Guarded

07

He stepped back and turned me around to show me the whole stadium. “There was 90,000 people here to see me and the rest of the boys tonight. Ninety thousand.” He repeated the number again, clearly trying to make a point. “Imagine playing venue after venue of this size with crowds just that large.”

He was behind me at this point, whispering in my ear again. “Imagine looking out in a crowd of that size and trying to find one person. Searching every face you could possibly see, sussing them out and looking for familiarities. You can find them if you look hard enough but it’s never who you’re searching for. It comes close, but it’s never that one person.”

He walked around to face me. “They all disappear at the end of night. They go home to tell their friends about the concert, to post Instagram videos and tweets and hope that I’ll retweet them and some of them even write stories about the concert and put themselves in the place where we’re standing in right now. Hoping to be that one person that I’ve been searching for. And now here you are. The stadiums cleared out, they’ve all left. And here we are.”

I tried to make sense of everything he said from the way he described the experience for the fans to the blinding lights to the searching, looking for someone but never finding them until now.

“Me?” I asked questionably.

“God, you are so dense sometimes! I just gave you probably the grandest speech of my life. Yes, you!” He pressed his lips to mine.

“You, Annaleise, are who I’ve been looking for this whole time. And now you’re finally here with me.”

I looked up into his eyes and wrapped my arms around his neck, pulling him close to me. “I thought for a second you were going to take back everything you’d said to me over the past few days.”

“Annaleise, I never stopped loving you. Just like I said. And I told you once before and I’ll tell you until you are sick of me saying it: I will wait for you for however long it takes for you to come to me. Although I’m glad it’s sooner than later. But I would have waited longer.”

I kissed him, shutting him up. “Enough with the speeches. Just kiss me.”

He obliged, kissing me back. His tongue slipped between my lips and I tightened my hold on him. His arms wrapped around my waist, pulling me directly to him. I could feel his body heat radiating from him and it rekindled all the feelings that had been there all along. The box that I had compartmentalized everything in had been opened and I felt so alive at this very moment.

We pulled apart from each other and I smiled at him. “I love you, Harry Styles.”

“And I love you, Annaleise Archer. Please don’t make me call you Archer. You’ll always be Annaleise to me.”

“I forgot how sexy it was when you said that.”

His hands slid down from my waist onto my butt where he squeezed. “Oh, cheeky, you are! You know, I read all these articles about all these women you’ve been with. I think we need to have a chat and a visit to the doctor before we do anything below the belt.”