Damaged » h. styles au

Chapter 92 - Scarlett

It didn’t really work, if the way he kept grinning knowingly from ear to ear was something to go by.

So, all in all, it’d been two weeks without talking to Harry. Again. (Last time it maybe wasn’t two weeks, but everything still felt like a decade, so I really couldn’t bother with the accuracy of the facts). And the lack of him was frustrating, clearly, but my efforts started to seem even more useless with time. Maybe he was running away. Maybe he did want to break up with me, and to put the blame all over myself, he’d been hiding. So he could use the excuse of never being looked for; later he’d say I didn’t care enough to try to change his mind.

Maybe. Probably not. Or probably yes. I couldn’t find the answer.

“You’re doing it again,” Tyler pointed out, chewing on his terrible, pale-looking chicken. The hospital food, nor the hospital circumstances in general were doing much wonders to him. Indeed, he looked paler himself, definitely skinner, the bones all over his body more prominent than ever. His wrists and ankles protruded out of his skin, nearly, and his eyes had lost the rest of the glow he hadn’t lost when Kirsten walked out of his life. Both the original and the theoretical one.

“Doing what, Tyler?” I breathed out from across the room, slumped over the very uncomfortable armchair just to keep him some company until Zach came over in a few hours. More than ever, I wanted to leave. But then again, that had been my constant thoughts ever since two weeks ago.

I wasn’t choosing Tyler over Harry. I wasn’t.

But Tyler had a bandaged head that still looked swollen as f–ck, his face hadn’t even started recovering from the lack of skin in some parts, and every time he casted a glance towards his legs, he would look completely broken. It was as if the air had been knocked out of his lungs, like all the hope he had spent years building had just drifted away as boiled water.

And it was about that, really, the scene that I was reliving. The image of a broken, lost, Tyler; better saying: the image of a broken and lost child. The illness made him look young, as young as I’d met him years ago at some random doorstep outside school. When he wasn’t bothering being the self-confident twat he was, he was staring at all white corners, trying to understand the meaning of life.

“Losing yourself in thoughts, leaving me all alone even though you’re just right there,” he finally said, struggling to swallow what was in his mouth. According to him, his throat was achingly sore, making it hard to deal with his own saliva.

“I’ve got problems to solve, Tyler. Places to go, people to talk to, and I need to put some thoughts into that,” I sighed, standing up once he raised his empty plate with some difficulty, pointing at the glass of water on a table in the corner. “I’m only here because you need to, otherwise you know I wouldn’t’ve come at all, don’t you?”

I took the plate from his hands, ignoring the squeeze in my chest when he sighed in relief, rid of the small weight that was still causing him pain. Silently, I handed him the glass of water, which he took hesitantly, staring at it as if he was being forced to drink something rotten.

“Nah,” he shook his head after a slow gulp, handing the glass back to me. “I reckon you’re here mostly because you’re pitying me ‘cause I can’t walk anymore and everything, but you’re here because you care, too, and you know I need to be taken care of carefully. And you don’t trust anyone else besides yourself to do so.”

I did something remotely close to growling at him, swinging back to my seat in denial with myself inside. It was simply unfair how everyone around me seemed to know me better than I did myself. It was unfair how everyone was right, and I was constantly wrong. Always wrong.