La Douleur Exquise

“Her upper lip was heaven and her lower was hell. Every part of her seemed to be a planet, really. Every inch was a completely different, unique, complex world.

And I had access to the whole galaxy.”

- Harry Styles, 2020

(Listen)

(x)

I stood in front of the canvas, not brave enough to touch anything. I gathered my dirty hair between my hands, organising it into a bun and securing it there with the black hair tie that I always wore on my wrist, prepared for events like these.

It was cold.

The temperature was, in fact, tolerable. But my skin was particularly vulnerable to the freezing air that invaded the room: I wasn’t wearing much, only the black bra and knickers of the same colour that Matt had taken off me less than an hour earlier.

I’d been naked and exposed to his curious light brown eyes, naked and exposed to his large and wandering hands, naked and making contact with his, too, bare skin. He’d kissed me slow when it was over, cupping my face between his hands and whispering sweet words against my mouth and neck. After a few minutes of heavy breathing, he’d dressed himself and passed me my clothes, out of which, of course, I’d only selected my underwear. I wanted to get some work done before the sunny afternoon turned black, taking advantage of the fact that I had the flat to myself.

Olivia wouldn’t be back until next week. The academy leaders had flown her and other girls to Bristol to meet an apparently distinguished group of ballet instructors that would analyse their skills to decide who got to stay and who wasn’t made for that sort of dancing. She’d been freaking out; practicing every move whenever she got the chance and rambling about how far up her career would go if these people gave her a positive review.

I’d been the one responsible to calm her down, since Harry had finally decided to stay quiet after constantly fucking it up with comments like “don’t practice it too much ‘cause you might forget it once you’re there” or “don’t you get dizzy when you’re spinning like that during the dance? I know I’d be puking immediately”.

I’d seen different sides of Harry in the past few days, but not enough to figure him out. He was funny and relaxed when Olivia was around, but when it was just us he turned sarcastic and monotonous. Not once did he attempt to contradict my ideas, though I occasionally read disagreement on his facial expressions. He was quite nice to be around, actually. The little scare I’d experienced after Gemma’s party that night had vanished during the days – I’d arrived to the conclusion that the sudden fascination I’d felt towards him that night had been rather conventional, something that happened often, a typical effect that hallucinating substances never failed to create on me: mesmerism towards anything I laid my eyes on.

But right now I stood in our living room with the company of my mess, no alcohol – student budget had been manifesting in all its glory lately – and a blank mind. Completely out of inspiration but fiercely wanting to get some work done, which only made me more desperate each passing, useless second.

It felt like I owned a lifeless body. My body moved only to carry out intentional actions: chest rising softly as I breathed, my eyelashes going down every few seconds when I blinked; and my pupils, scrutinising the large, square piece of paper in front of me. It was an uncompleted painting: I’d poorly attempted to capture the beauty of Olivia’s face, her dark skin, whose colour I’d define as a shade of cinnamon, her thin brown eyebrows, dark eyes and even darker, slightly wavy hair. But she was Olivia, and ‘patient’ was the last adjective I’d use to describe her. She’d only collaborated by staying put in front of me for less than five minutes each day before he left whilst I pathetically attempted to create a hand-made photo of her.

It was frustrating – I lived with her, such a beauty, had a chance to analyse her face from whichever angle I preferred. And yet I was making a terrible use of it. The painting wasn’t bad; it just simply didn’t do her justice. Not that Olivia would mind – she didn’t know how to even colour properly and for that reason she was obsessed with everything I created, always staring at my paintings and drawings as if they’d been made by Da Vinci himself.

The thick silence was interrupted by the sound of a key unlocking the door, and I found myself sighing in content, glad to know she was here to stop me from lighting fire to the canvas to relieve my desperation.

“If you don’t bring alcohol with you then turn around and don’t come back until you do, please.”

My heart stopped when I remembered she was kilometers away. And I didn’t feel calmer when I received a response delivered in a voice tone that certainly didn’t belong to Olivia.

“Hello to you, too.”

