hi :)
73.
FIVE MONTHS LATER (oof)
I hope extending this doesn't make you uncomfortable. Mitch told me not to do this, he doesn't even know I'm asking. I've just been listening to rehearsals, and I think you need to come experience it for yourself. I hope I see you next week.
-Jack
I scan the email again. My finger lays still over the touchpad of the laptop. My heart flutters at the words.
"Quinn," Emma sings from the floor. Leo bats at a wire she's working on. She holds it up out of his reach. My eyes dart to her. "What did he want?"
"He wants me to come to LA," I glance back at the laptop screen. "For the thing."
"What thing?"
I chew on my lip. "Harry's thing."
Emma's face darkens. "Oh." She looks back at Leo, scratching him between the ears. "What're you gonna do?"
"I don't know," I click the attachment, a VIP ticket to the forum. His premiere, the big album. The album about me that's going to be released in a week. I hover my cursor on his name. "Do you think I should go?"
She sighs and lays flat against the floorboards, squinting up at me on the couch. I tuck my feet deeper into the blanket around my legs. "You're so happy, baby." I smile and pick at my cuticle.
"Yeah."
"We haven't talked about Harry in so long."
It's true. The last time was before it snowed.
But that doesn't mean that I don't think about him.
It's a romanticized version of what we had back then. I've warped history, painted him in a better light to ease the grief. But they're still there.
Unfortunately, those thoughts have all but consumed me. I think them everyday.
"You've already decided you're going," Emma puffs her bangs out of her face. I shrug.
"I don't know."
"You have," she sits up and brushes Leo's hair off her sweater. I watch her figure slink off to the kitchen, and then my gaze turns to the window.
Frost is climbing up and around the edges of the glass. Beyond the picture the trees in our backyard are weighed down by blankets of white. I smile. I love winter, the puffy banks of snow, the cold, the coziness. It feels so quiet.
It snowed a lot in Hibbing. When I was little, my dad used to drive me and Danny out to the iron range after there had been a storm the night before. I would jump out of the car as soon as he put it in park, running to the edge of the lot as fast as I could. Danny wouldn't be far behind, he was still pretty young back then too, barely a tween.
Dad would grab the sleds from the trunk and the thermos of hot cocoa Mom had packed lovingly away. Danny would steal my hat and I'd chase him in circles around the car until Dad yelled at Danny to come help him carry the sleds. He'd plop the hat back on my head and dash away.
Danny would want to sled right away, but I would demand that he wait. I made both of them sit on the hood of our car and stare out at the iron range, at all the undisturbed snow that had smoothed over the rough quarry. In a couple of hours, the range workers would come and start to clear away the snow, piling it up and ruining the picture. But in those few hours, it was perfect.
"And what are we looking at Quentin?" Dad would rub my back and pull me up to sit on his lap. Danny would roll his eyes, impatient to ride down the ginormous hill.
"It's just very nice." My second grade self would try to articulate what I was feeling.
Now I look back and know that on that hill I felt peace.
The year that Danny died we didn't celebrate Christmas. I woke up miserable, and looked outside to see a fresh layer of snow in our front yard. I drove myself to that iron range and sat on the hood of the car, shivering in my flimsy sweatshirt and jeans. My teeth chattered so loud, I scared away the birds.
I sat there for a long time. And I felt peace for the first time since the accident.
I see it when I look out my window now too. I still feel my dad rubbing my back, I can see Danny's breath fogging up into the air.
I look down at my laptop again, and open a tab to buy a plane ticket.
LA looks exactly the same as it did last year. There's no one to pick me up from the airport. I take a cab.
"So what brings you to California?" the driver looks up at me in the rearview mirror. I shrug and play with the cuff of my shorts.
"Visiting some old friends."
He doesn't try to talk much after that. The ride is long and slow, traffic eating away at my patience. We finally get to the hotel and I pay the driver and bolt, suffocating in the heat and sheer volume of people.
When the hotel door closes, I am alone.
It's cold and empty in the room, a well-made bed takes up most of the space. I set my luggage on the TV stand, covering up the device. The thunk it makes is the only noise in the room. It wakes me up to the reality of my situation.
