Dentist!harry by @tobesobri on tumblr

Hi hello thank you for being here and wanting to read this mess of a story! If we’re being honest, it’s not my best writing and I did not spent enough time editing as I probably should have but this story also has some of my favorite scenes I’ve ever written and definitely some great memories interacting with yall on tumblr so since I know it was pretty well-liked, I decided to share it this way instead! This story had no definitive plan and it was a fun way to write but I often think I should have taken it in different directions. It is what it is. Okay anyways, I hope you enjoy reading!!

You can check out the dentist!harry tag on my blog here to know more about it

Warnings: drug use, language, sexual content, people being annoying because they can’t communicate their feelings, zayn

one

“Open.”

“S’that as wide as you can go?”

“You’re making this difficult, y’know.”

His latex-covered fingers intrude upon her mouth the second she parts her lips for him, and it’s not as if his attitude has her wanting to oblige, but she really has no choice in the matter. It’s either this or she never gets her teeth fixed.

She mumbles an apology around his fingers, as he’s preparing to stick in the small pieces of rubber for the x-rays into various uncomfortable spots of her mouth. He ignores her for the most part, besides lifting an eyebrow to acknowledge it. She’d been going back and forth between staring at the lines between his brows as he concentrated and at the popcorn ceiling above her.

Once her x-rays are all shot, Harry having to redo a few because he couldn’t position her correctly, he grabs a tissue to wipe the spit from her bottom lip and hands her another tissue for the involuntary tears he caused by pressing the little object too hard to the back of her mouth where wisdom teeth were slowly growing in. Swiveling in his chair, he concentrates on the screen of the desktop computer full of her personal data, inputting more details as he types at the speed of light. She tugs below her bottom lashes with the tissue until she’s cleaned up and then balls it into her hand to throw away later.

“Do you do any drugs?”

She hesitates and it has him pulled away from the screen for the first time in the past couple minutes. He watches her face first for any signs of an answer until he finds her hands fidgeting in her lap. “No.”

“There’s medical equipment we use that could interfere with certain narcotics. So… I’ll ask again. Do you do any drugs?”

She tilts her head to look up at him because she knows he thinks she doesn’t want to get in trouble, but really… she just doesn’t want him to know about it. “No.”

He watches her for another moment, trying to decide if he should believe her or not but having no evidence to prove otherwise. So, he sighs and turns back to the keyboard.

“Not pregnant?”

“No.”

“Is your address still 519 Young Road?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, I’ll go let Dr. Brown know you’re ready then. Sit tight.” He punches in a few last minute pieces of data before just about flying out of his seat and shutting her door behind him.

Dr. Brown has coffee breath and likes to tell Harry jokes while his pointy tools are digging around in Y/N’s mouth. Harry records all the data about each one of her teeth as quickly as the dentist reports them, poking around at a couple molars that look suspicious.

“Got another twenty minutes to do a filling, love?” He asks, sitting back in his chair to toss his gloves into the bin by the door. Harry keeps his focus on the computer, adjusting her data some more while they discuss.

“I guess.” He can hear the nerves in her shaky voice without even having to see the fearful look on her face that worries Dr. Brown.

“Haven’t had a good time with cavities, have you?”

“No. I’ve usually always felt the drilling.”

The doctor scrunches his face, “Ouch.” He glances up at Harry who then turns to meet the older man’s energized eyes with one elbow propped up on the counter and his two fingers covered over his lips. “Don’t have to worry about that here. You’re in good hands with Harry.”

“Don’t you do the shots, though?”

“Yes, but it’s his job to pay attention if you’re in distress.”

“Oh.” She’s not too sure about how good Harry’s hands really are. He didn’t seem to like her very much to begin with and she’s sure he’d just let her suffer through the pain. And when Dr. Brown leaves again to prepare the quick operation, Harry’s eyes find her staring up at the ceiling just as before, her hands gripping fistfuls of her loose t-shirt.

“Still nervous then?”

“Well, no offense, but you don’t seem all that pleasant.”

He rolls his chair up to her side, leaning down on her reclined one with his forearms folded snuggly against her shoulder. “None taken. Seems like you don’t respond well to the anesthesia, so I promise to pay attention.”

“Well that’s comforting.” He chuckles in response to her sarcasm. And just as he’s about to pull away from her and ready the tools needed on the tray for Dr. Brown, she’s got more to say.

“Do you like this job?”

He juts his bottom lip out, considering it for a moment, “S’alright, yeah.”

“But you have to look at people’s mouths all the time… and stick your fingers in them.” She shudders just thinking about it because it grosses her out, even if he does wear gloves.

“Hm… true.” He pushes off of her chair then, standing to retrieve a sterile kit of tools from the cupboard before returning to a spot right next to her, “Sometimes you get pretty mouths though that you want to stick your fingers in.”

Her whole face drops into utter revulsion when she looks up at him as he’s laying out the tools, “You’re disgusting.”  

He shrugs one shoulder while he’s got his back to her and she thinks she’s just as disgusting for being turned on by that simple gesture. “For example, yours is quite nice… small and snug,” he muses through the filter of a tempting little smirk on his face. She knows he’s just teasing her but it is making her press her thighs together and she’s thanking every higher power that he’s not looking at her right now or else he’d see how flustered she is.

“Alright,” Dr. Brown erupts through the door, a new set of gloves on and a protective layer of plastic covering his front. Clapping his hands together, he grins between the both of them, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

***

It’s the sound of the drill that really has her on edge the whole time. Harry tries his best to watch out for her hands to see if she needs a break, but with assisting and being sure to run the sucky-thing all throughout her mouth until it’s dry, he gets distracted.

And Dr. Brown is in the middle of a conversation about his travels to Europe when he hits a certain spot that makes her jump. That makes her ball her fists and lift her lower half off the chair when her heels dig into it for some relief.

Harry transfers the tool into his left hand and reaches for her with the other. Slipping his fingers into her palm and eventually lacing them through her own, she easily and without question, squeezes him. Hard.

“Sorry ‘bout that, love.” Dr. Brown pulls away the drill for a moment to let Harry clean her mouth out of any saliva that had pooled up.

They both have protective glasses on, which y/n envied the second she got spit flying up at her face. With her eyes still closed, Harry hooks the sucking tool on the side of her mouth and wipes her chin and lips down with the piece of blue fabric clipped around her neck that acts as a bib.

“Going back in, only another minute, tops,” the doctor assures, and Harry knows she can handle it the way she unclenches a tiny bit around his hand. She never hurts him, though he’s sure she’s not worried about that at the moment.

Once the drilling is done, Harry assists with the filling. Preparing all the equipment and spraying high-pressured water at the hollowed-out tooth to clear any lingering pieces of bone, then sucking it all up again.

She feels like a hot mess when it’s all over, especially when Harry releases her clammy hand from his own and wipes it down the front of his jeans. “Sorry.”

“S’okay.” He mumbles before turning to get the station tidied up and ready for her cleaning, which she is never too thrilled about, either.

Setting the small plastic cup of toothpaste onto the blue fabric over her chest, neither of them acknowledge that he accidentally bumped his elbow on her boob while settling himself over her with the dental-grade toothbrush in hand. He’s close now though, and she’s still nervous.

“No need to be all tense, yeah? Just cleaning now.” He digs the end of the toothbrush into the cup and pulls it out with paste, ready to give her teeth a deep cleanse.

She already has her eyes shut tight, however, knowing she was going to have toothpaste shooting up at her just as before, “I don’t like the sounds.”

He sympathizes with her for a fleeting second, knowing it’s quite a common fear among patients. Even he took time getting used to it. “Promise not to take too long then.”

While running the nib across every front and back of her teeth, he takes pauses to grab more paste and wipe her mouth down when she gets really messy. But, as promised, he’s done in a quick three minutes. “Cups by the sink. Rinse and spit.” He unclips the fabric from around her neck and pulls away from her before adjusting her chair upright to make it easier for her to get out of. The texture of the toothpaste in her mouth is gritty and making her gag by the time she reaches the sink.

Listening as he snaps the latex off of his hands and tosses the gloves just as Dr. Brown had, she gurgles water around in her mouth before spitting it down the drain a couple times. “You can talk to Sammy in the front about making your next check-up.”

He grabs the plastic cup from the counter, shortly after she had emptied it and placed it down to deal with after her final spit, and squeezes himself through the small gap of space between her and the chair, still managing to brush his front against her back as he makes his way toward the door and tosses the cup in the trash.

Pulling the handle, he waits as she grabs a paper towel to wipe her mouth on, then opens the door for her when she heads his way, stretching his arm out above her head as she ducks underneath in order to exit before him.

She stops at the counter in front of a lively-looking brunette with cute glasses and a name tag that reads ‘Sammy’. Not quite sure if she’ll even keep her next appointment, but still forced to schedule one with Harry standing right beside her and holding her accountable, she smiles politely back at Sammy.

“Sooo, we have next Friday open, same time,” she says, scanning across an old-fashioned desktop calendar with scribbles all over it.

“Um… I have to come back so soon?”

“You have another tooth that might need a filling, just wasn’t necessary today.” Harry answers, flipping through Y/N’s folder to be sure he’s got everything in the correct spot before he hands it back to Sammy.

“Oh… um, okay. That’s fine I guess.” Sammy pencils her in while Harry rests the mail file on the desk beside the calendar, sharing a look with Sammy that is a little too friendly for simple co-workers. And Y/N feels incredibly stupid when she sees the smirk on Harry’s face at the way he looks at Sammy. There’s no way she could compete with the cute, petite receptionist, feeling extra stupid when she thinks that. It’s not a competition. Harry has no interest, he’s just doing his job.

Still, her stomach flips a bit and her mouth falls into a heavy frown, exasperated by the local anesthesia still numbing half of it, and it’s not just about being jealous of Sammy, it’s about wishing she had anybody to look at her the way he just did.

***

Y/N rolls onto her back and bumps into something. Something hard and snoring and sticky. Knuckling at her eyes first, she blinks them open cautiously as the light seeping into the room is anything but forgiving. The boy next to her is passed out laying on his stomach, butt ass naked. She wants to throw the blanket over him to hide his horrible tan, but then she’ll be under the covers with a complete stranger who has no clothes on. Consciousness completely overwhelms her when she wiggles around in the bed and realizes she, too, is naked.

“Fuck,” she mutters through gritted teeth, having no idea how she even got here or whether or not what they did had even been consensual, on both their parts seeing as he looks as fucked up as she feels.

Then she hears footsteps and makes a move to hide her face under the blanket, but to no avail. He’s already standing in the doorway with a mug full of black coffee in hand, squinting at her through his short-sighted prescription glasses.

And she just about turns inside out when she realizes who it is judging her from the doorway. She covers the blanket over her head anyways because she’s too embarrassed to face him. Out of all the places in the world, she ended up at his apartment.

She hears him stepping up to her side of the bed and slowly removes the covers, peaking out at him as he grins down at her while bumping her hip to make a bit of room for him to sit down next to her, taking a sip of his coffee while he’s at it.

“Morning,” Harry greets, to her suspicion, as he pushes the center of his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. He’s in a big, grey fleece robe and she can see his hairy legs and the tattoos peeping out on his chest whenever he twists around to face her. “Had a fun night, did you?”

“Where am I and who is this?” She whispers as he glances over at his fucked out roommate, who he’d seen naked one too many times.

“My flat. And that’s Zayn… can’t imagine you forgot his name after keeping me up all night screaming it.” He takes another sip of coffee that’s just as bitter as he currently is.

She cringes back into the pillows, facepalming and wishing she could just disappear into thin air. “I’m sorry.”

“I have an exam today. And it’s not some silly undergrad midterm.”

“I’m not an undergrad either…” She still whispers even though Harry pays no mind to Zayn and accommodating his needs.

“But you’re barely twenty-two.” He regrets it a little bit when his words leave his mouth because it’s just an admittance to the fact that he’d remembered her birthday.

“Skipped third grade.”

“Hm.” He turns toward the window again, gulping down more coffee as he watches traffic pile up on the street in front of their building. He hates living on the first floor. “So, you’re smart and yet you let Zayn shag you?”

“Why?” She whips her head around to the other boy whom she fleetingly wonders if he’s dead, and then mumbles even quieter, “What’s wrong with him?”

“Nothing, he’s just not got the best track record with girls.” Which was code for… she’d slept with a fuckboy.

“Well, I don’t remember anything and I don’t think I’ll be coming back soon so…”

“Obviously.”

Silently, she mouths his one word response to mock him because he’s acting pretentious and she doesn’t quite know why. Not that her first impressions of Harry were good, but he did hold her hand when she needed it the most and cleaned her up when she was helpless.

She clears her throat, “Um, either help me find my clothes or get out.”

His eyes land on hers again just before heading south and scanning the outline of her body underneath the duvet, just now realizing she’d been as naked as Zayn this entire time. And his lingering stare doesn’t go unnoticed. She bumps him with her leg and he finally comes back to life, shooting up from the bed.

“Right, uh…” he set his mug down on the edge of the bedside table before scanning the room for any signs of clothes that definitely didn’t belong to Zayn. And when he found them, in a pile at the end of the bed, and shuffled over to retrieve them for her, she sat up, hugging the sheets to her chest to avoid any embarrassing slippage that no amount of coffee could prepare Harry for.

“There’s just this…” He tosses a single piece of black fabric onto her lap and the beginning of her evening last night floods back with the scent of cigarettes and beer that the little black dress wafts up into her innocent nostrils. “Can’t find anything else…” he goes on while searching just under the bed and resurfacing only to come up empty.

“Wasn’t wearing anything else.” She holds her dress in both her hands, staring at it instead of Harry when she admits that to him shamefully.

But, if she had looked at him, she would’ve seen his Adam’s Apple budge in his throat when he swallowed a nervous pit and the way his eyes widened just the tiniest bit. She even might’ve seen the fabric of his robe tent around his crotch when a bit of morning wood hit him fast and hard, if only he hadn’t reached around to cover himself as quickly as possible. “I’ll leave you to it then.” In his next move, he’s spinning on his heel and just about racing back through the bedroom door, nearly slamming it shut behind him which causes Zayn to stir beside her.

Only after being positive he’s still fast asleep, she slips out from under the covers and sits in almost the exact same spot Harry had been. Fully exposed in front of an open window in a stranger’s bedroom. Until she bunches up the fabric of the dress and pulls it over her tangled mane.

Her thighs stick when she stands up, adjusting the length of the tight dress and her head spins.  She’s nauseous and the need to hurl burns at the back of her throat, though her body never fully commits. It’s a close call once again when she walks out into the other room where Harry is and breathes in the scent of eggs and bacon that is much stronger now that she’s closer to the kitchen.

Their apartment is similar to her own, but just a tiny bit nicer and more organized. She can’t speak for their bedrooms, as Zayn’s room seems to have experienced a hurricane at some point, but their main room is flawless and well decorated with everything in a specific place.

“Want some?” He asks while leaning over the counter, chewing on a bite of bacon and he only does because she’s eyeing his plate of food while setting his mug of coffee he’d left in the room down in front of him.

“No.” Her cheeks puff out and she clasps her hand over her mouth while he quickly moves to guard his plate from any projectile vomiting.

“Bathroom’s that way,” he nods to his left where there’s a door off of the small living room, open and welcoming her in. And it isn’t the potential puke that has her racing across the wood floors per se, rather it’s her bladder about to burst. And if she pees herself in her current state, there’d be absolutely no hiding it from Harry.

When she’s done her business, and puked only a tiny bit, she’s floating back toward him like a new person. Bypassing him when she finds her purse and shoes on the ground by the door, she bends down to retrieve them first. Though Harry has a clear view of her ass and a little bit more skin than she’d normally agree to showing off. And of course he takes advantage of it for as long as possible.

She faces him again with her purse in hand and shoes on her feet again, and although she doesn’t look at him, he still makes himself look busy. Throws a huge bite of eggs into his mouth to pretend he wasn’t just checking out his dental patient from two days ago.

It’s not his fault, though, that she’s hot and he has the unfortunate knowledge of there being no panties on under that dress.

She sets her purse on the counter opposite him while he watches her dig through it, getting more frantic as she keeps coming up empty-handed for whatever she’s desperately looking for. Then there’s a sigh of relief as she pulls her iPhone from the very bottom of her bag.

It’s nearly dead when she clicks the screen on, the red bar at the top practically screaming at her to be plugged in. But, all she needs is a quick two minutes to get an Uber.

“Is someone picking you up?”

“No,” she pauses while inputting her location into the app, “I’m getting an Uber, though.”

“Oh,” he sets his fork down on the edge of his paper plate and wipes his lips on his sleeve, “I can give you a ride.”

***

It’s settled when he’s dressed and they’re out the door, Y/N hidden behind her sunglasses that just aren’t making the cut at the moment. The sun is still glaring down at her and intensifying the ache making its home at the front on her forehead. It’s settled up until the door opens behind them when they’re only a few feet away and they both turn around when Zayn calls out to Harry.

He’d put on a pair of gym shorts, an inside-out tank top and a pair of Harry’s flip-flops he was never too fond of Zayn borrowing. “Sorry, um, I’ll drive you home. You got a test to study for, mate.” Zayn steps up to Harry, grabbing hold of his car keys before taking them into his own hands.

Y/N’s whole body lights up in nerves at the thought of him driving her home. She didn’t even know him and he’s probably as hungover as she is. However, Harry doesn’t argue about it so she doesn’t either.

Zayn pats Harry’s back as he steps past them both and up to Harry’s little 2008 Volkswagen, pressing the alarm button to unlock the doors. “You coming?” He shouts to her when he has the driver’s door open and she glances up at Harry to save her, though he just nods like she’ll be fine behind the wheel with Zayn. Rolling her eyes back to the car, as Zayn crouches into the driver’s seat and starts the engine, she pats over with a pout on her lips toward the opposite side.

Of course, not without tripping over a crack in the concrete and nearly sending herself face first into it. If it hadn’t been for Harry grabbing her arm, she’d have one fucked up face right about now. “Thanks.” Her heart raced, both from the near-death experience and from him pulling her close to his chest, close enough to smell the fresh cologne he’d thrown on after getting dressed just moments ago.

“Come on.” He walks cautiously beside her toward the car, opening the door for her and making sure she doesn’t bump her head on the way in. He’s positive she has better posture when she’s not still feeling the heat from the night before, but while she is a bit dazed, he does what he can to help. Even making sure all her limbs are inside the cab before he closes the door.