I jolted and turned around; startled to see someone that wasn’t my flatmate, startled to see a male’s back, startled to see him.

Harry was surprised, too. When he closed the door and turned around to face the living room, he froze where he stood and stared me down, drinking in the ridiculous image he was being welcomed with –cans of paint, dirty pieces of paper, an uncompleted painting of his girlfriend on the canvas, and me, shuddering in black lingerie. He ran a hand through his hair and finally focused his eyes on mine, trapping his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger.

“What the fuck?”

His tone was flat, surprisingly unimpressed. As if this scene was something that everyone would expect from me. I bit my lower lip, not quite knowing how to react. I wasn’t embarrassed – no relevant regions were exposed –, and even if I was, I’d been standing still in front of my canvas for so long before he arrived that attempting to move quickly wasn’t an option.

His expression reassembled my mum’s when she got home to find five year old me stuffing my face with her favourite makeup: not surprised, not delighted, not sure how I’d gotten there, not sure how to react. I sucked my lips into my mouth to hide the uncontrollable and timid smile that was threatening to form. I breathed deeply to stop myself from laughing, something quite inevitable considering his expression. He spoke before I could.

“I’m – I’ll just –” he pointed at Olivia’s room and walked in that direction, shaking his head and closing the door behind him. The grin that was waiting to be liberated finally formed on my face as I began to organise the mess around me. Our brief encounter had awakened me and I gave up, understand that my mind wasn’t in the mood to create anything for the time being.

I didn’t realise he’d come out of Olivia’s room, but he made it obvious when he stood near me, clearing his throat.

“Gemma said you’d be coming over tonight.”

“I am, yeah,” I was cleaning my hands with a cloth, deleting all traces of paint from my fingertips.

“Is that Liv?”

He was pointing at the canvas, hands inside the pockets of his jeans and eyes drinking in the painted equivalent of his girlfriend’s face.

I sighed and observed the painting, mindlessly rubbing my fingers with the cloth, “a pathetic version of her, yeah.”

“It’s not bad.”

“I don’t love it.”

“No, I like how you made her eyes look bright. Nice. Her lips look good, too.”

I turned around and smirked at him, raising my eyebrows, “look at you being all artsy.”

“Piss off.” Harry mirrored my smile and extended it to a grin, shaking his head and walking towards the door. “Only dropped by to look for some things I’d left. I’ll see you tonight?”

I answered affirmatively, watching him smile briefly in response before he closed the door behind me and allowed dead silence to take over the flat again.

***

There was blood on my arm and it made me dizzy.

I’d found myself on the floor after a couple rounds of alcohol, not because I was too drunk to walk properly, but because Louis had been sitting on the sofa with his legs extended, unintentionally causing mine to tangle dumbly when I walked past him.

I landed on the floor with a thud. The beer I’d been holding didn’t survive the impact, turning into broken pieces of glass, and now I had shards implanted on the palm of my hand.

Gemma had taken me to the bathroom, painfully extracted the foreign pieces from my skin and coated the injury with antiseptic before covering it with a bandage. We ignored an upset Jack on our way to Gemma’s room – the reason we were at her flat was him and his desire to have a meeting where he could ramble about the government’s latest consideration to negotiate. The gathering wasn’t very formal: less than thirteen people were in the room, drinking and exchanging opinions whilst music played at a considerate volume. Some girls actually swayed to the songs, joined by Harry, who smirked as he chatted them – being the only one in the room who didn’t belong to the committee, he was free to mess around.

Though Jack knew I’d never been good at suggesting interesting or innovative ideas regarding politics, he’d insisted that I stayed in the room to “at least listen”, which contradicted Gemma’s plans.

“Give her a rest, will you?”

“Gem, she’s all right. You’re all right, yeah? Blue, I need everyone to pay attention. Go lay down but I want you back in a bit,” Jack’s soft tone buffered his almost annoying desire to keep me there. I wasn’t dying, no, but my arm did hurt. And maybe I was also using it as an excuse to leave the boring ambiance of a meeting at nine p.m.

