How Did I End Up With Them? (OHSHC)

My World

I invited Haru into my home with a shaky hand. Even if I said I was ready to talk about my feelings, it still didn't feel safe. I was paranoid about the reality – if I said it aloud, would it stay inside my home? I love Haruhi, I love the Host Club, I love how life is going right now, I don't want our family dynamic to change just because of some crush. Besides, plenty of customers have crushes on the hosts and nothing comes out of it; why would my opinion matter? My attraction shouldn't be a matter so volatile that the club, much less Kaoru, had to consider. I would stifle the words burning in my throat if it meant I could keep life how it was now. It wouldn't last anyway.

Haru sat at the table in between my kitchen and the living room, arms resting in front of her, propping up her chin. She stared at me expectantly. I sighed.

"I said we'd talk it over with food, you know, give me a sec," I told her, grabbing my cell out of my bag, and dialed for the sushi place down the road she liked. Maybe if I gave her good food she wouldn't think much about what I confessed.

In the half hour it took the food to get to my house, I felt like I wasn't in my body. My nerves were on fire and my hands were still shaky. No boy should have this effect on a girl. It was criminal.

Haruhi settled for finishing homework in the meantime, but the minute the food got to my house, she was back to expecting a response, one I don't think I was coherent enough to give. I fiddled with my chopsticks, hoping to stall as long as possible. I focused on the different types of sushi in front of me instead of on Haruhi's big brown eyes. It fascinated me how she could just eat her feelings away most days instead of tackling the issues head on? I want to be like that.

The sushi came in eight different flavors, I ordered the platter deal for her, and it never struck her as weird that the different tastes always worked well together. Spicy, sweet, bitter, they all melded together into a platter deal that was the store's best selling product, and it made me wonder if we could be like that: could the Host Club function like this sushi platter even if some flavors started mixing together?

I voiced this concern to Haru, and, needless to say, she burst into giggles at the ridiculousness of my train of thought. I stared at her with a deadpan expression until she straightened her back out and started eating like nothing had happened. After a moment, she glanced up at me still playing with my food and cleared her throat.

"You know, it's not a crime to have a crush," she said. My eyes darted up at her absently eating her sushi. "I'm not any sort of expert on crushes or anything like that – come on, I never noticed guys asking me on dates had you not told me flat out after I unknowingly rejected them – but I do know you deserve to be happy," she continued. "Maybe talking about it to at least me might calm you down some. It's worth a shot."

My laughter started out small and disbelieving and slowly grew into a raucous anyone could surely hear outside because who would have ever imagine Haruhi Fujioka giving me a love life lecture. It was insane.

I covered my face with my hands still holding the chopsticks and only when I accidentally poked my throat with it did I put my hands down, still chuckling to myself. The tension had been released from my shoulders as if a fairy godmother had drifted in through the window, waved her wand, and righted the wrongs in my head. I could talk about this. I could open up to Haruhi and confess all the jumbled thoughts to her because she's my best friend and I trust her.

I started from the beginning: the time cut my foot on the china shard. It was the first time I reacted like that to Kaoru. More than that, how I started to make it a mission to decipher the differences – I had to know, because I was sure I liked one far more than the other and I wouldn't want to hurt the other by confusing them. I told her how my heart would speed up around Kaoru and how the day of the ball I felt as if I'd collapse right there into his arms, screw clichés and romances, that they could in fact be real. They were that night. And the day my mom came back, how he called to make sure I was okay. It was so unexpected. The day we filmed and how he came after me.