Zayn rolls her window down as she pulls her seatbelt on. He leans over while Harry brings himself down into the now open gap, folding his arms on top of the door. “Can you make me some eggs while I’m gone?”

“Already have an extra plate in the microwave.” Y/N’s stomach buzzes wondering if what he offered her earlier had even been for her in the first place.

“Nice,” Zayn sits back in his seat and puts the car into gear, releasing the emergency break before his hand slips to her bare knee. Where he squeezes her and she just about jumps out of her skin from the sudden contact, “Gotta get you home quickly then yeah? I’m starving.”

Harry nearly bites off Zayn’s hand with his venomous stare, watching unsteadily as Zayn runs his fingers up her thigh just a bit before he removing it. He follows the tattooed arm up to his face, suddenly hating everything about his roommate and tensing up when his body is ready to attack.

Y/N glances up at Harry and it takes him a moment to meet her eyes, but when he does, he’s nothing but apologetic. She taps her hand onto his arm as a silent, ‘it’s okay.’

“See you Friday.” Even though he’s beyond worried about leaving her with Zayn, he doesn’t have much more of a choice when he’s backing out of the parking spot and leaving Harry alone  on the asphalt. The promise of seeing her again, though, reassures him.

Harry’s in the shower while his only roommate is still out. When he’s not fantasizing about Y/N and letting himself indulge a little bit under the warm stream of water hitting his back, he’s thinking about where she lives. He vaguely remembers her address, only because he’s sure he’d been to a party in her building just last week. He thinks about how her apartment is decorated, if her roommate is home to ward off Zayn. He thinks about her bed.

He thinks about her wrapped up in the sheets with him. He thinks about knocking her headboard against the wall and he thinks about his fingers in her mouth to silence her moans. He thinks about the dress and rolling it up her hips as he eats her out without any fabric in his way. He thinks about how her bottom lip pouts when she’s begging and how her hands tug at his hair.

He thinks about her until his vision is blurry with crossed eyes closing as he tilts his head back into the water and his load spills from the tip of his cock onto the shower floor and he’s thankful no one else is home to hear him moaning her name.

two

Y/N is late, like later than late. Like so late she knows she shouldn’t even bother going to class at this point. And it’s mainly because of the unanticipated line at the student store when she decided last minute she needed a snack and some caffeine to get her through her morning classes.

And her lateness isn’t helped any by finding Harry strolling into the store with his mouth lazily around a granola bar, backpack messily slung onto one shoulder, and checking the time on his watch. He heads straight to the refrigerated drinks without a second glance at the long line with a semi-familiar face at the very back of it. A face that is too busy blushing rosy red cheeks to realize the line has moved up considerably and she’s standing at the back like an idiot.

When she does finally move up, it’s because someone steps into line behind her and knocks some brain function back into her skull. It’s not her fault though that Harry had just swept past her like some ghost she wasn’t even sure she’d seen correctly. Like a spirit of someone she never thought she’d see again so soon.

A few more steps and she was third in line to check out and, most definitely at this point, the very last person to arrive at her lecture nearly fifteen minutes late already. When she heard someone behind her clear their throat, a sound that was particularly familiar, she couldn’t help twisting her head around to glance over her shoulder at him.

He’s eyeing the overpriced protein bars when she finds him behind the innocent girl that separates him from her. Now that he’s closer, she can see the white earbud connected to a cord that disappears into his front pocket and the current state of distress his semi-curly hair is in as if he’d just woken up ten minutes ago.

While reading the back of a Clif bar, his attention slowly drifts over to her because, well, she isn’t being so modest in her staring. It’s actually quite obvious, especially to the girl in the middle Y/N put in a seriously awkward position.

Once he sees her, he lifts an eyebrow at her and glances over her shoulder at something. When she turns to follow his gaze, she finds herself in her same dumbass predicament as before. The line’s moved and she’s still parked in the same spot. He tries to hide his smile as she shimmies her way up the line to catch the boy in front of her who is next to the tills.

Deciding on the Chocolate Fudge flavor, he tosses it in with his shameful bottle of water. It’s a little less shameful though the longer he thinks about it. Because if he hadn’t forgotten his reusable one in the fridge, if he hadn’t been in a hurry to get out of the apartment, he wouldn’t have seen Y/N. Wouldn’t have been there to obsess over the way her hair flowed onto her shoulders as she stepped up to the checkout stand, or the way she dug through her bag for her wallet like she had that morning on his kitchen counter. Or the way he had thought of her while he had his hand around his….

Okay, maybe he is just a touch shameful.

He’s checked out in lightspeed time to catch up to her, not that she’s necessarily racing off to her lecture either. She’s lingering. Taking her time to stash her wallet away and open up her plastic packaged junk food as she strolls toward the doors that lead out to the rest of campus. And he’s quick to casually fall into pace beside her as nonchalantly as he possibly can even though he can feel his stupid fucking heart racing from just the scent of her perfume.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Harry asks first, catching her growing smile behind a mouthful of kettle cooked BBQ chips she wasn’t sure exactly when she’d grown dependent on.

“Mm, I don’t think so. What was your name again?” She pushes open the doors first as he follows behind her with dimples and a blush on his face he’d be the first to blame on the sunlight. He’d also be the first to deny the 60+ SPF he put on every morning too.

Slipping his sunglasses onto the bridge of his nose, they cling back together like puzzle pieces and walk like neither of them has anywhere pressing to be. “It’s Harry. Remember, you slept with my roommate?”

“Oh, right.” She nearly sings out the vowels in her words, feigning off the horrible memories, or what little she had of them, from that night when he brought them back to the surface again. “Fuck, all this time I thought you were Harry from the dentist.”

His giggle nearly had her falling face first on the concrete, if the crack in the sidewalk didn’t already have her tripping over her feet in front of him like a complete idiot. Though she was glad he decided to ignore her clumsiness. “Oh, well, yeah. When I’m not kicking almost complete strangers out of my home, I’m looking at people’s mouths for hours on end.”

“Hm. I thought you enjoyed it?”

He rubbed the corner of his eye with his index finger while smiling as he followed her, wondering if she, like him, had any clue where they were going or if they were just following each other in the general direction of all the lecture halls. “Believe I said sometimes. Some mouths.”

“Now you’re just Harry with the oral fixation.”

“Sounds about right, yeah.” He’s quiet when he answers, but her insides are the complete opposite. Pressure buzzing in her stomach. Mind whipping around like a tornado at all the possibilities of what he fucking meant by that.

She clears her throat when she’s calmed down enough to talk. “Do you have class this way too or?”

“No, I thought I’d just follow you… if you don’t mind.”

“I mean I guess… but I’m late to Computational Genetics.” She says her course name like it is the most boring, uninteresting thing on the planet and it only makes Harry’s ears perk up.

“Once again,” he shakes his head in complete bewilderment, “too smart to be shagging Zayn.”

“Jesus. It was one time. We aren’t ‘shagging’.” She throws air quotes over what seems to be Harry’s favorite word in the English language.

“Shame we won’t be seeing you around anymore then?” The butterflies grw tenfold as he peeks over at her from behind his Persol’s with an inquisitive kink to his eyebrows. Normally, she didn’t give anyone’s forehead wrinkles a second thought. But his are cute. His skin looks soft and well taken care of. And his hair, as her eyes wander with minds of their own, curls onto said forehead defiantly like no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t keep the loose strands in place without product he didn’t have time to deal with this morning.

“Actually,” her one word, with the last syllable pulled up at the end like she’d just had an epiphany, puts a pause in their leisurely stroll across campus when she turns to face him, “I lost my necklace recently and the only place I haven’t looked is your apartment.”

He purses his lips and gives her concern minimal thought. “Haven’t seen any unfamiliar necklaces.”

“You don’t even know what it looks like.”

He shrugs, mainly because her returning to his apartment for something like that would mean her going back into Zayn’s room. Her seeing him again and officially raising the probability of a second hook up that he really just could not handle.

“Can I come over later and look? My mom gave it to me so it’s kinda…”

“Fine. Okay. I have to get to class now though.” She hates that she’d just blown off a good portion of her own education for him and he was already walking away from her to be on time to his. She hates that he went from actually being fun to be around to his normal semi-bitter self. She hates that she doesn’t understand anything going on in his mind and has to settle with the sad fact that maybe he was just in a nice mood when their conversation had started and she slowly, but surely, drained him.

“Harry said I could come over and look for something.”

Zayn steps out of her way to usher her back into his apartment. It’s later in the evening than she would have liked, and she’s wearing an oversized sweatshirt and yoga pants with a pair of knock-off Birkenstocks on her feet she found at Payless. It’s her cramming look, topped with a messy bun like a crown on her head, smudged mascara under her eyes, and a random mechanical pencil shoved into the front pocket of her pullover hoodie.

“Did you lose something?” He asks from somewhere behind her as she gets a little lost at the sight in the living room. Harry, spread out on the couch with a half eaten donut on his chest and the pink box it came out of lying open on the coffee table.

“Um, yeah…” But she’s far too curious about Harry now than she is about her missing necklace.

Zayn steps around her and follows her gaze. “He finished his exams today. He came home drunk and with a mixed dozen.” He flips the lid closed and she can see the sloppy handwriting on top of the box that says ‘congrats’ and catches herself thinking about who had given him the sweets in the first place. Who he’d gone out drinking with and if any of them were named Sammy and worked with him at the dentist’s office.

“You can probably steal one if you want.” Zayn plops back into his armchair, mistaking her preoccupations. She really couldn’t give a damn about the donuts.

“Huh?” She finally peels her eyes off of Harry and over to Zayn, who is already looking at her suspiciously. “Oh, uh, no thanks. Which is your room again?” She glances at the two doors to her right, her memories too faded to even try to figure it out herself.

“Door on the left. Need help looking?”

“No, that’s fine.” The soccer game Zayn unmutes muffles the sound of her footsteps as she treads across their home to the correct bedroom door she never would have thought she’d be going back into ever again. And as soon as she’s there, when the familiar scent of cannabis and cigarettes hits, so does the haze of damn near traumatizing flashbacks.

The ones of Zayn’s hands on her while neither of them can barely even keep their eyes open. The ones of being pushed back onto his bed with his fingers crawling up the sides of her thighs. The memories that are so hidden behind a cloud that it’s easy for her to imagine Harry doing those things to her instead of Zayn. Once she has that thought, though, she mumbles about what a complete idiot she is and goes about her rescue mission.

“Found it!” She announces as she strides back into the living room after only five minutes of leaving Zayn with napping Harry and a half-finished soccer game where the team he’s rooting for is clearly losing, if the deep set frown on his lips is any consolation.

Zayn reluctantly pulls his eyes away from the television when she steps up into the gap between him and Harry. “Nice.” His smile is loaded with the next question to come out of his mouth, “Do you not remember anything from the other night still?”

The question hits her just as hard as the nauseating odor of his bedroom had and she glances at Harry just to be sure he’s still in dreamland if they were really going to have this conversation. “Uhm, no. Not really.”

“Yeah, me neither.” He sinks down into the chair, stretching out his legs while his brain is visibly working hard to capture just one glimpse of their wild night. Or maybe he’s just pretending and he knows everything they had done. “Well, there is one thing I remember.”

“What’s that?”

Zayn smirks before answering, enjoying the memory for himself before he clues her in, “Doing cocaine off your tits at that party.”

Her eyes immediately snap back to Harry for any sign that he’s awake and listening to them. “Don’t worry about him,” Zayn starts after noticing her apprehension, “He’s a heavy sleeper.”

“Is that all you remember?” She hopes he’ll say yes. That the rest of the night is completely washed from his memory. She can handle her own embarrassment, but having to share it with him? A whole different story.

“No.” He smirks again and looks up at her through his lashes like she really does not want to know what other images of them are racing through his head right now. “Don’t know if it was the pills you took at that party, or if it’s just you, but you give really good head.”

Her whole body shivers at the memory that floods back like a twelve-point tsunami and she hopes Zayn is right about Harry. That he can’t hear a damn thing because she never wants to see him again if he is, in fact, conscious and eavesdropping.

“Like the best I ever had…” Zayn trails off and she snaps out of her pit of anxiety.

“Yeah, okay. I get it. I did drugs and sucked your dick.”

He stifles out a laugh at her sudden burst of shame that he doesn’t quite understand. “S’no big deal though, yeah? You do that all the time.” Zayn’s assumption, although premature, is nothing she could really be offended by when it is completely true.

“Yeah, um... thanks for letting me look around. I have to go.”

***

Her Friday appointment is met with nothing but nerves. Nothing but bouncing legs and fidgeting fingers as she tries desperately to get a fucking grip. It’s just a check up. Maybe another cleaning. Maybe Harry isn’t even here.

The thought is like some kind of bad karma when he rounds the corner into reception like he knew she’d been thinking about him. He’s like a flash, though, just as quick as he’d been to hand a file off to Sammy, he’s disappearing into the back again and leaving her in shambles.

The whole waiting room, which consists of her and some empty chairs, is silent enough to hear a pin drop and she knows she should feel bad about listening to the conversation behind the desk, but she can’t really help overhearing them.

“I went out with Harry again last night.” Especially with the mention of his goddamn name falling off of Sammy’s lips, her brain wouldn’t faze the two girls out even if she tried to reason with it.

“Oh? Where’d you go?”

“Well, it was with some of his friends. We went to a bar.”

“And?” The other girl seemed a lot more normal and a lot less interested in Sammy’s gushings about her co-worker than she led on. Or maybe Y/N was over analyzing a situation she shouldn’t even be regular analyzing in the first place.

“And it was like he couldn’t keep his hands off me.”

She rolled her eyes to the ceiling and prayed to whatever higher power to save her from listening to any more of the tales last night had been. She didn’t want to know how long Sammy and Harry had made out in the back of some grimey college bar or how far up her dress Harry’s hands had travelled. She didn’t want to fucking know.

“Sounds nice.” Y/N had to stop herself from cackling at the other girl’s completely aloof response.

“It was. We were going to go back to his place together, but he was too drunk.”

“I guess he does seem a little tired today.”

The conversation tatters into silence when Harry is back in view, just another flash behind them as he steps up to the door that separates the waiting room from the offices instead this time. Y/N is closest to the edge than she ever has been when the knob turns and it feels as if her heart has just jumped out of her chest and fallen onto the recently vacuumed carpet in front of her.

“Ready?”

And she isn’t. Not with him walking behind her as she descends down the same hallway as before. Not when he mumbles, “last door on the left” and it feels like he’s practically right at her ear even though when she glances over her shoulder she can see he’s left room for Jesus in between them. Of course, though, his wandering eyes are a little less holy.

“Have a seat,” he motions to the chair she’d been in before when she hesitates from the nerves. It doesn’t matter that she’d seen him a few times before her appointment. It doesn’t matter how much she’d thought about him or how much she thought she knew him. Here, in the dentist's office, he made her so incredibly nervous she could barely breathe.

Or maybe it was just the effect of the dentist alone… but Harry still seemed to do a number on her either way.

Especially when she hears him typing away behind her but not saying a single word. It’s like their conversation Thursday morning was with some complete stranger, not this Harry sitting at his little swivel chair giving her a cold shoulder.

When she speaks, it’s so quiet that she’s sure he can’t hear her. Sure that he thinks a fucking mouse just talked to him. And sure that she’s a different person as well than the one from Thursday morning. “Seemed like you had fun last night.”

His eyes stay glued to the screen in front of him, even though he’s fighting desperate urges to turn and look at her, to give her the attention they both crave. “Was alright.”

“Oh, well when I saw you, you were passed out on the couch with a donut.” At this point, she’s just grasping at straws in hopes to figure out if he had heard anything said between her and Zayn last night because the paranoia was damn near eating her alive all morning before the appointment.

And his quite passive mumble breaks the fragile, but naive, hope still left in her. “Wasn’t passed out.” If she couldn’t breathe earlier, she was definitely suffocating now. He’d heard everything and he doubtlessly hated her for it, if his silence and his slouched frame are anything to go off of.

The door swings open when Dr. Brown arrives, snapping his blue latex gloves on. “My easiest patient of the day! How are you feeling? Any pain from last time?” He plops down into his own chair and begins laying her back with the automated controls to get her appointment out of the way as soon as possible.

“No.”

“Good.” Grabbing his mirror tool Harry already had set out for him before she even arrived, he brought it over to her mouth. “Go ahead and open, I’m just going to check a couple…” His voice trails off as he begins searching through her mouth, switching the light above her on and nearly blinding her when he adjusts it to practically see down her entire throat.

“Have some swelling here,” he mumbles while tapping his tool against the base of one of her molars before glancing up at his assistant. “Harry can you pull up her X-Rays?”

She listens to the clicks as he does what he’s asked to do but she can’t see anything apart from bright light she refuses to open her eyes to. She can imagine Harry zooming in on the area Dr. Brown is concerned with, though, as they both examine the images.

“Has this tooth been causing any pain or sensitivity?”

She nods, not really sure how she’s supposed to give him any other more thorough answer when he’s still poking around in her mouth. Harry sighs before the light is switched off and she no longer has the horrible cold metal in her mouth.

“Seems like you need a root canal.” His gloves come off and she relaxes, even though the news isn’t really something to be calm about. “So, what we will do is schedule you whenever you’re free and you’ll come in and do another X-Ray just to be sure and then we will do the procedure right here. But I would do it sooner rather than later if it is very painful.”

She just nods along with his instruction, knowing next to nothing about root canals other than that they can be painful. But she figures she can just Google it when she gets home. “Um, okay. How much does it cost?” Both Dr. Brown and Harry stifle laughs at her one and only question. Not, will it hurt? What should I do to prepare for the operation? How long will I be in pain afterwards? No. She goes straight to the money.

“Your insurance will cover most of it. Out of pocket… students usually pay around twenty to forty dollars.” She hears clicking at the computer behind her again but Harry doesn’t ever say anything else while Dr. Brown is still in the room. “You also get a free whitening after two cleanings so you can schedule both with our receptionist on your way out.”

Once he’s gone and leaves the two of them alone in the same room again, she tenses up. His words from before flood her ears and she feels like she’s on fire as he prepares himself for her second cleaning. She stares at his back for a little too long again when he’s sitting beside her silently screwing together the tool he’d used last time.

Putting up a brave face while he’s somewhat distracted, she just goes for it. She can’t handle the tension in the room any longer. “I’m sorry you heard all of that… with Zayn.”

He shrugs one shoulder and pulls out a long enough piece of floss before swiveling to face her. “He didn’t say anything I hadn’t already heard.”

