Aerial

The Twenty-Ninth Chapter

"Harry! Get bent!"

If an outsider happened to overhear your squeaks, groans, giggles and shrieks, they would likely suspect that you were either having your wisdom teeth removed under a heavy dose of laughing gas or getting your ass tickled with a peacock feather. Lucky for you, the flirtatious squawks were nothing of the sort, but rather Harry testing out new methods of stretching your legs and ankles with resistance bands. Except he can't seem to keep his hands from trouncing where they absolutely should not trounce in such a public setting. Sure, you're tucked away in his preferred, private practice room a couple hours before you're meant to take the stage, but that wouldn't stop someone from poking their head in if they thought you were being pummeled or maybe even sexually harassed.

All of your little kitten cries and sultry giggles are an erotic, mewling orchestra to Harry's ears. Through the tunnel of his eardrums and across the electrical sheathing of his brain, they translate as flirtatious beckoning; pleas for his mouth, imploring for his fingers, dares for more and dares to stop. A static drone of love-tied mood swings that make his stomach swim with lots of soupy, goopy numbers: perched atop cloud nine, amongst seventh heaven, only five hours and counting until freedom for an entire two days, the constant reminder of two orgasms brought on by two fingers just six hours ago, and zero fucking patience for the need to keep your sexual prowess a secret in this moment.

Three stirs of his jaw chaperone a raspy melody of your name, two vibrations of his front teeth raking against his bottom lip, one echo of the final consonant burrowing a hole into his chest.

No one could have ever prepared him for the shadowy, sublime feeling of lovesickness. Responsive serene nostalgia, a puzzlingly clashing tight and light chest, ghostly tears clogging his windpipe, a perpetual ache in his center that radiates out to numb his entire torso. Everything around him glitters with reminders of what has been and what's yet to come, every step of the odyssey seemingly more ethereal than the last. As if every second he was turning a corner to head towards the beach in the plucky, late afternoon; the big sun sizzling as it dips into the ocean, the water glistening forever until it drops off the edge of the earth.

Harry had thought that he was already in love, as if love were some type of pinnacled destination to land upon, except he's learning that it's more akin to a perpetual nosedive and the fall feels really, really good in the pit of his stomach. It's addicting, it's profound, it's devastating. He never thought it possible to be in much deeper than he previously was, but it turns out that the sweet reciprocation is unlike anything he's ever experienced before.

Delightfully caving in; he finally understands it now. Perhaps the best part of this discovery is the novelty of the realization itself, followed by a slow, divine suffocation by an unknown substance. A rainbow sherbet, dripping sky reflecting into an opalescent, oil-slick-coated, sticky ground. But he's so, so beyond content with that. Fuck, this must be what all of those love songs, poems and books are going on about. The message is always one of two things, an evenly split consensus of either, "stop, it hurts" or "never stop, it tickles." Those sappy assholes have had it right all along and he just never knew it. What a fucking bombshell.

Surfing this morning is nothing but a watery memory now. His board cutting through waves and his sopping hair sticking to his face, a ball of fire rising over the shrub-freckled mountains and the morning haze burning off to make way for midsummer heat, salt water stinging his lips and pruned fingers unzipping his wet suit. It's all been overshadowed by that one blissful moment that his digit was siphoned by slick, tight muscle. Your seeping, breathing pleats. Your head colliding with the pillows, your cresting gasp suctioning his palm to your mouth as he attempted to keep your reaction hushed, your feet raveling with his as you grappled with unfamiliar, euphoric sensation. Those teeny, tiny whimpers of the pet name he begged you to utter. Who knew that being smothered could be so liberating?