Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

19ᵀᴴ CHAPTER

At a certain point, he removes his feet from over the table and turns around still on the chair, looking at Leesh behind the counter with a new crossword to fill.

“Since you’re into horoscopes and all, would you happen to have one of those magazines with zodiac sign shit?” he asks quietly, voice amused coming from the back of his throat, both his eyebrows up in a questioning manner.

Elisha laughs quietly at him, suppressing the need to arch her eyebrows herself. “You’re so into that ‘shit’ – she makes sure to gesture the quotes with her fingers –, Harry. Admit it.”

He shrugs, turning his back to her again, going for another dart that lands close enough to the centre of the target. “Whatever. D’you have it or not?”

She puts the newspaper aside and rolls her eyes, because she doesn’t actually need a horoscope magazine. Someone should’ve told Harry there are proper sites for that. The computer the café owns is old, and the internet is so shit it’s not worth using it most of the time, but it works.

Without a word, she turns it on, and Harry must hear something because he stays quiet for as long as she’s willing to, standing up only to reach for the darts again. He offers her one on his way back to the chair, but she simply shakes her head as she types something into Google and ends up on a horoscope page.

“What do you wanna know?” Leesh asks, glancing back at her crossword and trying to find out one of the few she didn’t manage to discover. The blank spaces seem to be laughing at her.

“Do you know Taurus’ characteristics?” Harry seems even quieter now, staring down at his fingers, entwined over his lap.

Elisha glances over the words on the screen, scrolling down until she finds the word ‘Taurus’ written in italic letters.

“Productive, persistent, possessive, sensual, practical, stable, harmonic, beautiful, jealous and patient. Also, always chooses safe ways to go by.”

Harry hums just to make sure she knows he’s heard what Leesh said, but he stays quiet for a long while, staring at the darts, twisting and turning the objects as if to examine them, just before throwing one towards the target again and missing by a mile. It gets stuck to the wooden walls instead.

“Mostly right. Can you see how well of a match Taurus is to Aquarius?” his voice wobbles at the end, his feet dragging slowly to reach for the missing dart, remove it from the wall.

Elisha sighs, looking away from the screen and to Harry’s frame instead. “It’s her sign, isn’t it?” He doesn’t exactly reply, only moving his head in what seems half a nod, though Leesh is not sure. “If she’s hurt you this much then maybe you shouldn’t be looking for such information. It’s stupidity.”

At her words, Harry’s shoulders go tense, all of his movements halting for a brief moment before he relaxes and shrugs, grabbing the dart and pulling it away easily. “Just curious, s’all. Maybe it was written in the stars it wasn’t meant to be. Or something.”

Leesh stares at him some more, curious, scrutinising his defeated features until she convinces herself it’s nothing to do with her anyway. She types out “Aquarius and Taurus” on Google and waits for what feels like decades until the page loads, clicking the first option and waiting a bit more.

“When Taurus and Aquarius come together in a love match, they can move mountains — if they can figure out how to coordinate their efforts. Blah, blah, blah. They may appear to have few common interests, but they share a very strong desire to succeed — which means they may make better business partners than lovers-”