Inherent

Harry’s new promise is hard to comprehend. Is he really telling me that he knows I’m keeping something from him, that he’s known for a while now? Even before he started to question me at lunch yesterday? I must be so transparent for Harry to be able to pick apart each and every one of my actions, my unspoken thoughts. And is he really so understanding, so caring, that he isn’t even really angry at me for it… and I can tell him when I’m ready?

Okay, I’m no fool. I can tell he isn’t pleased about me keeping something from him. But throughout the whole time he kept his cool, he didn’t blow up like I expected him to, even while I’m aware he doesn’t like to have to wait for me to tell him something I already admitted he should know.

Whatever I did to deserve a man like Harry in my life is beyond me. I know I don’t deserve such kindness and understanding. I wonder what Harry could possibly think this is all over; his guesses are probably miles away from an illness like mine.

Just as I’m not a fool, I’m likewise not naïve to what could very well happen once I do find the courage and look past all the reasons why I shouldn’t, and I tell him. He won’t be so sympathetic. It will be like ripping off my carefully constructed mask and showing Harry who I truly am. That person underneath the façade is even more broken than he already thinks she is. Because why would Harry want me when he could have any other girl he desires? A girl without a damaged heart.

Such faith from him I never expected. Such acceptance. I expected for him to grow angry, to shout and tell me what a terrible person I am. Not this, not patience.

As I wait for the popcorn in the microwave, all these conflicted thoughts mingle together in my mind, but ultimately I’m left in disbelief.

Harry shouldn’t be like this with me, so complacent, but he is. A warm feeling spreads throughout my chest when I look down at the pendant still hung from my neck. He must be crazy, but I will be forever grateful. Grateful and totally in love with his way with words in that he knows exactly what to say, the right promises to make, and more than anything else that I can put the faith in him to keep those promises. I love how he knows when to touch me, what to do to calm me.

Everything about Harry is perfect. Yes, I see some of his imperfections like his anger which he has always managed to keep control over while in my presence. I see all of him, and he is absolutely perfect.

I look out the small window in the kitchen door that leads out to the backyard, but it’s long past dusk and I can’t see anything but the darkened night. Harry ventured out there after he convinced me to let him stay—no. That’s not right. Harry went outside after he told me point blank that he’s staying whether I like it or not. Perhaps he could sense that I don’t want to be alone even though I tried to convince him otherwise.

After I floundered awkwardly thereafter, still trying to grasp the true meaning and depth to his promise… that he’ll stay, Harry suggested we at least try to act like all of this is normal and watch a movie. Normalcy is what I need, I realize, and I’m thankful that he knows me better than perhaps I know myself.

I then faced reality and figured out that I can’t get any more work done on the website tonight, that is at least if I don’t want a massive migraine. If Alex doesn’t come through in the next few days, I’m going to have to source another, probably more expensive, web coder to do the job. I don’t want that, but I’ll have to bite the bullet if I want my extravagant plans for Lou’s website to come to life.

Startling me from my reverie, the microwave dings and I take the popcorn out and place it in a large bowl to share with Harry. Then, after I bite my lip in contemplation for a moment, I finally decide to shrug on a light zip up sweater and venture outside to see what Harry’s gotten up to, bringing the popcorn with me.

Since it’s almost June the night air is cool but not overly so, and the lone red oak tree in the back yard has finally begun to bloom after the cold, hard winter. Spring has always been a season that signifies hope for me, and Harry is in the middle of it all, his lithe body strewn out across the green grass as he stares up at the darkening sky with his arms braced behind his head. He doesn’t move a muscle even after the door squeaks shut, ruining my otherwise silent entrance. I feel as if I’m interrupting something meaningful, something I don’t quite comprehend, and I stay rooted to the small deck in front of the door. Watching Harry in wonder.

What does he see up in that dark sky that’s caught his undivided attention? It’s yet another one of his mysteries.

“Are you coming or what?” He calls huskily, teasing, and finally my limbs propel me forward. Harry doesn’t remove his gaze from the sky when I sit cross-legged beside him with the bowl of popcorn set in my lap. I worry that he might be getting cold from the ground through his thin shirt. To top it all off he walked out here barefoot without so much as a pair of socks—though he looks content enough, and I decide not to comment.

So I stay quiet, afraid to break the silence that has enveloped the yard. All that can be heard is the scattered passing car out front and the hint of unseen chirping grasshoppers. It’s a comfortable sort of silence, one where I put myself in Harry’s perspective and try to figure out what he could possibly be thinking about in this very moment.

