September
Isabel's head was buried in a box, rifling around for some more leaflets with her fringe falling into her eyes. His voice made her jump so much that the hand she'd been resting against the cardboard edge slipped and she nearly tumbled forward.
"What do you want?" she snapped when she stood up, trying her best to ignore the fact that he was laughing.
"Do you really think I would pass up the chance to come and see my favourite girl?"
Louis was grinning at her, wearing a baggy orange t-shirt with the university's name plastered across the front, and she had an overwhelming urge to slap him.
"This is embarrassing," Louis said, pointing at her identical t-shirt. "We match."
She ignored him, clutching the leaflets to her chest. "Are you here to sign up?"
He sneered at her. "What, to this?" He looked around the cluttered stall, at the posters pinned behind it and at the leaflets, his eyes coming to rest on Rory who was chatting to a couple of freshers animatedly. "Nah, you're all right."
"Well fuck off then," she said. "You're putting people off."
"Me?" he asked incredulously. "Babe, I'm drawing them in."
She tried not to make a disgusted noise when he called her that. "Don't you have stuff to attend to?"
"Well you see, when you're boss you can delegate," Louis grinned. "But I guess you'd know that, wouldn't you?"
Louis was helping to organise Freshers' Week again this year, which explained why he and Isabel both had the fluorescent orange university t-shirts on. The difference between them was that people thought Louis' job was something to be admired, especially seeing as he wasn't an elected head of the Student Union but an unofficially appointed leader due to his universal popularity, whereas Isabel's one as head of Film Soc was just plain lame.
"You wouldn't believe the surprise when I found out you were head of this thing," Louis continued, gesturing around vaguely. "I didn't even know you were in it. But then again, you did a lot of stuff behind my back, didn't you?"
She rolled her eyes, not taking the bait. He shrugged.
"Fair enough," he added falsely. "This is... it's pretty cool, yeah?"
She smiled slightly, pretending she didn't get the sarcasm. "Yeah, I think so."
He scoffed, and she turned away, bending down to get more leaflets out of the box. When she straightened up again he was still there, standing there with a smirk.
"So, Scarlett told me you broke up with the boyfriend," Louis said, and Isabel swallowed. "Sucks."
She knew it was coming, but it hurt all the same, like Louis had punched her straight in the chest. She tried to take a deep breath, but she felt the familiar rush of blood to her ears, her heart accelerating like she was falling, tumbling fast towards the ground, and it was trying to remind her that she was alive, that if she kept in the air and didn't reach the ground she'd stay alive. She didn't have to hit the ground if she just tried to stay up.
"He wasn't my boyfriend," she mumbled, avoiding Louis' eyes.
"Oh, it was like that?" Louis said, letting out a low whistle. "Got to hand it to you, Isabel, you put on that cutesy innocent little girl act well, I'll let you have that."
"Hey, fuck off," Rory said from over Isabel's shoulder, and she turned to find him glaring at Louis, his glasses sliding down his nose. "Leave her alone."
She gaped at him, completely and utterly surprised. Louis just shrugged with a grin.
"Don't worry, sweetheart," he said leisurely to Rory. "I was just going. Wouldn't wanna be caught hanging out with you lot too long."
He blew Isabel a kiss and sauntered off through the Freshers' Fair, waving his hello at various people and not looking back once.
"Are you all right?" Rory asked her, placing a hand on her shoulder and blinking at her in concern.
Isabel nodded, but she really was falling, plummeting miles and miles away from the sky, and it hurt so much all she wanted to do was curl into a ball. "Yeah. I'm fine."
~~~
Isabel rushed to work after the fair was over, but her head was in completely the wrong place and she got on the wrong bus, meaning she arrived fifteen minutes late on the first day back.
"I'm so sorry, Dan," Isabel panted when she got in, having headed straight to his office to apologise. She halted in her tracks when she noticed Briony in there, her dark hair flowing down her back as she sat opposite Dan at his desk.
"Don't worry, Isabel," Dan smiled. "Harry's holding the fort. Did you have a nice summer?"
Isabel grunted in reply. Harry was here.
Harry was here.
"Freshers' Fair, yeah?" smiled Briony. She went to Isabel's uni too, but Isabel didn't have a clue what she did, or what year she was in, or who any of her friends were, and she blinked at Briony dumbly.