Gemma had rolled her eyes, “patience is a virtue, leave her alone. Harry? Will you watch her, please? God knows what will happen to me if I don’t stay here with Jack grumpy Wolf,” and took me to her room as she explained her brother what his ridiculous task of the night would consist of.

“Just make sure she doesn’t die or falls asleep.”

There I was, then. I’d landed on the bed, made myself comfortable and focused my eyes on the ceiling. It was all painted dark blue and adorned with fake stars, those things that glow in the dark, illuminating the room and looking real enough to make you get all philosophical and more likely to drift into sleep.

My legs were sprawled out, positioned as if I was making snow angels. My hands went to my hair, rolling parts of it with my fingers mindlessly, all my attention on the fake yet real-looking constellations above me.

A few seconds later, interrupting my observation, Harry walked into the room and closed the door behind him. His hands were carrying various objects, and he sat down on the reclining chair that was located horizontal to the bed. I focused on his hands, attempting to decipher the identity of the objects that they held. His right hand carried a beer, whilst his left was holding a brown journal and a pen.

He accommodated and tucked his knees to his chest – letting them play the role of a desk and placing his journal on them. He stared at the object and held the pen a few inches away from the page, as if organising his ideas and concreting the first words of whatever it was he was about to create before he began to mark the paper with the tint.

The illumination was poor. The glowing stars on the ceiling were the only source of light in Gemma’s room, and for a moment I wondered if he’d ever been told that writing or reading in the dark was bad for your eyes. Before I could open my mouth to suggest that he turned on the lights – even though I was perfectly content under the neon rays of Gemma’s fake sky –, a nice song came on. My eyes closed without permission and the corners of my lips stretched slightly, a subtle, relaxed smile forming on my face. My lips moved in synchrony to the music, not even whispering, simply mouthing each word that was pronounced by the singer.

With my fingers still running through my hair, toying with it and pushing it away from my face, I opened my eyes and turned my head, not bothering to lift it from the comfort of the bed. I watched him lazily. He was writing at a slow pace, unlike the last (and only) time I’d seen him do it. The movement of his hand was controlled but relaxed. His brows were slightly knitted together in concentration, generating a few subtle wrinkles on his forehead; I assumed it was a reflection of how much effort he was putting into writing under such vague light.

“I’ll be fine.” My voice came out hoarse but in a very low tone, and I cleared my throat, preparing myself to repeat the statement; I doubted he’d heard. His eyes didn’t leave the paper and his hand didn’t stop moving, though it did decrease in speed. He spoke and his voice was loud enough for me to hear, though a bit muffled by the ear-splitting music that played outside. “You said that five minutes ago and now your hand is bleeding.”

I breathed out a weak laugh, almost inaudible, and winced at his reminder of the previous events. The sight of blood had never been on my list of favourites. I covered my face with my hands, though there was nothing and no one to hide from. It was only us. “This never happens,” I groaned, “I had one pint. It had nothing to do with alcohol, I swear.” My hands went back to my hair, spreading as much of it as I could on the bed. “Fucking Bambi feet.”

Harry chuckled briefly, “we’ve all been there.”

“Where’s Harry?”

We both took notice of the high pitched voice calling his name. High pitched and slurry, which was likely to belong to one of the girls I’d seen him with earlier. My eyes landed on his, raising my eyebrows in expectancy of his next move.

He stared at the door and trapped his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger; brows pulled together in thought. His green eyes, subtly shining under the neon lights of the room, landed on me and he shrugged, placing his pen between his lips whilst he stretched his arms and then grabbing it again with his right hand as he accommodated his journal. “They’ll manage without me.”

My eyelids felt heavier than my head, and everything around me contributed to my body’s desire to say goodbye and good luck to reality for a few hours. The music was somehow relaxing, the room was mostly dark but decorated with glowing stars, and the cozy duvet below me was already warm. It all contributed to my growing inability to stay awake, but I forced myself to do so, knowing that Jack wouldn’t hesitate to give me his parental speech on the importance of “not being a lazy fuck”. So I allowed all sorts of thoughts to swim in my mind, searching for anything that would grasp my attention long enough to keep me conscious.