Laying here, in the weird book store girl’s back yard after he made it official and got to second base. Oh, Jesus. I can feel my entire body react through intense heat and clenched muscles just from thinking about what transpired not too long ago.

I jump when Harry moves for the first time since I came outside, reaching to take a fistful of popcorn from the bowl, and he spares me a glance of amusement for my obvious nervousness before he looks back up to the sky. He munches on the popcorn, lost in his mind like I am a lot of the time.

“There’s maybe one thing I don’t like about cities,” he murmurs in thought.

“What’s that?” I ask tentatively when several seconds pass and he doesn’t elaborate.

Personally, I don’t like a bunch of things about cities—if I had it my way I’d live in a small town, but Chicago is the only place I have to call home anymore. I’ve learned to, at the very least, appreciate it for what it is. Full of life. Of course, as always, I’m eager to gain a little deeper insight into Harry and all the things that make him tick. Conversation like this also takes my mind away from our heated confrontation just a while ago in the kitchen. From my new admission, how close I’d been to ruining everything by telling Harry of my heart, and then his new promise.

Of proving me wrong. I still can’t quite believe he feels so strongly about me that he’d go so far as to say nothing I could tell him would make him leave. As always, it’s a bold claim. It’s just as tenacious as Harry is himself.

“You can’t see hardly any stars,” he frowns, and I look up at the sky now too. Indeed, all I can make out in the darkened night is the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt and a bright, shining star off to the northwest. If memory serves me correct, that would be Jupiter. They miraculously manage to shine through the orange haze created by all the city’s lights. There are a few other faint trickles of starlight throughout the sky, but none of them decipherable.

“I remember I used to look at the sky all the time when I was younger,” he continues, still deep in thought as if he’s recalling a vague memory. I listen intently. “In my village, the sky would be full.”

“So did I,” I can’t help but to gush, surprised once again by this new side of Harry. A star gazer I certainly have not pegged him for, though the knowledge is undeniably pleasing—something we have in common, and that’s nice to have when in every other aspect we both seem like polar opposites. I decide to seize this opportunity and share a little about myself, too, something I haven’t talked about with anyone. “My dad had a cabin in New York when we lived there, and I used to love staying out in the woods for a few weeks every summer. Just to look at the stars. It was beautiful.”

The cabin is still in the family. Mom has legal ownership over it, though she never uses it and has someone hired to keep up its maintenance. Even after they separated after I was born, Dad still left it to her. Caleb explained to me a long time ago when we were just kids, shortly after he died, that Dad gave it to Mom because he wanted her to carry on the tradition of taking us out there as a refuge from the city life she loved in New York City, but she didn’t.

“You don’t anymore?” He asks, casually and out of curiosity, likewise interested in what I have to say since, aside from small outbursts when I can’t take it any longer, I open up about myself perhaps less than he does. With a stab of pain I have to remind myself that’s all it is for Harry, innocent curiosity, and not to tear up like a fool.

“No,” I say, losing the small amount of happiness and relief I was beginning to feel before I stupidly brought this on myself. I realize this is another thing I’ve neglected to tell Harry, but not on purpose. Because if I don’t talk about it I don’t think about it, and if I don’t think about it I can pretend to forget. “He—my dad. He died.”

It’s crazy to think I’ve gone this long without mentioning it. I know he’s probably been curious about my family aside from Grandma and Caleb. Only after I say it out loud do I realize what a shock it must be to Harry, to blurt something so heavy when we’re laying out casually in my backyard in light-hearted conversation about the stars. If nothing else, it’s another example of how I can never go about things the normal way. I always have to screw up something.

And I’m right. Harry snaps his head to look up at me in shock, his eyes wide though unreadable, and when I don’t say anything more he rushes to sit up straight. I sit there, still impassive, and think about how I just screwed up what could have been a perfect night.

“Jules,” he blanks, like he can’t find any other words to say. Oh, no… only now do I think about how this might cause Harry to worry over me even more.

Forcing myself from my sad, numbed daze, I reach forward to place a mollifying hand on his knee. “It’s fine. It happened a long time ago.”

But it isn’t fine and Harry knows that better than I do. His gaze travels from my hand at his knee to my face, incredulous. His next move is as shocking as my sudden admission—with a quick entirely too easy yank at my wrist he pulls me forward and forcibly into his arms, settling me easily into his lap.

“Shit,” I curse. This might be the first time I’ve ever sworn around Harry, and I believe it’s definitely appropriate. “I just ruined it, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Shut up, you crazy girl, before you make me mad,” Harry says in disbelief, his hand tight around my arm still while his other has snaked around my waist.