I'm alone in a hotel room, about to go watch my ex-boyfriend perform an album about me to a crowd of thousands.
That album came out this morning. Fine Line. He's dressed in a pink shirt and white pants, a fisheye lens capturing his figure. I stared at the picture in my music library for a little bit on the plane. I didn't download any of the songs though, so I couldn't listen to them on the flight. Even now, I don't think I should. I'm nervous to. Just looking at the song titles makes my heart race. Goosebumps raise on my skin. Cherry. Golden. Adore You.
Falling.
I can't do it. I'll just have to force myself to listen live.
I've heard a couple of them though. I know Lights Up, because of the music video, obviously.
That came out two months ago.
I watched it when it premiered. That was the last time I actively sought out his face on the internet. Emma watched it with me too. She thought it was lovely, that I did a brilliant job directing. I'm happy with how it turned out.
Seeing his face, I could picture the context of each frame. I know where his head was at in every shot. It was an uncomfortable sensation.
"Oh, Anna" isn't on the album. Thank God he kept his word.
I have a few hours until the doors open for the show, so I change out of the sweats I wore on the plane and escape the loneliness of the hotel room.
There's no snow in LA, just the occasional browning plant. I kick a pebble down a block and turn the corner, wandering into a coffee shop that appears.
It's extremely busy. Lots of teenage girls. And it hits me why the traffic was so bad down this street, why my hotel was almost completely booked when I reserved a room, why the line stretches for an eternity in this little cafe.
I probably shouldn't be here.
I turn on my heel and leave the shop. The bell above the door signals my exit.
What if someone recognizes me? What then, Quinn? Dumbass.
I go back to my hotel room and get a bottle of wine from room service.
The bed quickly becomes disheveled. I toss my phone to the other side of the room in an effort to reconnect with reality. The bottle empties into my cup and I watch HGTV, half of the screen hidden behind my suitcase.
Why did I come?
I don't know. I don't think I knew when I was buying the plane ticket either.
Why am I here? To torture myself? To circle the drain? To spiral back to the place I was when we broke up? To prove to myself that I made the right decision?
I think about him standing on that stage, his outfit sparkling with the lights and a thousand voices singing the words to his song that he gave them that morning. And in the smallest part of my heart, I beg him to look my way, to make eye contact with me. I want to watch his face fall with recognition. I want that little spark of reconnection. The love I miss so dearly.
I shake my head and turn to glance out my window.
The Forum, the stadium he will be performing in, sits comfortably in my vision. The parking lot outside seems to shimmer in movement, filled with bodies. From this distance, they look like a colony of ants. The rippling motion makes my head spin with mirage.
I don't know what I want.
I walk to The Forum, my steps loose, my head spinning freely from the wine. I cut partly through the cemetery across the block from the venue. The trees look so soft, so peaceful here. I want to sit beneath one and take a nap as the sun sets. Instead, I keep walking.
I find the backstage entrance very easily. Maybe I just know how, because I've done this at one of his shows before. It's shocking to me that none of the fans have made their way over here and snuck in this way.
The stark difference in lighting is difficult to adjust to. My eyes blink heavily, trying to see things in the darkness. My feet shuffle forward, my hand grips the bag hanging from my shoulder. I maneuver through piles of equipment, but eventually find a staircase to the sound booth. A few people are mingling back here, but for the most part it's empty. The doors just opened, I imagine Harry's in a green room somewhere.
I climb the stairs to the sound booth. There's a tech in the room. She looks at me bewildered, pushing her headset off her head and scooting away from the soundboard.
"It's okay," I try to reassure her, stumbling into a chair myself. "I'm Quinn Bellini, I have an access pass."
"Melanie," she responds softly, still in shock I think.
"Here," I pull out my phone and scroll to find my ticket. I show her the glowing screen and she gives a little nod. "I'd just rather not sit in the VIP box with all the super fans, if you get that."
"I suppose I do," she mumbles and pulls her headset back on.
