'And I was catching my breath
Staring out an open window
Catching my death
And I couldn't be sure
I had a feeling so peculiar
That this pain would be for
Evermore'
Song: Evermore by Taylor Swift
Jump.
Harry's POV.
"I lost myself a long time ago and I don't know how to get it back, and it's killing me."
I honestly didn't expect this.
I thought I'd come up here, sit with her for a little bit and maybe she'd yell at me more about how I need to mind my own business. But I did not expect to be sitting on the edge of this building with her, and hearing her admit something to me so vulnerable.
I don't even think she had ever said it out loud to herself, it seemed like the first time she said those words.
Slowly taking off the sweater I grabbed while rushing out of her place to follow her up here, I managed to sit it on her shoulders and tame some of her shivering.
Part of me knew she was hurt, and I'm honestly thinking that this might be some sort of PTSD thing because of what she told me before we came back here, but something in my gut tells me it's something more than that.
I guess me calling her out on her shit triggered something inside her, and right now I can't tell if that's good or bad.
I haven't said a single word yet, honestly unsure if my voice might upset her or not.
My stomach drops every time she sniffles or wipes some tears away from her face, and it's just so odd to see her like this.
I'm so used to seeing the hard exterior Callen, the one who's honest to god had me by the balls since the day we met. The one who constantly threatens to kill me if I fuck something up. The one who can't help but laugh at me every time I put on a pair of skinny jeans. The one who got excited when I gave her a set of fucking knives, which she then used to cut a mans fingers off one by one.
This isn't her, which is making this so hard for me to figure out what she wants.
"I'm sorry for yelling." I say quietly, trying to find some way to make her swear at me so I know she's okay.
She manages to let out a shaky laugh, sniffling again but shaking her head. She doesn't look at me, instead keeps her eyes straight ahead on the skyline. "You're seriously trying to apologize to me right now?"
I go to speak but she holds a finger up, telling me no. "Please, don't."
I move over a little until our thighs are touching, hoping that the feeling of someone beside her offers somewhat of a calming touch.
Taking a chance, I move my hand to rest on her thigh which makes her freeze.
I continue to push my luck and move my hand forward and back on her thigh, calming some of the goosebumps that keep popping up on her thigh. The muscles in her leg start to tense when I do that, but soon calm down again.
"I keep things from you because it terrifies me how much I-" she starts but her bottom lip trembles again, causing her to take a deep breath to try and calm down. "It terrifies me how much I think about you."
Her second confession has me trying to hide a smile, so I start clenching my jaw so I don't.
I think about you too.
Instead of telling her that because honestly I think it will just freak her out even more, I try to get her to talk more.
"Why are you so scared?" I ask and again try to keep my voice soft enough.
I still my hand on her upper thigh, keeping my thumb moving in a constant circle on the outside of it to let her know that I'm here for her if she wants to talk.
Downstairs when I was screaming, I was just frustrated. I just wanted her to talk to me, and now I know why she wasn't.
Now I know why she's so hesitant to let anybody in anymore, to let anybody know her.
And it's because right now, she doesn't even know herself.
"I lost my mom too."
My eyes immediately move from her thigh to her face, and I can see she's trying so fucking hard not to cry right now after those words left her lips.
This explains exactly why she got so tense when I brought up my mom, she knows that pain.
She can't stop the tears that start falling down her cheeks, and she doesn't try to either.
I reach for her left hand which is sitting in her lap, holding it as tight as I can without hurting her, and she just squeezes back. She still can't look at me, but for some reason I can't take my eyes off of her.
"Fucking hate crying." she says and tries to cover her pain with a laugh, her other hand coming up to wipe some of the tears from under her nose.
I know it's a long shot, but I offer anyway.
"Wanna talk about it?"
Instead of saying anything, she looks down at her lap where I'm holding her hand and brings her free hand over to them. Gently placing her hand on top of our intertwined ones, she lets out a shaky breath.
She spends a minute just running her fingers over and playing with my rings, then tracing the small cross tattoo on the top of my hand.
"Religious?" she asks while still looking down at her lap.
I know she's not deflecting, and I know she just needs time to be able to talk about this so that's exactly what I'm gonna give her.
"No, mum was though." I say quietly, adjusting my hand so she can see more tattoos on my wrist which her fingers immediately gravitate towards.
Her breathing skips which makes me look at her face, checking to see if she's okay but her gaze is still on our hands.
"You miss her."
I don't think she realizes what she said, her body completely still while she continues to play with my hand.
Her words sound almost like she's talking to herself, and it makes me realize again how much pain she's actually in.
I decide to just keep talking, hoping my voice or my words are able to offer her some sort of comfort right now. "She was like, one of those people who would just light up any room she walked into you know?"
I start to talk while keeping my eyes on her to judge her reactions, more tears simply falling from her eyes.
