Moon Tower

42.

this chapter has been edited and updated. enjoy!xx

harry

"Fuck," I breathed. My fingers were wrapped tightly around my hair, and I felt my chest moving up and down rapidly. From stress, or panic, or fear, I wasn't sure, but my heart beat wildly in my chest, and I didn't know how to make it stop.

After months of not seeing Luz in person, of taking the time I needed to figure my shit out, of making sure I was the man worthy of her love and affection, I finally thought I was ready to see her. To apologize for being the absolute worst person on the planet when she had been nothing short of angelic.

But I'd taken too long.

In those months, my head swarmed with warring thoughts. I thought I didn't deserve to be with her anymore. I thought I'd never be ready to be the person she needed me to be, and as time went on, I was too scared to reach out, afraid that when I did she would say she didn't want me anymore. In my mind, if I stayed where I was, and Luz was doing her thing, and we stayed in this state of limbo we'd found ourselves in, then I never had to go through the heartbreak that I had convinced myself was waiting for me when I eventually called her.

My heart finally won out. Despite the strides I was making outside of my relationship, I was still miserable without her. I slept, but it wasn't as soundly as when Luz was holding me tight. I would smile and laugh with my friends while on tour, but it wasn't as bright or genuine. With the help of my therapist and my friends and family, I slowly pieced myself back together after the exhausting past few months I'd had, but the final piece that would make me complete was somewhere in Europe touring with Niall.

I wasn't resentful that she'd somehow ended up on Niall's tour; it hurt that she wasn't with me, but I could only blame myself for that. So I focused on being happy that she was happy, and that helped to ease some of the ache in my chest. I focused on my own tour, throwing every bit of effort and energy I had into each and every performance. It was the one thing that brought me real joy these days, and I held onto that feeling with everything I had until my band and I played the last chords to the final song of the night. Mitch tried to get me to go out with him and the rest of the band after some of the shows, but I was too exhausted. Not from the show, but a kind of tired that had settled deep into my bones and seemed to follow me everywhere I went. Mitch understood how I was feeling, not pushing me to go out, but offering every night in case my answer miraculously changed.

I knew what Luz would say if she saw the state I was in, how disappointed she would be if she saw me moping around everywhere except for onstage. So halfway through July, I started making more of an effort to have a good time, to enjoy an experience that usually brought me unparalleled joy. I would go out to a bar with the band on a night here, meet Jeff for lunch at a café there, all the while meeting with my therapist like clockwork once a week. She told me a lot of things I didn't really want to hear at first, mostly because they were true and I didn't want them to be. But the more I talked about the last couple months and how terribly I'd handled things with Luz, the anger that had been simmering under the surface of my emotions since February started to fade. It felt like I had been possessed, like I had been watching these last few months from outside my body, and I now felt comfortable in my own skin again. I felt like I could stand up on my own two feet without stumbling and falling to the ground in a mix of twisted limbs and tangled emotions.

I started to truly feel better, but there was still that fear lingering inside me of reaching out to Luz and being rejected by her. So I started daydreaming about the future instead of facing the one right in front of me. I thought about a distant future, where we'd magically made up and were happy, so happy that we were unbearable to our friends and family, but we were too in love to care. Of traveling the world and going on countless adventures together. Of late mornings in bed avoiding responsibilities after a short time apart, where she would whine about wanting to get her day started, but didn't mind all that much when I kissed her and kissed her until she eventually gave up having any sort of plan that day. My fantasies were so vivid that they felt like reality, and I suddenly wanted it to be a reality so bad that I found myself looking at listings for houses in my free time, trying to think which ones Luz would like best. She'd like this small one because it was on the beach and was a pale shade of pink, and Luz always had a soft spot for things that were both cute and small. Or maybe she'd like this one more because it was big with multiple rooms so her siblings could sleep over whenever they wanted. Or maybe she'd like the one that was closer to her family and had a backyard with a huge lawn where we could run around with our kids, teaching them how to play sports or how to find constellations in the night sky.