"You won't even know that I'm here," I sigh and lean back in the chair, setting my purse down on the floor.
"If you don't mind," she murmurs. I glance over at her. "It's just, I know who you are."
"Do you?"
She nods, and then glances down at my knee, at the tattoos peeking out from beneath my shorts. "Why are you here tonight?"
I chew on my lip. "To be completely honest, Melanie, I have no fucking idea."
The venue fills up. The pit rumbles and shifts anxiously. Someone speaks into Melanie's headset, because she brings her hand to her ear and nods. "Okay, thank you," she says back. I watch the scene unfold, slowly sobering.
Five minutes later, she hits a button and the lights fizzle out. And the screaming starts. My heart pounds.
"Go Harry, go band," Melanie speaks to her headset. I lean forward in my chair and suck my lips to my teeth, eyes frantically taking in the stage.
There's some shifting in the dark as his band takes their places. I've stopped breathing. Now I'm just staring at the rod in the center of the stage, a microphone at the top. I'm waiting for a figure to move to stand behind it. And the lights will come up, and it will be him.
I want to see him so badly. My heart is begging for him, for just a glimpse of him.
A song starts, a soft introduction. There's a light drum and guitar. This must be the first track on the album.
The screaming reaches a peak when he walks on stage.
There he is. In real life.
Everything in me relaxes.
And I get why I'm here.
He's the snow covering the iron range when I was a kid. He's the comforting summer dusk. I see him and I'm at peace.
I sigh again and lean back in the chair. The lights come on. He moves, greeting the audience. Even from here, there's a grin behind his eyes. I can tell.
I miss you.
He runs to the mic and begins to sing.
"Golden," he smiles.
I feel like I might explode.
"And that certain way is?"
I stared at the screen, watching the stick twist over the fire as the sugar bubbled and turned brown. And I looked up at the sky turning purple, pondering his question. Finally, I felt as though a word had come to mind that explained how Cherry's footage made me feel. "Golden." I said.
"I know that you're scared because heart's get broken."
I let each lyric fall into my lap. They saturate me with memories, with nostalgia, with what it was like when we were together. I had almost forgotten. But now I'm bombarded with the memory of laying in his bed naked, while he whispers in my ear that he wants to call me his.
"Watermelon sugar high!" He chants and dances across the lip of the stage.
And he's on his knees before me at the MET, Emma's pearl earring dangling against his cheek, begging me to let him in.
"I just wanna taste it, I just wanna taste it." He grins.
I wonder if this song makes him even the tiniest bit sad. The lyrics are desperate, but the drums are loud.
It makes me really sad. But that's because I'm thinking of his thumb rubbing little circles into my watermelon tattoo. In my head, I'm turning him down all over again.
I'm always going to love you.
My heart pounds.
"Walk in your rainbow paradise--"
This must be how he felt after watching Cherry. The simplest lyric sends me spiralling to the depths of my brain, returning with some long forgotten, dusty memory of him that I cling to.
"You know what song you remind me of, Quinn?" He grinned. "She's A Rainbow, by The Rolling Stones."
And then his band sings the little riff I came up with in the hotel in Mexico.
"I'd walk through fire for you, just let me adore you."
He feels so comfortable up there, smooth and charismatic. He's a natural performer. It's almost impossible to know that these are all songs about his ex-girlfriend he broke up with a year ago. He's glowing.
The observation leaves me numb and empty.
"What do you mean? I'm sorry by the way."
I know this one.
I sit back in my chair and close my eyes, enjoying the music. There's no surprises. I've listened to this song so many times I know it like the back of my hand. I can picture the music video in my head.
It's short though. And then I plunge headfirst back into the unknown.
There's a break in the transitions. Harry pulls a guitar over his head. His face sombers. My eyes narrow at him through the sound booth glass. He takes a shaky breath and swallows.
"This one's a little sadder," he mumbles into the mic. The crowd cheers. They know what's coming next, at least a little bit. I have absolutely no idea.
He plucks the guitar.
It's melancholy, immediately pulling at me. My heart aches for the guitar. He tips his head to the mic.