“I like the brunette better.” Eyes on the ceiling, hands now entwined and resting on my stomach, I exposed my comment out loud.

“Ah?” the corner of my eye captured a movement; he’d raised his head and was looking at me.

“The brunette and her two blonde friends, the ones you were chatting up. If you’re gonna shag one, I vote the brunette,” I smiled, satisfied with myself for forming a coherent sentence despite my mental fatigue. When he didn’t answer immediately, I forced my eyes to go from the fascinating stars to his face. He was running the fingers of his left hand through his hair, frown in all its glory, stamped on his forehead.

“I’m not – no.”

I smirked. “Ah, going for two, then? Greedy. All right,” my right hand went up, forefinger moving to explain, “I suggest you go for the brunette first and then the short blonde one…her tits are just massive.”

“You sure you only had one drink?”

I breathed out a laugh. “The other one has a tight arse, though. Decisions.”

If it wasn’t for the fact that the room was nearly lost in darkness, and if seventy percent of my brain didn’t feel as if it was about to slip out of consciousness, I would’ve laughed hard and genuine at his expression. Frown gone, eyes open to the maximum, one of his hands moving in the denial to match his following words.

“Please…stop.”

My eyes shut closed as I laughed, bending my knees and taking my shoes off as to not ruin Gemma’s duvet with their dirtiness. After I threw them to the floor, conserving my relaxed position on the bed, I noticed the corners of his mouth were slightly curved up, though his frown was still there, mixed with an expression of disgust at my attempt of an advice.

His bottle of beer had been resting on the small, square table next to him, and so he grabbed it and took a sip, staring me down and running his thumb across the corners of his glistening lips, cleaning off the alcohol that hadn’t made it to the inside of his mouth.

I held his stare. He was now sitting manly, with his legs open, small journal balanced on his right thigh. He rested his elbows on each side of the chair, refusing to take his eyes from me; refusing to be the first one that looked away.

I let him win to help his ego, and darted my eyes back to the ceiling. Those stars were something I’d become obsessed with since the first time Gemma had gotten them. The night sky was one of my favourite sights, especially when the amount of stars that adorned it was abundant. It was beautiful, powerful and superior. It was untouchable.

I was unaware of how much time had passed, but remained awake and it was all that mattered. I owed it to the music that was playing, one good song after another, although the volume was lower, which indicated that the people gathered in the living room were now discussing important topics regarding the student committee. Not surprising, since that was the reason why we were there on the first place. But thanks my impasse and the fresh injury on my hand, I was now resting in a comfortable bed, under fake yet fascinating glowing stars. Poor little me.

If he hadn’t sneezed at that very moment, I wouldn’t have remembered he was there. I turned my head slowly, lazily and sleepily, drinking in the image of him, again questioning myself on why he couldn’t go to his room to work under decent lightning. Only his right knee was tucked to his chest now. His left hand held the journal in place and his right was in control of the slowly moving pen. The frown that seemed to be a part of his face was actually gone this time; he seemed relaxed. Too bad I was beginning to fall asleep and needed something to distract myself. So I interrupted.

“What’re you doing?” My voice was surprisingly slurry, not so much as a result of the poor amount of alcohol I’d consumed earlier, but a manifestation of how close I was to initiating a nap. My question was heard, but it went unanswered. He continued to write, oblivious to the fact that I despised being ignored. “Harry.”

He didn’t raise his head and kept spreading the tint of his pen in the shape of words. But his lips opened and he spoke with the tone that one acquired when speaking to a curious toddler – secretly annoyed but masking it well –: “nothing interesting here, get some sleep.”

I rolled my eyes – something he missed, since his gaze seemed to be perpetually centered on the content of his journal. Genuine interest flooded through me this time, and combined with the tiny amount of alcohol in my head, it encouraged me to speak again. “What do you write about?”

Eyes still on the paper.

“Bit of everything.”

“Is it any good?”

Eyes still on the paper. Three seconds of silence. “Dunno.”

