Diana

There are only two parking spot choices for Harry no matter where he goes, or the other One Direction members for that matter, the back alley or a block away from the actual place, and that night Harry chooses the latter. He parks his SUV, one he always preferred to drive himself, on one side of the road and unbuckles his seatbelt. He already has his wallet and phone in hand, collected from his door compartment, but he isn’t moving out of the car. With his stuff resting on his lap, he holds onto the steering wheel, lightly tapping on it. A stream of thoughts are running through his mind, and one of them is whether or not he should walk out there and face Diana.

Even before he made the move last night, he knew that it was incredibly stupid. She was finally talking to him, when he ingeniously swooped in and made it all awkward again. Harry was barely asleep once he got to his flat after, beating himself up for it, and the reaction from the gang was not helping either. At noon today, Sadie took no time in summoning Harry to the café and giving him a lengthy ramble as soon as she heard about it from Diana, with Niall backing her up.

They weren’t quite angry, but they just couldn’t stand how idiotic his action was. Sadie knows that Diana is not the type that takes any sexual encounters seriously, but with the way she has been acting around Harry, who knows how she might react? It really wasn’t Diana that Sadie was worried of, it was Harry. The poor kid has been bending over backwards, trying to get a word out of Diana, and it makes Sadie cringe to see the potential of it breaking down because of a silly kiss. Niall and Sadie felt the absolute need to talk some senses into him, and that’s exactly what they did. They were also the ones that convinced him to come over to Diana’s flat tonight; they even offered to go out for a bit so Harry and Diana can have a proper talk.

So there he is, sitting inside his car with the AC off, starting to feel the heat of the closed space. A few minutes have passed, but the only movements made were the vibrations of his busy phone.

“Fuck it,” Harry finally says, firmly opening the door and starts walking. It probably doesn’t take more than a minute as he speeds his pace up, afraid that he would change his own mind if he doesn’t get there sooner.

As he approaches Diana’s building, he sees a figure walking out of it and into a car on the opposite side of the road. A girl is waiting on the driver’s seat, and the bloke swiftly enters from the passenger side. The bloke looks damn familiar, almost like Jace, and Harry debates with himself about whether or not the girl is Diana. If she is indeed Diana and about to go out, then he can’t do anything but have the talk another day.

The car then goes off before Harry can be sure if she was her, so he decides to just go inside the building and come up to check on it himself.

With just a few feet away from the flat, Harry can already hear the sound of PS3 games being played blasting from the inside. He knocks on the door, not quite sure if the person inside can actually hear it.

He is soon greeted by a reply, “Come in, it’s open!”

When he opens the door, Harry finds Diana sitting on the couch with cookie crumbs on her lap and a PS3 controller on her hands. “Hi, you busy?”

“Yes,” she says with her eyes locked on the screen.

“Oh, well then I should just…”

“I’m kidding. Wait though, let me finish this stage,” she takes a short glance and smirks, “Sit,” she encourages.

“Uhh, yeah okay,” Harry takes a spot next to her. So it wasn’t her, he confirms to himself, but decides not to make a fuss about it.

Harry leans back against the back of the couch, playing with his rings and rubbing around his sweaty palms. To that second, Diana seems to be indifferent about his presence, which Harry prefers to take it as a positive sign. The fact that Diana greets him back and can joke a little bit is good enough for him, but it still doesn’t make him any less anxious.

Just before Harry starts to text Niall, or anyone really, to look for comfort, Diana pauses the game at the end of the level.

“What’s up?” she asks, catching his attention.

He quickly tucks his phone back in his pocket. Harry doesn’t know whether to be surprised or glad by her being casual after what happened last night, and he still can’t tell whether it’s a good thing. “Umm, about last night…” he starts, as he plays with his lip yet again.

She puts down the controller and shuffles on her sit, waiting for him to finish the sentence.

“It was a mistake,” he continues.

“I agree,” Diana simply says, “Is that all you came here to tell me?”

“No, I mean, I want to apologize,” his head is ducked but his eyes slowly trail up to see her.

She squints at him before she stands on her feet, “What for?” she says as she nonchalantly heads towards the kitchen.

Harry is left sitting by himself, but soon moves to follow her once he realizes that she’s going out of the room. “For making the move. Messing it up.”

“Messing what up? We barely had anything,” she says bluntly in return while she reaches for bowls in the upper cabinet.

Diana’s response makes him slightly wince, but he brushes it off immediately because he knows that it’s true. It just seems that Harry can never choose better words when he is talking to Diana. He then takes a seat on one of the stools, “Well we were finally, you know, talking, and I couldn’t have picked a worse time to be so bold.”

