Bloom

February

“You could stay.”

I paused, leaning over the side of the bed trying to hook my foot into my panties — thrown carelessly onto the floor next to one of my socks — while simultaneously fastening the hook of my bra.

There are many sets of three words in the English language. Some have more meaning than others. This was one of them.

Harry had rolled onto his side, one arm curled beneath his head, and was watching me with a smile, though his eyes were cautious. His hair was still a bit wonky from last night, when he’d stumbled in at half past two smelling like other people’s perfume and wearing a suit (I almost died on the spot), his hair gelled flat on the sides of his head and curling behind his ears and at the back of his neck. I’d done my best to make it messy again, but whatever product Lou used was like fucking cement.

“I thought we didn’t do that,” I replied carefully, quickly grabbing my panties off the floor and pulling them on. A quick glance at the clock on the bedside table told me it was half past eight. I sat on the mattress with my legs criss-crossed, facing him, and waited for his reply.

“Not, like, stay as in ‘let’s cuddle,’” Harry explained in his raspy morning voice. The low rumble made me shiver, but I tried not to make it too obvious. “Just stay. Have breakfast. Watch some television.”

“You want to hang out,” I concluded. Harry nodded. “Okay. But you have to put clothes on, because then I won’t be as distracted.”

Harry raised an eyebrow and smirked, then reached out and traced the constellation tattooed against my ribcage with the tip of his finger. He did that a lot. “You too.”

Then he slid out of bed on the other side, procuring a pair boxer briefs off the floor, and paused by the doorway. “Gonna have a shower. Meet you downstairs?”

I nodded. My jeans were in a heap at the foot of the bed, and once I’d zipped them up I went in search of my tank top. I vaguely remembered it being discarded somewhere downstairs, and grabbed my socks before leaving the room.

To say it felt weird wandering around Harry’s house with only a bra covering my upper half (and not even a very substantial bra at that) was an understatement. Knowing that basically all of Harry’s close friends knew the security code and either had a key or knew where he kept his spare, and could walk in at any second was making this whole thing feel like a super secret operation. Which it sort of was, but I didn’t like thinking about it like that.

My tank top and cardigan were in the hallway. Now fully dressed, I headed into the kitchen to see if Harry actually had any breakfast foods. There was just enough coffee left for the both of us, and I had to remind myself how to operate the complicated espresso machine Harry owned. Why, I had yet to figure out.

While the coffee brewed (there was actually a whole part of it dedicated to making regular coffee, but the pot was in the cupboard, hidden behind a bag of dried apricots) I leaned against the massive refrigerator door and surveyed the selection of food inside. There was a lot of takeaway, but also a carton of eggs and some breakfast sausages.

I grabbed a pan and turned on the burner, then went in search of oil or butter. While I was rifling through the cupboards Harry came in, wet hair and all in black, and leaned back against the island, stretching his long legs out in front of him. I kicked one of his freakishly large feet as I walked past, now with a bottle of cooking oil in hand, and he nearly fell over in surprise, but managed to get away with a scowl and whine of protest.

“Instead of standing there being useless,” I began, casting an expectant look over my shoulder. “You could make toast or something.”

“Was gonna do eggy bread,” he replied. “But you’ve gone and ruined that plan now.”

“What the fuck is eggy bread?”

“French toast.”

“It shouldn’t be called eggy bread. That’s ridiculous,” I said, wrinkling my nose. Harry rolled his eyes at me. “Fine. You make French toast and we can still have breakfast sausages. Everyone wins.”

Harry sighed dramatically, but heaved himself away from the counter and grabbed the half loaf of whole wheat from the fridge. “I can give you a lift back to Astor later, if you like,” Harry said, whisking the eggs and a splash of milk in a bowl. He dropped two slices of bread in and let them soak in the mixture.

“That reminds me,” I began, and I must’ve sounded a lot more nervous than I thought because Harry stopped what he was doing and turned to look at me, frowning his usual frown. “Jillian knows. She came and confronted me about it after you left on Saturday.”

“That was almost a week ago, Imogen, how have you not told me about this until now?”

“Every time I’ve seen you we’ve either been having sex or were with other people. I didn’t know how to bring it up.”

Harry grumbled to himself, slapping one of the egg-soaked slices of bread onto the pan. The mixture splattered and sizzled, and he grumbled some more.

“Is this gonna be a big deal?” I asked tentatively.

“I don’t know,” Harry replied, exasperated. He wouldn’t look at me, and would probably burn holes through the fucking bread from the level of intensity with which he glowered at it. “This makes things complicated.”

“Obviously,” I said. “But she won’t tell anyone.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I asked her not to.”