"Don't you call him baby. We're not talking lately. Don't you call him what you used to call me."
My eyebrows knit together.
"I, I confess. I can tell that you are at your best. I'm selfish so I'm hating it."
I lean forward, glancing at the set list hidden beneath Melanie's arm, counting the songs to figure out what we're listening to.
Cherry.
Oh.
So this is about the stuff he saw on the camera. I sit back and turn my attention to him again. Melanie tries to discreetly push the set list closer to me.
"Does he take you walking 'round his parent's gallery?"
Then it clicks into place. He's singing about Emma. For some reason he changed the pronouns, maybe a record label thing.
There was a jealousy boiling in him over the footage he saw. That word's always been touchy for him. Baby.
He screams at the end, belts out a wild note that transports me to our hotel room in Japan. I feel him laying in that bed, plucking his guitar and screaming. I want to run onto the stage and hold his face.
And then he stops playing, but the fizzing of a cheap audio recording buzzes over the speakers. He backs away from the mic, letting the recording ring out into the crowd.
"Cou cou!"
My skin heats and glows red. I blink dumbly, slowly registering the sound as my own fucking voice.
"Tu dors?"
I don't understand. What is happening.
"Oh, j'suis désolée, bah non." I laugh. My french is choppy and mediocre. I hear my accent seeping in at the corners. I cough and cross my legs, folding my arms over my chest. Melanie side eyes me.
This must've come from a recording on Cherry. And he put it into the song. If it wasn't obvious that we broke up before, this pretty much confirms it.
It's strange to hear my voice echo into the crowd. I feel exposed, naked under a microscope. I kind of wish he would've asked for my permission first. Part of me hates that he put it in, bringing the attention to me. Part of me understands.
It's him grieving. He had to include it.
He sniffs and the song ends. The crowd erupts. He smiles gratefully.
"Thank you. That one was pretty hard." He murmurs into the microphone. I scoff, but my heart pounds. I'm desperate for our old intimacy he's sharing with everyone. "This one's going to be even worse."
The guitar gets taken away. I glance down at the setlist.
Falling.
Oh fucking shit.
Charlotte starts gently playing the keys. The three note melody I made up in my house one day. We had just got back from the Grammys. I was hungover beyond belief. I was desperate for peace, for any kind of relief. So I wrote part of a song.
He leans into the microphone. I hold my breath.
"I'm in my bed. And you're not here. And there's no one to blame but the drink and my wandering hands."
And I'm in my living room, sitting on the piano bench. And he's right there beside me, testing those words for the first time as I tap out the melody. He's putting his hand on my knee. He's kissing me, a kiss so gentle, so apologetic, I feel tears creeping into my eyes even now.
"Forget what I said. It's not what I meant. And I can't take it back, I can't unpack the baggage you left."
I blink and they trickle down my cheeks, dripping from my jaw and staining my shirt. My heart is weary from the feeling that's returning. That familiar ache, I can't seem to shake it.
He belts out the chorus. The words I wrote about him. To the thousands of fans before him. They sing along. I can't believe they know the words already.
"What am I now? What am I now?" He asks them, and they echo it right back.
So many people singing that existential question I asked myself alone in my living room. Goosebumps creep up my arms. Harry sings the bridge.
"And I get the feeling that you'll never need me again."
I choke on a sob.
"Don't blame me for falling. I was just a little boy." He smiles through tear-streaked cheeks. The crowd screams the lyrics back at him. "And I'm just an arrogant son of a bitch who can't admit when he's sorry."
I remember hearing him write the chorus to this song in LA. He held a strand of my hair, staring at me nervously in his hallway. I thought we were going to kiss. Instead, he turned on his heel and ran for his room.
"He takes a boat out, imagines just sailing away."
Was that about Wes? I lean in.
Mitch crushes his guitar solo. He grins cheekily at the crowd.
"Sunflower, sunflower," Harry dances around. My jaw unhinges.
I can easily picture him writing about the fish. It confused him a lot.
"Sunflower's just died. Keep it sweet in your memory."
Did he kill our fish?
"And I keep thinking back to a time under the canyon moon."
