Corruption™ (Punk Harry Styles)

Chapter Thirty-eight

IMPORTANT: If you are going to say that this chapter is just like After, you can save your breath because it isn't and was NOT intended to be. I got this idea before I knew that Anna was writing something similar. So, please take your hate somewhere else if you cannot handle a little bit of a similarity. Thanks. xx

Two weeks. Fourteen full days. Three hundred thirty-six hours. Twenty thousand one hundred sixty minutes. The more you break it down, the longer it seems. I’ve gone a full two weeks without him. Each day, every hour, every minute, every second I become stronger. I left him and now I’m a full country away from his lies and games I was foolish enough to be a part of.

I thought it was going to hurt like hell, but honestly I feel free for once. When I was still in England Harry was everywhere, breathing down my neck. He followed me like you would stalk your prey and I got close enough for him to take a bite of me. He took that bite the first time he kissed me and he didn’t swallow it. No, he kept chewing on it, slowly devouring part of me.

But now I’m free. I don’t have him here to give me orders, to captivate my full attention with just his eyes. Now I was gone and he could no longer withhold me from the real world. That was his plan; to keep me so close to him that I would never be able to leave, I would never know what it felt like to be free, I would have never even known that I was being held captive by my own lover.

I was blinded by him; he was all that I could see. But I’ve learnt to open my eyes and look at everything around me, take it all in and appreciate the feeling of liberty.

The first day I was fine. I had slept on the plane, so I was well rested when I arrived at my apartment, as they call it in America, and was able to unpack my belongings. The apartment was already furnished and very nice. It was actually considered a studio, which is more high-end. I guess I have my father to thank for that as well as the car that he bought me that was sitting outside in the drive.

That day went by rather quickly as have the rest since then.

On the third day, I decided I needed to stop getting pizza delivered and went to the store with a grocery list. I had absolutely nothing in the apartment, so it took me a while.

“Do you need some help with that, Miss?” a man asked me when he saw me struggling with the package of water bottles. I really need to get back in shape.

“Sure, thank you,” I replied.

He easily lifted the package into the boot and smiled at me. “I’m Shawn, by the way.”

“Gabby. I just moved here from England.”

“I thought I heard an accent,” he joked.

I smiled at him and we ended up talking by my car for quite a while. He was a student at the University of Delaware studying to be a journalist. We went out to dinner that night and I had a great time, fighting the memories of Harry to the back of my mind. I didn’t need to be thinking about him anymore, we were over for good.