I frowned. Had he ever had an actual conversation with another human being? How come he was nice and chatty whenever we sat down with Olivia to have dinner, but turned annoyingly monotonous when it was just the two of us?

“And when it’s done what do you do with it?”

“Well, it’s not, uh…” his pen was finally disconnected from the paper when his hand travelled to the back of his head, scratching it, eyes scrutinizing his journals, brows furrowed together again. “It’s not a story or anything. Just random stuff that comes to my head, I write it down.”

I understood what he meant – if he meant what I thought he meant. Ninety percent of painting or drawing ideas came in the moment, when you were staring at a blank surface of paper, when you had endless shades of colours next to you, ready and inviting.

But the other ten percent came at random times, when you were at the grocery store and spotted a girl with exotic cheekbones and messy hair that screamed “paint me”; when you were close to falling asleep in class and your professor mentioned technical words that somehow motivated you to create a piece that combined both elegance and vulgarity; when it was three in the morning and sleep wasn’t an option; when you were showering and something about the heated water and the dense vapour encouraged you to create something dramatic. And when that happened, when creativity approached you at unusual places and during ordinary situations, you had to be prepared to portray a sketch rapidly, because it was all very likely to fly away in seconds.

He interrupted my thoughts and continued. His frown had relaxed, though it was still there, and his eyes were on mine. His irises and his glistening lips were the only parts of his face that shined under the glowing stars; the rest was visible but slightly shadowed. “I guess at some point, when it feels ready, I’ll sit down and try to piece it all together,” his right hand moved in the air, gesturing, black pen caged between his fingers, “might turn out to be a decent story, I hope.”

“Or just a book with many poems. Those are nice.”

He let out a breath of a laugh and scratched his head again, looking at me with the type of expression that you portrayed before sharing your pathetic school grades with your excited parents, “I’m not sure it’s poetry, it’s just –”

“Can I see it?”

He winced. His lips unzipped slightly, eyes scanning my face but not quite concentrated on it. It seemed as if he was rapidly looking for a polite way to tell me that the contents of his journal were none of my business. The corners of my lips curved up slightly, warmly. Again, I understood.

“S’all right.”

Silence.

“You know what?”

By this point, Harry had given up on his writing. He’d assimilated the fact that I wasn’t going to shut up and so he placed his journal on the table next to him, pen on top. He raised his brows and accommodated in his seat, waiting for me to continue.

“When I make something that I really like, I don’t show it to anyone. Got a bunch of sketches hidden in the closet,” my voice was sleepy. I was nearly whispering, only speaking loud enough for him to hear.

Frown. “Why would you do that?”

I shrugged, “they’re mine.”

He chuckled. His teeth were on display and so were his dimples, one on each side of his face. His eyes were half closed and surrounded by those small wrinkles that appeared when you smiled, no matter what age you were. He pointed at me, “fair enough.”

“You’re fucked, though, ‘cause the stuff you’ve got in there,” I pointed at his journal, “you’re gonna have to make it public at some point.” I stopped and pondered for a second, another rush of genuine curiosity approaching me, “you wanna get published?”

Harry stopped smiling but displayed a relaxed expression, sucking on his lower lip and rubbing his chin mindlessly. “That’d be cool, yeah,” he took a sip from his beer.

“What do you wanna do?”

I bit my lower lip in thought, though I’d been asked this before. It was an easy question; simply because I’d never worried to find an answer for it. “I don’t… I don’t think about it much.”

“I could see you getting a gallery or something, no?” I frowned and he noticed. “What would you like then?”

“I just –”, at a loss of words, I broke the contact and stared at the ceiling instead of Harry’s eyes. “As long as I get to do what I like I’ll be all right, you know? Plans don’t matter much.”

“Hmm.”

Harry’s tone made me look back at his face, curious to inspect his expression. He analysed my face thoughtfully and I smirked knowingly. “You think it’s stupid.”

He frowned. “Not true.”

I decided to let it go. This topic was a constant debate between my father and I; we’d gone through it so many times I no longer cared when someone mirrored his opinion. But it was difficult to stop from myself from mentally discussing it now that the topic had been touched.

