Buttercup [H.S]

Chapter Twenty Seven

"Can she pack a bag?"

I'm bobbing between watching the two of them like a ping pong match, wondering when this decision was cemented in stone.

"That should be fine, just be careful not to touch anything that may seem important to evidence. If you find anything missing, call out to one of the team."

With that, Harry leads me up the stairs, so close behind me that I feel hairs prickle up my back.

He closes my bedroom door behind us, where I choke on another cry when I see that every room has been destroyed to the same extent of downstairs.

Harry's eyes search over the red paint above my bed, before shaking his head with a troubled sigh.

The messy, dripping scrawl over my bed like a label.

Lying Whore.

"Try not to look," Harry says quietly as he begins rifling through the mess until he finds an old backpack. "Just get what you need."

I don't respond. We work quietly, and it takes an age to find clothes that haven't been torn or cut apart; I even find that the bathtub had been filled, items of clothing and shoes floating on top, ruined.

When I come back into the room, Harry is holding a frame in his hand. He doesn't look to me when I approach, instead his eyes are flicking over the picture in his hand.

The photo I'd taken of him all those years ago.

The glass is smashed, the frame falling apart at the joints. I take it from his hands, trying to sniff back my tears, and I open the back of the frame to remove the photo.

Hoping that he doesn't see with my back turned to him, and hoping he doesn't judge me if he does, I slip the photo into my backpack.

With barely enough clothes for a clean set tomorrow, we head back downstairs together, stepping over the broken mess of my life on the way down, and meet the officers at the front door.

The entire time Harry looks livid, and I feel paralysed with guilt that he's stuck with me again.

"We've arranged someone to board up the door to secure the property," One of them says.

"And you'll need to come down to the station tomorrow for a full statement." Says the other.

They carry on like that, bombarding me with information but I stop listening. I think Harry must realise, because I see him nodding intently, his lips moving as he talks to the officers.

With a hand hovering over my back, he leads me back outside, where the sky has fallen into night, and into the van.

"I can get a hotel for the night."

I hear my voice but I feel numb. Harry only sighs, his face lit up from the light reflecting back from the headlights.

"It's fine."

I shake my head, my eyes blurring. "It's not."

He doesn't respond.

When Harry had given me a lift home from his bands gig all those weeks ago, when Kyle had left me at the tail end of a panic attack on the side of the road, and had said he lived around the corner from me, I didn't take it so literally.

We only drove for five minutes before we'd come to a stop again, outside a skinny, three story terraced house. All of the windows were lit up behind curtains and blinds.

"Is this your place?" I ask quietly.

Harry nods, glancing at the house before back down to his lap. He clears his throat awkwardly.