Butterfly Keeper // h.s. au

Chapter Forty One

It's such an foreign feeling, waking up with Harry's arms wrapped around me. I don't think there's ever been a morning that I've woken up and found him fast asleep beside me, holding the frame he had taken when we had passed out in the darkness only hours before. It's ironic that this thought resonates with me more than the headache drumming in my skull. But the more I think about it, the more it baffles me. I've never awoken to a sleeping Harry nestled into my side. Not even when we first met, not even at the beach house when I thought everything was perfect, not even when sadness almost took his soul from this prison of a world.

    Now though, when the mornings are dim from a clouded sky, and the sheets feel extra warm from the heat of his chest. He is here with his arm thrown over my waist and his lips parted into that perfect 'o' shape. His long curls run down his neck and swirl around the shell of his ear. I take my finger and ghost the tip over a wisp that lies curled just to the left of his lips. It's almost unnatural, how always admirable he is.

    With a single glance at the flushed color to his cheeks and gentle pace of his breathing, I regretfully move his hand from my waist in a careful motion. Something feels different, and I need to figure out what that is.

    My toe hits the carpet as if the ground will shatter beneath me and I slide myself off the bed in the same manner. As I creep to the door I peer back at the man fast asleep beneath the white sea of sheets, taking it in for all it's worth, and then leave the room.

    The over sized fabric of Harry's sweaters swishes between my legs with each step I take. I'm not sure when I put it on, or if it was even me who did so. Everything is just a blur I guess, and the bits and pieces from the night before are scattered across the contents of my mind.

    I stumble into the bathroom on the weak support of my knees and as soon as I look up into the mirror hung on the wall before me my frail joints almost give out. An absolute stranger looks back at me, with bags under her eyes, a scrape on her chin, looking like a ghost of the girl I last remembered. My eyes flicker wildly to the different pieces of myself, trying to arrange them into the person I saw in the mirror before the Christmas party. My hands roam my arms, covered in goosebumps from the image staring back at me, and then trail up to my shoulders and stop just at the bottoms of my ears.

    Nineteen years of untamed locks and braids that reached down to my waist flash through my mind. Nineteen years of holding onto a piece of me that's remained unchanged for best and the worst of my days, all gone.

    My hands hover over the place on my shoulder where my hair should rest only to prick my fingertips on itchy remains of what was once there. The girl staring back at me has a choppy mop with pieces that unevenly fall, at the longest, to mid ear's length. My hand shakes as I work up the courage to run my fingers through what I have left, a gasp escaping me as I find the lump on the back of my head. The stinging lingers even after I've yanked my hand away and when I look up into the mirror once more a drop of moisture is scaling my cheek.

    "Charlotte,"

    Harry's figure appears behind me in the mirror, as if out of thin air. I look at our placement together, examining the worried look sketched out onto his sleepy features.

    "It's all gone," I whisper, turning around to face him. As soon as I see his sympathetic green eyes gauging mine I break into an array of tears following that desperate sound you make while crying as if your lungs will never have enough air to breathe as a normal person should.

    "It's gone Harry it's all gone! The last- The last piece of who I've always been-"

    He shushes me and pulls me deep into his arms, being careful not to rest his chin atop my bruised head. I'm desperate though, the feelings I'm holding inside are not gentle. They're ravenous, and Harry has been the thing to hold me together and break me every time. The reckless want inside me is for him to do both. I pull him closer to me, wrapping my arms under his and gripping the fabric of his sweater. I cry into him as if I've never cried before, like the emotions are all crawling out at once. I cry into him like...