Matilda | Harry Styles

FORTY-NINE

We were silent for a while.

I was tempted to ask if he was mad at me, even though I knew that he wasn't. It was far too natural of an assumption for me, even when he constantly proved otherwise. I knew whatever frustration or annoyance he was feeling wasn't directed at me.

He was texting for a little while, before Stella called him. He had this thumb nervously between his teeth, chewing on his nail as Stella spoke on the other end - and I assumed she was mapping out whatever they were going to do about this. It was exhausting, and I didn't have the capacity for it.

Harry had an image, and that had been abundantly clear from the start. He'd sat me down and told me what I was getting into when it came to his public image, and the more I'd gotten to know him; the more complex it had become.

I knew he had been paired in publicised, fabricated relationships before; other celebrities, models, and such - people who either wanted a push in the industry or who had a management team who felt that there would be mutual benefit in Harry being paired up with them. People who were nothing like me. These relationships were calculated - and when media outlets would inevitably deep-dive to tear apart his partners, they'd find them to have similar images, pre-cultivated by management teams of their own.

I knew, equally, that he hadn't been pictured with somebody he was actually with - let alone, somebody like me. There was no professionally, delicately constructed image for the media to delve into with me - there was only a real one, of somebody who was a dull, plain, and ordinary shell of the models he'd spent the past half-decade or so publicly parading around with. I knew none of it was real, and he'd expressed to me before that he was very thankful that his career was in a place, now, that he was no longer as greatly served by those types of industry ploys. He was famous enough in his own right, now - he had his own name that he'd made.

His image had shifted, he'd told me, from how they'd painted him in his teenage years as a the charmer who every girl fawned over - but it was never real, at least not to him. Then, as the years had gone on, he'd finally - slowly, but finally - elevated himself into a position by his own talent, that he could be left alone at least a little more. His image, now, was a limited one, and somehow, it worked for him and his fan base equally well. He'd told me that whilst he'd been in his former band, he didn't have an ounce of privacy - but, now, he'd managed to draw back in that at least a little bit. There was an air of mystery around him, in that nobody truly knew much about his real relationships, or how he spent his private time - and now: how he spent it with me. Despite the fact that media sources and fans alike would follow his every move as much as they could, there was never much substance in what they knew or saw, and I knew he held his personal life close to his chest. He was private, and he didn't show himself to just anybody. Every day, I considered myself lucky to know him the way that I did, and I knew he didn't want the rest of the world to become a third-party in our relationship. I trusted him in knowing that wouldn't bring anything positive.

He was insecure about his current position. It was like he feared the rug might be pulled out from under him at any moment - I knew that, and he'd been honest in confessing that to me early on. He may have earned some privacy, but that didn't outweigh how he hadn't truly earned much freedom in how he spent his day-to-day life. He was at the mercy of his fear that it could all disappear if he grew the slightest bit complacent; that was why he'd take every interview that Stella got for him, and do his shows without a day of rest in between and with only an hour or two of sleep under his belt; why he was already foreseeing his next album and tour, because he refused to risk his own hype dying down. He couldn't see that he transcended that. He was endlessly grateful to be where he was, no matter how draining it was - he didn't dare utter a word of complaint. He did exactly what he was told, and any slight infringement made him panic.