Harry paused, thought about it, and then nodded. “I guess this is okay.”

“So we don’t have to…” I began, my voice petering out.

“Stop?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t want to.”

“Me neither.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“Imogen?”

“Yeah?”

“The sausages are burning.”

I tore my gaze from his, cursing loudly and moving the breakfast sausages around on the pan with a spatula. They were pretty crisp on one side, but still edible.

When all the food was cooked and divided between our plates, Harry told me he’d meet me in the living room while he went to make a call. I grabbed my coffee and my French toast and made myself comfortable on the massive sofa, clicking through the channels and realizing that there really was nothing on at 9AM on a weekday. These are the sort of things you forget when you don’t have a television.

Harry sidled in a few minutes later, sliding his phone into his back pocket while he balanced his plate in one hand and coffee cup tucked into the crook of his elbow. He sat down next to me, but not as close as he usually would, and started complaining when I skipped past some soap opera to get to the news.

I’d thought that hanging out with Harry when there were other people around would be the hard part. I mean, there were all these other variables to consider in that sort of situation, like whether or not people were watching us or if the way we looked at each other was different now even if we weren’t aware of it. But being alone with him like this was oh, so much worse.

It bothered me that he was sitting so far away, even though it was really only a foot or two. There was something about his posture, and maybe it was just because he wasn’t leaning toward me like he always did, but it looked like he was purposely keeping his limbs tucked in and his head directed forward. Where was the playfulness? The endless teasing and little smirks, were they only reserved for when we weren’t wearing clothes?

I could tell already that this was different, that it was probably always going to be different, and I started to wonder whether or not we should’ve ever crossed that line.

But if Harry noticed, he didn’t show it.



Cuddling was against the rules, but there isn’t much to be done when you’re both unconscious and Harry has a habit of reaching out for whatever’s there and wrapping his long body around it.

My phone went off well after 1AM. I figured it was Jillian, wondering why the hell I wasn’t staying in my own room when I had class in the morning. But Harry had already offered to give a lift to campus, it was part of his (albeit very short) list of incentives for me to come over earlier. The list had gone as follows:

Me (Harry)
Bed
Lift to uni

It wasn’t particularly romantic, but that wasn’t the point, and he was stuck in some room doing interviews all day and there was only had about five minutes before the next one started, so subtlety wasn’t on his mind.

The messages were from Jillian, but it wasn’t so much about me not being at Astor and rather warning me that Harry and I needed to be more careful about how much time we were spending together. I thought she was being a little over-cautious, because although there were paparazzi around every single time our friends went out, Harry and I hadn’t actually been photographed together since the trip up to Manchester. But the article still worried me; it was pretty clear that the media was trying to figure out who I was, a job made much more difficult by my lack of presence online (I mean, I’m an Astrophysics student, I don’t have time for Instagram). I’d always been concerned that someone at UCL would tell one of these awful tabloid sites my name, and now with this article headlined HARRY STYLES AND MYSTERY BRUNETTE BACK TOGETHER? and a practical plea for information throughout the badly written piece, my anxiety amplified.

Possibly the worst part of it all was that the conclusions that the article had come to reminded me painfully of what Sasha had said at Harry’s birthday. She’d accused him of using me as a figurehead, something steady for Harry to be photographed with in the daytime while he made careless decisions at night. The article was a little less blunt, even calling me his girlfriend, and making swooping claims of our “tumultuous relationship” filled with scandal, where Harry couldn’t be “tied down” to one girl but kept coming back anyway. It was, I’ll admit, melodramatic.

But also kinda true.

I was still scrolling through the pictures, wondering how the hell they’d managed to take them from behind a fence and a crowd of girls. I could make out my face clear as day, and realized that maybe if I’d put my hair down then it wouldn’t be so obvious who was sitting in the passenger’s seat. The whole thing had been Harry’s idea, because he figured if Stan was picking him up from the nondescript building where the interviews were being held then why shouldn’t he just stop by Astor and get me on the way?

Sleep didn’t come so easily for the rest of the night. Harry’s arm around my middle had me locked into place, so I was stuck staring at the ceiling for six hours, drifting in and out of consciousness, until my alarm went off at seven. I didn’t actually have class until noon, but after how uncomfortable I’d felt on Thursday just hanging out with Harry, I wasn’t much inclined to go through that again.

Harry took a million years to wake up and actually be coherent, so I twisted out of his reluctant arms and pulled on my underwear, then headed for the bag in the corner where I’d left my change of clothes and toothbrush. I glanced over my shoulder my shoulder at Harry — he’d replaced me with a pillow, and buried his face in the soft material grumbling about regretting the decision to offer me a ride.

