I Can Change Your Life

After school Harry took me straight to and his and Louis's house – another one of Louis’s requests, of course. I still didn’t understand what was wrong with Louis. Something had him seriously worried for Harry. Or maybe me. But I felt that I was fine. At this point, it had to be Harry. Especially since he decided to punch Dale on the first day of school.

Harry had asked me not to tell Louis about how he punched Dale, and although I felt a bit weird keeping things from Louis, I agreed. So when I collapsed onto Louis’s bed and he immediately asked me how the first day was I hesitated to answer.

“Oh, it was a first day. Not much to it.” I buried my face into his pillows as I kicked my boots off. I waited to hear them plop on the floor before I pulled my feet up onto the bed and crawled under Louis’s comforter.

He was sitting at his desk with his back facing me, clicking around on his laptop. “Oh, yeah. I know what you mean,” he answered without paying complete attention.

He swiveled around in his chair just as my eyes had begun to shut.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted. He jumped right onto my body. He let his body go limp on top of me so all of his weight was crushing me.

“Stop,” I said, dragging the word out. “Let me just take a quick nap.”

Louis laughed and bent down to bite my cheek. He took the meat of it between his teeth and held it there. I tried to scream to get him to stop but every time I moved my mouth it would add more tension.

“Do you pwomise not to take a nap?” he asked through a mouthful of my cheek.

I tried my best to say yes and he let go of my cheek. I pushed him off of me and sat up. “Who the fuck bites someone’s cheek? You freak,” I said while wiping my cheek clean of his spit.

“I hope you bruise,” Louis laughed. “That would be an interesting mark to explain. You can just tell them your boyfriend is rough in the sack.”

“Ha-ha,” I laughed sarcastically. “…boyfriend…” I huffed at the word and pulled my legs out of the blankets.

“What?” Louis asked, laughing a bit.

I shrugged my shoulders and tried to avoid eye contact with Louis. I didn’t like talking about relationships and hated thinking about ever having a boyfriend again even more. “I don’t like that word,” was all I said and Louis seemed to understand.

Louis knew everything about me and my ex – he was the only one that knew the extent of our relationship, and the extent of Josh’s wrath. He wasn’t abusive or anything, he just let his hands get away from him every now and then. No matter how much Louis hated him and told me that Josh didn’t love me, I knew that he did. He had to.

Just as I looked back up and pulled myself away from my thoughts, Harry walked up to the doorway. He looked at me for a brief second, but before he could completely turn his head over to Louis he shot his head back over to me. “What the fuck is wrong with your cheek?” he asked with an eyebrow raised.

I jumped up and ran over to the mirror that was in the corner of Louis’s room. Sure enough, there was a perfect bite mark that was starting to turn purple on my right cheek. “Louis!” I shouted. “You left a bruise!”

Louis began to laugh hysterically from his computer chair. I ran over to him and tackled him, taking the chair down with us. I went down and bit his cheek in return. Making sure to bite really hard so he’d have a bruise even worse than the one I was going to have.

Harry cleared his throat from the doorway and I let go. “You guys are fucking weird," he said. “Anyway, your Mom wanted you to go with her to the grocery store, Louis .”

“Can Gianna come, too?” Louis asked right away.

Harry shook his head. “Mom says that we aren’t allowed to leave this house until our homework is done.”

I immediately shook my head. “I don’t have any homework!”

Harry laughed. “I tried that, too. Didn’t work.”

I picked up my purseand stormed into the kitchen where mama Tomlinson most likely would be. Before I could even enter the kitchen all the way, she was already holding up her index finger to save herself my objections.

“I know what you are going to say. Harry already said it all,” she said. “You guys are so similar it’s insane.”

I just stood there, holding my purse in confusion. Why was it that everybody was trying to get Harry and I to realize how similar we were? Why was everybody trying to force us to spend time together? I shook the thought out of my head. I was just reading far too into things. It was bound to happen sooner or later – Louis and I had been best friends for nearly half of our lives. It was a shock that Harry and I hadn’t already become best friends, too.