She swallows and stares directly into his eyes like she’s terrified to find out what else Zayn has said. He realizes it when she freezes like he’d just turned her into pure cement.

“Must’ve been really good for him to not shut up about you still.” She’s not sure if the pressure she feels in her stomach is butterflies from how disappointedly jealous Harry sounds or if it’s because she feels so insanely embarrassed for both Zayn’s big mouth and for thinking Harry would even be jealous in the first place.

The second option seems about right.

“Think he’s exaggerating. It kinda sucked.” She’s not sure why she’s telling him that, but it works to make herself feel better. To let Harry know she has zero interest in hooking up with his roommate ever again and also did not condone his blabbing about her or agree with any of it.

Harry just nods and pouts his bottom lip, lost in thought while placing the stupid bib around her neck again and avoiding her eyes because he knows she’s trying to convince him of something but he doesn’t want to hear it. So, with a sigh, he leans over her with the floss strung tight between both hands and pauses to say one last thing that finally confirms her fears.

He hates her.

“Yeah, I’ve already heard enough about how much you suck. Now open your mouth.”

two and a half

Harry is already in study mode when Zayn flings his keys onto the counter in front of him without stopping on his way to the microwave for the promised breakfast that had his mouth watering since he left Y/N’s apartment.

“Sorry ‘bout last night, man.” Zayn pulls open their unorganized mess of a silverware drawer and searches blindly for a fork with his eyes glued to Harry, who resumed reviewing his notes strewn all over the marble.

“S’fine.” Harry doesn’t really want to relive it again, he just wants to cram in as much bullshit about dental anatomy as he can before his midterm and forget about Y/N. Forget about getting off to her just twenty minutes ago like he was some hormonal teenage boy again. He couldn’t even look himself in the eyes while he was brushing his teeth after that mess in the shower.

Zayn grins while shoveling a heap of scrambled eggs into his mouth, still a little bit in a haze that accounts for his blabbering on about the topic. “You’re seeing her on Friday, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you guys like… friends or something?”

“No.” Harry shoots him down quickly before correcting himself, “She’s one of the patients at the office.”

“Oh so you don’t like... know her?”

Harry narrows his eyes skeptically, but goes along with it because he doesn’t really know where Zayn is headed, he just knows it can’t be anywhere good. “No, not really.” It’s not a complete lie. Even if he does know the inside of her mouth quite intimately, he doesn’t know her.

“Hm,” Zayn chews down another few bites before setting his plate on the counter and leaning onto it across from Harry, close enough to see all the scribbles in his notebooks but not caring enough to leave him to his studying. “Well, that’s good then.”

Harry lifts an eyebrow curiously, taking Zayn’s bait. “It is?”

“Yeah, then you wouldn’t mind if I hooked up with her again.”

Harry really hopes his discomfort goes unnoticed, he hopes the way he cringed and immediately hid his eyes into his books again wasn’t so obvious. He can’t help but mind if last night was repeated. He minded more than he probably should.

“Or would that be weird for you?”

Harry just shrugs, sighing as he scans his focus across his untouched studying materials, “No, do whatever you want to I guess.”

Zayn hesitates, knowing Harry isn’t being completely honest, but also too lost in his own good mood to question it. “Good. Because she was fucking incredible…” Again, Harry shies away from the topic Zayn is adamant on discussing, and Harry hates himself for wanting to know more about just how incredible she was.

“You should get her to suck your dick,” Zayn pauses to wipe his mouth on the back of his hand, “Life changing, man.”

Harry just shakes his head and avoids eye contact at all costs. He’s no stranger to Zayn’s oversharing, but it’s usually about girls he doesn’t know and will never see again. “Yeah, I’ll remember to ask her when I’m fucking cleaning her teeth.”

Harry’s sarcasm seems to escape him when he shrugs one shoulder, thinking the scenario over like it would be an actual thing Harry would or could do. “Might be hot, you know?”

“No… it wouldn’t.”

“Well, you’d be missing out. Her mouth was unbelievable, but the rest of her?” Zayn practically gets hard again right in front of Harry thinking about it and it just makes him even more uncomfortable as he squirms in his chair. “I might’ve been high… and drunk… but I was not imagining how fucking good she felt.”

“You know what… I really need to study and I don’t want to know about any of this so…”

“And so fucking wet, man.” Zayn goes on anyway, completely ignoring Harry’s protests. “‘Specially when I started spanking her.”

Harry clears his throat and shoots straight up from his chair, landing both feet on the hardwood and immediately packing up his things while ignoring Zayn’s chuckling. “You know what, I’m just gonna go to the library.”

“Aw, come on. Don’t you want to hear the rest?”

“No. I’d rather take this fucking exam ten times before listening to any more of this.”

“Oh, so you don’t want to hear about how tight she is, or what her--”

“Nope! No! La la la, I don’t want to hear it!” Harry shakes his head again, taking a moment to squeeze his eyes shut in the same way he’s trying to squeeze all the dirty thoughts from his brain, though it’s not really working. He continues shoving all his necessary junk into his backpack, a little more in a rush this time though, while trying not to think about burying himself inside of her and listening to her screaming his name instead. He tries not to think about her mouth like he hadn’t already been thinking about it and her lips since he first met her. He tries not to think about the fact that he has to see her again later this week and pretend like he didn’t get himself off to her in the fucking goddamn shower, for christ’s sake.

“You’re literally the worst roommate I’ve ever had.” Harry is halfway to the door, slipping into his sneakers left messily in a pile of other tattered shoes by the doormat. His backpack hanging open off his shoulder like he doesn’t even care if he loses important notes, he just wants to get the fuck out of there already.

“She deep throats, Harry. Deep-fucking-throats.”

Zayn only gets a ringed middle finger flashed at him and Harry doesn’t even bother sparing his roommate a second glance before practically flying out the front door.

three

“There’s an opening next Wednesday at three.” Y/N is beyond lost in Sammy’s perfect, shiny brown hair. In her straight white teeth and dimples that match Harry’s. In the way her hands move across the desk with dainty rings on her soft fingers.

When she’d been here before, she barely knew Harry at all. Now, it was like there had been some spark of hope for her. A spark that died out the second Y/N landed eyes on Sammy and was reminded of her disappointing place in his life.

“I have class then actually.” She tenses up before she even sees him with her own two eyes, while he’s walking into reception from behind her and then he’s all she can see while he’s digging through patient files and pretending not to eavesdrop.

“Next earliest is… that following Saturday at nine a.m.”

Y/N rolls her eyes because of course. One of the few days out of her week she prides herself on sleeping in and it had to be wasted on going to the stupid dentist for a horrible procedure she’d rather avoid.

“That’s fine I guess.”

“Cool.” Sammy is already penciling her in and writing up a similar card for her to take so she doesn’t forget about her appointment. “Did you want to make an appointment for the teeth whitening now or wait?”

“You should probably get that done before the canal.” Harry is quiet in his interrupting, and nonchalant as well while he’s still flipping through a file acting as if he’s paying little to their conversation.

Sammy looks over her schedule again and gives Y/N the cutest smile ever that makes her so uncharacteristically self-conscious about her own set of teeth it’s almost ridiculous. “Does Tuesday at noon work?”

“How long does it take?”

“Well, usually the application process is pretty quick, but curing takes about an hour. But you’ll have Harry.” She spins around in her swivel chair to motion to him as if guaranteeing him for her appointment would at all help her decision. Especially not after what just happened. She’s not sure she can even say two words to him at this point.

Y/N clears her throat and tries not to sound like he’s the deciding factor here. But she’s sure the deadpanned look she gives him in response to his own is more than enough. “That’s fine, I guess.”

“Awesome, so we’ll see you soon!” Sammy finishes writing her details down and hands her the information card she is, without a doubt, going to lose at the bottom of her backpack the second she steps out of the office just like she did with the last one Sammy gave her.

***

Her Lyft is late and clearly lost if the map she’s eyeing like a hawk is accurate, so when Harry steps off the curb beside her, she almost just ignores him. Almost just lets him go like he is clearly doing to her. But she doesn’t have the same level of self-control he does.

“Wait, Harry, can I talk to you?” She flies off the sidewalk towards him after the split second it takes for her to make up her mind that she did, in fact, need to say some words to him after all.

He had been trying to reach his car as soon as possible in an attempt to avoid her when he rolls his eyes and turns on his heel to face her like it physically pains him to have to look in her eyes for an extra few minutes. And it does actually hurt to look at her, all the intimate details of her night with Zayn now freshly on his mind again. “You have thirty seconds.”

She wastes about ten of them just staring at him because she wasn’t sure he’d even give her the opportunity at all. So, she collects her thoughts and speaks a lot faster than he’s used to hearing her. “I’m sorry about whatever Zayn told you, and that I lied to you about…” her eyes flash to the side of his face, missing the disappointed look he gives her because she can’t even fully own up to it. “But I already don’t like coming to the dentist and you hating me makes it worse.”

“I don’t hate you,” he mumbles unconvincingly before sighing and staring behind her at the ‘Open’ sign on the front door of the office they’d both just barged out of. “I hate that you’re fucking my roommate.”

She blinks a couple times, taking a wavering step away from him because she’s both confused and boiling with anger. “So what? You’re fucking your receptionist.”

His eyes are back on hers in a heartbeat and he looks just about as furious as she feels, “But she’s not your fucking roommate now is she?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She raises both her hands in a surrendering motion, “I guess next time we’ll just fuck at my place then.”

He stares at the ground, hating the idea of that more than her seeing Zayn again in his own apartment. “Thought you said it sucked?”

“It did! So I don’t know why you’re being such an asshole about this.”

He doesn’t really know either. Maybe Zayn’s bragging finally got to him and he’s just misplacing his anger onto her. Because she’s the only one here and involved to place it on. Maybe he’s mad that someone he’d let himself get so infatuated with turned out to not be who he expected. And he doesn’t know what to do about any of it.

“I’m being an asshole because you lied about doing drugs.” For the first time in the past minute that she’d stopped him in the middle of an empty parking space, she’s completely silent. Her lips are pressed together in a hard line, ready to take whatever hits he’s throwing because he’s absolutely right.

When she does finally get words in, they’re barely audible. “I’m sorry…I--”

He shakes his head and glances over his shoulder toward his car, already taking steps away from her. “Your thirty seconds are up actually. And I have to go.”

She lets him turn away, lost in her own guilt until she’s mad again. “Are you serious?” He just barely turns his head and only to listen to her, not to give her any more of his time as he continues off toward his car. “So, you hate me because I lied?”

Then he stops again, in the middle of the parking lot and faces her for the last time. “No. I hate you because you made me think you were better than all of that but you aren’t.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Grinning unhappily like she should know exactly what he means, he presses the alarm button on his car key. “You know what, you and Zayn deserve each other.” And as he twists himself around again, he can already feel his heart breaking from letting himself go too far. From saying things he never intended to but couldn’t take back no matter how badly he wanted to hop into a time machine and do it all over.

***

Harry is positive the entire world is out to get him when he’s home and still can’t have any of the peace and quiet he’s craving. When Zayn and his smoking buddies are taking over the living room and he wants nothing more than to take a nap uninterrupted. But it’s not happening.

Instead, he drops his backpack off on their dining table, which is less a place for them to eat and more of a storage facility for all of their crap. Zayn catches his eyes and lifts a beer in his direction to offer him a spot amongst his friends and Harry really doesn't have the energy to come up with excuses. So, he practically drags his feet the entire way, grabs the cold bottle from Zayn and plants himself down on the couch beside him.

“Rough day, huh?” Zayn asks while resuming his hands to the half-rolled joint on the coffee table. The whole place is already permeated by the stench of weed so there’s no point in Harry demanding that they smoke literally anywhere else.

Harry shrugs while twisting the cap off of the beer and chugging back about half of it in one go. Nearly choking when Zayn opens his mouth again.

“Guess that means Y/N didn’t suck your dick then, eh?”

“Jesus.” Harry spits, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand while Zayn laughs along with the rest of his friends. The three complete stoners taking up root on his couch who he hopes didn’t already get the full review of Y/N’s sex life like he had.

Lighting the end of his homemade cigarette between a smirk, Zayn lets out a puff of smoke mixed with coughs before handing it off to Harry, “You really need to lighten up, man.”

Shaking his head at the offer, it doesn’t take long for one of Zayn’s friends to reach around and take it instead. “Maybe you need to stop telling all your friends about her, man. It’s messed up.”

After another fit of coughs, Zayn sits back against the cushions with the same grin on his face that Harry desperately aches to smack. “Don’t be mad just because you aren’t getting any.”

“Neither are you.” Harry’s mumble is barely even audible while hidden behind coughs and giggles from the other three in the room. And as much as he wants to speak up and repeat it, he doesn’t. There’s no energy for that argument either.

“What?” Zayn laughs like he’s just heard the most ridiculous thing in the entire world.

And Harry finds some confidence in the bottom of his Tastes-Like-Piss beer. “Clearly she’s not interested in you if she hasn’t been back yet.”

“She’ll be back. You don’t know girls like her very well if you think that.”

Harry can’t help but grip his bottle a little tighter and keep his mouth under as much control as he can, though it doesn’t really come out that way. “What the fuck do you even know about her, though?”

Zayn sits up, elbows on his knees as he pushes his hair off his forehead, a constant reminder that he still hadn’t made the time to buzz it all off. All signs of playful bantering between the two lost on his face now. “You really don’t want me to answer that question because I’m positive I can think of more things about her I haven’t already told you.”

The other three boys worry when Harry and Zayn just stare at each other like a fight is about to break any second. With Harry’s jaw clenched and his hand around the neck of his bottle so tight they all think he might break it. Until he finally rolls his eyes and takes another drink instead.

“Besides,” Zayn adds, “there’s another party tomorrow night I’m sure she’ll be at.”

“I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

“Did she say something to you? Why are you acting like a dick?”

Finishing off his beer, Harry pushes himself from the couch with Zayn’s waiting eyes following his every move. “You don’t know girls like her very well if you think she’d ever fuck you again.”

***

Not even the back of Cindy’s Diner at ten o’clock in the middle of the night is sacred.

“Oh, jesus christ,” Y/N mumbles between her teeth, cutting her current conversation short, not that it was headed anywhere productive anyways. The topic of Instagram stories and poor choices at a college party dies when Harry steps through the front door, setting off the bell and every single one of Y/N’s nerves.

Especially when she sees who he’s holding the door open for behind him and she feels like the biggest pile of garbage to ever exist.

“Do you know him?” Her friend asks from the other side of the booth, not even trying to hide the fact that she’s following Y/N’s gaze right to Harry, even when he glances in their direction.

“No… not really.”

“Hm,” they both watch as Sammy steps up beside Harry at the counter and wraps an arm around his waist and Y/N doesn’t have the strength to spy on him any longer than that. “Is that his girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

She turns around again to face Y/N. “He’s not the guy you were telling me about, is he? The one from the dentist?”

“No. Yes. Can we please talk about something else?”

“You didn’t tell me he was that hot.” Maddy mumbles one last thing about Harry while she still can and hides her face in her phone again.

“He’s not.” Even she scrunches her face amidst her own lie. He’s not even within ten feet of her and he has her a flustered mess.

“Don’t know why you’re fucking around with Zayn when you can have that instead.”

Y/N runs her fingers through her tangled, stringy hair that had started out it’s night flowy and coconut-scented while she finds Harry’s figure again as he pulls his wallet from his back pocket to pay, “I can’t have that.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn’t like me.”

“His loss then.” Maddy shrugs and rewatches the same Instagram story she’d posted an hour ago of Y/N doing something stupid at the party that explains why she still reeks of raspberry flavored vodka.

“Fuck,” Y/N sinks into her side of the booth, making pathetic attempts to cover her face with her sleeve even though Sammy is already on a bee line to her table with her sparkly brown eyes and mauvey-pink lips that outline the perfect smile Y/N has already seen too much of.

“Hey, Y/N right? Funny seeing you here.” Y/N drops her hand from in front of her face to her shoulder when Harry walks up beside Sammy and he’s suddenly the only thing she sees.

“Yeah, uh…” She glances at the brunette, who is unknowingly making her night even worse, and with a frown and a bitter taste to her tone, agrees. “Funny.”

“Do you mind if we sit here?” Sammy points to the open booth behind hers, already taking small steps towards it while Y/N just shrugs.

“You can do what you want.” The second her eyes are back on Harry, he knows she isn’t talking to Sammy or about the stupid table anymore. She’s talking to him.

With a huff, Harry slides into the seat right behind Y/N, not really having a choice in the matter when Sammy takes the opposite side before he could get to it.

She’s tense and nervous again around him, though in her defense she can practically feel the heat radiating off his body and every single move he makes in their connected booth. She tries not to smell his cologne as he removes his jacket or listen to the way he coughs before speaking.

And Maddy’s phone buzzing on the table saves her, for at least a few moments, from being so hyper aware of Harry it feels like she could explode any second.

“Is your phone dead?”

The battery status of her iPhone 7 had been the least of her worries most of the night, but still, she reaches into her back pocket and places it next to her glass of watered down Coke, pressing the home button just to find that it is, in fact, dead.

“Guess that’s why Zayn’s texting me asking where you’re at.”

Y/N takes in a sharp breath, hoping Harry isn’t as tuned into their conversation as she’d been to his. It’s wishful thinking though when she feels him shift in his seat at the sound of a familiar name.

He’s listening.

“Just… tell him I went home or something. I don’t know.”

Maddy lifts a judgemental brow at her before rolling her eyes and doing as she’s asked to. While typing, she lets her concerns run free with little regard for Y/N’s worries or privacy or practical begging on her knees that her actions tonight would remain a secret. Which is, again, wishful thinking when she realizes she should have prayed while she was on her hypothetical knees. “I know he’s…. Zayn, but why hook up with him literally an hour ago and then avoid him?”

Y/N closes her eyes and actually does, briefly, pray. Because it’s come to that at this point. She prays mostly that Harry didn’t hear anything. But also, that if he did, he doesn't think any less of her than he already does. That his cough after the word is out is because his throat is actually dry and not because he’s actively adjusting his already tattered impressions of her.

When she calms down, when her eyes are open and her hands are no longer in fists ready to fight Maddy for exposing her, she answers. “Because he’s Zayn.”

“Then I guess,” Maddy reads off of her screen while cluing Y/N into the contents of the second and final ding from Zayn, “you don’t want to meet him at his place later then.”

“No.”

“Any particular reason?”