The ensuite bathroom had, as Harry told me when his renovations were finished, a clawfoot bathtub. I doubted it had ever seen use, because Harry always went down the hall to the other bathroom, which had a shower. I dropped my bag onto the floor and dug through it for my toothbrush, then used a bit of Harry’s toothpaste knowing he wouldn’t care. I realized while I was brushing that my jeans were still in Harry’s room, since I’d made the executive decision to bring one pair. With the toothbrush still in my mouth, I switched my underwear for the clean set I had in my bag, then stepped back into the bedroom.

Harry appeared to be awake now, and was sitting up against the headboard fiddling with his phone. The comforter was barely covering his waist, and my eyes traced his hip bones greedily. Unfortunately, no morning sex was another unspoken rule. Harry said it was different somehow, the sleepy intimacy of it. The room was quiet as I shuffled around looking for my jeans, thinking I’d found half a dozen times when it was just another pair of Harry’s. I guessed he wasn’t accustomed to doing laundry on a regular basis, because there were always clothes everywhere.

“Imogen?” Harry said.

I glanced up, having finally found my jeans. I couldn’t really talk with the toothbrush between my teeth, so I simply raised my eyebrows to indicate I was listening. I wondered if, for the briefest of moments, that he was going to ask if we could break the morning sex rule. Because I realized that I really wanted him to.

“Do I have time to make a couple of calls before we go? I’ve got a couple writing sessions this week and we’re still trying to work out times.”

Maybe he didn’t notice the way I hesitated, because Harry grinned when I nodded at him, going right back to his phone like I hadn’t just been checking him out. I returned to the bathroom, furiously brushing my teeth and mentally chiding myself for letting those sort of thoughts get into my head.

I was buttoning up my shirt when Harry strolled in, navy blue boxer briefs slung low on his hips. He started brushing his teeth, acting completely normal, and I was trying my best not to stare at him.

“All right?” Harry asked, once he’d finished.

“Fine,” I forced out, slinging my backpack over one shoulder.

Harry caught up to me in the hallway. He grasped my elbow and turned me around, leaning forward so he could catch every twitch and blink. “Imogen.”

“It’s just weird to have school again. Reading Week felt really long this time.”

It was true, and my tone seem to convince him, at least enough for him to drop the subject and go to his room to get dressed. I loitered in the foyer, hoping that it would make Harry take the hint that I wanted to leave as soon as possible. He was on the phone when he finally made it downstairs, chatting away to somebody about studios and meeting times and a few other things I tuned out. He made another call while putting on his boots, and put the phone on speaker for a moment to grab a coat from the front closet and shrug it on.

“Yeah mate, two-thirty’s fine. See you,” Harry said, hanging up and tucking his phone in his back pocket. He swung his keys around his finger, glancing at me. “It’s cold out. D’you wanna borrow a scarf?”

My head flooded with images of Harry’s various scarves, all costing the rough equivalent (or more) of one my overpriced textbooks. “Uh—“ I stammered, not quite knowing how to reply.

“Here,” Harry said, reaching into the closet and pulling a blue and red Alexander McQueen scarf from the pocket of one of his coats. He stepped toward me and wrapped the smooth fabric around my neck twice, his fingertips grazing the skin below my ears and causing a shiver to run up my spine in a way that I wasn’t entirely happy about. “Cozy.”

“Silk isn’t exactly my idea of cozy,” I replied, after he moved away and I felt a little more at ease.

“I could grab a wool one if you like, Christopher’s just sent me some nice ones.”

It took me a second, but I realized he was talking about Christopher Bailey, the chief designer at Burberry, or whatever his official title was.

“No, that’s cool, I’ll stick with this,” I replied in the steadiest voice I could muster. I liked clothes. I liked cheap steals at places like H&M where you could get a whole outfit for less than £30. I liked finding stuff that was probably chic back in the day, but now collected dust at the back of some thrift shop run by a lady in her sixties who wore heavy earrings and too much powder. Having Harry’s jacket in my room earlier this week had almost given me a heart attack, and now there was a three hundred dollar scarf around my neck. It felt more like a noose.

A soft, silk, really expensive noose.

Harry tried to talk to me the entire drive to UCL, which took a really long time thanks to awful Monday morning traffic, but when I didn’t reply with more than a few words at a time he ended up turning on the Breakfast Show and frowning ahead for the rest of the trip.

I directed him to the parking lot nearest one of the Costas on campus, because I needed coffee to clear my head. There was a click as I went to open the door, and suddenly it was locked. I swung my head around to blink at Harry in confusion, and he was still staring ahead with that intense frown on his face I hardly ever saw anymore.

