Bloom

July

Seeing Harry in my tiny Brooklyn apartment was ten times weirder than I’d imagined it to be. He was sat with a plate of fresh fruit, eggs, and toast (Mom was trying a new vegetarian thing, which I didn’t see lasting very long) on the couch, a patchwork pillow under his elbow. His hair was swept up into a half bun, still damp from the shower we’d taken twenty minutes earlier, and he was dressed surprisingly plain in a black t-shirt and jeans compared to the ridiculous clothes I’d seen him flit around stage on in the last two-and-a-half months. We had two weeks just for the two of us (plus Harry’s American bodyguard), and I wanted to spend the entirety of it cooped up inside.

Up until mid-June, my concern with the public side of our relationship was very small. I could avoid fans and paparazzi when I was on my own. Without Harry, I wasn’t very interesting to them. When they were back for the UK leg of their tour, I was in the midst of exams and didn’t hang around much. But then term was over, and Harry asked me to come to Sweden. It wasn’t too bad; a few pictures from outside a club we’d gone to with a big group. The team was more relaxed about me being there, because it wasn’t the media circus they’d been expecting when Harry Styles’ girlfriend joined the band on tour, so I followed them to Denmark.

But after the Copenhagen Fiasco, we were all a little more wary.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal. It was just supposed to be a few friends having lunch. But then Harry had to go and sit with his legs bracketed around my chair and grab my arm to stop me from crossing the street at the wrong time and get photographed doing both of these things, and suddenly I had to sign papers, have a security detail on speed-dial, and forget any plans of making an Instagram account to document my thrift store finds.

“Are you doing mental maths?”

I snapped back into reality and glared at Harry, throwing a blueberry at him. “No. I was just thinking about if we should go to that pizza place today.”

“What pizza place?”

“Only the best slice this side of the East River!”

Harry frowned, chewing thoughtfully on a bit of cantaloupe. “What?”

“Nevermind. It’s really good pizza, okay? And it’s super close by.”

“I’ll let Donald know,” Harry said, dragging out his phone and sending a quick text. “He wants to know which place.”

I told Harry the name, and two-seconds later Donald’s reply came. Apparently, my excellent taste in pizzerias confirmed for this fellow New Yorker that I was a keeper. I was looking forward to meeting Donald; maybe he’d be just as excellent as Stan, his British equivalent.

“New York has always been a bit mad for me,” Harry said, setting his plate and phone down on the coffee table and turning his body toward me, one hand curling around my thigh. “Since I’m gonna be here for a while, someone’s bound to find out where I’m staying. We can try to avoid them, but I think you should know ahead of time that there might be paps camped outside the flat by the end of the week.”

“We can get Donald to pick up pizza for us,” I offered quietly.

I did want to stay hidden inside with Harry where no one could bother us. But I also wanted to show him the city. My city. I wanted to go to the Brooklyn Flea and try on silly hats and eat local/organic/vegan food, I wanted to ride the subway and get off at a random stop, wander through the streets of a foreign neighbourhood, go to MoMA, take naps in the park and go to all the best pizza joints in Brooklyn. But with Harry, those things were impossible.

“No, we’re gonna go.” Harry’s hand tightened on my leg, and when I looked up he was frowning deeply. “We’ve been talking about this for ages, Imogen. If anything bad happens, we’ll deal with it. I know things have been a bit off since Copenhagen, but we can’t fix it by hiding. It’s not gonna get any easier to deal with that way.”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

Harry tucked his other hand under my hair, thumb brushing over my cheekbone. “It’ll be all right. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

The first time I’d said it was by accident. I’d been thinking it the whole time Harry was in South America, and then he was suddenly back in the UK and I was busy and he was busy and I only got to see him for a few hours at a time. But then, when we were both exhausted (him from singing and generally goofing around on stage, and me from studying for three straight days) and lying in bed at 2AM, minds half-conscious and bodies tangled, I’d mumbled it, forgetting for a moment that ‘I love you’ wasn’t something we’d said to each other yet. The thing was, he didn’t even hesitate to say it back.

By the time we were ready to leave the house, plans for the afternoon made, Mom was back from her class and intent on having a nap. She’d woken up at three in the morning after a particularly vivid dream, and because she was Marianne Schneider, she had to paint it. While Harry waited by the door texting, I found her in the kitchen putting on the kettle for chamomile tea.

“Hey,” I announced my presence in the doorway, arms folded over my chest.

“It’s hot out, you won’t need that,” she said by way of response, gaze flicking down to the plaid shirt tied around my waist.