Despite the dampened mood, I feel secure in his arms and less like I need to cry. I can tell Harry’s still trying to process the information, and I feel terrible. Maybe he’s thinking something along the lines of how a dead brother he could deal with… but a secret… and now a dead father on top of that?

It’s too much. For me. I know without doubt it must be for Harry. Way, way too much. It’s hard for me to even understand what he says, so caught up in reliving the grief and trying to hide it at the same time. Remarkably quick to recuperate after he stunned me to silence, I blankly return Harry’s stare, which is much more intense than mine, and his expression is for once open to interpretation; vulnerable.

He’s sad for me again. I instantly feel worse.

“How old were you?” he asks quietly, unsure whether he should press for any details. He’s deserves them, however. I’d be even more selfish than I thought if I left him with all these worries and no explanation.

Simply grateful not hear an apology for Dad’s death like I’ve received so many times over the years, I answer with uncharacteristic honesty. This is information I can’t hold back. “Eight.”

“He had a heart attack.” I watch his eyes soften even more when he hears it happened at such a young age. I can never decide whether the timing of Dad’s death was for better or worse… on one hand, at least I didn’t have to go through it as a teenager, but on the other… I grew up alone. Grandma was there, sure, and Caleb too, but a lot of the time I separated myself from everyone because of it. This is what I’ve become, what I have grown into, the way I am. All because of stupid little electrical impulses in the heart that can’t keep themselves functioning normally.

And it had been so hard for me, for my eight year old self to cope with my dad being there one day and then not the next. The resulting discovery of my inherited condition is perhaps the one thing I have left from him. And that’s the saddest thought I’ve had all night.

“Jules,” he says, and my heart shatters all at once into painful sharp fragments, bursting through my chest in splinters of despair when I hear Harry’s own anguish. Instantly I reach to comfort him; when I decided to open up this much to him, I didn’t expect for him to be so sad. I regret it now, and express it through gently pressing my palm against the curve of his jaw. “It’s okay. Really, Harry. It was a long time ago. I’m okay.”

He rears back again in disbelief, and my hand falls from his face. Now is the first time ever Harry looks as if he doesn’t know what to make of me, like he doesn’t understand.

“Let me get this straight,” he starts slowly, still dubious and perhaps even a little annoyed. “You’ve just told me that your father passed away, when you were just a child, and you’re trying to comfort me?”

Angry. He sounds angry, and I stare at him in much more subdued confusion. His jaw jumps in a frightening way, like he’s trying hard to restrain himself from saying anything more. I fight the urge to spring from his lap and give him some space, though mostly because I know he wouldn’t let me. When Harry looks up to me again, eyes hard with resolve, I know he’s come to some sort of decision. “No, Julia. It’s not okay. You’re not okay, and you don’t have to act that way in front of me.”

Then, without further explanation, Harry pulls me closer with the same unyielding strength he used to get me in such a position in the first place. I try not to fight him, though I remain tense and unsure, even as I have to wrap my arms around his middle and rest my chin on his shoulder to get comfortable within his forced embrace.

“Harry, it isn’t—”

“No. Shut up, Jules. I want to hear what you have to say, but not if you’re going to pretend nothing bothers you. Don’t worry about me.” As he speaks, Harry’s arms constrict even further around me, like he believes he can shield me from all the hurt. Maybe I believe that, too. There’s a truth to his words that I can hardly handle. It’s only now, that he pointed it out, I realize I do pretend.

I pretend a lot, especially when I’m not near Harry and he can’t break down my barriers with as little effort as a flick of his fingers, the sound of his deep voice, or a sympathetic though unpitying gaze. I remain silent, biting back tears, and try to deal with this new confrontation quietly.

“I want you to be yourself around me, sweetheart, and that includes the whole spectrum of emotions. If you need to be sad, you be sad.”

For the whole while I remain stiff in Harry’s hold; I try not to think too much on what he says because I don’t want tonight to turn into a sob fest, I don’t want to think about how I pretend all the time or Dad or how much I miss him, even after all these years. I don’t want to think about it because I don’t want to face the reality of how truly broken my heart is.

Yes—I like to pretend I’m not as affected by Dad’s passing as much as I used to be and still am. His death could have been prevented had anyone known of his condition, and it’s thoughts like those that keep me up all night. Slowly, I begin to hold Harry in return, I squeeze him almost as tight as he holds me, as if the act will transfer some of my grief and Harry can then extinguish it for me with his sheer strength and courage.

“I don’t like to think about it,” I admit, in a roundabout way of telling Harry’s that he’s right. He’s so right about me it’s scary. While I say those few words, I recall every stricken emotion and stage of grief I went through after Dad and everyone’s initial constant worry over my health, too. Even as a small child I felt suffocated, and I think that might be a contributing reason to why I separate myself from others even today.