“It’s just uni?” he asked.

“Just uni,” I confirmed.

Harry turned to look at me, rolling his lips together while the crease between his eyebrows deepened. “You now how important it is that we tell each other the truth, right? I keep saying it, but it still feels like you’re holding back. Not talking almost ruined us, Imogen, we can’t let that happen again.”

I was holding back, but telling the truth seemed worse than saying nothing at all.

“Don’t worry,” I said, with what I hoped was a genuine smile. I reached out and drew my thumb between his eyebrows, surprising him enough that he stopped frowning altogether. “I’ll tell you if there’s anything you need to know.”

My hand returned to my lap slowly. There was another click, but Harry and I stayed there for another minute at least, staring at each other. It was the space again, like an invisible barrier that we weren’t supposed to cross, and even though I’d smoothed the creases on his forehead only a moment ago it was like the barrier was even stronger now, warning me not to do it again.



Although it seemed like I’d done the next three months’ worth of coursework in three days, when classes started up again after Reading Week was over I still managed to find assignments and reading I hadn’t yet done. The second I got home from my lab on Wednesday afternoon I changed into a pair of sweatpants and knocked on Jillian’s door. Studying was going to have to wait. I needed to talk to the one person who knew about Harry and I, because I’d been feeling miserable for days and it definitely had to do with him.

She waited until I’d gotten comfortable on her chair, knees pulled up to my chest and my chin resting on them to put on her serious face. “There’s pictures of you wearing Harry’s scarf,” she said calmly. “It’s not on any news sites, thank God, but the rest of the Internet knows you go to UCL now. I would’ve told you when I saw it yesterday, but you were gone the whole day. They’re going to figure out who you are, Imogen, and your life is gonna be turned upside down.”

“That’s already happened at least a dozen times since I moved here,” I said mournfully. Her words should’ve shocked me a lot more, but at this point it was just another item to add to the list of Things Making Imogen’s Life Complicated.

“What’s going on?” she asked, suspicious. Her eyes softened when I met them with my own, and she sat down on the edge of her bed, beckoning me over. When I didn’t move, Jillian rolled her eyes and grabbed the seat of the chair, pulling me toward her. “Imo, babe, you can tell me whatever’s bothering you. That’s why you came over, yeah? Cos I’m the only one who knows about Harry? Is this about him?”

I nodded, tilting my head back to stare at the ceiling. “I don’t know if I can do this. It’s been what, ten days? And I’m already freaking out?” I rubbed my forehead, pushing the hair away from my face. “I can’t be his friend, Jillian, it’s too weird! He changes so easily, it’s like the second we get out of bed he forgets that we had sex. But he doesn’t act like he used to, he doesn’t sit next to me and he hardly ever looks at me unless he’s trying to get me to tell him something. I’m afraid to touch him because he gets this look on his face like I’m doing something wrong, like I’m not supposed to do that when we aren’t in bed or…”

My voice drifted off, replaced by an exasperated sigh.

“Tell me, honestly, was it ever just sex?”

I hesitated, then shook my head.

“Do you think it is for him?” Her tone told me she didn’t think it was.

“I think that it’s different, for sure. But he’s not in love with me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Jillian pursed her lips. “Are you in love with Harry, Imogen?”

“No,” I replied, too quickly. She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think I am. This doesn’t feel like that. This is just me being angry at myself for thinking I could handle a purely physical relationship when I clearly have no idea what that means. It seemed so nice, in theory, the whole friends with benefits thing. Easy. Simple. But it’s only good when we’re, like, together. You know we don’t even cuddle? Isn’t that just weird?”

“I told you it wasn’t going to work,” she said, not sounding patronizing at all, which surprised me. “It’s not who you are. I know you never say anything about all the men I’ve been with, but you have to admit you’d never be able to shag someone when it didn’t mean anything.”

“This is different.”

Jillian looked at me patiently. “But it’s not, don’t you see? You’re like two different people for Harry. He hasn’t changed the way he lives his life at all, except that instead of shagging Darcy or whoever else, it’s just you.”

“He said that it was different,” I insisted.

“Babe, I know he said that, but you can’t forget what he’s done. The type of person he is. Harry didn’t change for you. He’s exactly the same. Just because he’s only seeing you doesn’t mean there’s some deeper meaning other than that he’s more attracted to you than anyone else. We all saw it, right from the start. It’s always been more to you. And we tried to tell you — me, Matt, even Silas — but you didn’t listen. Not until it was too late, it seems.”

“I need to stop it,” I said quietly.

“Probably for the best,” Jillian replied, just as soft.

My breath shook, and I hugged my shins tighter. “Okay.”