"She would've liked you, you know." I say, and her hands freeze on mine.
"She doesn't know me." she says, her lips barely moving while still not looking at me. "You don't know me."
I slowly pull my hand out of hers and place it back on her thigh, rubbing my thumb along her tattoo which is poking out of her shorts.
"I want to know you."
The minute I say that, she bites her lip while starting to shake her head. I watch as she clenches her jaw and her hands form into fists at her sides, like she's having this internal argument with herself right now.
I don't know what to do, so I just keep talking and decide to put myself out there for the first time with her.
"I know you like yellow." I start, watching her knuckles turn white because she's fighting so hard to not lash out. "All I know about that is that it makes you feel happy, but I have a feeling there's more to it than that."
I reach out and pull her hands into my lap, making her look away from me.
I unravel her hands and see how hard she was actually holding them, small crescent shapes in a dark red colour on her palm.
"I know you like sunsets instead of sunrises, which you know I prefer." I say while carefully running my thumb over the indents on the palm of her hand, small drops of blood falling from where her nails were dug so far into her skin. "I think you said it's because the days finally over, then you called me an optimist."
I chuckle at the last part, thinking back to us sitting on the floor of her bedroom while she was drunk off her ass eating pizza the first night we got here.
I know she's had something to drink tonight while I was gone, and maybe it sent her into a spiral of overthinking.
"I know you like bedazzling your lighters." I say and she actually laughs, it was small but it was there which makes me feel a little bit better. "God knows why, but I know you like it."
I hold onto both of her hands, bringing them up to my lips and carefully kissing her palms which makes her suck in a sharp breath so I gently place them back in her lap.
"I know you've been hurt, a lot." I say and look at her once again, but this time she looks back.
Her eyes are still red around her irises, dark circles under her eyes joined by trails of dry tears which are quickly being replaced with fresh ones.
My left hand carefully comes up to cup her cheek, and she ever so slightly flinches but tries to pretend I didn't notice.
I decide to not push anymore than I already have, and instead I cautiously wipe under her eye with my thumb. Her eyes flutter shut and let me do this a few times under each eye until I've gotten all I can with my thumb, and she opens her eyes again.
"I know you feel like this pain you're feeling is going to last forever, like you're just staring out this window that's leading you to your inevitable death, but I promise it's not all that bad." I say and press my thumb against her quivering chin, attempting to soothe some of her pain. "It's not all bad."
"If it's not all bad why can't I feel okay?" she asks quickly, probably feeling overwhelmed and wanting to get the words out as fast as she can. "Why does my chest feel this heavy every goddamn day, because I am this close to giving up Harry."
She holds her fingers up between us, pinching her pointer and thumb until they're only a few millimeters apart.
Right now I don't know what to say other than to make her a promise.
"I promise you Ca-" I start but she shakes her head, making me pause.
She scrunches her nose at me and holds onto my wrist, "Please don't promise."
Her voice is hoarse from all the crying, but she doesn't stop. "Don't promise you won't hurt me, please."
The grip her hand has on my wrist stays constant and makes me keep my hand on her cheek, letting me speak. "I won't hurt you Callen."
She pinches her eyes shut and starts rocking forward a little, making my heart skip thinking the absolute worst for a minute until she shuffles more towards me if it was even possible.
"Promises," she starts, keeping her eyes shut and my hand on her cheek almost as if it's the only thing keeping her here. "Promises are useless in my life. Please don't make promises you can't keep."
She opens her eyes again to look at me but keeps talking. "I know, I know you won't hurt me intentionally but Harry, there's so fucking much you dont know about me and theres so much I don't know about you so right now, neither of us can make promises we can't keep."
Taking all of her words in as much as I can, I honestly agree with her.
I move my hand to tuck some of the hair up behind her ear, slowly nodding my head while trying to wipe the sad look that I know is on my face right now.
It's slowly replaced by another stupid grin on my face which makes her slowly raise an eyebrow at me, and I just keep holding her face in my hand.
"I really admire you." I admit quietly, which makes quite literally roll her eyes at me as she pulls my hand from her face and rests it in her lap.
I watch as she goes back to playing with my rings, switching between running her fingers over the designs and jewels, and twisting them on my finger.
She pauses when she reaches my pinky where the ring with the ruby is, and slowly pulls it off my finger. She hesitates for a second while moving it around in her hand, but then decides on what she wants to do.
Her small fingers let mine go for a minute before she slowly slides the ring over her knuckles and onto her thumb, finding it fits her perfectly.
"I admire you too." she says while looking at my ring on her hand, and I smile to myself but she keeps talking. "My mother, she shouldn't have had me."
She starts to twist the ring around her thumb like I do with mine while I'm anxious, and I stay quiet because this is yet another thing I wasn't expecting.
She's actually opening up to me.