“It’s part of the outfit, Mom.”

“Oh, right, of course,” she rolled her eyes. “Where are you off to?”

“Pizza. Then I thought I’d show Harry all the cool brownstones in the area.”

“Will you be alone?”

I leaned against the doorway, one arm wrapped around my stomach and the other hand tangled in my hair. “No, we’ve got Donald. I haven’t met him yet, but he has good taste in pizza, so I figure he’s an all right guy.”

“Okay.” Mom crossed the room to me and squeezed my shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

“For what?”

“For not letting any of it stand in the way of being with the boy you love. That’s my stubborn daughter.”

“Well thanks for passing on the trait,” I grinned, leaning into her for a moment before the kettle started to whistle. “Okay, we’ll see you later, Mom. It’s The Maltese Falcon tonight, right?”

Mom and I had started a Humphrey Bogart marathon last week, and we weren’t going to stop just because Harry had arrived. When he flew in yesterday, arriving at the apartment late in the evening, Mom and I were at the end of Key Largo. I’d taken him straight to my room, where we both promptly fell asleep, knowing there would be a proper welcome in the morning.

She nodded, and I headed for the door. Harry fiddled with the sleeves of his t-shirt while I put on my sandals and tucked my keys into my bag, then called out a goodbye to Mom as we went into the hallway.

There was an SUV parked out front that I immediately identified as the one we’d be taking to the pizza place, despite it being less than ten minutes away. Donald, in the driver’s seat, was tall and lean and not at all what I expected. With a name like Donald, I was either expecting burly, aging man or an actual duck. Definitely not someone with such nice cheekbones.

Harry climbed into the front and I got in the back, a pattern I was already quite accustomed to. Something about the tinted windows dulling the flashes, although they were never quite as bad in the daytime.

“We’ll park as close as we can,” Donald said, at a red light. “What else have you got planned?”

“I thought we could go for a walk, if that’s not a problem,” I replied, leaning forward and resting my forearms against the back of Harry’s seat. “There’s some really beautiful houses around here, as I’m sure you know.”

“Oh, yeah,” Donald agreed. “If you wanted to go to Central Park, that might me more of an issue, but a nice quiet neighbourhood should be just fine.”

Harry craned his neck around to smile at me. Donald had to loop around the block to find a spot, but soon we were parked and ready to have a slice of the best pizza in Brooklyn. I hopped out onto the sidewalk, adjusting my sunglasses over my eyes and making sure my flannel was secured around my waist, and turned around to see Harry standing five feet away, frowning.

“You okay?” I asked him, as Donald came from around the vehicle and waited where he wasn’t imposing.

“Yeah,” Harry said, giving me a quick smile. “All good. Let’s go.”

I thought my heart might explode out of my chest when we got to the end of the block and he laced his fingers through mine, in the way I’d always wanted him to but never had where anyone but our friends could see us. After Copenhagen, I didn’t think he’d ever hold my hand in public, because of the uproar that a brief grasp of the arm and relaxed sitting position had caused.

There wasn’t anyone around to see us, except Donald, other disinterested pedestrians, and people driving past. Harry, with his recognizable hair, tattoos, face, gait and, well, everything, was sure to be spotted, but for the few minutes that he could be a regular person, I could tell that he was trying to do whatever he could, while he could. I gave his hand a squeeze and bumped my hip against his, eliciting another more genuine grin.

When we got there, I started to pull my hand from Harry’s, but his fingers only tightened against mine. We were outside the pizzeria, and the men lounging out front weren’t paying us much attention, but the girl approaching from the other direction with her family certainly was.

“All right?” Harry asked me. I wished that I could see his eyes behind his sunglasses, but the dark lenses were impassive.

I swallowed as the family got closer and the girl’s eyes grew wider, wondering when the moment would come. When we would be surrounded, cameras in our faces and questions bombarding our ears, evidence released the next day (or even sooner than that) of how Harry Styles and his girlfriend had gone out for pizza. Then the speculation on how our relationship was going would come out, questioning how long we’d last and if tour was taking a toll like it had with his last girlfriend, of whether or not we were really even together or if management had paired Harry with an unknown, passably cute, rather intelligent university student to combat his bad reputation with women.

But the girl whispered something to her mom, then approached us and tapped on Harry’s arm, a nervous smile on her face. “Are you Harry Styles?” she asked, her voice quavering.

Harry released my hand and crouched down, coming to eye level with the girl, who couldn’t have been older than seven. “Yes I am. What’s your name, love?”