Did people ever stop to ponder over the fact that the future was yet to happen? That it was physically, scientifically and spiritually impossible to even predict the next five minutes of their lives? Why were they so obsessed with planning everything? What if a small detail didn’t go as expected and then fucked the whole thing up? What were you supposed to do then?

Future: unknown, undetermined, unpredictable. Past: gone, finished, elapsed. Present: immediate, existing, being. Not very complex, was it?

“Blue? Blue, what happened?” Matt opened the door harshly and walked into the room, ignoring Harry and sitting down on the bed, beside me. His right hand landed on my lower hip and his left cupped one side of my face.

“I fell.”

He frowned. What was it with men and wrinkled foreheads these days? “You okay?”

He received a close-lipped smile in return. “Well and breathing, Matt.”

“Good,” he grinned and leaned down. His hair was getting a bit long, and it tickled my face when he was close enough to let his lips make contact with mine. I whimpered in surprise when I felt him caress my lower lip with the tip of his tongue, adding pressure, encouraging me to part my mouth open to allow him entrance. He got what he wanted and I nearly winced when we engaged in an open-mouthed, quite audible kiss. His tongue tasted of alcohol and, though I usually enjoyed playing along, something told me that it wasn’t the right time or place. His hand travelled from my hip to my thigh, meticulously touching the skin hidden beneath my dress. I wrapped my hand around his wrist and it was enough for him to understand what I was suggesting. He pecked me a few times and when he pulled away, running his fingers though my hair and staring down at me, a curvature of the corners of my lips formed without my permission and he mirrored it in a higher scale, grinning breathlessly.

“I gotta get back. Be good.”

Matt kissed my forehead and walked away, not bothering to spare Harry a glance and closing the door behind him, leaving the two of us alone in the glowing room that, for unknown reasons, no longer felt relaxing. He’d stopped writing long ago, when I’d forced him to do so with my interrogations. Now he was looking at me, bottle in hand, frown gone, expression unreadable. I decided to focus on the ceiling, hoping it would give me back the tranquility that the past three minutes had taken away from me.

He went back to writing and I no longer cared about Jack or the annoyingly accurate speech that I’d receive from him if I fell asleep then and there. I closed my eyes and shifted, turning my back to him and facing the wall, instead. A few minutes passed and I could feel myself drowning into a state of limbo, not awake yet not asleep. Pointless concern suddenly rushed through me, and I shifted again, facing him but keeping my eyes closed. I curled myself into a ball. Comfort.

“Harry?”

It was impossible to know if he was looking at me; my eyes were closed and I no longer possessed the energy to open them.

“Yes?”

“I’m falling asleep.”

Silence. “Not the end of the world.”

His voice was calm and quite soft when he spoke. Harry was aware of my intentions to stay awake. After all, he’d been the one commanded to take care of me whilst making sure I didn’t slip out of consciousness before the meeting ended.

“Sorry,” I spoke, loud enough for us to hear. Not sure what I was excusing myself for but wishing he’d answer so my day could come to a conclusion that would allow me to officially disconnect my head from the real world.

“Forgiven.”

It was only a matter of seconds before my entire body began to feel as if it was floating, the sort of sensation that you get when a part of you is awake and the other is already deep gone into the blur of subconsciousness. I let go, sighing in content and shuddering slightly as a reflex to the sudden wave of cold air that travelled through the room. I heard noises, and a few seconds later felt a warm blanket being placed on top of me, instantly stopping my skin from becoming ice. I felt a pair of hands maneuver the fabric until it was covering every part of my body except from my face.

“Sleep tight, Blue.”

Dead silence, only interrupted by the music that played in the background. The quietness within the room came to an end after a few seconds, when I heard footsteps, followed by the sound of the door being opened and then closed.

He was gone. And so was I, finally giving my mind permission to drift into sleep, inhaling the strong scent of his cologne when it was left flying in the air. I found myself fiercely expecting to dream something vivid that would help me analyse the many events of the day.

I had a few things to think about.