“To be fair, I reacted as well, so it wasn’t all you,” Diana points out as she gathers eggs and a carton of milk from the fridge.

Harry chuckles, somewhat relieved by her ease, “I guess, but— Okay hold on, what are you doing?”

Diana turns her head before she goes on to get a bag of flour from the bottom shelf, “Making pancakes,” she answers easily.

“At 10 PM?” he wonders, “Why?”

“Because I’m hungry,” she shoots him a look as if he just asked the most ridiculous question, “Now go on, you were saying?”

“Making pancakes? How am I supposed to have a serious talk with you when you’re making pancakes?” he asks rhetorically.

She flips the pan open and turns the stove on to heat it up, then turns around to face Harry, “We don’t have to have a serious talk. It’s okay, you—no, we made a mistake but in the end it didn’t happen. It’s fine, Harry. Things don’t have to get weird.”

“Yeah? So we’re good?” he isn’t sure what Diana is implying.

“Why not? Shit happens, we move on.”

“Are you sure? Didn’t seem like it last night.”

“Yes Harry, yes. I was just bummed that you turned me off that way when you’re the one who started the whole thing. But I guess that was just the alcohol reacting. It doesn’t mean anything to me, I swear,” Diana is almost tired trying to convince him that it really doesn’t bother her that much.

Harry finally senses her sincerity and gives in, “Well, for what it’s worth, I truly am sorry, Di. A stupid, drunken mistake like that is never a way to get to know someone.”

“I know you are, I am too. If you remember, I responded too, so stop apologizing.” Diana is somewhat irritated, yet flattered by Harry’s excessive apology. She honestly doesn’t think such simple accident needed this much discussion. She has had many drunken almost-encounters like that, so by now it has gotten easier for her to get over it. However, she must admit that this is first time a person actually come up and face her afterwards.

“I just hope I didn’t ruin anything for you and Jace, or us,” he subtly hints, “Sadie and Niall have been giving me shit for it, much more than you have.”

“Nah, he doesn’t need to know. I don’t feel like bothering him for such a stupid thing,” Diana is now searching through the pile of cooking utensils in one of the drawers for some measuring cups, “Sadie talked to you? Love her to death, but I swear sometimes she can be so…“ she says, clunching her free hand into a fist while making a scrunched face.

“She means well,” Harry chuckles, then tries to bring up the hint again, “What about us?”

“What do you mean ‘us’? There’s no us,” she takes a quick glance at him, but goes on to use the cup that she just found to scoop some flour onto the bowl in front of her.

“I mean, you and me,” Harry quickly corrects himself.

“We’re just… being,” Diana answers while she cracks one of the eggs open, “What else do you want us to be?”

Harry runs his fingers through his hair, somewhat embarassed by his own being candid, “….Friends?”

Diana looks away from the bowl in front of her and turns to see Harry. This is the first time she takes a good look at him since he arrives here, and she hates to admit even to herself that she likes the view. He is wearing a rolled-up shirt with two buttons down, his butterfly tattoos peeking out of it. He looks like a worn out working man, really, but the nervous grin he has on his face makes him look like a giddy five year-old to Diana.

It tickles Diana to remind herself that what she has in front of her is a mature nineteen year-old, who is, in fact, asking her to be friends. No one has ever done that to her since she was probably eight, yet here he is with his tender stare and dimpled smile, making her feel like she’s in kindergarten all over again.

She lightly chuckles and shakes her head to snap back to reality, “Yeah, sure, friends,” she says finally, cuing Harry to let out the breath that he has been holding.

Harry’s emerald green eyes reunite with her blue ones after so long, looking for any sign of hesitation or deceit, but Diana doesn’t even flinch. “Friends as in ‘our best friends are dating so we’re forced to be around each other’ friends, or ‘friends’ friends?”

“Just friends, Harry, Christ,” she says, fighting the urge to roll her eyes as she goes back to her pancake mix.

Harry is actually a bit hesitant to accept Diana’s words, because he doesn’t know whether Diana is truly sincere or just saying it to make him happy. But to be honest, he still feels a thousand times better. “Okay,” he says finally.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Good,” a tiny but genuine smile curves on her face, “You should try to control your drunken self better next time, though.”

Harry scoffs in return but chuckles nonetheless, “Says the girl who returned the favour seconds after she rejected it,” he smirks.

“Asshole.”

“Hypocrite.”

“Asshole.”

“Hypocrite,” he says for the last time before he gets up from the stool and approaches Diana from behind, “Now move, let me show you how to upgrade the pancakes the Styles family way.”