Her perfectly loaded response to that question is more of a test to see if Harry’s listening than it is anything else. Sure, she says it because she’s mad at him for what he said to her yesterday. She’s mad that he’s spending time with Sammy and that the tiny green monster in her has come out.

And mostly, she’s mad that she could never be good enough for someone like Harry.

So, when she notices him glancing over his shoulder just the tiniest bit after she says it, it’s apparent his ears have been multi-tasking after all. “Because his roommate’s kind of an asshole.”

four

Sammy is first to escape to the bathroom, claiming she’ll be back in a couple minutes before Y/N sees her stroll past her table in a much less urgent fashion than when Maddy rushes off just forty seconds later after having been squirming on the edge of her seat for a while. Once both girls are gone, Y/N considers saying something to him, just turning around to get any sort of words out to protect her own reputation with him, but she can’t muster even a teaspoon of courage to do so.

But it doesn’t matter anyways when Harry coughs and opens his mouth first. “I’m an asshole, huh?”

She freezes up for a moment, realizing they had both been thinking about taking advantage of being alone at the same time, though Harry actually had the balls to say something first. With both of their backs still facing each other, she scoffs and swirls her straw around in her refilled glass of soda. “That’s what you get for eavesdropping.”

She swears she hears a giggle from him, feels the seat vibrate a little, but maybe it’s just her imagination. He can’t find anything she says amusing when she’d been ruthless enough to call him names behind his back, literally. But then he’s just as ruthless. “So, you slept with Zayn again?”

As soon as the four-lettered Z-word leaves his mouth, she’s twisting around in her seat to face him. Her arm over the back of their shared booth for leverage, fingertips accidentally grazing his upper back when she does so. She doesn’t wait for him to look at her, to turn his face over his shoulder and give her those judgemental green eyes. “I know what you’re thinking and I don’t need you--”

He cuts her off quick, shaking his head and returning his attention to the empty table beneath him where he rests his elbows. “You’ve no idea what I’m thinking,” he says in a low, deeper voice than the one she’s used to.

When she’s eerily quiet is when he glances at her again, catching her deadpanned eyes for a moment before slipping his gaze to her parted lips that clue him in a little bit more to what she must be thinking. That maybe she’s realizing how wrong she was about him, he hopes. That she’s the one making the snap judgements, not him.

Though his brief preoccupation with her mouth confounds any idea Y/N has about what he could possibly be thinking right now.

She looks away first when she notices a familiar figure in her peripheral, turning around hurriedly when she sees Sammy returning, catching the very first unpleasant look she’d ever given Y/N while gliding past her table towards her own. And it’s not that she cares about the two chatting, she cares about how quick Y/N is to hide it. Like they were doing something they shouldn’t have been.

***

“So what were you and Y/N talking about?”

Harry’s hand wraps a little tighter around the steering wheel, having hoped to avoid the topic of Y/N altogether once they’d left the diner but not quite getting his way in the end. “Nothing.”

“Didn’t seem like nothing…”

He glances over at her, finding Sammy fidgeting with the hem of her shirt and staring out the passenger window. He already knows what’s on her mind even if she won’t just come out and say it. “She’s sleeping with my roommate. We’re not… whatever you’re thinking we are.”

“Oh I just... “ she sighs and focuses her attention to his hands. One rested on his thigh furthest from her and the other gripped around the wheel while he drove the familiar streets bordering their college town. “I just thought maybe you liked her or something.”

He hides the ironic look on his face by pretending to gaze over his shoulder to check his blind spot off his side of the car. Because if she really knew…

“Speaking of your roommate… is he home right now?”

“Don’t know.”

“Well…” he hears the suggestion in her voice long before she slides her hand onto his thigh, nearly making him crash the car. “If he’s not… we could go back to your place.”

Harry glances at her hand, inching her fingertips dangerously close to where he has himself securely tucked away behind the tight denim and he clears his throat, “Um… I’m actually kind of tired.”

She stops then, retracting her hand and herself back to her own side of the car with a loud and intentional huff. “Another time then, I guess.” He knows she’s beyond disappointed, but he can’t help wondering how many rejections she’ll take until she finally gives up on him.

***

“... I need to reschedule my appointment tomorrow.” Y/N hates phone calls, even more so than she hates most other things. She hates knowing what her voice sounds like and hates not having two pairs of eyes to look at while she’s speaking.

And right now, she’s just glad it’s not Sammy she’s being forced to talk to over the phone while she nervously sits in a tucked away corner of the campus. It’s a small quad between a couple medical buildings she likes to relax in, whether she’s eating lunch or catching up on her readings for class. The privacy it offers embraces her like the hug she desperately needs after a few solid hours of demanding lectures and labs.

“Okay. We actually have an open slot later tomorrow evening instead if that works for you.”

“What time?”

“Four-thirty.”

She thinks it over for a moment, envisioning her schedule and making sure it works. And just as she opens her mouth to respond, she hears a familiar voice from across the little courtyard that just completely turns her mind to mush.

She can’t make out what he’s saying, but even his muffled accent is something she’d never miss. He’s surrounded by a small group of diverse people all with backpacks slung onto their shoulders, strolling through her little peaceful solitude like they’d all just gotten out of class together.

“Y/N?” The voice on the other end of the phone pulls her away from him. From his dreamy fluff of hair that makes it seem like he rolled straight out of bed ten minutes ago. From his fitted black t-shirt tucked into his light-wash denim jeans she’s never seen him wear before. From his inked skin she wishes she could see up close.

“Sorry, um,” when she finds him again, he’s already looking at her. He makes her entire world feel like it’s the first days of warm spring, blooming flowers and sunshine, after a long, dark winter. And it’s bittersweet because she knows soon enough spring turns into the unbearable and scorching heat of the summer. “You said four-thirty?”

His grin flops in the opposite direction when she looks away from him for good. When she doesn’t even brave another glance across the quad like he wishes she would.

“Yes. Does that work for you?”

“Yeah. That’s fine.”

She listens to the typing on the other side of the phone, heart racing because she can feel him staring. Or at least she hopes he is. She hopes he’ll come over and say hi like the last time they ran into each other on campus. But… the last time that happened she hadn’t called him an asshole yet.

***

It’s hard not to watch Harry while he’s getting everything ready. While she can see his hands shaking around the odd mouthpiece made of silicone she’s sure she’ll get to know really well for the next hour she’s stuck with it. While he’s avoiding her eye contact like the plague because of all the unsaid words between them. And the fact that they are alone in a room together again and still… not saying anything about anything.

Until he’s finished placing every little tool in the exact right spot on the tray and he sighs. A type of sigh like he’s given up. Like he’s ready to surrender.

“I’m sorry,” he finally mumbles before twisting to face her for what feels like the first time he’s looked at her since he brought her back into the room ten minutes ago. When he sees her expectant face, waiting for him to elaborate, he sighs again like he’s practically on his knees kissing her feet for forgiveness. “For what I said to you last time you were here.”

She blinks twice when she drops her gaze to his mouth, or more specifically, to the birthmark he has just to the right of his lips. It intimidating her less than those stupid green eyes of his. When she shrugs, he already knows his apology doesn’t matter. That his words already did all the damage he’d never intended them to. “You were right anyways.”

He stares for a little too long, at her heartbreaking expression he’s sure he’s caused more than he’d care to know about, when there’s no time left to explain just how wrong he’d actually been. Because Dr. Brown is barreling through the door right when Harry manages to open his mouth again. And it’s too late.

“How’s my favorite patient today?” The middle-aged dentist asks her as he plops into his own swivel chair that creaks a little just as it always did every time she’d been here. She gives him a polite smile and a simple, routine response in a mumble Harry can hardly even hear and he wonders if it’s because of him.

“He says that to everyone.” Harry jokes under his breath, earning himself a smack to the shoulder for exposing Dr. Brown like that.

“Alright, smart ass. Do your job so we can get my favorite patient out of here as soon as possible.” He gives Y/N a smile that’s just between the two of them, making Harry out to be the grouch that she already knew him to be.

Grinning, Harry reaches over and picks the piece of silicone up off the tray frist. “Alright, so it’s really simple. This goes in your mouth to protect your gums and keep your teeth dry while the gel is on. We’ll do two passes of the gel total, second one after thirty minutes, so an hour total.” Setting the intimidating object down, he doesn’t notice Y/N’s preoccupation with it while he’s reaching for the creepy looking tooth samples next.

“I’m gonna look stupid with that thing in, huh?” Dr. Brown giggles next to her while throwing a piece of candy in his mouth like he really had no reason to be in the room apart from supervising Harry and getting free entertainment.

Harry turns back with the samples in hand, already distracted by trying to pinpoint her current shade level with a very prominent dimple poking into one side of his face. “Everyone looks stupid.”

She’s not sure if what he says is all that reassuring, but at least he seems to be used to doing this on numerous people and that calms her nerves a little. “Okay well… don’t make fun of me then.”

Harry glances at her finally after placing his thumbs on the two samples he has picked out. One a match of her current teeth and one two shades whiter that will give her an idea of what they’ll look like afterwards. “Oh, I will.”

***

It’s quiet between them for a while after the application process was over and Dr. Brown had left the room with a promising remark that Harry was a pro at whitenings by now and she had nothing to worry about. However, when he realizes he has the chance to speak without her being able to respond or interrupt him, he takes advantage almost immediately.

“I was wrong, what I said. I don’t think you deserve Zayn.” Sitting right beside her still and with his eyes glued to his hands in his lap, he doesn’t notice how she snaps her head towards him with an incredulous expression. Because what he just said makes her heart drop even more. And if she didn’t have an almost literal brick in her mouth, she might have made it very clear she didn’t like what he said.

When he does finally see the way she looks at him, he shakes his head and clarifies, “I mean… I think you deserve better than him.” He’s not selfish enough to believe that he’s the thing that’s better for her than Zayn, but he can’t help thinking it. And maybe if he’d told her that to begin with, if he had said the right things instead of the wrong ones, she might not have crawled back to Zayn again. But, he’s also not selfish enough to think it’s because of his poor choice of words that she did it. The guilt still ate him alive though.

And it’s almost like a completely new side of him talking to her now that she never thought existed. A side that was soft and vulnerable and wearing his heart on his sleeve that she’s sure is going to be a very fleeting glimpse. She keeps her eyes off of him, but her brows are still pulled together while lost in her thoughts and all the words coming to mind she wished she could say out loud.

Clearing his throat, he pulls her back to him. “I just think you are so much better than him, better than… everything.” She knows he’s referring to her drug usage, and maybe he’s right. But it doesn’t stop her from digging into her back pocket for her phone when she finally has the right thing to say to him and just can’t stop herself from typing it out into the notes app.

She faces the screen of her phone towards him once she’s done and he leans in, squinting at the small text.

I know I’m better than you, but thanks for admitting it.

He rolls himself away from her chair to hide the smile creeping onto his lips, because of course she would say something like that when he was trying to be sincere and, heaven forbid, nice for a moment. Planting himself in front of his computer again, she watches him for a while as he clicks and types. Her grin slowly fading the longer she stares at his hands and thinks about whose skin he’s touched recently. If, when she was feeling sorry for herself and letting Zayn back inside, he was doing the same with Sammy.

He listens closely as she types again and doesn’t glance in her direction until the tapping stops and she’s reaching to hand her phone over for him to read.

Are you really fucking Sammy?

It’s a fair question, she thinks. He wants to have his own opinions about her sex life. About what is and is not good for her, the least he can do is answer a simple question. Though, she isn’t sure she’s prepared for it. For letting her imagination go when he confirms it once and for all.

But he leaves her in a massive, never-ending pit of anxiety when he stares a little too long at her screen like he’s too scared to answer. Or like he’s trying to figure out a way to lay the truth on her in the nicest way possible. Which makes her more anxious as she hopes her question didn’t come off as her being anything other than curious.

“No,” he finally says, lifting his head again to her entirely too suspicious glare, “we just hang out.”

With grabby fingers, she tugs her phone back out of his grasp and quickly types up her thoughts after deleting what’s already written in her notes.

That’s bullshit. I don’t believe you.

With an exasperated laugh, he runs his fingers through his hair and pushes his loose curls back on top of his head. “M’serious.”

She types again. Okay so why not?

Sighing, he hands her phone back without a response at first. He retreats to his desk instead to give himself a moment to really think of why he hadn’t gone there with Sammy yet. Maybe it was because she stepped into his life before their relationship had gotten to that point. Maybe it was because he liked his job too much to screw it up by literally screwing his co-worker. Maybe it was because the last couple times he and Sammy got a little more intimate, making out on the couch in his apartment, he closed his eyes and pictured Y/N.

“Think it’s rude to lead people on.”

She doesn't know what to say at first, because clearly he has no idea how much he’s already led Sammy on. He didn’t hear the conversation she did in the waiting room last week. For someone who doesn’t want to lead people on, he sure did a very good job of it.

Her tapping fills the silence again until she’s reaching her arm out for him to take her phone. And when he does, it’s with a roll of his eyes and a pursing of his lips. Are you fucking serious? Why don’t you like her?

She can tell whatever he’s thinking now has him nervous as he picks at his lips and avoids her eyes. She wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to answer her. That it’s really none of her business because just his reaction alone makes it obvious it’s a little more complicated than she realized.

But, when he instead lifts his face and hands her phone back with his eyes dead set on hers, she realizes all her worries are so foolishly misplaced. “I like someone else.”

It’s quiet again and the hard line Harry’s lips are in gives her absolutely no clue as to what he fucking meant by that. He’s not being his usual fuckass charming self and she’s beyond confused. She entertains the idea that maybe the someone else he likes is her for only a brief moment. A moment long enough to make her feel like a complete idiot once Dr. Brown is back in the room and leaving his vague words lingering in the space around them again like a heaping elephant.

“Hey, H, I’m sending everyone home early because my last appointment cancelled. Are you okay to finish up here?”

Without even second thought, he nods. “Yeah, that’s fine.”

“Okay, we’re going to close up everything, just make sure you lock the front doors again when you leave.”

While they discuss what else Harry needs reminding to do for closing, Y/N is completely left in shambles. His words and how he’d said them are tearing her apart right in front of both men and neither of them even realize. And it’s for the sole reason that her mind’s shut down any and all fantasies about him liking her. There’s too much going against her for him to ever admit that and she knows it. And she knows that if he doesn’t like Sammy, the literal goddess that she is, then Y/N has absolutely no chance.

Her mind is an overwhelming game of ping-pong when Dr. Brown leaves the room again, offering her a goodbye she almost ignores, and while mentioning seeing her on Saturday, she’s already too far into her rabbit hole to come out. And Harry notices it too.

“I can ask him to stay if you want.”

Quickly, she shakes her head no. That the ghostly look on her face isn’t from the impending doom of being left entirely alone in the office with Harry. It’s that she’s on the verge of a breakdown because she’s stuck in a whirlwind of negative thoughts, throwing her several very valid and hard truths why she’s not ever going to be good enough to be that someone else.

***

He slips the thick piece of plastic from her mouth after cleaning her up and she feels just as sore as she thought she would after having the thing in for an hour. Her lips and gums feel almost as numb as her brain does. After he left her to dwell alone in the room when he went out to do god knows what around the emptied office for a solid fifteen minutes. It felt like hours, though, listening to deafening static going on behind her skull.

Until he eventually came back. But even then she wasn’t sure if she felt better with him in the room or not.

He mumbles on about aftercare, about not consuming anything that would stain her teeth like dark sodas or most fruits while she’s gearing up the confidence to finally confront him. While she’d had plenty of time to sit and stew over what she’d finally say to him once she had her mouth back to herself.

So when he’s quiet again, eyes intent on hers to make sure she’s heard everything he just said, she makes it pretty clear she hadn’t been listening to him at all. “What did you mean… earlier?”

“‘Bout what?” She almost loses every ounce of courage when he says that because it apparently was something he didn’t think too much about. Something she’d had the exact opposite reaction to.

“Liking someone else?” She’s as quiet as a mouse because of it. Because it’s not a big deal to him at all.

“Thought it was pretty straightforward.”

He turns his back on her then, leaving her unsatiated with his response. She wants to yell at the top of her lungs that it was, in fact, not straightforward in the slightest. That she has no fucking clue what’s going on in his head and it infuriates her to no end.

Instead, she lets it go. He likes someone else. There’s no deep meaning behind it at all.

“You can wait in reception and I’ll let you out when I’m finished here.” He doesn’t even bother to look over his shoulder at her when he’s talking. To watch her walk out of the room and take a deep breath in the hallway after being relieved of the tension building between them.

He doesn’t leave her waiting long, but it’s long enough that she finds herself snooping around Sammy’s desk. Reading her calendar upside down and taking in all her framed pictures and trinkets she has around her desktop monitor. When she’s deep in jealousy land with her eyes glued to a photo of Sammy and her, presumably, large family, is when Harry finally emerges from the office at the end of the hall. Kicking the light off and closing the door behind him as he slowly removes his scrubs while heading her way.

“Ready?” He stops beside her, pulling his keys from his front pocket. It’s not how either of them want to end the night, but reality is a hard pill to swallow.

When she turns to him instead of toward the front glass doors that are visible through the reception area she’s gone in and out of numerous times, he’s curious to say the least.

“No um… can I just say something to you really quick?”

He shrugs, glancing at the doors and then back at her while his heart picks up speed because he knows whatever she has to say can’t be pleasant considering the tone of her voice. “I guess, yeah.”

“You’re really fucking stupid.”

“Excuse me?” Taken aback would be an understatement with the way he scrunches up his face and puts a step or two of space between them.

“If I had someone as decent as her,” Y/N glances to Sammy’s desk, and more specifically to that same family photo, “interested in me, I wouldn’t be trying to fuck it up.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are. You’re already leading her on and if you can’t see that, then you’re a bigger asshole than I thought you were.”

“What about you, huh? You told me you wouldn’t sleep with Zayn again and then you did? Isn’t that leading him on?” He takes those two steps back to her when he raises his voice.

“No! He’s just some shitty guy like all the other shitty guys I’ll end up with. You’re the one tossing something good to the side for what?”

It’s then that he realizes maybe he wasn’t as straightforward as he thought he was. That clearly she didn’t understand what he meant and he wants to answer her now. Wants to make it abundantly clear. Wants to say for you, but he knows that’s exactly what he shouldn’t say. Because she’ll find a way to make him feel stupid for liking her. Even if it’s true, even if he can’t help it.

Instead, he shakes his head with a ‘I-can’t-believe-what-you’re-saying-right-now’ sort of smile on his lips. “S’that all you wanted to say then?”

