the social experiment // haylor au

three // opening up

       

Two days after his stargazing outing with Taylor, Harry noticed he was acting particularly out of character.

He hadn't ever been the type to be distracted – even when he was a child in preschool – he had always been able to focus on one task for sometimes up to fourteen hours at a time. His brain was just wired that way. He'd been known to work for a full day on a coding project – with no breaks for food or anything – just him and his computer, stuck in a world where it was just them that existed and mattered.

It was moments like this when his personal assistant, seeing him in yesterday's clothes with slight stubble above his upper lip the next morning when she came into work, would close his laptop and force him to go home, take a shower, and sleep; ordering him to only come back to work the following day.

Harry didn't have problems with concentration.

But for the entire weekend, his mind couldn't stop wandering whenever he wasn't actively focussed on schematics or a computer screen – like when he was preparing dinner for himself at night, he would wonder for a moment what Taylor was doing at that moment. Was she doing the same as him? Did she still have a patient with her or had she gone upstairs, where he had deduced was the lavish townhouse she lived in. Would she watch TV or choose to read a book in the evening?

This had happened a few times – that his mind wandered to his psychologist like this – and he found his curiosity slightly annoying, but not completely unfounded. Taylor knew a lot more about him from their first two sessions than most of his acquaintances had found out about his life in many years. He, on the other had, knew almost nothing about her, besides the basic information he'd found on her online while hacking her phone company – he knew her age, basic identification information, even bank card numbers and the other mostly random things she'd told him – but besides that, he knew nothing too specific about Taylor Swift.

For most of the next week, when he wasn't preoccupied with wondering about a certain blonde, Harry immersed himself in his work and in a few minor trial runs in his lab – luckily, all of them were scientific and not social experiments.

It had snowed sometime during the middle of the week, and everything outside of his apartment and office was covered in a translucent layer of frost and the freezing temperatures left his breath visible in the air every time he breathed. The snow sat on rooftops and on windowsills, reminding him slightly of the weather around this time of year in England.

It seemed as if the snow had arrived with his sister, who was in town for a few days on business. Gemma had, predictably, made time to go to dinner with him on Thursday night, so the two of them could catch up on each others' lives. Harry didn't object to much his sister said – she was after all, the reason his Friday evenings were spent in Uptown Brooklyn seeing a psychologist – so he found them a nice restaurant down the street from the hotel she was staying in.

The first thing he noticed when the host had showed him over to where Gemma was already sitting was the fact that her hair was now a shiny platinum blonde colour. Harry couldn't pretend to understand his sister's relationship with colouring her hair, but he thought that this new colour looked rather nice on her, and he told her so as he sat down.

She thanked him and smiled, noticing that he also had a smile – be it small – on his face. She wasn't used to seeing her robot brother showing emotion this openly. When they had both looked over the menu and ordered drinks in the companionable silence, Gemma leaned back in the booth and studied her brother carefully. She smiled a little bit and then said, "How are you doing little bother?"

"Brother," Harry corrected, swatting at her with his menu even though he was smiling at his sister.

"Right, right. Sorry," she laughed a little and the stopped and said seriously, "You know, I'm proud of you. There was a time I was scared I wasn't ever going to see you smile again. But this is one of the few times I'm glad to be wrong."