and him don’t really get on after all, and you come back here and it’s done. At least you can say that you tried, yeah?”

“I guess,” I replied, my hand ghosting across my phone. “He called me earlier. My dad. It was during class, so I didn’t answer, but now I don’t know if I should wait for him to call back or if I should do it.”

“You should,” Elliott said. “It shows that you’re making an effort too. Parents like that sort of thing.”

“Yeah,” I said, forming a firmer grip around my phone. I pushed back from the table and returned Elliott’s encouraging nod with a nervous smile, then ducked into the stacks. There, amidst the books on Marine Biology (which had nothing to do with our field, but the top floor was the best place to study without people walking by every two seconds), I pulled up my dad’s number and hit call.

“Hello? Ciaran here,” said a voice that should have been familiar, but wasn’t, after three rings.

“Um, hey, it’s, uh, it’s Imogen,” I stammered, already failing to sound at least semi-intelligent in our first conversation in nine years.

“Imogen,” he breathed. “I didn’t think you’d call back.”

“Yeah, well, here I am. Calling you.”

Dad chuckled. “Yes. I’m glad you did. I haven’t got much time to talk just now, I have a seminar in ten minutes. Catching up like this isn’t quite what I had in mind, anyway. I know your mum’s talked to you about it, but I want to know what you have to say about coming up for a weekend. I was thinking this weekend, in fact.”

“It’s already Wednesday,” was all I could come up with.

“If this weekend’s too soon, we could do—“

“This weekend is fine. I just need to figure out how I’m going to get there.”

“It’s easy by train. I could pick you up at the station.”

I hesitated, too many possibilities running through my head. What if we didn’t recognize each other? How would I know which middle-aged man was my father? The photos Mom had of him — of which there were only a few, since she’d thrown everything from before I was born out — were outdated and I didn’t even remember what he looked like in them.

“I’ll let you know,” I said, and waited a thoroughly awkward period of time for his reply.

“Alright,” he said, and I could hear shuffling in the background. “I’ve got to get going just now, Imogen, but give me another ring on Friday and we’ll figure out the details.”

“Okay.”

“Bye then.”

“Uh, yeah. Bye.”



After our last class, Elliott and I parted ways and I headed back to Astor. I knocked on Jillian’s door first, feeling drained physically, mentally, and emotionally, and hoped that she was there.

When she did open the door, dressed in very un-Jillian like attire (sweatpants and a loose-fitting top), she let me slip past her into the room without a word. We sat on her bed, and I criss-crossed my legs, my hands fidgeting in my lap.

“I talked to my dad today,” I said quietly.

“This is the man who left you and your mum when you were two, yeah?”

“Technically we left him.”

She shrugged; it made no difference to her. “Didn’t you say he lived in Manchester?”

“He teaches at one of the universities,” I replied with a nod. There was a tear in the knee of my jeans, I picked at the fraying edges absently. “He wants me to come and visit this weekend.”

“He just asked you? Out of nowhere?”

“Well, not really,” I said. “I was supposed to call him weeks ago. Him and my mom have been talking about it since I decided to go to school here.”

“Your dad sounds like a right tit. I wouldn’t have called him either if I were in your situation,” Jillian said. “But if he’s made the effort, it might not be so bad if you go up there. Just so you can say that you have.”

“That’s what Elliott said.”

“Elliott?” Jillian echoed, brows furrowing. “Oh, right. Cute Astrophysics boy. Big eyes, sort of shy, needs a hair cut.”

“Yeah.”

“You talked to him about going to see your dad?”

“We were studying. He was there, so I asked him what he thought about it all,” I replied. I wasn’t going to tell her I’d actually been thinking of Harry, and that talking about my parents was a way of averting my thoughts to something that was more important, but had caused far less mayhem in my brain over the last several days.
Jillian turned her upper body toward me, pushing back the loose strands of hair that were falling around her face. “So are you going up to Manchester?”

“I told him I would,” I said. “But I don’t know what I’m going to say once I get there.”

“You’ll be awkward and hilarious and adorable, just like you always are,” she told me, grinning. “I would go with you, but I’ve got an essay on Thoreau due next week and I haven’t done any of the readings.”

I groaned, falling back on her bed and narrowly avoiding banging my head against the wall. Single beds really are the worst. “This weekend is going to <i>suck.</i>”

“Bring somebody with you,” Jillian said. “It’ll make it better, I promise.”

“Who could I possibly bring?”

“A week ago, I’d say Matt. Actually, he’d go with you now if you asked him. But I know you aren’t going to do that. What about Silas?”

“He’s in Switzerland this weekend, remember? It’s his grandmother’s birthday.”

“Right. I mean, I suppose you could ask Harry—“

“Absolutely not.”