“No, it’s not actually,” she pushes herself off from the counter to get even closer as if she’s at all intimidating to him. And maybe if his mind isn’t currently a little preoccupied, he would be. “I’m sick of you never just saying what you mean. Like I’m supposed to read your fucked up mind or something.”

“Saying what I mean?” She doesn’t notice the way he snaps his eyes from her lips to her own, that he’d been staring at them while she went on with insulting him.

“Yes! You have no idea what I’m thinking,” she imitates him, in his deep voice, accent, and everything. “I like someone else. What the fuck does that mean, Harry?”

He’s hesitant, leaving her question a rhetorical one for about fifteen seconds before he takes a deep breath. “It means,” there’s only one final step separating them that neither realize until Harry takes it.  Until he’s close enough to catch her breath in her throat when he reaches a shaky hand up to tuck her hair behind her ear gently. When she finally finds his eyes fixated on her lips, “you’re the stupid one for not knowing what it means.”

For the first time in the past ten minutes, she has absolutely nothing to say. No harsh words are ready to fall off her tongue. No sounds or mutterings about Harry’s dumb choices escape through her lips. Not while he’s looking at her the way he is now. Not while he steps her back into the counter, bracing the edge of it with the hand that isn’t wrapped around her jaw.

She only has his eyes on hers again for a brief second before they look over her head at something else and when she twists around to see for herself, she pushes him off of her with two hard smacks to his chest that leave him with fully offended furrowed brows.

“Oh, sorry.” It’s the slightly older woman who works in reception with Sammy that interrupts them, that had snuck through the front doors and caught Harry’s attention. The woman that always smiled at Y/N and asked how her day was. “I left my reading glasses here… I’m not interrupting, am I?”

Harry’s quick to respond, almost too much. Enough to make Y/N feel like he just took a dagger to her chest because she had definitely interrupted something, even if Y/N didn’t fully know what. But, he’s too quick.

“No.” His eyes find Y/N again with intent, “You aren’t interrupting anything.”

five

“You’re not thinking of sleeping with Zayn again, are you?” Maddy slows her pace to keep up with a distracted Y/N, who is too focused on what she’ll say to Harry or if he’ll even be there. She’s been too focused on him since Zayn first texted her about the party. The entire rest of her day went into worrying over what to wear, what to do with her hair, what would get Harry’s attention. And she knew it was stupid, that there was a strong possibility Harry wouldn’t even be there. He wasn’t the lively, party animal type. She could easily have gotten all dressed up for nothing.

“What?”

Maddy rolls her eyes. “If your dress got any shorter or tighter…”

Y/N is quiet, unlike the street around them that got busier and louder the closer they got to Zayn and Harry’s shared apartment. Dumb drunk college kids littered the sidewalks on the infamous Thursday night before exam week. It was the beginning of ‘binge weekend’ on campus.

“S’not for Zayn…”

“Who’s it for then?”

Harry’s face appears in Y/N’s mind and she knows Maddy knows about him, but she doesn’t want to admit it now. She can’t find the words to explain why she even wanted Harry’s attention in the first place. Why she’d been trying to find any reason to run into him again since Tuesday evening. She feels the weight of her dumb decisions as they reach Harry’s (Zayn’s) building.

“No one,” she mumbles while leading the way to and through their door, dodging the unfamiliar people that littered the space just outside the open apartment. Like trained K-9’s her eyes instantly scan the familiar space for Harry only for her mission to be cut short when Zayn finds her instead.

“You made it!” She can tell he’s high, or drunk… or both, when he gets closer, flinging his arms around her shoulders and she grimaces at the way he smells. She hates weed and he reeks of it like he’s an actual bag of kush himself.

When she gets a chance to come up for air is when she finally spots Harry, but it’s not because she’s deliberately searching him out this time. He had already been watching her. He’d already seen the way Zayn’s hand snuck down her backside. He’d already seen her tight dress and wondered selfishly if it was for him.

She doesn’t look away from him for a while either, from behind Zayn’s back, until she sees a flow of familiar brown curls and glances to Harry’s left quickly to find Sammy. Her eyes almost instantly glaze over and she hates herself for it. She hates that she’d come here at all hoping they could finish where they left off. Hoping he’d do whatever it was he was about to do when they last saw each other.

It’s all wishful thinking though when she sees Sammy. When Sammy sees her and cringes at her short dress and makes her feel even more like a complete idiot.

The second she feels Zayn’s fingertips somewhere they shouldn’t be, she jumps and pulls away from him easily. His limbs are like jello at this point with whatever mellowing substances are frying his brain.

She looks into his bloodshot eyes while grasping his shoulders to make sure he stays upright. “Please tell me you have more of whatever the hell you’re on right now.”

“Course I do, come on.”

Maddy is already gone when Y/N turns to look for her before letting Zayn drag her off to the couch where all his mildly-familiar friends are gathered. He sits her down between two guys who exude the same energy as Zayn, like they’ve had a little too much pot over the course of the past hour.

When her purse slips off her shoulder, Zayn grabs it. “I’ll put this in my room for you!” He shouts over the music and she lets him take it even though he leans down to whisper into her ear next, throwing her off guard. “It’s where you’re gonna end up anyways.”

His words leave a sour taste in her mouth, but she lets him go. Her bag is safer there than it is on her shoulder because with the little white lines laid out in front of her now, she’s sure she’d lose it by the end of the night.

Harry hasn’t taken his eyes off her the entire time since Zayn left her alone on the couch with friends he knew all too well. Friends who, like him, knew a little too much about what she did in bed thanks to his fucking roommate.

Who, after three whole minutes, still hasn’t come back to check on her and thus turned Harry into a never-ending pit of spiraling panic.

“Hey,” Sammy gently touches his shoulder to get his attention back to her, where it rightfully should be given since he’d invited her and not Y/N to this party. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” He says, returning to the red solo cup and the bottle of triple sec he had yet to pour into his mixed cocktail. Suddenly, though, he doesn’t quite feel like the dull buzz of vodka. He wants something a lot stronger.

He can’t help but look at her again when he notices her in his periphery while she scoots to the edge of the sofa and plucks what looks like a rolled dollar bill from the table. It feels wrong watching her but he can’t fucking look away to save his life.

Her mouth waters as she cleans up a line she plans on taking, hands shaking because she can feel Harry’s eyes on her. But she doesn’t care anymore what he thinks. Without letting another thought about him clog her mind, she bends over and finally Harry looks away.

The second the drugs infiltrate her system, she knows something is off, but she’s too fucked to realize what. She just knows it’s not like all the other times she’s done this. The dollar slips from her grasp and she can do absolutely nothing but fall back against the cushions and listen to the giggles around her getting slower and quieter the longer she stares up at the ceiling.

Whatever she’d just ingested is like nothing she’d ever felt before. In fact, she’s sure she can’t feel a damn thing anymore.

She hears the giggles around her again but it’s like they’re miles away this time. Her head is in a cloud and her eyes are rolling around behind her eyelids like she’s lost all control of them.

“What the fuck was that?” Her words sound like she’s speaking at a ridiculously low RPM and everything starts to feel just as lethargic. People walk by in a haze. She doesn’t feel the rough graze of jeans on her thigh from the boy sitting next to her until he’s already bent over the table where she’d just been.

She isn’t even sure her heart is beating anymore.

There’s giggling again and her vision is slipping, only catching fleeting glances of everything as if her entire world is stop motion. Someone mumbles a vague answer that would normally make her worry if she wasn’t currently floating.

“S’not coke, that’s for sure.”

Normally this is where she’d freak out, but right now… she doesn’t give a damn about anything.

Her limbs feel heavy, like they might fall off and like it takes extra effort to move them, so she doesn’t. She just lays there, trying to keep her eyelids open because they’re heavy as well. The one thing she can’t deny is that nothing hurts anymore. Whatever headache she might have had is gone. The heartache Harry gave her no longer exists. Everything is better than it ever has been.

“Is she passed out?” Sammy asks, pointing a long fingernail at the seemingly lifeless body on the couch across the room. It had been an entire ten minutes since Harry had even thought about glancing her way again.

It had to have been at least a half hour since he last checked on her, since Sammy distracted him in a conversation about work and what he wanted to do after it tomorrow. Now, though, after following Sammy’s pointed finger to Y/N, he feels guilty for ever taking his eyes off her in the first place.

He watches her for a moment, for any sign that she isn’t passed out, but nothing tells him otherwise. She doesn’t make a single movement and the only thing not worrying him that she’s actually dead is the fact that he can see her breathing. Thank god for tight dresses.

His hands shake around his cup, which had already been emptied and refilled with Jack Daniels. It’s not because he’s almost certain she’s blacked out. It’s not because Zayn is nowhere in sight. And it’s not because he’s anywhere close to being mad at her anymore.

It’s because there’s a hand on her knee that she doesn’t seem to feel. There’s a hand on her that doesn’t even make her flinch. She doesn’t wake up and he’s sure his heart hasn’t raced so fast in his life.

He nearly makes a mess of whiskey on the kitchen floor while trying to put his cup down. While trying to take his drunken limbs with him as he races across the room, pushing himself through people he doesn’t know and mumbling sorry’s at all the ones he accidently elbows.

But everything is still better than it has been.

Until it’s not.

There’s a slapping sound before the sensation of fingernails raking across her thigh brings her back down to the party again. It’s the first time in what feels like hours she’s been able to feel anything.

“Don’t touch her.”

His voice sounds like it’s coming from rooms away, but she knows it’s him. She knows it’s him when there’s a hand on the side of her face, lifting her head up off the cushions. She knows it’s him when she blinks her eyes clear and sees the familiar swirl of hair on his head she’d imagined running her hands through too many times for her own good.

“Hi, Harry.” She grins crookedly, not understanding why he’s frowning at her. She wants to reach up and turn his mouth the other way around but when she finally goes to move her arms, his mouth is already busy again.

“What did you give her?” His eyes flip back and forth between hers, trying to guess for himself what she’d taken. She just continues to smile at him lazily like there’s absolutely nothing wrong. The only thing not making him lose it is her touch on his stubbly jaw. But the composure she gives him doesn’t last long.

“Relax, man.”

She cringes away in a delayed response to both him ripping his head out of her grip and his raised voice as he yells at whichever boy sitting beside her. “What did you fucking give her?!”

“It was just smack... jesus. Calm down.”

“Don’t tell me to calm down.” His mouth falls into a flat line and he clenches his jaw around his sharp words, stopping himself from saying anything else. From yelling at them to get the fuck out of his house for even thinking it was okay to bring something like that here.

But he bites his tongue and focuses on Y/N instead.

She whines the second he tugs on her arms and realizes the task isn’t going to be as easy as he initially thought. When he instead, wraps himself around her until his hands have a good grip on her back, she cries in his ear about not wanting to leave. Still, he pulls her up with him anyways, mumbling to ease her discomfort. “Y’have to get up, Y/N, come on.”

She groans again when he finally manages to get her onto her feet, even if she has a hard time standing on her own. Even if she’s the one wrapping herself all the way around him as tight as she possibly can, forming fists around the fabric of his black shirt.

“M’gonna fucking kill Zayn.” He mutters near her ear to himself, grinding his teeth in frustration as he adjusts her weight onto his hip and glances around to figure out what he’s going to do with her.

“Harry, here. I’ll help.” Y/N feels like crying when she hears Sammy’s voice. When she feels Sammy’s cold and unfamiliar fingers on her--a harsh contrast from Harry’s warm and safe touch--tugging the hem of her dress back into place before gripping Y/N’s arm to assist Harry. When she’s pulled in both directions, she wants nothing more than to hold onto Harry just a little bit longer, for as long as she can. So when there’s a chilling distance between them, when Sammy supports half of her weight instead, she wishes she was sober enough to protest.

They prop her against the wall between Harry and Zayn’s bedrooms and Sammy’s heart nearly breaks watching Y/N desperately reach for him again when he steps away from her. When she can’t feel the comfort of his hands anymore and she pouts. She lets her head fall back against the wallpaper and Sammy stays on guard in case she tips, but her legs seem to be doing fine for the moment.

“Y/N, hey…” she retracts from Sammy’s touch, even though it’s another delayed reaction. Even if Sammy tucking her hair out of her face goes on longer than it registers in Y/N’s foggy brain. “Harry will be right back. We’re probably gonna get you home. Do you know what happened to your friend? The one you came here with?”

Sammy quickly realizes asking questions is fruitless when Y/N just stands there as if she’d said nothing at all.

Harry knocks on Zayn’s door twice before losing his patience and letting himself in, which… turns out to not be his best idea of the night.

“Oh what the fuck, man!” He covers the view in front of him with his hands, still seeing too much of Zayn doggy styling it with some girl he vaguely recognizes.

“You’re the one who let yourself into my room, dumbass.”

When Harry peeks through his fingers, Zayn hasn’t even moved an inch and Harry’s sure he has no intentions to. Grimacing, Harry glances around to locate Y/N’s purse. “Your shitty friends gave Y/N heroin,” he says the name in a hushed voice, “why did you leave her alone with them?”

“Y/N?” The girl practically pushes Zayn off of her and when Harry finally gets a good look at her, he knows why she’s so familiar. She’s the one Y/N had come to the party with. The one she’d been with at the diner, too. “Is she okay?”

He watches as she slips back into her clothes and Zayn falls against his pillows, lighting a cigarette like he couldn’t give a damn about anything that’s going on. “She does that shit all the time, who fucking cares.”

Harry freezes, balling his hands into fists at his sides while a target paints itself across Zayn’s face, just asking to be knocked out. And if it weren’t for Maddy still being in the room, Harry might just do it. He stops himself when he spots Y/N’s bag finally on the top of his dresser and grabs it instead.

“You know what? Don’t even bother.” Harry’s eyes flash between both of them, forcing Maddy to stop tying up her shoelaces. “You’re both horrible people.”

Slamming the door behind him wakes Y/N right up again, and even more so when she feels his touch again, his hands slipping around her waist to peel her off from the wall. He doesn’t even hesitate to put his hands all over her and she knows she’s sobering up just from the fluttering in her stomach.

The drug that’s wearing off is no match for Harry’s touch. He intoxicates her more than anything ever had.

“Let’s go. M’gonna take her home.”

She can almost walk on her own once fresh air fills her nostrils and Sammy is really only there for moral support now. Her head spins though as he gets her across the parking lot to his car and she doesn’t like the feeling of coming down from this high. Every little thing starts to come back like it had never left in the first place.

And it all hurts a lot worse when he leans her against his car and the ice cold metal meets the backs of her warm thighs. He has one arm around her waist still as he checks his pockets for his keys with the other one. She hangs from his neck with a death grip though, so he knows she’s not going to topple face first into the asphalt anytime soon. But he’s sure if she was her full self right now, she’d rather be caught dead than caught clinging onto him the way she is.

Still, she buries herself further into the crook of his neck and gets lost in the way he smells and the way his skin feels against her cheek.

“Shit,” he says through his teeth and she feels his heavy breath in her hair as he twists his neck away from her to face Sammy. “I left my keys. I think they’re on my desk, can you get them?”

She waits until it’s quiet. Until she can no longer hear Sammy’s footsteps and she’s positive it’s just her and Harry.

“You almost kissed me…why are you still with Sammy?”

Her voice works a lot better this time, albeit she still sounds exhausted but it’s not so bad now. He understands what she’s saying the first time she says it, even if it makes him tense up underneath her.

“And you almost let me… but you were still here with Zayn.”

She breathes in sharply, staring at the birthmarks on the side of his neck she hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe she had. Steadying herself, she pulls away from him with a silent cry from all four of her limbs. And from her heart, no part of that poor organ wants to be seperated from Harry. Pressing her palms flat against the door of his car, she gives him a sour look.

“I came here to see you, dumbass.” It’s the second time that night he’d been called that, but this time it hurts a little more coming from her.

He’s quiet for a while, it feels like, after she confirms what he had hoped for all night since she first stepped foot into his apartment. And then his mind races back to the reason why she’d come to see him in the first place and he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I’m sorry… I shouldn’t have tried to…”

“No you shouldn’t have.” He’s not positive she’d be saying any of the things she is if she were one-hundred percent sober, but her words still cut through him like glass. Until she pushes herself off of his car, topples a little, and then stands a couple inches taller. “You should have just fucking done it.”

She’s offended in the way he just stares at her, offended that he’s ignorantly continuing to prove the point that comes spewing out of her mouth next. “But you’re too much of a coward, you… you don’t want to lead people on, but that’s exactly what you’re doing!”

When his voice comes out, it’s a lot softer than hers. It’s gentle and insecure. “I didn’t think you wanted me to…”

“Of course I fucking do!” She laughs, not at all amused by him however.

He doesn’t do anything though, doesn't even blink or breathe, let alone do the one thing she expects him to do. So, when he hesitates for longer than she’s okay with, she scoffs. “You’re still a fucking pussy, Harry.”

She gets a single step away from him before he grabs her wrist and he doesn’t even realize what in the actual hell he’s doing until he’s pulling her right back onto him, meeting her halfway and quite literally smashing his mouth against hers. When he lets go of her arm, she tumbles back against his car again and he follows, pinning her against it and giving brand new meaning to the way his hands touch her hips this time. Because he’s grasping for whatever he can reach and practically begging on his knees for more. And she gives it to him, even though she can taste the alcohol on his tongue that whatever threads of sobriety she’s weaving together are telling her it’s all a horrible idea. Kissing him, like this, while they’re both under the influence is not how she imagined it. But she’s taking what she can get.

She moans against his mouth when her lungs start burning and he only gives them a second to catch their breath before he tilts his head in the other direction. She gets a faded glimpse of his furrowed brows and swollen lips before he’s pushing her back against the car again, nearly leaning her over the top of it as one of his hands grips the edge of the door to keep himself upright on something that is a little more stable than Y/N. Because kissing her feels like he’d consumed a lot more than two red cups of hard liquor. They’re both a little clumsy with quick, needy movements. Her hand balls into a fist around the hair at the back of his neck, tugging everytime he goes a little deeper. His arm wraps completely around her midsection, fingers wanting nothing more than to feel underneath her dress as they instead dig into her side and form prominent divets in her skin every time he feels her teeth catch on his bottom lip.

He unintentionally lifts the hem of her dress, making it a few inches shorter on her as the fabric gathers around his arm and the sudden cold metal in very warm places forces a gasp into Harry’s mouth and her eyes to shoot open.