I can't help but smile, the cheeky fucker. And no one knows what he means. Through the power of metaphor he wrote an entire song about me topping.
Harry's sneaky like that though. He likes to be cryptic with his art. He told me one time that it's the only way to keep a private life.
"Quick pause in conversation. She plays songs I've never heard. An old lover's hippie music. Pretends not to know the words."
I'm confused at first, but then I think I understand. He's talking about James, from Hibbing, and that song he wrote about me in high school. He's talking about the night he told me that he'd slept with someone else.
"And I keep thinking back to a time under the canyon moon."
He strums his guitar and raises his eyebrows, backing away from the microphone for a moment.
God that was so long ago. Almost a year. And now he's up there with an album, performing the songs he swore he'd show me "someday".
"Maybe we can find a place to feel good!"
My cheeks red and damp, my leg bouncing from anxiety, my heart pounding wildly from the experience, I clap along to Sarah's drumming.
The song ends with Harry falling to his knees and shaking his head wildly.
And then there's a long break. People shift uncomfortably. I wonder if the album is over.
But Harry grabs his guitar again. The band backs off. Melanie tenses the spotlight on his frame. There's a restlessness in the crowd. Harry leans into the microphone. I lean forward in my seat.
"It's hard to play this for the first time so, please," his eyes dart nervously around the venue, and then they glance up at the sound booth.
There's a blank expression on his face, but his eyes stayed glued to the glass I'm hiding behind. His eyebrows crease lightly. He licks his lips and presses them together.
He looks like he's in the middle of a revelation, head tipped up slightly, eyes staring at something behind everyone. Everyone except me.
I wonder if he can see me. If he even recognizes me.
I don't have blonde or blue or pink hair anymore. It's a soft brown, it looks like how it did when we first met. I've had no reason to dye it since we stopped seeing each other. I've had no reason to touch it all together. Emma's cut it once or twice. It falls to my shoulder now, soft and natural.
From where he stands, I imagine I look like a brown-headed figure in a red shirt. The glass probably blurs the image too. I doubt he knows it's me.
He tips his head to the microphone again, eyes never leaving the booth.
"This song is about my friend."
My heart stops.
"Put a price on emotion. I'm looking for something to buy."
My mind is racing. Was that comment for me? Can he see me? Does he know I'm here?
A friend. I know exactly what he means. He scrunched up his face in New York one time. "I'm Harry Styles, and this is my... friend." He teased me. I giggled.
"You've got my devotion. But man, I can hate you sometimes."
My mouth goes dry.
He hates me?
My insides crumble.
"I don't want to fight you. And I don't want to sleep in the dirt. We'll get the drinks in, so I'll get to thinking of her."
Of me.
My leg bounces incessantly.
"We'll be a fine line." He hums so gently. The crowd murmurs along. A few turn on flashlights to wave as he sings. I feel like there's a war being waged inside me, a hurricane of emotions. But above it all there's one thought. It's pulsing in my head.
I miss you, Harry.
"Test of my patience. There's things that we'll never know."
Me? Am I testing his patience?
I feel like I'm seeing his soul in a way that's never been shown to me before. I feel him exposed against me. I feel his head tucked into my neck.
"You sunshine, you temptress. My hands at risk, I fold."
He sounds so tortured every time he opens his mouth.
"Crisp trepidation. I'll try to shake this soon."
He glances up at the booth.
"But spreading you open is the only way of knowing you."
My breath hitches, catching an unexpected sob. Melanie glances over at me.
"We'll be a fine line. We'll be alright." He sings over and over, his voice growing in confidence, in hope, in desperation. How can a song make you feel so hopeful and so empty at the same time?
The last chord rings out. The crowd cheers wildly. The band leaves the stage. He waves for a while and disappears behind the curtain. The fans start screaming his name.
I'm overflowing, so panicked I've gone numb.
"Quinn," Melanie looks over at me again. "Are you okay?"
"I don't know."
I stand up and walk out the door.
a/n aHHHHHHH it's almost the end.
*sobs*
There's two more updates after this.