“Now get your butt upstairs with Harry and whip out your textbooks. You’ve got to have something to do. Louis and I might be a little while, but you’ll survive. I gave Harry some money to take you to get some ice cream once you finish your work. I’m trusting you two to have integrity and actually get your work done.” She folded a few rags after wiping down the counter. She turned to me with a serious look when she saw that I hadn’t budged.

“Gianna Elizabeth Wilder,” she said in a stern tone. “Go upstairs and do your homework. I’m not telling you again.” She placed her hand on her hip and waited for me to give in, which I eventually did.

I threw my hands up in defeat before dragging my purse back into Louis’s room with a frown. “Your mom really won’t let me go,” I said in monotone. “This sucks.”

Louis groaned and got up from the computer chair. “Lame,” he agreed. “Oh well. I’ll try to buy you some ice cream while we’re there.”

“She gave Harry money to buy me ice cream after we finish our homework.”

Thoughts of Harry flew back into my head. I couldn’t help but think about how awkward it would be to sit in his room and do homework with him. What did Harry’s room even look like? I couldn’t think of a time where I had actually been in his room. Sure I’d poked my head in a few times to tell him something, but I never actually went inside and looked around.

Louis was summoned downstairs and as he left his room he gave my hand a quick squeeze. “Text me,” he called as he disappeared down the hallway.

I was hesitant to enter Harry’s room. The door was cracked just a bit and I could hear him drumming on his desk and humming along to some music that was playing from his laptop. I pushed the door open just a little bit and started to enter. I didn’t know if I should say something or just awkwardly wait for him to notice me.

He turned around a few seconds later and just stared at me. I looked down at my feet and tried my best to avoid eye contact with him. I would feel too awkward.

“Why are you just standing there?” he asked.

I began to look around his room and try to take in my surroundings. His room was so much darker than Louis’s. The walls were painted black and he had posters and pictures hanging up everywhere. The floor was relatively clean – only a few pairs of shorts and a couple shirts scattered around. Other than that it looked a lot like Louis’s room. The furniture was the same, just arranged differently. His bed spread was black with maroon sheets. He had white pillows that looked even more comfortable than Louis’s. I wanted to just plow my head into the pillows and take a nap.

“I’ve never been in your room before,” I said quietly. “It’s really dark in here.”

Harry just laughed a bit and turned back to his laptop. He shut off the music and shut it. “What homework do you have?” he asked as he began to pull his binder out of his backpack.

“Just stats,” I said as I stared around his room in wonder. I walked up to his dresser and began to analyze everything that sat on top of it. Deoderant, cologne, a brush, three beanies, two crumpled receipts, a lighter, and an iPad.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked.

“Doing what?” I turned around quickly and saw him pulling out his stats homework. I almost forgot that we were in the same class.

“I don’t know. Being weird. Sit down or something. You’re making me nervous. Like you’re gonna steal my shit.”

“Sorry to disappoint, but you don’t have too much worth stealing,” I laughed.

He took a seat on his bed as he yanked a pencil out of the front pocket of his backpack. He laughed a bit in response, but seemed distracted as he got comfortable on his bed. He sat with his back against the wall and his legs dangling off the long side of the bed. I thought about getting on the bed with him and sitting on his fluffy pillows, but immediately felt like the proximity would be way too awkward.

“You can sit wherever,” he said. “Stop being so weird!”

“How am I being weird?” I replied as I took a seat on the floor. I crossed my legs and turned my body so I was looking up at him. “I’m not doing anything!”
Harry laughed and shook his head. “This is so awkward,” he said through laughs.

I just nodded in agreement and looked down at the worksheet in front of me. It was only the first day of school and our stats teacher already lectured us and gave us homework on the new lecture. If it weren’t for mama Tomlinson forcing me to do my homework, I probably wouldn’t have even looked at it.

I stared at the first problem for about ten minutes before I realized that I had no idea what was in front of me. The directions made no sense, the problem made no sense, and I was pretty sure that I had never even heard of statistics before. Why did I take this class to begin with? I should have just skipped taking a math and signed up for late start so I could be sleeping in every day.