And she gets a fleeting look over Harry’s shoulder, beyond the soft, short strands of naturally curled hair tucked behind his ear that almost, but not quite, blocks her vision from something that makes her entire body feel like it’s crumbling in his hands.

“Harry.”

He imagined the first time he would hear his name after spending an entire minute on Y/N’s lips would be in a way that begged him for more too. That she’d say it in a way he wouldn’t ever be able to stop thinking about. Consuming his mind for weeks, maybe even months. This doesn’t sound like that though. It sounds like she’s instead begging him to stop.

He complies, as much as he doesn’t want to, but especially when she presses both hands to his chest in the same way she had urgently pushed him away from her at the office. When there is finally a painful amount of space between them again, he’s beyond lost at why she needed him off of her so fast. Until he sees her eyes not looking at him, but at something behind him.

He twists around a little too quickly that makes him realize how light-headed he’d gone. His dizziness from Y/N turns into nausea real fast when he sees what she’d been looking at. When it’s all he can see even as Maddy comes racing up to them.

The heartbreak on Sammy’s face says everything he’s dying to know. How long she’d been standing there. How much she saw. If he can even apologize and make it mean anything to her. If he should even apologize when he doesn't feel sorry at all.

He feels Maddy push pass him, knocking into his shoulder that does the trick of pulling him out of it. His eyes follow her to Y/N again.

“Shit, I’m sorry. Are you alright?” Maddy doesn’t even seem to notice what she had just walked into until she sees the way Y/N and Harry look at each other. Like something had happened, something that made their cheeks blush red and their lips billowy. Something they should not have been doing. She glances between both of them suspiciously. “What’s going on?”

Y/N doesn’t look away from him for a second, not even to blink. “Nothing. Let’s go.”

He half expects Sammy to be gone already, after watching Y/N walk away from him for as long as it takes to gather the courage to face her again. But she’s still there, with his keys in hand and the same look on her face that brings even him close to tears.

“Are you fucking serious?” She shouts into the now deserted section of the parking lot, the noise of the party sounding like a very distant mumble while she chucks his keychain at his feet that doesn’t even make him flinch as much as hearing her curse at him like that does.

He opens his mouth to say literally anything that will incriminate him a little less but… what can he say exactly? Sorry... I slipped?

“Maria told me there was something going on between you two but I didn’t want to believe it. Jesus. I should’ve just fucking listened to her instead of thinking you were better than that.” He watches as she drags her hands through her hair, hair that was always free from knots and tangles unlike it is now.

Of course Maria tattled on him, no matter how much he’d begged her not to peep a word about what she’d seen on Tuesday evening, even going so far as to bribe her with her favorite Starbucks order the next morning. He supposes it doesn’t matter now, even if it does leave a bitter taste in his mouth knowing all his co-workers hate him.

“I’m sorry.” His apology is pathetic, and even he knows it. Even he hates the way he says it because it’s so unconvincing that it would have been better if he said nothing at all.

“Don’t,” she squeezes her eyes shut tight for a second before opening them again with an equally heartbreaking huff of air. “I know you’re not, Harry. Just… leave me alone.” She throws her hands up and turns away from him to find her own car.

And when she’s gone, when he picks his keys up off the asphalt, he wonders if it’s too late to find Y/N again.

six

Her hands had been shaking the second she spotted Harry’s car in its same spot it was always in and her heart raced the second she stepped up to his very familiar front door. It’s almost as if the weathered and peeling paint on the metal is judging her for her actions after seeing the way she’d been dragged out this very door under eighteen hours ago. Just being on his doorstep now takes her right back to last night, to his arm firmly around her that she still felt into the morning, to the way he kissed her that she would’ve sworn was a dream had Maddy not asked several fucking times, what she’d been doing with Harry in the parking lot. It had been real.

As real as Harry standing in front of her now with her name on his tongue to question what she’s doing at his apartment in the middle of the afternoon. He holds it in though when the answer to his question is clear.

You kissed her last night, dumbass, that’s why she’s at your door.

“Is Zayn here?” She asks and like muscle memory, his whole body shrinks an entire foot as he slouches his shoulders and frowns.

“No.” He glances behind him at all the studying he had yet to finish strewn on the counter, his tone disinterested and harsh when he turns back to her. “Don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Okay, good.”

Her sigh of relief confuses him more than seeing her here in the first place. He normally wouldn’t question why it’s good that Zayn’s not around, but right now he has no clue of her intentions and the uncertainty is written all over his face from knotted eyebrows to flared nostrils.

“I just wanted to apologize for last night.” She finally looks at him and sees how hard he’s trying to understand what she’s doing here. Why she’s the one apologizing. “I didn’t mean to come here and be a fucking idiot like that.”

“You weren’t…” He lets it go when he realizes no matter what he says, it’ll be a lie. She was being an idiot last night. And even so, he still didn’t mind taking care of her for one second of it. “Besides, I should be the one apologizing.”

She tilts her head, “For what?”

“For kissing you.”

At first, her stomach bubbles with just the memory his statement brings up, and then her feelings are on the other side of the spectrum in a snap when she realizes what he’s saying. That he’s sorry he had kissed her last night. That maybe he regrets it. That maybe he wishes he wouldn’t have done it in the first place. Now she’s the one falling in disappointment.

“Oh.”

He’s quick to notice the way she averts her eyes and hugs her arms around herself and it’s clear what he was saying wasn’t what she came to his doorstep to hear. “I mean… I’m sorry for the way it happened.”

There’s a glimmer of hope when she looks at him again, ears perked up and waiting for him to say more as that familiar buzzing in her stomach resurfaces.

“Shouldn’t have kissed you when you were like that.” There is regret stitched into the way he frowns like the experience brings a bad taste to his mouth.

“Think you being drunk and me calling you a pussy had something to do with it.”

When he laughs, it’s better than any high she’d ever had. His smile that radiates on it’s own against the late afternoon glow of the sun has her feeling like she had last night, almost even better, but all completely natural this time. It’s just him and his giggling and his cute little front teeth sticking out just a little further than the rest of them that has her in the clouds this time. Just pure Harry.

“Would you kiss me now then?” Her question brings with it the end of his giggles and the end of the lighthearted tone their conversation had shifted into. Now she’s serious as she talks with her eyes fixated on his lips as if this is why she’d come over in the first place. “Promise I’m not on anything.”

She lifts her eyes back to his just as her hands go up in a surrendering motion to assure him even further that she’s clean. That if he just smiled one more time like he had she’d be sober for the rest of her life.

He doesn’t hesitate this time, instead he steps over the threshold to meet her on the small concrete porch, one hand making use of her arms being out of the way and slipping to her back while his other hand practically glues itself to the side of her face once he’s pulled her in close enough. Her arms wrap loosely around his neck and he squints at the harsh sunlight suddenly in his face, though to be fair he doesn’t really need his eyes open for much longer anyways.

He pauses when he presses his forehead to hers, fighting back a smile at the way she pouts when he doesn’t give her what she wants yet but instead opens his mouth for much more frustrating reasons. “M’supposed to be studying.”

“And I’m supposed to be kissing you right now.”

He nods his head to the side agreeably, and his smile is small but powerful, especially since she hasn’t stopped staring at his mouth and practically begging it to make a move already. When his arm around her tightens in an attempt to pull her closer is when she looks up at him again, finding him preoccupied with the same thing she had been, his poor green eyes reddened around the edges from the irritating sun are fixated on her lips like he’s asking for permission she already granted several minutes ago.

His movements are slower than what she's used to, but it’s worth it with the way he looks at her, studying her face as carefully as he dips his head down to her level. His thumb under her chin pushes her mouth up to meet his softly and suddenly his eyes, sparkling in the sunlight that put the Emerald City to shame, are a distant memory. Because nothing looks as good as he feels, on her mouth and at her waist with desperate attempts to pull her back through his door even though he trips on his own way in and forces a bubbling laugh out of her while he shuts the door behind them. Neither of them having separated from each other for more than half an inch the entire time.

“Oh shut up,” he mumbles against her lips, her giggles shortly turning into moans when he kisses her again but it’s with a little more force now that they’re not on display for Harry’s entire neighborhood. Her spine bends against his not-so-supportive hand while he reaches for more and more until eventually she has no choice but to fall back onto the door, and once she’s there, he’s kissing her like he had last night again. With his hands gripping everything they can reach and his mouth making her lungs burn in the best way possible.

It’s when she feels his fingers on the bare skin of her thigh that he takes things further than they’d ever gone and she nearly jumps into his lap herself, his hands not even able to reach the back of her thighs quick enough before she’s wrapped around his hips.

He’s the one laughing now as he finally gets a good hold on her and presses her back against the solid door. “Someone’s eager?”

When she doesn’t respond is when he puts a little distance between them and he sees her glassy eyes and her lips formed into a prominent pout, possibly exacerbated by Harry’s abuse of them before she finally speaks and fills the air he’s heaving with words that makes his knees weak.

“I need you.”

That and her crawling back to his lips is all it takes. The muscles all along his arms flex as he adjusts her back onto his hips and walks her a little more securely to the counter he’d been studying on.

Of course, when he gets there and sets her down, he knows not much more studying is going to get done any time soon. Not with the way she’s practically clawing at him for more.

When he pulls away, she latches onto his neck and makes it hard to focus as he pushes his books and papers out of the way to sit her down properly, making them both laugh while wrapped around each other's lips when most of it falls to the kitchen tile on the opposite side.

Once he fits himself between her legs, digging his fingers into either side of her thighs, there’s no stopping them. Not even when he hushes her whispers about Zayn coming home to find them because frankly, he doesn’t care. He almost gets off on the thought of them being caught, particularly by his shitty roommate who can’t do even half the things Harry plans on doing to her.

Almost like he can’t wait another second, his hands go straight to the band of her jean shorts, undoing the button before deciding her shirt is in his way. Lifting it over her head as quickly as he can manage without tearing her hair out in the process, his head spins when he sees her. He’s dizzy from how overwhelmed the sight in front of him is, that he can finally reach out and touch her like this. That she’s even here at all when he’d been certain she hated him only a week ago. He can’t even see straight looking at her and knowing she’s finally his for at least a little while.

“You okay?” Her voice comes out in a giggle when she places her shirt off to the side in a neat mound of crumpled fabric.

He nods, glancing up at her eyes before slipping his hand around her back to pull her closer and get lost in her all over again. And it isn’t long before he’s kissing her again, gripping every inch of her skin and pressing into her until she’s gasping from the ice cold countertop against her bare shoulder blades.

With one hand pressed flat against the granite--where his eraser shavings had once been when studying had been a priority--at her side to keep himself from falling on top of her, his other hand moves back to her shorts, undoing the zipper this time slow enough to make her tug at his hair.

When he takes himself and his mouth down her body, when he kisses the middle of her chest just below the band of her bra as she arches her back into his lips, she’s sure she’s never wanted something so bad before. His fingers lightly trace down her spine to follow his mouth as he gets closer and closer to the promised land and the goosebumps he’s causing are a mix of excitement and fear twisting together in her stomach right where his lips are.

He glances up at her when she picks herself up on her elbows to watch as he tugs at her shorts and leaves marks in the skin at her hips, fogging her brain to the point where the words she’s trying to get out are stuck. But, when he sees the look on her face that’s nothing if not full of hesitation, he stops.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, pulling away and dropping his hand to her thigh instead with a cautious worry that maybe he’d crossed a line somewhere with her.

She shakes her head and it slows his heart beat down just a little. “Nothing I just…” she sighs and he notices her cheeks turn a light rosy color as she avoids his eyes and instead stares at the state her shorts are in, practically almost peeled off of her to reveal the lacy underwear she’d thrown on in hopes this exact moment would happen. Or maybe she hadn’t expected this exact moment, with Harry’s head dangerously close to being between her legs…

“What?”

“I’ve never done this before,” she confesses shyly, turning back into the girl he’d met at her first appointment when she hadn’t said much without being full of nerves.

Scrunching his eyebrows, he’s a little more than confused. “Find that hard to believe no one’s ever gone down on you.”

She shrugs and drops her eyes again, but this time it isn’t from embarrassment but rather from disappointment. “You don’t have to.”

“S’not something I have to do. I want to.”

“Why?”

Her question leaves him a little at a loss for words, raising his eyebrows before letting out an exasperated laugh and shaking his head, “You must have really shitty sex with really shitty people then if you have to ask me that.” He already has plenty of evidence that she does, considering her frustrating encounters with Zayn, but it’s a little worse than he thought.

The blank gaze she has fixated on his hand and her pressed lips upsets him more than it should and he almost lets himself ask her why she feels like she doesn’t deserve better than the likes of Zayn, but he stops that familiar train of thought before getting himself into the same trouble with her again. Instead, he straightens up to face her, placing his hand back on the side of her face and tilting her head up with his thumb under her chin.

“Just need to know if you want me to.”

It takes her a second, but eventually she nods and he meets her lips again with a reassuring smile that relaxes her enough to not second guess him when his mouth is back in it’s spot just below her belly button and his hands are back to tugging at her shorts, slipping his fingers underneath her panties that definitely haven’t gone unnoticed.

While he’s lost in kissing and nipping at her skin, he makes her breathing even more unsteady when he manages both her undone shorts and the flimsy piece of fabric underneath them an inch or two down her hips to make room for himself to get closer and closer to where she can’t help but want him to be. When he slips his hands to her sides and gives her a much more firm tug while still completely distracted driving her crazy with his mouth, she lifts her bottom half off the surface of the counter to help his cause. When he moves to take advantage of the room she gives him, both articles of clothing come off as slowly as he gravitates south. He alternates pulling them off from leg to leg until they’re over her hips and he slides them right off her legs to the tile floor next to his feet.

With her legs dangling off the counter, he picks her ankles up until her heels are on the edge and she’s spread enough for him to fit his face perfectly between her thighs. And with him there, she loses every ounce of strength in her muscles to keep herself upright to watch him and gently lays herself back again. Though to be fair, she wouldn’t have lasted anyways when, in the following second, he licks the tip of his tongue over her clit and she’s practically in the clouds.

“Shit,” she breathes out heavily, lifting her head to glance down at what he’s doing, “you’re good at that.”

He giggles against her, still very much buried, before relocating his mouth to her thigh, kissing her before meeting her eyes. “Well you don’t really have anything to compare it to.”

“No.” She lays back again, spreading her arms out on the counter and fluttering her eyes shut and he grins at the sight of her because it’s like she’s completely let go now. “But you’re still good.”

He watches her, breathing and seemingly at peace for a moment before kissing his way down her thigh and situating himself back into place that completely interrupts that peace because the second his tongue is on her again, she’s whining and her body is trying desperately to pull away from him. But his reflexes are a little quicker than her weak limbs and he catches her before she gets too far, pinning her hips down on the counter as he gives her everything he’s capable of. Everything that she deserves and then some.

The cries of his name and her fingers twisting in his hair make him light-headed and his knees a little unreliable as he shifts his weight and pushes her back on the counter to support his own weakening body. And his moans against her because his lungs are burning, for good cause though, do nothing to help slow her down. He shows her no mercy, only following her every jolting movement like a magnet until she’s had enough. Until her shrieks heard around the whole neighborhood turn to labored pants and she melts back onto the counter like a popsicle on a summer day.

The second he moves away from her, after having given her a few moments to breathe again, and prepares to lift her off the counter and take her to his room is when the front door jostles open quicker than either of them can collect themselves.

Luckily, the rush of adrenaline from being caught the way she was sent her feet to the floor as she hid behind Harry to slip her shorts back on, but it still wasn’t much help in denying what they’d been doing.

“What the fuck?” Zayn’s eyes bounce back and forth between the two of them as the front door shuts behind him and as Y/N pulls her shirt back on. Even if she wasn’t half exposed, the state of Harry’s curls, messier than ever, gave it away plenty well enough.

“I thought you had class?” Harry glances at the digital clock on their microwave just to verify that it is, in fact, four o’clock and smack dab in the middle of Zayn’s usual Friday lecture.

“Ended early…” his voice trails as he sets his keys down on their table by the door and his backpack on the floor beside it. “Thought you couldn’t get lunch because you had to study?”

“Uh…” Harry scratches at the back of his neck, looking over his shoulder first at the state of his study materials half on the counter and half on the floor, then at Y/N, who he can tell is trying her hardest not to break out in hysterical laughter. “I was… studying.”

“Last I checked you were in dentistry, not female anatomy.”

Neither Harry nor Y/N could stifle the smiles on their faces as they share quick glances at one another. The only thing going through Harry’s mind is that he possibly would study more if he was in that field, specializing in Y/N’s anatomy though of course.

“Guess I can’t blame you…”

Y/N’s face goes sour, but she just rolls her eyes over to Harry, ignoring Zayn all together now. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Oh don’t let me stop you.” Zayn puts his hands up in a surrendering motion as he treads not-so-lightly through Harry’s mess on the floor of the kitchen. “I’m just shocked you’re actually getting laid, H.”

“Fuck off, man.”

“Not much of an accomplishment though fucking around with the easiest girl on campus.”

Harry picks up and chucks an entire 3-subject notebook at Zayn’s face then from the other side of the counter, narrowly missing what he’d aimed for but still managing to hit his roommate in the head before going in to throw a hardcover textbook at him next.

But with Y/N’s hand clasped around his wrist before another thing goes flying across the kitchen and Zayn’s hands up in defense of his face, Harry backs off instead, grumbling, “You’re a fucking dick.”

***

If she wasn’t still feeling the lasting effects of Harry having been between her legs only a few hours ago, the studying she was actually trying to get done would have gone a lot smoother. She’d be able to focus on her lecture notes instead of hearing his little moans and feeling his fingers digging into her skin almost as if she wasn’t in the busy diner surrounded by people so naively unaware of the images flashing in her brain that had little to do with DNA sequences and a lot to do with Harry’s tongue.

Right as she fully let herself get lost in the frustratingly short memories, someone snuck into the seat opposite her at her usual booth, not even having bothered to ask her if it was okay. But, when she looks up and notices who it is staring right at her from across the cluttered table, she’s a little more than too intimidated to follow through on her plans of telling this person off.

Because Sammy’s sitting directly across from her, her arms crossed on the edge of the table with a very prominent resting bitch face Y/N didn’t even know she had.

“Can I help you?” Y/N finally mutters, pulling her earbuds out and glancing around the small restaurant around them, thoroughly confused.

“I just wanted to make sure you knew,” Sammy starts and Y/N can smell the alcohol on her already, glancing around the tables again to find the equally drunk group of friends on the opposite side Sammy must’ve come with. “That if you hurt him, I literally know where you live.”