But she seemed very much attached to the idea. “Think about it, Imogen, he’s got, like, training in how to behave in social situations. With Harry around, nothing would be awkward.”

“I would. I would be awkward.”

“Yes, but you’re always awkward,” she said flippantly. “Harry’s the perfect option, really. He may be a moody sod half the time, but that’s just because he doesn’t have to put up a front when he’s with us. You’ve seen him when he’s around strangers. He’s an entirely different person.”

I’d seen several different versions of Harry in the months I’d known him. Jillian didn’t have to tell me this. I knew that Harry would be lovely to bring up to Manchester, aside from the media storm that would probably occur, even just for emotional support. His ability to flip his personality like a switch, from the irritated boy I knew to the polite, smiley young man the public saw (romantic liaisons not included) was perfect for this sort of situation. If he put his mind to it, Harry could get on with anyone.

But I didn’t know if I could handle four hours in a car — because he definitely wouldn’t want to take the train — alone with Harry. It was hard enough being around him with other people there. And then there would be the questions from my dad and his family when we got there. What is Harry Styles doing sitting in their living room? Are we dating? How did we meet, anyhow?

After running through multiple situations in my mind, all in rapid succession, I came to the conclusion that I would ask Harry if he wanted to come to Manchester. There was always the chance he’d say no, anyway. If he did say yes, then it meant we would have the perfect opportunity to prove that we were able to move past what had happened on New Year’s. I had a feeling he was doing exceptionally better than I was — due to his ordinary behaviour and soirées with Darcy and other random girls he picked up in clubs — and so I wouldn’t have to worry about him making the whole thing weirder than it needed to be.

I decided to text Harry, because I didn’t want to hear his gravelly voice while I was trying to concentrate, and I would probably just get distracted and not ask him at all.

What are you doing this weekend?

Nothingggg

Are you up for a road trip?

Is anyone else invited

Wait where

Just you and me, friend

Manchester

Whats in Manchester

My dad

I thought you didn’t talk to him??

He wants me to visit

And you want me to come with

…

Yes

Okayyy

As long as I get to pick the music

And we visit my mum

Deal

“You’re smiling. I’m guessing he said yes?”

“It looks like Harry’s driving me to Manchester,” I said.

Jillian adjusted herself on the narrow bed, leaning back against the wall next to me. Her long legs dangled over the edge and she wiggled her toenails, painted bright purple. “Should be fun. But you know there’ll be lots of paps around. Who knows what story they’ll spin.”

“I don’t know how anyone would believe we’re dating when he’s been photographed with half of London in less than two weeks.”

“He’s Harry Styles, that’s how,” she said. “But with all the stuff going ‘round about Darcy being seen in his neighbourhood a lot since New Year’s, they might disregard you entirely.”

“That would be awesome,” I agreed. “Doubtful, but awesome.”

We left the conversation at that, and I went back to my room. I plugged in my laptop, which was just surviving on 8% battery, shed my coat and sweater, tossed my jeans into the hamper, and crawled into bed. It was only eight thirty and I already wanted to sleep.

Around this time last year, I was happy with how my life was going. There weren’t any pressing concerns, except what I was going to get my mom for her birthday. I had a loving boyfriend and I was halfway through my first year of university. Everything was great, and it never occurred to me that any of that would change. Although I was still me, thinking too much and getting caught up in one thing, I didn’t worry nearly as much as I do now. But that was largely because I didn’t have any problems. Not in my personal life, at least.

And although I don’t particularly enjoy constantly thinking about my dad and school and Matt and Harry, trying to juggle it all and sort everything out, how it was back then wasn’t perfect either. I was blissful, sure, but I also didn’t pay close attention to what was going on around me. It was that ignorance that made me so hyperaware of everything as it is now, right down to the tangle of curls at the nape of Harry’s neck.

I hummed in frustration, hands curling into fists against the comforter, and buried my face into my pillow. It didn’t matter what I was thinking about, it just kept on coming back to him. Stupid Harry Styles and his stupid face. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to be thinking about him, that his face appeared when I closed my eyes, he was there anyway. I could try to focus on something else, and it would work for a while, but as soon as I stopped focusing, that messy hair and those too-pink lips would pop into my head and plague my thoughts until I found something else to distract me.

I needed to move on. The ideal situation was that I’d just forget about what kissing him was like, or how his skin felt beneath my fingertips, but that didn’t seem likely. I fixated, and it was a bad habit, but it wasn’t just something I could stop doing. My brain just worked that way, skimming through problems and solutions until I found one that would work. And at this point, the solution to moving past That One Time I Kissed Harry Styles was through flooding.

A technique in behavioural therapy, normally used to treat phobias, though adequate in my predicament. Exposure to the thing until it no longer has the undesired effect. Being stuck in a car with him for four hours would be frustrating, but maybe it would help.