Cruel Summer | Harry Styles

One: Beginnings

When she saw the red pins located in Nice, she clicked on the area to enlarge it. She remembered dropping the pins, three years ago while she planned the graduation trip she swore she would take when she finished her degree but Josh had happened instead. One pin marked a quaint bakery she wasn't sure how she found and the other marked the Monet museum. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and opened a new tab where she started re-researching the small city. The more pictures she saw, the more the longing grew. It was pretty, it was old, there would be amazing food and a beach. It wasn't as cliche as Paris, but it wasn't as close to being the countryside as was the place her grandmother was from.

"Not exactly my roots," she whispered. "But close enough."

Bursting with impulsivity, Della took a big swig from the bottle and pulled her laptop onto her lap. She went straight to SkyScanner and scrolled through flights. She played with the start and return dates until she found two dates where they were lowest: June first...and August thirtieth. Three months. It repeated in her head like a warning—or maybe a prayer.

She would be back in time for the fall semester, so school wasn't an issue. The family she nannied for already had three separate vacations planned...meaning they wouldn't necessarily need her; the small bakery she worked at on the weekends would surely survive without her. But could she afford it?

Della wasn't a reckless spender, but she wasn't exactly frugal. Her limited closet space had definitely halted her shopping habit, but she was usually too tired to cook after taking care of children all day and ordered out most nights during the week—and she liked to go out on the weekends.

She flipped over the forgotten syllabus that was on her nightstand and started scribbling down numbers after consulting both her checking and savings accounts, accounting for her half of the rent she would have to pay while gone, the flight and how much money she could potentially spend in that amount of time. The numbers didn't scare her until she started looking for places to stay. A hotel was out of the question and AirBnbs weren't exactly cheap.

She could feel the second thoughts start to unravel as she scrolled through listings and took another swig from the bottle. Four pages in, she saw the cheapest one yet. A twenty minute walk from the Promenade and tiny, but clean. Before she started doubting herself enough to call the entire thing off, she did the math and, comforted by the fact that she wouldn't end up emptying her entire bank account, she booked her summer in the tiny city.

The whole thing hadn't seemed as romantic the next morning. She pushed the scribbled on syllabus to her floor and mumbled profanities at herself.

Della remembered thinking that she needed the summer away—she needed to get away from Josh, she needed the space and the time to be alone, to figure out her life, where she wanted to go and what she wanted to do. She convinced herself that this trip would give her the time and solitude to map out the future, to finally pinpoint the kind of woman she was so that she would stop making decisions on a whim, stop being so unsure of herself, strengthen her constitution and stop being so fucking impulsive.

The irony wasn't lost on her.

Then, awake and hungover, Della wasn't really sure if she needed those things. Sure, she wanted them. She had lived her whole life by the blow of the wind—at least that's what her grandmother said. Any time she said it, Della knew it wasn't meant to be sweet and would make it worse by reminding her grandmother that she was actually a water sign.

This trait was something that Della was supposed to have fixed rather than embraced. She hadn't seen anything wrong with it while she was in college. She was still willful and head strong—just not in the way her family wanted. Basically, she wasn't Addie: the girl with a plan and vision; the girl who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it due to the extensive research she had done; the girl who rarely did things simply because she wanted to or because it felt right.