This Love

Chapter 44

HARRY STYLES

Three Years Ago

"What do you think happens when we die?"

"What?" I chuckled, tearing my gaze from my book to look down at Scarlett with her head on my lap. "Why are you asking me that?"

"I'm just curious," she smiled. "Don't you ever wonder about it?"

"About dying?"

She nodded.

"Well," I sighed and marked my page before closing the book and setting it aside. "I feel like there's probably a heaven and a hell."

"Really?" She frowned in genuine curiosity. "Why do you think that?"

"I don't know, I guess it just sounds nice."

"Hell? Hell sounds nice?"

I laughed and smoothed my hand back on her forehead to keep her hair away from her face. "I was sort of talking about heaven."

"Oh," she nodded like she finally understood, though she knew what I meant to begin with. "What do you think heaven is like then?"

Brushing my thumb over her cheekbone, I looked down at her while she kept her big green eyes glued to mine. "I think it's probably not too far off from being like this."

Her cheeks turned a subtle shade of light pink as she smiled and rolled onto her side with her head resting on my thigh, facing the foot of my bed. "Be more specific, please."

I watched her close her eyes as I adjusted the throw blanket around her shoulders and started playing with her damp hair. "Well, you would obviously have to be there with me for it to feel like heaven. And I think it would be quiet like this, and we'd be warm like we are now, and we'd have nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be."

"Do you think it would just be us? In our own world?"

"I'd like to think the rest of the people we care about would be there too," I laughed, seeing her smile as she wiggled to get more comfortable.

"What if that's only you for me?" She asked, and even if I knew that she loved her brother first and foremost, it made me feel inexplicably good for her to insinuate that I was the only person she cared for. It wouldn't be too far off for me to say the same thing about her.

"Is that what your heaven looks like?"

She nodded against my thigh, keeping her eyes shut. "You'd be there, and you'd hold me, and kiss me, and spend every second with me because nothing and no one else would be important."

"Oh, so you mean your heaven would be our lives now?"

Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she laughed and tugged at my shirt until I laid down so she could get on top of me. "Maybe."

I still needed to turn the lamp off in the corner of the room and we still needed to get under the comforter together, but I was fine to lay there and hold her the way she wanted me to, feeling her breathing start to slow in time with mine. It was the moments like those that sometimes made me wonder if I was already in heaven after all.

***

My eyes flutter open at the sound of the door clicking open, but I whip my head up just to see that it's my mum holding two paper cups of coffee. Uninterested, I lay my head back down to rest on Scarlett's thigh, looking up at her as her chest slowly rises and falls in her hospital gown. Her lips are still an alarming shade of white, as is her skin, and she still has an IV stuck in her arm to deliver the fluids to treat dehydration. The alcohol has already been filtered from her blood when her kidneys failed to do so. I still find it hard to swallow as I picture last night when the nurse explained to me all the complications of her alcohol poisoning.