I looked up to Harry who was scribbling away on his paper. It looked like he was already halfway through the worksheet. He kept flipping through the notes in his binder and then going back to the worksheet. I wanted to just ditch my homework, but I knew that Louis's mom would ask me what I accomplished and if I had nothing to show her I would be in a lot of trouble.

“I don’t understand this,” I spoke up. Harry looked up from his paper and smiled at me. He patted the bed next to him and scooted over just a bit so I would have room to sit on the pillows beside him. I got up and brought my worksheet over to him.

I looked down at his paper once I had adjusted myself on the bed. He only had two problems left to finish. There was math crammed into the margins of the paper and circles with his answers mixed in.

“I’ll show you how to do it,” Harry said. He pointed at the first question and began to explain the problem to me, but as soon as he started talking I focused in on the way his lip piercing moved with each word. Then I started to stare at way his eyes creased a bit when he said certain words.

“Gianna,” my name coming from his mouth knocked me out of my trance in an instant. I don’t think I had ever heard him say it before. He put a slight amount of accent into it, pronouncing it just like my mother did with her Latin flare when she spoke certain words. Gianna was one of them. I had never heard someone say my name exactly the way it was supposed to be pronounced.

“Are you even paying attention?” he asked.

Just before I could reply, my phone began to buzz from within my purse. I held up my finger to tell Harry to wait and began digging around in my purse. For a moment I thought that Harry was right about what he had said earlier – maybe I did need a smaller purse because I couldn’t find shit in this one.

I pulled out my phone and flipped it open. It was a text message from a blocked ID. I didn’t even know it was possible to text someone from a blocked ID. I opened the message.

I know the truth about Josh.

The phone fell from my hands and made a loud thud against my paper. Tears began to blur my vision. What truth were they talking about? Who was this person? What if they really did know things? I began to tremble from trying to hold back the tears. I didn’t want to cry in front of Harry. He already thought I was weird enough already. The last thing I needed to do was cry in his room.

“Whoa,” Harry said. “Are you okay?” He placed a hand on my shoulder and I immediately pulled away. Josh was on my mind, and I didn’t want a single hand to be placed on me. I pulled my knees up to my chest and let out a slow nod.

My phone buzzed again. I stared at it on the bed before slowly picking it up.

I know everything.

Before I could throw my phone against the wall, Harry placed his hand over my own. He gently worked the phone out of my hands. He turned it off, and as it shut down he tossed it onto his desk beside his laptop. He put his hand back over mine.

I couldn’t hold them back anymore. The tears left my eyes in a steady stream – leaving my eyes stinging and my vision blurred.

“Shh…shhh…” Harry began to coo. He placed his hand on my shoulder again and this time I didn’t flinch.

I just wanted Louis to be home already so I could crawl into his bed and fall asleep while he sang to me and pet my hair.

Harry’s response was automatic and natural; he scooped me up in his arms and set me down in his lap. He held onto me while I cried into his tank top. I was trying so hard to stop crying. I felt embarrassed and ashamed of my emotions. I don’t know why those texts got to me so bad – so many people had said things way worse than those texts. The texts weren’t even bad. Maybe they were just somebody trying to get a rise out of me. I cried even harder when I realized that they had won. They got the rise out of me. And now here I was, crying like an idiot while someone I hardly knew held me in his arms.

Harry continued to shush me and try to relax me. His arms were wrapped around me so tightly that I had no choice but to allow myself to lean into his chest completely. At first my body was resisting his grasp, but as the sobs rattled my chest, I felt too drained to even try to keep a distance. He rubbed his hands up and down my back, making a soft spiraling motion as he did so. My body immediately relaxed, and I no longer felt the awkward tension in the room. I let go of my knees and placed my hands on Harry’s chest. The steady rise and fall of his chest calmed my breathing. The feeling of his breath on the back of my neck cleared my mind. The feeling of his coos vibrating against my own chest warmed my body.

I let my body go limp – his arms being my only support. When I let myself go, the sobs came harder and harder. But my body didn’t move. Harry held me firmly in his lap, pressed up against his chest, with his hands caressing my back, with my head against his shoulder, with my mind at ease and my body relaxed.

Notes