The Academy // Harry Styles AU

Chapter 31

Chapter 31

Nicole’s POV

“I feel like a wrinkled prune,” I told Harry as we swam by me again.

It was nearly dark outside and we were still swimming. After our conversation awhile ago we kind of fell silent for awhile, neither one of us wanted to say something wrong and mess up the peacefulness and inner giddiness that was left from the last few moments of our conversation. We left even more silence between us when people had started coming in here awhile after lunch had ended.

Once most of those people had left and we had settled ourselves, we had gone back to talking. We had almost pretended none of it had happened for the time being, but I knew that we couldn’t do that forever. Harry lifted up a hand to how me his fingers with were also wrinkly, and we decided to get out of the water. I grabbed my towel out of my bag and began to dry myself off a bit.

“You wouldn’t happen to have another towel, would you?” Harry asked me as we walked up to me.

I grabbed the extra towel I had brought out of my bag since I had had a feeling that he might forget to bring one. He thanked me as he grabbed the towel and I continued to dry myself off.

Harry’s body dripped with water as he used the towel to dry his hair, making if difficult not to look at the ink covering his skin. I waited for Harry to finish up with the towel, and then he threw it back to me and I folded it up and put it back in my bag.

“When does dinner start?” Harry asked me as I slung the bag up onto my shoulder.

“I don’t know, probably not for at least an hour or so,” I told him.

“So um, I guess do you want to eat with me in the dining hall?” he asked.

“Yeah, of course,” I said to him and he nodded with a smile.

I was hoping that Harry would’ve offered to walk me back to my dorm building once we had left the inside of the pool building, but he didn’t. He just said bye to me and then began walk the opposite way. I sighed and turned the other way to walk back to my dorm.

The fact that he didn’t walk me back didn’t bother me too much though because I was still left with a smile on my face thinking about the time we spent at the pool this afternoon. Sure at first it ended up being a bit awkward after awhile, making me think he was exactly who I thought he was when I first met up, but then at the end of that he turned out to be almost exactly who I had been beginning to think he might me, which was actually caring instead of a player.

I still wasn’t sure what to think of him. Sure I did like him, but I still needed to know for sure if he actually liked me or if he was just playing me like I feared. I just wanted to stop thinking about all of this though because all it was doing was stressing me out, wondering if I wanted to pursue this with him or not. Not knowing if I should trust him or not.

Thankfully I was pulled out of my thoughts when I heard a voice yell, “Wait,” and I turned back around to see Harry jogging over to me.

I was hoping that he had decided to walk me back to my dorm but it wasn’t, what he did stop be for was just as good though.

“I was wondering if I could maybe have your phone number?” he asked him.

“Sure,” I had answered a bit caught off by his question.

I hadn’t expected him to come back over to me just to ask for my phone number. It had never really occurred to me that we didn’t have each other’s numbers. He handed me his phone and I gave him mine. He mumbled a quick thanks and smiled before walking back in the direction he came from. I couldn’t but smile a bit more as I walked back to my dorm.

Harry’s POV

I couldn’t help but let a small smile form on my face as I walked back to my dorm. I got to kiss Nicole today, pretty much had her admit that she liked me, and I got her phone number.

As far as the kiss went, I knew that I might’ve taken it too far, and Liam would scold me if he found out, but at the moment I just couldn’t help myself. She never pulled away when I had thought she would, and then the longer the kiss lasted, the more I wanted and at the end I got a bit too selfish and ruined it.

Nevertheless, all was okay now. When I got back into my dorm, I of course was asked questions about where I had been the last couple hours. I refused to tell them anything for multiple reasons.

One of them being I didn’t want any type of lecture from Liam, good or bad. Another one of them being I didn’t want them to think that I was letting myself be whipped by some girl. I knew that they probably wouldn’t think that, they would just express some meaningless teasing. I was just thinking of my friends back home and how they would think if they knew that I had been hanging out with the same girl for this long.

Normally back home when I would get with my friends we would just sit and brag about what we did with the different girl that each of us were pursuing at the moment. Here it was different, everything here was different. I hadn’t talked to any of my friends back home for awhile, and I thought about calling one of them to let them know that I was still alive and all, but I just didn’t feel comfortable with bragging to anyone about Nicole, I just wanted to keep everything to myself.