“Hurt who?”

“Harry. We both know you aren’t good enough for him and he doesn’t realize that yet, but when he does… he’s going to come crawling back to me because you’re just not the kind of person someone like him ends up with.”

Y/N’s eyes fall to the keyboard of her open laptop, wanting nothing more than to argue and fight back but she knows better. Even while drunk, Sammy’s right. She takes in a deep breath and faces Sammy again, tears threatening to give away how much she’s trying very hard to keep herself together.

Nodding, she blinks back the heartbreak and stares out the window into the parking lot. “You didn’t have to tell me that.”

“If you wouldn’t have come into the picture, everything would still be fine.”

Watery eyes find Sammy again and the pure look of sadness and disappointment on the other girl’s face makes Y/N want to cry more than anything else. “Can you please leave?”

Sammy sits for half a second more before nodding and sliding out of the booth while Y/N keeps her head bowed again as to not see or hear another thing that might push her over the edge. She listens as Sammy sighs and turns to head back to her group, leaving Y/N with absolutely no motivation to study any longer and definitley feeling stupid for having been daydreaming about Harry, for having let herself do anything with him in the first place. All the confidence she’d had in herself today just vanishes like it hadn’t even been there at all.

***

Something is definitely off when Harry picks up Y/N from the waiting room but he doesn’t question it, at least not right away. And he forgets about it completely once he’s holding the door open for her and she eyes him up and down, offering him a suggestive smirk that gets his heart racing as she shifts past him into the confined office. It doesn’t help that he gets a whiff of her coconut scented shampoo that takes him right back to yesterday afternoon as if no time has lapsed between her being pinned down on his kitchen counter and now.

She’s already getting comfortable in the patient’s chair when he closes the door behind him, swiveling his own seat up next to her and shoveling his hands into new, clean latex gloves.

He can feel her staring and he’s sure if he doesn’t make her knock it off, he won’t be able to do his job properly at all. Not with the short sundress she decided to wear either that he’s trying his hardest to keep his eyes off of.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he warns, glancing over his shoulder to find her doing exactly what he’s asking her not to do, if not even more so now. And it’s subtle too, the way her eyes watch him as if she’s not doing anything wrong at all.

“Like what?” She tilts her head, teasing him.

“You know like what.” Scrunching his face, she laughs at his gritted tone and gives him a break, staring instead at his hands as he readies the pieces of plastic he’d soon be shoving into the back of her mouth to take more x-rays.

When he finally turns to face her, he reaches down to the control panel on her chair and lifts the back of the seat up until she’s at a ninety-degree angle and at eye level with him. Leaning over, he grabs the familiar small piece of plastic while his other hand is on her jaw and his thumb is just below her bottom lip to get her to open her mouth.

She stares at the concentration lines between his forehead as he tries to position the plastic correctly, eventually whispering for her to bite down on it while he quickly pulls over the hanging bar with the imaging machine on the end of it to snap the photo. While he does, however, she moves just the tiniest bit and he groans knowing whatever image he got on the first try would be garbage.

“You have to sit still.”

He pulls the plastic out and reshapes it again while she mumbles an apology. The second try goes a lot smoother and when he checks the computer screen, the image is clear and perfect this time. When he rolls back to her to take the piece from her mouth for a final time, things slow down once again, though he isn’t nearly as bothered by it this time.

Not when he reaches his index and middle finger in and she instead closes her lips around them. He blinks slowly, already mesmerized by what she’s doing. With his other hand, he reaches in to pull out the plastic and she’s able to wrap her tongue around his fingers the way she knows must be driving him crazy.

His eyes never leave her lips as she rolls the glove off his hand until she’s replacing his bare fingers onto her tongue. His own mouth is gaping watching her as she licks all the way up the bottom sides of his two fingers until she’s swirling her tongue around the tips just like he’s imagining her doing to another one of his body parts. And then he can’t help himself. He pulls himself from her mouth, his wet fingers sliding across her jawbone and then tangling in her hair as he pulls her in, kissing her like he’s completely forgotten where they are. Which is obvious with the way he swipes his tongue over her bottom lip and grips her thigh with his one and only gloved hand.

When they both tilt their heads in the opposite direction to deepen the kiss is when they open their eyes for a brief moment, but it’s long enough for Harry to see something that causes him to stop before he loses all self-control. He pulls away from her pouty lips and tilts her head straight again to look into her eyes. When she refuses, his other hand grips the opposite side of her face and she has no choice now.

“Look at me,” he whispers and after a moment of hesitation, she flickers her guilty gaze up to him. He doesn’t know why he hadn’t noticed before, but now it’s apparent, especially this close and under the harsh fluorescent lights. Her pupils are completely blown out, the color of her irises almost non-existent. “Are you high right now?”

“No.” She folds her hand around one of his, trying to sound more sincere, but it’s not much use when he knows she’s lying. She feels the sting of her heart breaking into a million pieces all over again when she leans in to kiss him again and he pulls away harshly with a disgusted look as if the last thing he wants is her.

He rolls his chair away from her then, removing the singular blue glove from his hand before standing to toss it in the trash with his other one she’d discarded when he didn’t have such a bitter taste in his mouth as he does now.

“I get doing that stuff at parties but… it’s morning, Y/N,” He warns in an intimidating and cold tone as he turns his back on her and types at his computer.

Her cheeks feel like they’re burning as she keeps her gaze pointed on her hands in her lap. She’s ruining everything just like Sammy said she would.

“You shouldn’t be with me, Harry,” she starts with a heavy sigh and he pauses what he’s doing to listen but doesn’t face her again quite yet. “I know you think I deserve better than people like Zayn but it’s really you who deserves better than me. We should have both just… stayed in our own lanes.”

He stares at the computer screen without actually seeing it, his hand gripping the mouse harder and his jaw clenched. “Where is this coming from?”

She shrugs even though she knows exactly who had brought up all her negative thoughts again but bringing Sammy into everything would just make it worse. “It’s just the truth.”

“Didn’t seem like the truth yesterday when we…”

Shutting her eyes close tight, she tried to grasp those few serene moments with Harry behind her eyelids when they finally had gotten a chance to pretend like their relationship wasn’t as fucked up as it actually is. Then she lost the good memories to the ones that came later that night with Sammy.

“That was stupid, Harry. I shouldn't have even come over.”

He’s the one biting back tears this time when it becomes clear she regrets all of it. When she makes him feel like an idiot for feeling like he was the happiest he’d ever been after being with her.

There’s a quiet lapse between them when Harry simply just can’t believe what she’s saying. But then he closes her file on the computer and turns to her finally. “You can reschedule your appointment up front.”

He can’t even look her in the eye when she twists her head around to see if he’s actually being serious. And when she realizes how badly she’s fucked everything up, she can’t do anything else besides leave.

And seeing Sammy again at the front desk is the final blow to her system. She doesn’t even bother stopping to reschedule, just hides her watery eyes from a worried looking Sammy on her way out of the office. She stands from her seat behind the counter to watch as Y/N slumps out the front door because she’s sure whatever just happened has something to do with her.

“Who’s next?” Harry’s voice startles Sammy back to reality and she twists around to find him mindlessly jotting down notes in what she can only assume is Y/N’s patient file.

“Did something happen?”

Harry glances up at her quizzically, “No.”

And then her guilt practically eats her alive, “I’m sorry, Harry. I didn’t mean to say all those things. I was drunk and…”

“What are you talking about?”

Sammy pulls her culpable gaze back up to him and matches the confusion currently set on Harry’s features when she realizes he literally has no fucking clue about any of it. Her heart sinks even further as she glances toward the door where she’d last seen Y/N, realizing she hadn’t told Harry about anything that had happened the night before. And no matter how much she disliked both of them, and especially Y/N, no one deserved to be talked to the way Sammy had talked to her last night.

“I um…” Sammy’s words got caught on her tongue as Harry’s features deepened from simple confusion and curiosity into anger.

“You said something to her?”

Sammy swallows the lump in her throat, instantly wishing she hadn’t opened her mouth in the first place. If Y/N was keeping it secret from Harry then she should have as well. It wouldn’t be making their already rocky relationship any worse than it already is.

“I-”

“What did you say?” He demands, making her flinch. He knows he has no reason to be mad at Sammy no matter what awful things had come out of her mouth. He just wished whatever she had to say, she would have said it to him and not Y/N. He deserved it more than she did.

“I told her that um… I just said really terrible things to her, Harry. I’m sorry.”

“Like what?”

She hesitates before answering, wincing at the foggy memories from last night and praying she could take it all back. “I just…” she drops her eyes from Harry’s unable to look at him and admit everything, “I told her that she wasn’t good enough for you and that you just didn’t realize it yet. And um… I said that… that,” she sighs, finally realizing just how childish she’d been after hearing her words out loud again and while sober this time. “I said that everything would be better without her.”

He even flinches at that one, not ever taking Sammy as someone capable of saying those things to anyone, no matter how mad she might’ve been. Everything suddenly made sense to him though, her sudden outburst in the office and why she’d turned to her vices this early in the morning. And it hurt him knowing that she never told him any of this. That Sammy was the one who’d put those thoughts in Y/N’s head.

“Are you fucking serious? I know what I did to you was shitty, but if you’re going to be mad at anyone, it should be me, not her.” When Harry raised his voice is when the entire office finally took notice of the two of them, and luckily there weren’t currently any patients in the waiting room to hear him as well.

“I know, I’m sorry. I was drunk and…”

“And what?” He practically shouts, “Do you know how long it took me to convince her that she deserves so much more than she thinks? And then you go and say the one thing that makes her fall apart again just like that.”

Sammy’s quiet, head bowed and ashamed and slowly getting a grasp on just how much Harry actually cares about Y/N. That what she’d said wasn’t even true. There had never been and would never be a chance that Harry could come running back to Sammy. And it’s abundantly clear now that nothing they did was ever meant to hurt her, it was just that Harry had been falling for someone else.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles again and Harry shakes his head, not accepting her apology for one second.

“No.” His sharp voice cuts through Sammy’s self-pity and she looks at him for a final time,  “I’m sorry. I should have told you. And I think it’s best we both leave each other alone.”

seven

It may not have been his best idea ever, to have copied Y/N’s address from her patient file onto a sticky note he stole from Sammy’s desk long after she had gone home for the day, but at this point he had a plethora of bad ideas involving Y/N that made his current one a little less terrible.

And it was only bad because he’d raced to her apartment after his shift only to knock on her door incessantly for an entire minute and a half just for there to be no one home. Running an anxious hand through his hair as he stepped away from her door, he just hoped she wasn’t at some party getting wasted as she usually did on Saturday nights, and especially when she was already feeling particularly sorry for herself.

“Are you looking for Y/N?” He swivels around quick at the sound of the one and only name he cares about at the moment, and finds Maddy carrying heavy textbooks down the hall towards him.

“Yeah, do you know where she is?”

Maddy frowns when she gets close to him, stopping as she flips her keys around in her hand to find the one that opens the door to their apartment and Harry realizes then that Maddy and Y/N aren’t just friends.

And he hates himself for thinking he has one more thing in common with Y/N: shitty roommates with no moral compasses.

“I don’t know.” If it wasn’t for the genuinely concerned look on Maddy’s face as she unlocks their front door, he might be a little more angry at how extremely unhelpful she is. Instead, he’s worried, even beyond that. He’s petrified at the reality that even her roommate has no clue where she is.

And if he hadn’t literally dragged her ass out of a party while she was high on heroin, he wouldn’t be nearly shitting himself now.

He watches at the doorway while Maddy sets down her books on the couch and disappears into their apartment in what he hopes is a successful mission to find Y/N. He almost finds himself praying that she finds her passed out on her bed, which wouldn’t be the best situation either, but it’s better than not having a single clue.

When Maddy returns, it’s with an even more concerning look on her face. “She’s not here… maybe she went to a party? There’s a few I know of…”

“Could you take me to them?”

“Is something going on?”

Harry runs shaking fingers through his hair for probably the hundredth time since he’d left the office. “We didn’t um… leave on good terms. I tried calling her number but I think her phone’s off.”

Maddy just nods and picks her purse up again, hiking the strap over her shoulder. “Okay, there’s um... Jason’s house around the block.” She begins, stepping out of the apartment and joining Harry on the balcony. “He pretty much parties all day on Saturdays, and she usually starts the night there.”

***

Jason’s apartment is big, and Harry understands now why he binge partied in it so often. He could fit a small army on the top floor of one of the nicer buildings off-campus. Even so, the second Harry steps through the door behind Maddy, he knows it isn’t the kind of scene he ever wants to be in again. If people weren’t popping pills and snorting cocaine and doing god knows what else, they were practically having sex in whatever corner they could find. The place is trashed, not a single surface isn’t covered in red solo cups and empty bottles of booze. Just walking through the crowd, he steps on a crushed water bottle and trips over someone’s missing shoe.

It’s a fucking disaster.

“I think we should split up!” Maddy shouts over the music, twisting her head around just in time to see him nodding in agreement.

From there she disappears into the sea of undergrads, pushing through people like she’d done it a million times. Harry isn’t as hands-on, however, just trying his best not to become a fourth member of an orgy or get beer spilled on him.

It smells like cigarettes and dirty laundry; weed and the underside of someone’s armpit after they’d worked out… and then didn’t shower for a week. It smells like tequila and an unsuccessful attempt at covering all the horrible odors with Axe body spray.

And by the time he hears someone yell out Jason’s name, he already feels like throwing up.

Even while nauseous, Harry still follows the shouting of an unfamiliar college student with bleach blonde hair through a cloud of smoke until the other boy meets whom Harry can only assume is the infamous Jason.

Taking a deep breath to calm his stomach, which doesn’t help as much as he hoped it would, he pushes his way through until he’s standing right in front of Jason and all his friends.

“‘Scuse me, sorry.” They all look at him like he’s just a little bit crazy and maybe he is. This wasn’t some place Harry had ever ended up on a Saturday night, not even in his first four years of college. “Have any of you seen Y/N?”

Like a bomb had gone off, they all burst out laughing. Some snicker to themselves while others whisper into their friends’ ears about things Harry doesn’t even want to imagine. Why does just mentioning Y/N illicit that kind of reaction?

“Man, if she’s here, she’s probably fucking some loser in my bed again,” Jason explains, forcing Harry into a whirlwind of emotions. Once they all leave him alone, off to get even more wasted, Harry stands there stunned like he doesn’t know how to process anything anymore.

It’s the first time he’s hearing anything about Y/N’s sex life that hadn’t come from Zayn’s mouth. He would have preferred to hear it from his roommate instead of a bunch of strangers. But, he knew what she was like, he just never really knew she had that sort of reputation. And he doesn’t know how to feel about it now.

His need to vomit reaches new heights.

Luckily, Maddy isn’t far when he finds her again, closing the door to what he assumes is Jason’s bedroom behind her and letting out a breath of relief that Y/N isn’t following.

“She’s not here!” Maddy shouts over the music that had somehow gotten louder as the night progressed. She traces her eyes around the apartment with her arms crossed over her chest for a while as they both think of what to do next. But Harry has no clue and thankfully, Maddy comes up with something else.

“But I know another place!”

***

Their next stop is a house this time, shared by a bunch of girls Y/N and Maddy had befriended at some point throughout college. And even though he tries his hardest to focus on the road, to give Maddy’s directions his complete, undivided attention, Harry is still lost in his thoughts.

So while they stop at a red light, he lets them out.

“I didn’t know Y/N had such a bad reputation.” Part of him did know it all along, though. He just didn’t really care. But what Jason had said still bothers him, enough to bring it up with Y/N’s not so morally innocent roommate.

Maddy sighs in the seat beside him. “It’s not really that bad, those guys are just…”

When she doesn’t finish, Harry glances over at her quizzically. His eyebrows pull tight almost like, from an outsider’s perspective, he’s angry. But he really just wants to know what she means.

Just as the light turns green, she sees that look on his face and makes herself clear. “I mean, they can go around and fuck whoever they want and be gods because of it. And then turn around and treat her like the biggest slut on the planet.”

Harry tightens his grip on the steering wheel the farther Maddy gets into her explanation, not realizing that he is actually angry now. Beyond angry, actually. Enraged might be a better word for it. For the way his mind spins so fast it can be nothing but a wave of fiery emotion. Even when Maddy moves on to tell him to turn down the next street, he’s stuck on it still.

To the point where he’s hoping another stupid boy would say something just so he could make a permanent imprint of his fist in their face.

The next party is a little more tame, like it had been planned and not just a free for all like Jason’s. He learns the two girls Maddy knows best are named Layla and Julia. And that they definitely had not seen Y/N at any point in the night.

Harry starts to get his hopes up, watching in disappointment while the girls shake their heads for a final time. Locating Y/N was becoming a much harder task than he had ever anticipated.

And then someone interrupts.

“Are you guys looking for Y/N?” The guy seems to be genuine, even though he looked like any other fuckboy on this campus. Disregarding the boy’s lack of shirt and empty bottle of whiskey in hand, Harry perks up a little bit at the chance of getting some kind of an answer. That maybe the girls hadn’t seen her tonight, but he had.

“Yeah, have you seen her?” Maddy asks the question on Harry’s mind before he can.

Harry knows it had been too good to be true when an awful, evil smirk spreads across the boy’s face. That’s all it really takes for Harry, to be honest, but then he has to open his mouth again too and push Harry right over the edge.

“Yeah, she was sucking my dick five minutes ago, you just missed her,” he laughs, not realizing the time-bomb he just set off inside Harry.

“Mark! You’re such a fucking--” Laya shouts, smacking Mark’s shoulder, and then is immediately cut off because Harry really just can’t hold it back any longer. They all gasp when Harry takes an intimidating step forward, pushing Maddy out of his way, as his fist cuts through the air.

And it feels good, punching stupid Mark in his stupid face. Hitting him so hard square on it makes Mark trip over himself and fall against other people. Harry doesn’t even care about his own impending sore knuckles, the blood dripping from Mark’s nose is well worth it.

Harry makes another move toward him, not quite finished yet, but he’s pulled away instead.

Maddy grabs hold of Harry’s fighting arm before he does anything else. And it takes everything out of her to do so, because Harry really wants to give him a matching black eye on the other side of his face.

“Come on, it’s not worth it,” she pleads with him and eventually he lets it go. Looking around at everyone staring is enough to shake himself out of Maddy’s hold and storm out the front door back to his car as quickly as he can.

Quick enough that Maddy has to chase after him and spend time catching her breath once she’s in the passenger seat of his car.