“R-Rebecca,” she murmured.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Rebecca. Would you like a picture?” She nodded, and Harry wrapped an arm around her shoulders while her mom came up and snapped a photo of them. Rebecca threw her arms around Harry’s neck after the photo was taken, probably surprising herself by doing so, and he hugged her back immediately. When he finally pulled away, Harry kept a hand on her shaking shoulder. I could just make out her wet cheeks from my spot a few feet away. “Are you getting pizza?”

“Y-yes.”

“What’s your favourite kind?”

“Cheese.”

“I think that’s a pretty great choice, maybe I’ll get it too,” Harry stood up then, hand still on Rebecca’s shoulder. He guided her back to her family, shook hands with both her parents, and waved as they went inside.

Then he came back over to me and grabbed my hand once more. “You’re so wonderful I might have to punch you,” I said, squinting at him behind my sunglasses.

Harry frowned immediately. “Why would you do that?”

I rolled my eyes. “We might have to work on your sense of humour, though.”

“I’m hilarious!” Harry objected as we went into the pizzeria, Donald just behind us. When we took off our sunglasses and stood in line, hands still linked, I took note of all the glances our way. Harry, as always, was expertly ignoring peoples’ stares, his thumb absently rubbing circles against the back of my palm and his eyes on the delicious pizza at the counter. “They’re massive. How am I supposed to eat it?”

The combination of music and voices in the small restaurant caused him to lean down and mumble right in my ear, which would probably be all over the Internet in the next five minutes. I wondered how many Snapchat stories we were on already, then reminded myself that it didn’t matter. I was with my boyfriend in my favourite pizza place in my favourite city and that was what I needed to focus on.

“You fold it,” I replied, and we got closer to the counter. Ahead, Rebecca and her family got their slices. She waved to us as they walked out.

Harry took a million years to decide what kind of soda he wanted, but eventually (after a few fan pictures) we’d gotten our slices and found a table away from the front windows. Donald took his slice outside, and I saw him introduce himself to the men seated out front and join them a moment later.

“Right. How am I meant to do this?”

I laughed as Harry attempted to fold his pizza the wrong way, then frown at it when it flopped out of his hand. “Not like that,” I nudged his arm and got him to look up at me, my slice folded properly, and raised my eyebrows at him while I took a bite. Harry’s frown only deepened, and he struggled with his own pizza while I ate mine in three minutes flat, feeling like I could eat nothing else for the rest of my life and be satisfied.

But then I noticed them. Cars pulling up on the street and men with cameras jumping out, others arriving on foot, drawing the attention of people walking past. Donald got up from his chair outside the pizzeria and came in, a stoic expression on his face. “As soon as you’re finished,” he said, nodding at Harry, then looking at me. “I think we should drive around for a bit before going on that walk.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want me to get the car now, Harry?”

“Yeah, mate,” Harry replied. He glanced over his shoulder at the waiting crowd, the muscles in his jaw working even though he hadn’t taken a bite of his pizza. Donald nodded and left, shouldering through the people on the sidewalk. “I’m sorry.”

“You always apologize. Don’t. It’s not your fault.”

Harry sighed and sat back, tossing what remained of his crust onto the flimsy paper plate. “Feels like it is. Always has. They’re a part of my job, which is a part of me.”

“No,” I said, raking a hand through my hair and leaning forward to look him straight in the eye. “If you blame yourself, it only makes things worse. Yeah, they’re a super annoying and inconvenient part of your life, but it’s not your fault they’re here. We can’t fix things by hiding, but we can’t do it by blaming ourselves either. Man up.”

“Bollocks to that. I need something to gripe about. You don’t want me happy all the time, do you? It’d be like dating Niall.”

“You were the one who said we need to move past it! I was trying to be a good encouraging girlfriend.”

“I was trying to help you,” Harry corrected. “You didn’t sign up for any of this.”

I grabbed his hand, squeezing his fingers tightly. “Stop it. Stop making your life out to be this terrible thing that nobody should want to be involved in. You’ve been doing it ever since I met you, and you need to stop it right now. I get that you’re not Nick or Niall who’re always fucking happy, but you’re still pretty damn fantastic and I fell in love with you anyway. So stop, okay? You don’t have to pretend to be something you’re not anymore.”

I didn’t know if anyone had heard me or taken a picture of us holding hands, but for the first time, the idea of being watched was actually an afterthought. My brain was too full of Harry, of the surprised look in his eyes and the slight part to his lips, of the complete absence of a crease between his eyebrows for probably the first time since I’d met him, of his hand, tangled with mine, our rings clinking together.

“Okay,” he said. “I think I can do that.”