"I'm sure she loved you." I say quietly which makes her look at me with the most sad and broken smile on her face.
"Oh Harry," Her hand comes up to my cheek and stays there for a minute before she pulls away from me and sighs. "She did, I know she did. But she still shouldn't have had me, her life would have been so much easier without me."
I quickly wrap my arm around her and pull her as close to me as I can, and she leans into my chest. "What was she like?"
She wipes yet another tear from under her eye and rests her hand on my thigh, "Yellow."
I look down at her while she looks out at the many street lights lit up right now, for some reason I feel like my heart is about to jump out of my chest.
"Yellow?" I ask, honestly not really sure about what she means.
"That night in the motel when you said you felt me tense up, or freeze in the shower, remember that?" she asks and I slowly nod my head, wondering what she's on about right now. "It wasn't because of my scars, honestly I forget they're there half the time."
"What was it about then?" I slowly ask, adjusting my sweater on her shoulders after she shivers a little.
"The name you called me," she starts to say, and I just get even more confused. "You called me sunshine."
"I'm still lost here baby." I say and turn my body to face her more, gesturing for her to explain further.
"My mother," she starts, shuffling around and holding onto my arm for stability until she hooks her legs over mine. "She used to call me that."
The realization hits me like a ton of bricks, and explains exactly why she was so tense after that.
I called her the name that her dead mother used to call her.
"Callen..." I start to say but she rests her head on my shoulder while shaking it, and my eyebrows furrow on my forehead.
"It's okay Harry." she says and looks up at me, "I'm not that broken. I just haven't heard someone say that to me in a long time."
I don't know what to say and I can tell she knows that, so she keeps talking. "She painted my room yellow when I was younger and called me sunshine, so that's the only way I know how to describe her. It's the only side she let me see of her."
I just sit and listen to her because that's what she needs right now, and she almost looks happy when she's talking about her.
"She used to take me to the zoo every chance she got, that's why I love pandas." she says and I can't help but laugh, remembering how content she looked on the plane when I put on that Disney nature thing for her. "She used to smoke too, and let me bedazzle her lighters as you call it, so I just kept doing it to mine."
All of these things she's telling me might seem like a normal conversation you'd have a couple dates into getting to know somebody, but I know how much it's killing her inside to talk about her mother.
I know the exact feeling.
When I first brought up my own mother to her, no matter how bad it hurt to think about her and what I did that led to her dying, it helps to talk about the happier memories.
"You're right." she says and laughs a little, looking up at me finally without glassy eyes and somewhat of a smile on her face. "It's not all bad sometimes."
I smile back down on her, knowing she's referring to talking about those happy memories.
"My mum loved to bake." I say, faintly remembering the smell of our house all those years ago. "Brownies were her favourite."
"Do you remember the recipe?"
I purse my lips together thinking about it, "I could probably remember if I tried hard enough, why?"
"I love brownies." she says while humming, closing her eyes and pretending to smell as if we had just made them.
"I'll have to remember it then." I say and move my hand back to rubbing her thigh, feeling chilly myself.
SIlence eventually falls over us as we just sit there, and I enjoy the sound of her steady breaths with her face pressed against my chest and my arm wrapped around her shoulders.
For a while the only sounds I can hear are the cars driving by us, a lot of people honking in Los Angeles traffic, and the odd sirens here and there.
Tonight hasn't gone like I expected for a lot of different reasons, and I was honestly expecting us to be in some sort of screaming match when I got back but instead it was just me yelling.
I've now come to the conclusion that enough alcohol makes her horny, and any more than that will end up with her like she is tonight, in pain.
I don't want her to be in pain anymore.
She relaxes into my shoulder even more and I just hold her as tight as I can, enjoying this type of closeness with her that I don't think she's had in a long time.
"I think about you too." I lean down and whisper in her ear, pressing a kiss on the side of her head against her hair.
As soon as I pull away her head turns to look up at me, and her hand comes up again to hold my jaw lightly.
Her eyes are looking all over my face, moving from my own, then down to my lips and back. I can practically see her thinking, one of those hamster wheels going a million miles a minute up there in her head.
My own eyes look down at her lips, and when they come back up her hand had moved to the back of my neck, fingers looping through stray curls.
"Callen-" I start to say but she quietly shushes me, her hand starting to pull our faces closer together.
"Just, be quiet." she whispers and pauses when our lips are barely touching, close enough to feel her breath against me until she lightly presses her lips against mine.
My eyes shut as quickly as my other hand comes up to hold her face, our lips not moving but simply holding their places.
Every kiss we've shared before this has been rushed, in the heat of the moment, and it hasn't felt like this before.
She pulls away quicker than I wanted her too, like she was just trying something out. I look down at her with my hand still on her face, and hers still holding onto the hair at the back of my neck.