“I warned you.” She mumbles in an I-told-you-so kind of tone that does nothing to make him any less mad.

Realizing this, that he is still seeing red and anything she has to say isn’t helping, she lets him calm down quietly. Instead, she flips between her phone, where she checks text messages and social media to find out about other parties going on, and him. Glancing at him every now and again to check on him, but remaining silent.

She doesn’t know him very well, but from what Y/N had told her about Harry, he doesn’t seem like the type to blow up the way he had. So she can’t be too sure he’s functioning properly right now.

When his breathing seems to even out and his features soften up again like normal, she clears her throat. “We can check the Sigma Chi house.”

He almost goes right back into it then and there.

“A fraternity?” He groans, wiping his hands down his face dramatically because it is the very last place he had wanted to end up. He has no clue why Y/N would ever associate with a bunch of liver-diseased, morally corrupt frat boys.

“Unfortunately,” Maddy starts, Harry’s ears turning up at the way her annunciation of the word slurs but not thinking too much of it with everything else going on, “but she’s slept with almost every guy there and they’re having a party.”

“Fantastic.”

***

Harry’s not mad anymore. Maybe a little bit at all the guys he still wants to punch. But he’s not mad. He doesn’t feel any differently about Y/N either. Maybe judging her a little for making the rounds with a bunch of idiot frat guys, but he’s not mad. Jealous is more appropriate. Jealous that other people have laid their disgusting hands on her. That she felt so poorly about herself to seek out those kinds of situations. He really wouldn’t care as much about her sex life if he didn’t know her. If he didn’t know that she tossed her life into anybody’s arms just to feel worthy of something, because she thought she didn’t deserve any better.

Maybe he’s a little mad. At himself. For ever having been a source of making her feel that way when he had just been too stupid to tell her how he really felt.

Fraternities are equivalent to the ninth ring of hell, in Harry’s opinion. Just the culture surrounding them should have been more than enough to eradicate them long ago. But alas, here he is, leading the way into the Sigma Chi house while Maddy struggles to keep up with him.

This time, though, it’s not because he’s going to fast, he’s not storming in through the front door, fists blaring. No.

It’s because Maddy can barely see straight now.

And he doesn’t realize what she had done until after he searches the entire house top to bottom. Until he’s asked every random person he can if they’d seen her. Until he’s done checking behind every door and still coming up empty. Until he catches a glimpse of Maddy through the crowd downstairs and realizes… she hasn’t been helping him look for Y/N at all.

Unless she had found Y/N at the bottom of a shot glass.

“Hey!” He shouts, placing his hand on her shoulder to get her attention. And the second Maddy turns around, a huge grin spreading across her face, he figures it out.

Her pupils are dilated.

He has no clue when, during their long and endless night, she had found the time to get high, but she most definitely is. And she’s also shouting at him like a drunk person would, turning the last vowel of his name into a high-pitched screech that makes him cringe.

He also cringes when she offers him a shot, and instead he tries to remind her why they’re at the party to begin with. “Y/N’s not here.”

“Who cares? Here!” She shoves the shot towards him again, and he’s a little more standoffish this time, making it very obvious he wants nothing to do with the alcohol in her hand. Or the way she wraps the arm attached to that hand around his neck. Getting closer than she’s supposed to, and sufficiently making him uncomfortable and angry all over again.

“You don’t need Y/N, Harry. You can have anyone else and they’d be better.” He’s not nice anymore. Not when her free hand is slipping down to his jeans and especially not when she talks about Y/N the same way all the guys had.

He pushes her off, every nice bone in his body leaving the building. He’s done. Absolutely done with all of it and with her. With Y/N’s too-faced, selfish, backstabbing roommate. And it takes everything in him not to hit her. But if Maddy were a guy, he might. And it takes everything in him not to blow up either.

“If you’re not going to help me then I’m leaving.” He’s stern with her instead. Straight up. Even if she’s looking at him like he’d just murdered her first born.

“Fine! Fuck off!” She pours the shot she’d been haggling Harry with down her throat. “Good luck finding your slutty girlfriend.”

Again, it takes everything in him.

Every little stitch of his being is working to keep his hands at his side and his mouth shut. Which he’s thankful for by the time he reaches his car again, because the best revenge is leaving her here. Giving zero fucks about what happens to her or how she might get home. He simply… does not care. Not one bit.

He slams his forehead against the steering wheel once the bubbling anger fully subsides, and he realizes he still has not found Y/N. And at this point in the night, he’s losing hope fast. Every inch of his brain is working overdrive to think of where she might be. Where he’d seen her go before.

But then it hits him like a fucking lightening bolt, or a coconut to the head.

He sits straight up and struggles getting his key in the ignition with unsteady hands. But he finally figured it out. This had to be it. And he could not get there soon enough.

***

Cindy’s diner looks exactly how it always has. But he doesn’t really care about the regulars and the familiar, overwhelming scent of coffee (which he swears they clean their tables with, but that’s another story). No. He cares about finding an even more familiar pair of eyes.

And once he’s whipped his head around in every direction, he finally stops. Because right when he’s about to come to terms with being wrong, there she is. But it isn’t her eyes that catch his attention, it’s her hair. He hadn’t spotted her right away because she had her head down on the table at the very last booth in the back.

His heart races so fast as he walks towards her, thinking it might actually malfunction right there in the middle of the diner. And when he’s standing right in front of her, he realizes she hadn’t been at a single fucking party. She’d been here, eating waffles and letting a cup of coffee go cold.

His heart’s ready to take off when he slips into the booth opposite her, shaking the table just enough to get her to look at him. To get her to lift her head and peek up at whoever the fuck had decided to sit at her table while she was trying to sleep off too much maple syrup.

“Do you know how hard it is to find you?”

He smells like cigarettes and weed, and very unlike himself. And then she does something he never would have expected her to. She smiles. “How many parties did you go to before you ended up here?”

“Too many,” he sighs and she sees it on his face that he’s had a rough night and almost feels bad for being amused by it. “Which reminds me,” he sits forward a little bit, closer to her, “Your roommate’s a bitch.”

She nods as if it’s obvious. “I know.”

He’s still reeling though. “Think we need to trade you and Zayn out.”

“Why do I have to be the one to move?” She teases.

“I don’t care who moves. Whatever it takes to get rid of their toxic asses.”

She laughs this time, and he’s just happy to have found her not high off her ass at some batshit party. Resting her head on her arms again, she looks peacefully content, and he is too while they just sit in silence together naturally. It’s not awkward or weird at all, but rather soft and fulfilling.

He almost hates to break it, but he has to.

“You deserve the world, Y/N. Not these stupid boys who treat everyone like shit. Definitely not your fucking roommate. You’re too smart and beautiful and… incredible for all that bullshit.”

She stares at the table while he talks, the smile slowly melting off her face. And once he’s done, she mumbles, “Still doesn't mean I deserve you.”

“No, you deserve better than me. I’ve been an idiot. The biggest idiot that ever existed.” He pauses just to watch her smile again, not even mad that she finds amusement in him making fun of himself. It’s true, after all. He’s stupid for wasting so much time. “I’m just an idiot sitting in front of the most amazing person I know, asking for a second chance.”

Her smile widens even more as she finally sits up and faces him head on. But then she tilts her head to the side, and narrows her eyes at him like she genuinely has to consider his second chance. And if it wasn’t for the teasing tone of her voice, he would be worried. “I don’t know… I’ll have to think about it.”

She loves seeing his dimples in full action, more than she loves most other things. So when they make an appearance because of something she had done, the warmest, fluttering feeling spreads all across her body. Something she never thought another human being could ever make her feel.

“Well, let me know when you do.” He says, biting his lip.

“Oh I will. After you give me a ride home.”

***

His car smells even worse than he does himself and she can’t help but wonder how his night had gone. If his hair had been all mangled because he’d been tugging on it constantly like he does. If his skin had been flushed from going in and out of strange parties all night. If…

If his knuckles were red from…

She stares at his right hand as he grips the steering wheel just moments after starting the car. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, how red and irritated his knuckles were like he’d just finished punching something or, even worse, someone.

“What happened to your hand?” She finally asks when he’s turning out of the parking lot and onto the main street toward her apartment.

He glances at the steering wheel, his face going a little sour and she knows it isn’t something he’d like to reminisce on. So he gives her the short answer. “There was this really annoying guy.”

She can do nothing but giggle at the fact he’d really punched someone on the quest of finding her. And her brain bounces all over the place wondering which guy she knew had finally pushed every single one of Harry’s grumpy buttons to earn a black eye from him.

“Y’think that’s funny then?” He asks, glancing at her while she continues to openly laugh at him. But when she sees the same sour look on his face, she eases up on him the tiniest bit.

“It’s a little funny,” She admits cautiously, only trying to make him feel better about something that had clearly bugged him. Because she doesn’t know one single guy that didn’t deserve to get clocked by him. Because even with Harry’s general gloominess, she was pretty sure it would take a lot to get him that angry at someone. And she does want to know why. What had been said to have Harry resorting to physical violence, but she knew better than to ask right now.

His entire night would have to be a story for a different day.

When they’re finally in the parking lot of her building, he remembers Maddy and where his night had begun on the doorstep of their room before things had gone to shit. Before he punched someone, before Maddy got high and showed him her true colors. The only thing he’s glad about, while walking her up to her door now, is that no matter how shitty it had gotten, at least he’d found her at the end of it. At least she had been sober from any illegal substances (if not necessarily from breakfast foods).

He’s just glad to have her hand slipping into his, intertwining their fingers in a way they’d never done before that turns him into soft pudding inside. He only realizes how she makes him feel when she pulls away to unlock her door and he’s cold and bitterly alone without her touch.

But when she pushes the door open and grabs his hand to lead him inside, all is right in the world again.

And he hopes nothing more has to be said. That she believes him this time. That all their mistakes and stupidity can be left in the past, and that they can start right now.

She turns to him after he shuts the door, backtracking her steps until she’s inches from him, making his heart race. Making it pound against his chest faster when she slips her hands up behind his neck, wrapping her arms around him and pulling herself closer. It reminds him of the last time they were like this when they were on his doorstep and then on his kitchen counter.

He chose to forget about their encounter at the dentist earlier that morning because frankly, neither of their heads had been screwed on quite right. And it’s better remembering her sober moments anyways.

Gently resting her forehead against his, the smiles spreading across both their faces seem to grow at the same pace. They’re finally on the same page again, and everything feels brand new.

“Does that mean you’ve thought about it?” He asks quietly, getting a little bit lost in her eyes just in time to notice the way she glances at his lips while he talks.

She nods her head up and down, making his follow the same motions from where they’re connected. “I thought about how you being an idiot wasn’t the right terminology… and that asshole is a little more fitting.”

“Shut the fuck up,” he mutters between a lighthearted chuckle because he knows she knows just how much he hates being called an asshole. And for them to come full circle, it makes him so dizzy with happiness, that he feels like passing out.

She tilts her head again, not even trying to hide the fact that she’s staring at his lips. And just before she opens her mouth, she finds his eyes again. Challenging him.

“Make me.”

He gives in too easily, even though he knows she’s just trying to get him to kiss her. She really doesn’t have to go to any lengths to get him to do that, but he still has a little fun with it first.

His own arms wrap around her waist, pulling her further onto her toes and even closer to his chest. Where his nose brushes against hers and she can practically feel his lips on her own even though he’s refusing to kiss her still. To let her sit in anticipation just a little bit longer.

When he’s had his fun, when he looks back up at her eyes and sees the way she looks like she might just murder him, he laughs and brings one hand up to the side of her face, wrapping his fingers around her jaw and getting them twisted in her hair. He tilts her head back slightly, admiring the way she looks at him and wondering how in the fuck he even got here. How does she still want anything to do with him?

He glances back and forth between both her curious eyes, deciding that if she would stop doubting herself, so would he.

And kissing her is just as good as the other times he did it, but somehow better now. Somehow sweeter and deeper. Like they both need each other to breathe and to feel. It makes him crash against her a little harder, supporting the middle of her back so he doesn’t accidentally tip her over. He needs her and the way she’s kissing him back and hugging him close makes him feel like maybe she needs him too.

It doesn’t take long for her to start backing up. Taking him with her as she blindly makes way toward her bedroom. On the way there, they clumsily bump themselves against furniture and walls until something a lot softer hits her back when he lays her down on her bed. And he follows her like a lost puppy until their mouths meet again near her cloud of pillows.

Shoes are gone first, and after he kicks his off, he sits back on his folded legs and takes care of hers. Slipping her out of her sneakers easily before tracing seams all the way back up to the zipper on her pants. She takes a deep breath while watching his fingers undo them slowly, while he peels her jeans off her body. And when he’s crawling back up the second time, it’s with hands rough against the outside of her bare thighs until his hips are spreading her open more than before as he fits himself between her legs like he belongs there.

The second he’s within reach, however, even with his forehead on hers and his mouth ready when she is, she becomes more concerned with getting his shirt off. She doesn’t even care about his well-being when it gets a little caught in his hair. She only cares about the goofy face he makes once his shirt is off, like she’d just put him through a whirlwind. She only cares about the way his necklace falls back into place against his collarbone. The way the ink on his skin stands out but also fits him perfectly. The way he slips back down to her level, pinning her arms above her head, both in a giggling fit until his mouth captures hers again and the rest is history.

When they’re kissing, when one of his hands is wandering off someplace he’d been before, she reaches into her nightstand. Once she’s found what she’s looking for, after various failed attempts at searching around the drawer blindly with her fingertips, she presses the little square package into the middle of Harry’s abdomen. Right on top of the butterfly.

It’s all she can manage after he slips his fingers beneath her underwear and sees for himself how wet she’d gotten without very much effort. Not that he’s any better off behind the zipper of his own restraining pair of jeans.

He sits up again and takes the condom from her with his free hand while her arm falls like jello onto the mattress, making him laugh a little bit more.

“Don’t tell me that’s too small.” She says, noticing the way he hesitates for a moment, waiting for the same reaction every guy had given her because of the medium-sized condoms she owns.

“No, it’s just… this brand is shit.”

Her eyebrows furrow then, not at all expecting him to say that. “Oh so it’s not that your dick is too big but you don’t like Durex?”

He shakes his head, dimples reappearing because he really should have seen that one coming. “Anyone talking about how big their dick is... has a little one.” He pinches his two fingers together after handing the thing back to her, reaching into his back pocket instead.

“Please don’t tell me you carry condoms in your wallet,” she cringes even though he is most definitely taking his wallet out.

“S’not like I use them everyday. Just like to be prepared.” She watches as he pulls out a little black package, not recognizing the brand but trusting him enough to use what makes him feel most comfortable.

And while he relocates his wallet to her nightstand, she’s already undoing the button on his jeans, swallowing thickly in anticipation of what he has hiding underneath.

He sits back on his knees again, out of her reach and questioning her in a very familiar way. They had been here before, it had just led to his kitchen counter instead. “Someone’s in a hurry…”

Ripping open the condom distracts him enough so that he doesn’t see her pouty face at first. Not until after she opens her mouth and makes him freeze in place.

“I need you.”

He stares at her for a while, recalling the last time she’d said those three little words and how it did the trick of getting exactly what she wanted. It doesn’t matter to him though, just the way she pleads with him now is enough for him to stop wasting so much time.

He doesn’t even bother getting out of his jeans, just pulls the important bits out, secures the condom around himself and meets her halfway again.

And she’d been watching him too, confirming for the first time that he was, in fact, not small. Even so, when he pulls her panties to the side with eager help from her to get them the fuck out of the way already, she doesn’t expect it. Doesn’t expect the way he goes so slow, filling her up until he’s able to reach her forehead with his again, forcing her to look at him and nothing else. It’s not like anything she’s ever done before. It’s less purely sexual when they’re getting lost in each other’s eyes. When Harry is wiping away the loose strands of hair stuck to her face. When her heart races not from his dick but from the way his necklace trails against her collarbone.

When it’s just quiet between them. They aren’t bickering at each other. No yelling about stupid shit in a parking lot. No less than sober messiness. Just them and their in-sync moans when getting to really know each other for the first time.

Although, some things are familiar. Like when Harry’s fingers find their way to her mouth again and she loses his eyes to the way her tongue swirls around his fingertips. Or when he uses those same fingers to rub against her clit and get her off even more than what he’s already doing. Or when her hand is in his hair again, tugging on it to find some sort of relief from how good he feels.

Then there’s the familiar way he grins at her when she calls him an asshole again for stopping. But not caring too much when he does so to finally take the rest of his clothes off. She doesn’t care much after he’s done burying both their bodies underneath the covers and diving right back in again. She liked the way his denim had felt against her bare skin, but having just Harry is even better.

He goes deeper than before, having to rest his head on her shoulder while her arms wrap tightly around his neck, carving half-moon shapes into his sweaty skin with her fingers dug into his backside.

“I need you, too,” he mutters near her ear, his voice straining and if she didn’t know any better she might think he was in pain. “So much,” he continues in heavy breaths, “more than you know.”

When he faces her again, she knows he isn’t just talking about sex. It isn’t the same as when she’d said it, when she had just wanted him to fuck her already. It’s like he needs her, like without her he would be lost. And like maybe they were more similar than she had thought.

His fingers are back in her mouth after he kisses her again, when he needs his mouth to get out proper breaths because they’re both close, and he’s not showing any signs of slowing down. He can feel the beads of sweat dripping from his hairline, but he doesn’t care. It’s hot and he needs her.

She jolts up against him in a fit when she comes, half a second before he does too until he’s able to hold her down again. To keep himself buried inside of her while they’re just a mixture of moans and yelps and screams.

And neither of them quite enjoy it being over, but they know they have all the time in the world to do everything as many times as they want to. So, Harry falls to the side of her, taking care of the mess he made inside his high-quality condom before coming back to her. He wraps his arm behind her shoulders and pulls her close. Neither of them keeping their eyes open too well and both of them still trying to catch their breath.

Still, he manages to kiss the top of her forehead, which somehow makes her start laughing. Possibly for the same reason she makes him laugh again too. That they’d wasted so much time when they could’ve been doing this all along. That where they had started didn’t seem like they’d ever end up here.

And then he rests his head back on her pillows, staring up at the ceiling and admiring the sound of her giggles because he didn’t get to hear them that often.

He’s still on his daydreamy cloud when he mumbles, “Y’know I’m serious ‘bout you moving in.”

***

thank you for reading!

I cant get this page to go away. I'm sorry for fooling you into thinking there was more but there’s not. Have a good day!