What Goes Around... || H.S. Harry Styles

8.

Tasha pulls away from Harry's kiss again and leans her weight on both hands against his kitchen counter.

"We need to talk about this," she says again, the only rational thought peeking out of the herd of memories stampeding through her mind.

"I know, fuck, I know," he exhales as he runs his hands over his face in despair.  He has been over this situation in his mind a million or more times over the years, what he would say if he ever got the chance to speak to her again, how he would be able to convince her how sorry he was, what on earth he could do to prove to her how much that horrible mistake changed him.  But as she stands in front of him with her eyes full of regret and fear, he has the strongest urge to tell her to leave, that she deserves better, that he doesn't deserve her.

"I was so shocked to see you at the bar with Jamie and Alice, I thought stupidly in that moment that maybe, just maybe, we could start fresh, pretend like we just met, act like nothing had happened between us, but... but, I can't forget, Harry," she strains, her words trembling as she balances awkwardly on the edge of tears.

He wanted this too.  The last time they saw each other they were kids and now they were practically strangers.  He didn't know about her travel after high school or what she did for a living and she had no idea about the bar or what city Harry was even living in. But the truth is the ghosts of their past were always going to haunt them no matter how many times fate pulled them together and begged them to forget.

Her beautiful face awash with the pain he created is bringing back a mountain of memories he had safely repressed for his own sanity.  He watches lip tremble as she stands in his kitchen by some miracle, after seven years apart, and he can't ignore how improbable and unimaginable that is.

"Natasha," he runs a hand through his hair and tugs at the roots, trying to punish himself for contemplating letting her walk out the door for even a moment.

She's watching him lose all composure, his eyes welling with tears and his hands in his hair.  She takes an involuntarily step back away from him and his breath catches at the sight. 

Tash squeezes her eyes shut and contemplates whether or not to open this excruciatingly painful door any further.  She had moved on, gotten her life back on track after a few awful years.  She made peace with what had happened but his lips touching hers were like a dam breaking and the onslaught of water rushing around her was now threatening to drown her. 

She meant what she said in the Chinese restaurant, that type of guilt will kill him if he doesn't let it go but that doesn't mean that their relationship is fixable or that she has to go down with him.

She comes to the same realisation as Harry, that meeting again like this, in another time, in what feels like it could be another life, just doesn't happen very often and she owes it to the universe to find out why.

Her eyes peel open and a single tear escapes down her cheek, Harry moves to close the distance between them but stops dead in his tracks when her voice cuts through the silence.

"Why did you do it, Harry?" She croaks the question that has been plaguing her for the best part of decade.  The image of that stranger on top of him, naked with him inside her, flashes through her mind and she feels like she is going to be sick.

His lips part as he hisses in a lungful of air, the weight of the question hitting him like a moving car.

She wants to continue, her mouth filling with a truck load of questions she had safely stored in the back of her mind but she's frozen by the intensity in his green eyes just a couple of feet away.