After The End: Book 1

36. Who We Want To Be

Harry's POV

I didn't want to be the instigator of trouble, but I wasn't good at keeping secrets. Especially not now that I was going to be open with Louis. If I was going to start talking to him again, then I had to be honest. And I needed to be able to talk to him again. That didn't feel like an option anymore. I needed to get over myself. Louis needed me as a friend as much as I needed him. Especially because Naomi was pregnant. Louis deserved to be told the truth. He was going to be a dad. He didn't have time for games and Naomi was a good person, but she needed to be honest with him.

I don't know what Louis planned to do with the information I gave him but outwardly it didn't look like much. He and Naomi remained unchanged. She kept going to work, Louis kept working on new music for Melvin and they acted as if nothing was different. There were conversations over dinner about the baby. They were pretty settled on the name River, if it was a girl. That had been Daisys suggestion.

Lux and I were a bit of a different story. The first night, after speaking to Louis, I'd gone back to find her already in my room. I don't know if she had any plan but when I got there, I'd crawled into my own spot and she'd snuggled up to me the way she'd done that one night and we'd just gone to sleep almost wordlessly. We didn't acknowledge the change. We didn't acknowledge the conversation we'd had. After the recurrence of trauma, we just took pleasure in the proximity and safety of each other's presence.

The next day, Louis woke me up earlier than necessary and ignored the fact that Lux was still clearly asleep in my bed. I watched him look at her quizzically before deciding not to react. He made me get up and go with him to the store to see about getting a new front door. I didn't mind. I hadn't slept well and clearly neither had Louis. I left Lux there sleeping and complied to accompany him. It felt like a weird and mundane task, but it was calming to do something productive after everything. The door was fully installed by the time both of the girls woke up for breakfast. The doorframe was warped now, so the door didn't lay quite flat. Louis said he'd have someone out to look at it. We were going to get a better security system installed too, he informed me.

As the first couple of days passed, Lux and I didn't explicitly talk about what "not pretending" actually looked like. She went back to her activity of flirting with me in a way that bordered harassment and I went back to only half heartedly denying her. She slept in my bed. The pillow that separated us was gone, but it was a completely non sexual relationship. We played our board games as usual and smoked cigarettes on the porch. I cooked and she drew. She pulled me aside once on the first day and told me that she didn't expect me to have all the answers about what I wanted, but that she'd be happy to wait by my side while I figured it out. She held my hand and kissed me cheek and told me to think before making decisions. I was willing to follow those instructions. I think Louis was thankful to watch as we tentatively and mostly wordlessly navigated a relationship. I was all in, but I'd never navigated an explicit relationship with healthy boundaries and I'd definitely never tried to do it sober. I had made my initial proclamation of affection but I'd not much considered what came next. So we held hands and cuddled our way to sleep and she would kiss me before bed and we just didn't talk about it.

Naomi had offhandedly told me that it reminded her quite a bit of primary school when I'd delivered her a sandwich to the living room one day. I'd told her to mind her business. She told me that I was cute. I was having a hard time not being annoyed with Naomi after realizing she had dishonesties with Louis. I was trying not to hold their business against her, but Louis was my best friend. It was hard not to want better from her.

The day after my talk with Louis, I'd also woken up with the desire to gain some independence. If I was to be in a relationship, I needed to know my own PIN number among other issues. It was time to take my life back a little. I got a notebook and I made a list of things Louis did for me. On it, I included managing my bank, paying all of the bills, ordering groceries, managing my doctors, meds and health... anything I could think of. Then I began thinking of ways to retake my own control. What I realized, was that it was going to be a long process. Still, I learned my PIN, wrote it down and considered it a success.