Madness ➮ Harry Styles AU

C4

Christopher

It was funny wasn't it? How smoke tasted so good, when all you wanted, was to die.

And I could hear her voice, it was everywhere. It was in my head and on my clothes and in the air and I'd be damned if it wasn't somewhere hiding behind those locked doors within a house that only ever spoke of her.

I was trapped, and for what seemed like the countless time, the poison in my lungs didn't make me feel any less than just that.

Rather ironically, the day was quite beautiful, a cruel joke to my pitiful self.

And there was grass beneath my boots and daylight painted the sky like the world was some kind of canvas, but you see, I hadn't had the time to think about any of that at all.

"Will," he said, his voice like acid. "His name is Will Colbari.'"

It was driving me insane. And it hurt more than my hallucinations ever did.

There was something about knowing the name of your lover's lover that made it a thousand times more painful than going about not knowing.

It was all I could think about.

So I stood on green blades of grass, on a Saturday afternoon, just thinking thoughts that were bound to drive me to madness, and trying to pick out any words in AshleyandChristopher that may or may not make my day a bit brighter.

Hopefully.

Yet, the first word I found was disaster, a word that used eight of the phrase's twenty letters, but I stopped right there, because I didn't quite like where this was going. It was just my luck, really, and I wasn't surprised at all.

I decided right then and there that loving her was a drug; delicious, and destructive. And the next thing you knew, you're standing alone in a place you'd rather not be, wondering what it was like to live in a world without her.

After deciding upon just that, as well as the simple fact that there was absolutely nothing I could do, I allowed the cigarette to slip from my cold fingers, and crushed it beneath the black sole of an even colder shoe.

My feet carried me back inside our house, and the next thing I knew, a familiar, leather-bound journal was sat on my lap, the page only adorned in two words.

Will Colbari.

I stared at it. And I just sat there. I just sat and stared and at that name and wondered how much better it was that Christopher Eve. And how much better it was to her.

So I forcefully grabbed my laptop sitting upon our desk, hypnotized by a singular name, and brainwashed by the idea that it held some sort of drastic significance.

Yet, there was nothing. I searched his name everywhere and anywhere and I got nothing.

My desktop was utterly cluttered some two hours later, packed full of abandoned Facebook profiles and Linkedin users and any site containing anything that may or may not lead to a man I thought I knew.

I kept telling myself that he's fired anyway and Ashley won't be spending any more time with him. But that wasn't comforting in the slightest.

It became more about finding out why she had given him a moment's time, rather than the fact that she did at all.

I came to realize that this wasn't an act of vengeance, this was an act of self-pity.

All I wanted was an explanation..was that too much to ask?

Apparently.

The diary was still on my lap, wide open and reflecting off the sunlight shining from a wide-framed window. So I lightly licked the tips of my fingers before turning the page, and finding it blank. And I turned that page. And it too was blank. And it became all the more infuriating as I delved deeper into a book I knew would only destroy me. It was just simply that all the pages were white. That they were all just empty. I had so much time to fill them of her and I and of us, but it was all just unwritten, and ultimately, just lost.