"Yeah," Isabel choked back.
"Briony was telling me she wants to switch from the arcade to the alleys," Dan told Isabel. "Maybe you and Harry could show her the ropes if we transfer her over?"
Isabel thought that even if she sat under exam conditions for three weeks with the question "what's the most hideous idea you've ever heard?" she would not be able to conjure up something worse than Dan's suggestion.
"Yeah, sure," she forced herself to say. Briony grinned and Isabel's polite smile slipped as quickly as it had appeared, trying her best not to glare at Briony.
"All right, off to work," Dan said, pointing at the door, and Isabel shuffled out as though she was walking to the gallows.
She'd thought about this moment all summer, what it would be like when she saw Harry. She'd held herself together reasonably well – she barely moped around feeling sorry for herself, and despite the sharp sting of her and Harry's ending, the excruciating feeling of drowning, she'd pushed through it and had been okay. But she had no idea what Harry would be like, whether he'd ignore her, or be angry at her, or seem sad or tired or rejected.
She supposed a part of her had assumed, though, that the first time she saw him they would talk about them, about getting back together even, because all summer she'd thought that had to be what happened next. She'd seen enough films to know that this was how it went, that this was the natural order of things. Harry would be better now, and they would tell each other they still loved each other and everything would be okay.
Except, it wasn't.
Because when she walked in Harry glanced up from his phone, his face freezing for a moment, his lips parting and his eyes widening and his cheeks flushing, before he shot her a smile. "Isabel. Hi. You all right?"
She blinked at him, and everything in her, her blood and her lungs and her heart, seemed to halt as her eyes swept over the curve of his jaw and the mess of hair and the green of his eyes, and it was like when you go abroad to a place you've never been and it's completely new but weirdly familiar too, like you'd been there in another life. "Yeah?" she replied, her own answer sounding like a question.
He smiled, his eyes darting across her face, the skin between his eyebrows pinching together, and just when she thought he might say something more, he went back to his phone.
That was it. That was all she got.
She just looked at him, waiting for him to turn and say something to her but he didn't, just gripped the phone tightly in his white-knuckled hands and stared down at the screen.
And despite her disappointment, she couldn't help but notice that he looked so well. The dark circles under his eyes had almost completely gone, his skin was clear and tanned and bright. His hair was so much shorter, lighter too from the sun, and even sitting down she could tell he was broader, that he'd gained more muscle over the summer.
It was horrible because she'd never felt like this about someone. She knew him so well, knew every inch of his face and every trick to make him laugh and every sound he made when he slept, when he came, when he was happy, sad, confused, concerned. And it was still him, but a different version of him, older by a few weeks and healthier and stronger and she was so weirdly jealous that he'd kept going, kept moving and breathing and living and people had seen it and she hadn't.
He had a new tattoo on his hand, a cross on the back of his palm, and for some reason this alone managed to completely incinerate all of the strength she'd built up over summer, the whole thing dissolving into nothing right there in front of him. And it was another thing to be stupidly, pathetically jealous of, but the tan and the ink brushed into his skin was something she'd just sort of hoped she'd have been able to witness, to share with him almost. In those two weeks of June when they were together every day she'd imagined it, their summer, Harry driving them in his shitty car to Blackpool and drinking beer on the beach and staying in an awful bed and breakfast with tatty sheets and sand in their toes. And not just this summer - she'd imagined the next summer, and the next one, and the one after that, going around Europe with him, cycling through Amsterdam and trekking around all the museums in Paris and climbing the hundreds of steps right to the top of the Vatican in Rome.
She'd seen it all, a series of random images of the pair of them, of holding Harry's hand in a tiny tattoo shop in Madrid and grinning when he pretended it didn't hurt, and maybe she'd get one too, maybe something he'd drawn. And if she tried hard enough she could imagine them in five, six, eight years going to America, and she just knew that out of nowhere Harry would start spouting something about Steinbeck and Wolfe and Kerouac, his eyebrows pinched as he recollected from his vast, intricate store of knowledge of everything that always surprised her because he pretended it wasn't there, and she'd just nod, so in love with him that she'd forget for a minute how to breathe.