Almost as if we're both thinking the same thing, I lean back in and kiss her with a little more force and this time moving my lips in sync with hers.
I try not to move so much because we're still sitting on the edge of this building and I don't want us to accidentally fall off this roof, so I move my hand from her face to around her waist instead as an attempt to pull her closer to me.
She sighs against my lips and slips her tongue out, running it along my bottom lip which makes me part mine enough for her tongue to slip into my mouth.
Letting go of the hairs on the back of my neck, her hand falls down to rest on the bare part of my chest that isn't covered by my shirt. Twisting the shirt in her hands as I kiss her even more, it's like all the sounds I was hearing before suddenly stopped, and it feels like I'm floating.
They describe kissing like this in the movies, and for the longest time I always thought they were talking the most shit but this, this is so different.
Pushing against my chest a little bit, she pulls away and tries to catch her breath.
I look down at her and realize how long we had actually been kissing, feeling somewhat out of breath myself.
Her hand comes up to wipe my lips off, and I just keep staring at hers.
They're a little more pink than usual, and more swollen because of the kissing right now but honestly she's never looked more beautiful.
"You're thinking too much." she says, making me look back up to her eyes.
Moving her legs off of me so she's sitting beside me instead, I just shake my head and look at the street below us.
She lives in a pretty busy part in the city, considering there's a bar I've seen get pretty busy on the corner of the intersection down the street.
It's busier tonight, more cars parked along the side of the streets.
Sometimes I wonder how she gets any sleep, it gets pretty loud some nights here.
"Hey! Watch where you're fucking going!"
Both of us look down at the sidewalk across the street, seeing some guy apologize to another group of guys walking in the direction of the bar.
I just roll my eyes at the interaction, some people are assholes.
But Callen beside me suddenly gets fidgety, making me turn to look at her in confusion.
"What's wrong?" I ask, trying to find her hand to hold onto but she moves further away from me while watching that group of guys walk down the street and finally into the bar.
She then takes my sweater off of her shoulders and starts climbing down off the ledge, looking over at the bar once again before making a run for it towards the door to the stairs.
I quickly follow her as she quite literally rips the door open and starts running down the stairs.
"Callen!" I call out to her but she doesn't stop. "You're gonna trip or something, what's wrong?"
I try to follow her as fast as I can when we finally get down to her floor, and yet again she whips open the door and flies down the hallway with me running after her until we get to her door.
It's still unlocked from when we first came up here so she opens the door, quickly walking directly to her room.
Fucking hell.
I get her to open up for once and she's instantly regretting it.
Great job Harry.
Following her into her room, I walk in on her rushing to pull a pair of jeans up her legs and struggling to get the button done.
"Hey!" I say, literally waving my hands in her face to try and get her attention. "Callen!"
"What Harry?" she says out of breath, finally looking up at me and then walking to her closet.
She grabs a black blazer to put over the small tank top she has on, and I look at her in shock.
"What the fuck is going on?"
Suddenly she drops to her knees and pulls a case out from under her bed, then lifting it and dropping it on her bed. When she opens it, I'm honestly taken back by the amount of guns she can fit in there.
"Those guys, the ones that went into the bar across the street, I know who they are." she says simply, as if I'm supposed to know what to do with that information.
"What does that mean?" I ask while she walks around me to pick up her pair of boots with small heels, sliding them on and opening a drawer in her dresser.
I see a flash of red as she pulls out two of the knives that I gave her, sliding them into the sides of her boots.
Instead of answering me, she walks back over to her bed and pulls out two guns, starting to load them and make sure the safety is on.
"Hello? What are you gonna do, just walk in and kill them?" I ask while scoffing, "I don't even know who they are!"
"Those people, they know who killed my mother." she says point blank, making me freeze and look at her. "So yes, I'm just going to walk in there and yes I might kill them, I don't care if you aren't coming Harry."
I rub my hands over my face a few times and tell her to wait a minute, leaving her room and going into mine.
I quickly change my shirt, pulling out a see-through button up and grabbing my own, already loaded gun and quickly changing into a pair of boots before going back to her room.
She finishes tucking the gun into the waistband of her jeans when she looks up at me doing the exact same, and she smiles at me.
"Remember how you said you wanted to see the Callen who doesn't take anyone's shit?" she asks and I slowly nod my head as she walks over to me, putting a hand on my chest and looking up at me through her eyelashes.
"Yeah." I say slowly, watching as she undoes the top button enough so she's able to see the butterfly tattoo on my stomach.
"Always liked that one." she whispers to herself, fingers running over it lightly but keeping eye contact with me.
This is what I was talking about, how the mood between us flips so fucking quickly all the time.
"Callen..." I whisper, which just makes her smile even wider up at me.
"Well Harry," she says while fluffing her hair and adjusting her blazer, stepping away from me and towards the door. "Follow me and you will."