Things like that, they change you. It doesn’t matter I was a happy—if not a little shy—child before it happened. It doesn’t matter because one event transformed my life and made me the way I am today, and I allowed it all to happen.

For a long time things were hard, and as I grew up and developed coping mechanisms I chose to simply block out the memories.

It worked, at least until things got to be too much like on birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths and then it all plays on my mind until I can’t take it any longer and I break down altogether.

“You’ve lost so many people,” he murmurs sadly, his hand trailing from my mess of curls at the middle of my back, down my spine in a comforting touch, and then back up to run through my hair. We’re so close I can feel the beat of his heart, and I wish I could be entwined with Harry like this for eternity. The necklace touches both of us while it rests on my chest, and I realize it isn’t just mine. It’s ours. After he made us official and I didn’t utter a single word of protest, I can say that Harry is the only person to ever take possession over my broken heart. He has my heart, now, and somehow while he manages to hold every broken fragment of it together it feels much safer and more secure in his hands than it ever has in my own.

“You won’t lose me.” His promise hints at many things; his physical, ever calming presence, his refusal and promise not to leave even though he has no idea what I’m keeping from him, so much it leaves me reeling.

“Do you mean that?” I waver, forcing out the question from the worried confines of my mind all while I feel like a naïve little girl. My mother would tell me to never believe a man or the things he says to gain your trust, to learn from her mistakes and not take any male’s word at face value. But I want to with Harry. I want to believe him so much it hurts.

“Yes. I promise you,” he says, slow and sure of himself, and he doesn’t offer up his little finger like he always does when he makes his promises. It makes it feel that much more serious. Believable. And I do, I believe that he has every intent to keep this promise to me, right in this moment. The reassurance cancels out any doubt my self-conscious mind conjures. I nod against him after only a second’s worth of hesitation, I don’t cry, and for a long time I simply hold Harry and take refuge in him.

Now he knows. He knows about Dad, he knows about Caleb, and now he knows that I’m keeping something from him. This is about as squared as we can get, I think, without being straight with him about my heart. He knows I’m afraid he’ll leave, something I still don’t know how I managed to admit. I attribute tonight’s progress and just simply the fact that he’s Harry, the man who calms me with a single touch when needed, to why I’ve let loose so much.

“Tell me about him,” Harry urges on quietly after our lapse of silence. He shifts to lie backward, still holding me, and I rest against his chest on the ground while our limbs tangle and we both look up at the sky. His prompt startles me—no one’s asked about Dad in a long time, but then I find it isn’t so hard. I recall what I began to talk about earlier before I accidentally dropped such a huge bombshell on Harry.

“The stars,” I say, soft, hardly audible. “I always used to tell him how I wanted to stay at the cabin year round just to see them; because he loved astronomy I liked it too.”

I smile at the memory, it having seemed to be blocked out along with all the bad ones. It’s nice to recall easier times with Dad, when all we worried about was the night sky. Harry smiles too, probably picturing a total daddy’s girl, and that’s what I was. “He told me to study the constellations, so that even when I can’t see them I’ll know they’re still there.”

That sticks with me now, after all these years of forgetting about that one harmless moment when Dad was trying to get me to calm down the night before we left the cabin after the summer was over. I know he didn’t mean much by it at the time, but now I take such comfort in his reassurances that the beauty of the stars won’t disappear once I got home.

Harry nods and looks at me for a long moment, like he too takes more meaning from it than what my father intended. Then he leans upwards to press a gentle, soft kiss to my forehead before he takes my hand that idly rests on his side to hold, bringing it up next to me at his chest. His hand, once again, warms mine. I refuse to wonder if he notices how cold my hands have gotten, after I started to take my medication again, but then I stop.

I stop, because it doesn’t matter.

For a long while we just lay there on the grass, looking up at the dark sky, and together we imagine the stars.

Only when I start to shiver from the night’s cold do we disentangle, in that same easy, comfortable silence I have never experienced with another person. Harry holds my hand while we walk back toward the house, and he stops me just before my hand makes contact with the handle of the door. He looks down at me with another one of his unreadable expressions.

“Do you trust me?” He asks quietly.

Notes

Okay... I guess we can call this a slight cliffhanger? Haha, I'm sorry. This chapter ended up being so long I had to split it in two, and this seems like the only halfway appropriate place to do it!

I'd like to thank everyone so much for your comments! And to the silent readers and just everyone. Your wonderful feedback gives me so much motivation to write, you have no idea :)

So, yeah. I would love to hear what you think! Thanks again!