It was there. It was still there, the possibility, because there was always a possibility, but then there was that new ink scar on his skin and she hadn't known about it until now, hadn't known about a part of him that would be there forever. And that meant their forever seemed to drift aimlessly away until it was just a faint smudge in the distance, an idea she'd once had when she was twenty and stupid and thought that just because there was a possibility of it happening, a one in a million chance, that didn't mean it actually would.
There were always possibilities. There weren't many that made it to reality.
"How was your summer?" Harry asked her, ripping his eyes away from his phone to look at her, his teeth gnawing into his lip. He was being too courteous, too casual, too anonymous. Disregarding Isabel's horrified expression, an onlooker would assume they were at most vague acquaintances and not two people who had said they loved each other only two months earlier.
"Fine," she stammered, and he smiled softly.
"Liar. Nobody ever means it when they say 'fine'."
Her breath snagged in her throat and she nodded, biting down on her nails and praying that she didn't start crying. He had to say his stupid phrase to her now, and he knew, too, because the smile flickered from his face and he licked his lips carefully.
"Caitlin said you two had been meeting up a lot," Harry said quickly, inadvertently reaching a hand toward her before dropping it awkwardly. "That's cool."
"We live close to each other," Isabel said, sliding into her seat and sitting strategically on her shaking hands. "It was nice to have a uni friend live so close by."
"That's cool," Harry nodded. "I saw Zayn quite a lot as well."
She couldn't take her eyes off him. She tried to memorise his entire face all over again, her eyes darting hungrily from his eyes to his nose to his lips to his jaw and back again, drinking him in. He was blinking back at her, saying nothing as usual, but his mouth was hanging open slightly like he wanted to.
"How was your work experience?" she asked a bit breathlessly, wanting to hear his voice again.
"Good, yeah," Harry said, licking his lips. "I mean, I didn't like the gallery. And I did another week at an art shop which was all right." He wetted his lips again and then smiled slightly. "The best one was helping out at this art summer school thing at my mum's school. I loved it."
Her heart juddered. "Really?"
He nodded. "Yeah, I love working with kids."
She wanted to ask him a million questions about it, but she couldn't get any words out so they just stared at each other, and panic started bubbling in her chest, molten hot and scorching her insides.
"How was Barcelona?" he asked desperately, his voice cracking a little, and it was just so, so awkward that it was painful.
"Yeah, it was nice," she said, swallowing hard. "I went to Sweden as well, to see my mum's sisters. Savannah and Alex and their kids came as well, which was weird, I mean I was a bit of a spare part, but it was fine."
She was rambling, and she was acutely aware that he was nodding but his eyes had glazed over and his face was blank and he can't have been listening anymore. She felt sick.
"Ah, sounds awesome," he mumbled, and she knew he had no idea what she'd just said. He blinked hard and looked down at the table as she suppressed her tears, squeezing her hands into fists and trying to regulate her breathing.
She wanted to quit her job. She wanted to run and run and run and never look back, never see Harry again, never see anyone that reminded her of him again, and in that moment she hated him. Awkward didn't even cut it – this was excruciating.
He lifted his head up, opening and closing his mouth like a fish and trying to say something before he eventually mumbled: "Nice t-shirt."
She looked down stupidly, having forgotten that she hadn't taken off her orange t-shirt and put on her red polo in her anxiousness. She gulped. "I was at the Freshers' Fair."
"Ah wicked," Harry said, running a hand through his hair before adding in an incredibly forced attempt to sound breezy: "Just before I forget, we're all having dinner on Saturday together before this party Nick's having. You got the Facebook invite to the party, right?"
She nodded weakly.
"Yeah, well everyone was saying the six of us should go for dinner beforehand and catch up. Sound good?"
She blinked at him. "You want me to be there?" she asked slowly.
He swallowed and then shrugged. "Yeah, why not? We're friends."
She'd heard enough. "Excuse me for a minute."
"Are you all right?" Harry asked, standing up just as quickly as she did, his eyebrows pulled together in concern.
She nodded and stumbled off through the complex, not able to get to the bathroom fast enough, but eventually she did, locking the door and leaning back against it, taking huge, gulping breaths as she dug her nails into her palms and tried not to cry.
Every morning when she woke up she missed him so much that she had to stop herself from calling him, her fingers inching towards her phone before she was even fully awake. She missed the feeling of his nose buried into her neck, of his warm hands limp on her waist while he breathed heavily onto her collarbone, his lips ghosting over the skin, their legs so tangled she wasn't sure where his stopped and hers started.
She missed things she hadn't even thought it was possible to miss, like the feeling of his hair on her skin, whether that be the hair on his head or on his legs or the dark coarse trail down his stomach that disappeared into his boxers. She missed the dent in his middle finger, the bump of the scar on his palm, the way his fingertips were calloused but they could touch her so softly and gently when they trailed along her jaw and through her hair and down her sides that his touch alone could have made her cry.
She missed the pinkness of his lips, the way they were always jutting out in a pout and the way they moved when he spoke. She missed that they were always slightly chapped from lots of biting with his teeth and pulling with his fingers, but when he kissed her they never felt scratchy, but soft and warm. She missed kissing him for hours and hours, hearing him sigh into her mouth and pull away for a moment just so he could breathe in the air she exhaled.
She missed the crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he smiled properly. She missed the sound of his laugh, the sound of his voice in the morning, the sound of his voice when he told her a secret, all breathless and desperate and aching. She missed the way he listened to her, the way he spoke to her, the way he looked at her sometimes when he thought she wasn't watching, all warm and adoring like he'd never seen anything like her before.
All Isabel had ever wanted was for Harry to love her in a way that was separate from him needing her to make him better. She wanted him to look at her and see all of her insecurities and scars and bumps and freckles and love every part of her. She didn't want to be the person he looked to when he wanted to fix himself, she just wanted to be loved for her, because otherwise she faded into nothing. There was a reason most pills were plain white, she thought, because they weren't meant to be exciting or interesting or alluring. They were there to be used, swallowed up, forgotten about, thrown down somebody's throat with a glass of water again and again until their problems went away and then they were discarded.
But what made it worse was that she knew, somehow, beneath it all, that Harry didn't just love her for that. Because Harry's whole life had been a series of calculations: if I do x then this won't hurt anymore. If I do y then people will think I'm okay. And If I do z then I can feel alive. All of those things surmounted to one solution, which was wanting to be wanted so badly that it actually hurt him, because that's who Harry was. He wanted to leave scars in people's lives, and as much as it upset him when Caro cried at parties or when he saw Poppy's face after he cheated on her again, in a way, he liked the pain. It meant he was real, that he hadn't disappeared when Adam had, because she was pretty sure that's how it felt most of the time.
But he'd never liked the pain with Isabel. Every time he carved a hole into her he'd tried to fill it, and every time he'd made her cry he'd tried to stop it, and she knew that for a long time it had absolutely terrified him, that the thought of it had scared him so much that the ground must have felt unsteady beneath his feet and all his careful plans and calculations and x's and y's and z's crumbled right there in front of his eyes until they were nothing, nothing, nothing.
And with that, she knew Harry was right. You didn't need to know somebody to love them. You didn't need to know anything other than the fact that your heart sped up when they laughed and that you liked the smell of them all over you and you wanted to be next to them just because it made you feel safer. You didn't need to know what their favourite colour was or what their order was when they got
Chinese or why they always liked to sleep on top of you. You didn't need to understand them entirely, you didn't need to try and figure every last piece of them out, and you didn't need to be the person they went to when they didn't feel okay. You just needed to know that they loved you too, and that should be enough.
It was enough for her. It had been enough since the moment in his car when he'd realised, finally, that he wasn't okay, and it had been enough all summer, and it was enough now. But that didn't mean anything, it was just another possibility, just another thing that could have been but wasn't.
She unlocked the door and went back to the shoe booth, finding him sitting there anxiously and pulling his lip between his fingers. He sat up straight when he saw her, coughing into his hand.
"You okay?" he asked.
"Yeah." She took a deep breath, wondering when they'd agreed that lying to each other was the easiest and simplest and best thing to do. "You okay?"
He paused, swiping his tongue across his lips. "Yeah."
And if that should have seemed like enough, it wasn't.
But with an aching heart, she knew it was all she would get.