The Clearing

Gossip reaches her ears and she ignores it. The KCAs are as wonderful as they can get, but she finds Selena and hangs out with her anyway. The One Direction boys are here and perform their “What Makes You Beautiful” song, and before she knows it, afterward, she’s being swept backstage and the “What Makes You Beautiful” boys are standing in front of her.

“Hi,” she says, smiling big at them. They’re new in the industry, testing their joints out; they glance at each other and she sticks her hand out. “I’m Taylor Swift.”

“We know,” chortles one, as another reaches out to take her hand. He’s flannel and smiley. Taylor nods appreciatively at him.

“But of course you don’t know us,” says a third, and the curly-haired one next to him nudges him pointedly.

Taylor’s eyes immediately fasten to the pointy haired one—he’s staring pointedly at the guy who’s now speaking, going, “I’m Louis, that’s Liam,” flannel guy, “Harry,”

Harry, Taylor remembers, saves for later,

“Niall, and Zayn. And you’re Taylor Swift,” he says, cheekily.

“And I’m Taylor Swift.” Taylor laughs a little and gestures uselessly at them.

“We love your work,” Niall bursts, suddenly. “Harry especially.”

“Niall.” Harry looks scandalized.

But Taylor feels her cheeks warm and there’s just this strange pull of Harry’s gaze, she can’t take her eyes off, keep her eyes off of him. She laughs again and says, “Oh really?” looking at Harry.

Harry stares at her for a moment, before he’s nodding in assent. The other boys laugh at him, but he says, “Yeah, um. Yeah.”

Taylor glances away quickly, but catches his eye a second later to see that he’s still watching her. The hot tug in her chest drops into her stomach like a bomb. Her cheeks are even hotter now.

“Oh, that’s,” she fans her face, giggles. Oh god, she’s reached giggle territory. “That’s very lovely, thank you, Harry.”

Harry blinks at her. A beatific grin stretches across his face, and he nods a little. “You’re welcome.”

Taylor’s heart does backflips even hours, days, weeks after the conversation.

*

Taylor can’t shut up about Harry, but only because they’d exchanged numbers. It’d been in secret, after the One Direction boys had gone out to socialize at the after party and Harry had doubled back and met her against the wall. Taylor couldn’t stop meeting his eyes and couldn’t meet his eyes and sometimes looked at his mouth too long.

They didn’t kiss, at risk for getting caught, but he’d smiled and asked if he could catch her later, you know, cellular wise, and she’d laughed and said sure.

Selena and Justin pretend they don’t know about the number thing, but she talks endlessly about Harry with them anyway. They’re good sports enough to not even tell her to shut up; sometimes when she gets a text and brightens up Selena will say dramatically, “Oh, it’s Prince Harry again,” and Justin will join in, “Prince Harry,” in an awful accent and Taylor will say, seriously, “I’m pretty sure that’s not even his accent, you sound all, like, cockney or whatever.”

Selena nudges her shoulder and snickers. “You don’t even know what a cockney accent is.”

“I know it’s not the type of British accent he has,” Taylor says to her, tapping out a reply.

“Is he from Surrey?” Justin says, taking on a different accent. “Like Harry Potter?”

“Ooh!” Selena finger guns at Justin in the backseat. “Harry Potter.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s heard that one before,” says Taylor, rolling her eyes.

On the less embarrassing side, she actually doesn’t keep up with One Direction news, mostly because it’s herded by fangirls from all over the place that it’s hard to keep track when they’re being talked about all the time. She has her own career to tend to, and Harry sends really hilarious inane things like, I wonder if owning a chicken farm is a worthy investment and Do you suppose there’s a career in bubble blowing? and she sends back, Your bandmates would probably be ecstatic to be part-time chicken hands and I should show you New York sometime.

You should keep that promise, Harry writes back.

It’s not until well in the summer Taylor hears about her name being dropped in One Direction interviews. She rolls her eyes, but texts Harry anyway, saying that if he’s touring in the U.S., he might as well visit her if he’s around. He texts back something indecipherable and probably witty, if she were that kind of person, but she just sends him her address and lets him decide what to do with it.

So he shows up on her front porch a couple of days later.

He’s disguised, though Taylor recognizes him right away. Her chest does that hot jumpy thing again, and her throat tickles like her heart might come out of it. “Well look who we have here,” she says, feigning surprise. “Batman.”

Harry puts a hand up to his mouth. His curls are wild around the black top. “Taylor Swift,” he says, in a horrible Bruce Wayne impression. “I’ve come to take you hostage.”

Taylor laughs and steps aside to let him in. “I’m pretty sure Batman’s a good guy,” she says to him.

Harry rips off his mask once she closes the door. “Plot twist,” he says, in his normal American accent. “I’m Harry Styles!”

Taylor gasps dramatically, pretending to fall against the railing of her staircase. “Harry Styles is Batman?”

“I hope you let me leave with a souvenir, because the boys are going to give me so much shite for this.” Harry looks around, nodding approvingly. “Nice place.”

“You can’t just walk into my house and demand a souvenir,” Taylor says teasingly. She leads him out of the parlor and into the kitchen, fetching a pail of water.

Harry continues looking around, at the pictures of her family on the shelves and tables. “Then I really will have to take you ho—ahh!”

There is the assuming sound of a hiss and a tackle, and Harry yelping a little as Meredith clings to his ankle. Taylor turns around, snickering a little as Harry makes very non-violent attempts to get Taylor’s cat off of him.

“I probably should’ve warned you about Meredith,” she says thoughtfully, handing Harry a glass of water. “Here.”

Harry looks at her incredulously. “You’re giving me water but you’re not going to stop your cat from attacking me?”

Taylor shrugs. Harry takes the water anyway. “You’ve got to make her like you somehow,” she says, pouring a glass for herself. She turns and watches as Harry stares reproachfully down at Meredith, who is clinging to the hem of his pant leg and refusing to let go.

He sighs, though not long sufferingly. “I suppose, if I plan on coming here in the future,” he says. He slowly picks his foot up until Meredith is over a foot off the ground, scrabbling and clinging on for dear life. “Hi there, Meredith,” he says, voice fond. “It’s nice to meet you too.”

Meredith stays for a couple of seconds, hisses in defeat, and then springs off, landing on all floors on the kitchen tile.

Harry laughs. He’s got a deep, light laugh, along with his mouth, taking over his face in such a stunning way that Taylor can’t seem to take her eyes off of him. She watches his lips dismally, the way they curve into a smile as he watches Meredith skitter off.

“Can I kiss you?” she asks, suddenly. Harry swivels around, but she knows she’s blushing, swirls the glass of water in her hands. She averts her gaze somewhere near the ground. “I mean, I know we’ve only been together face to face only a handful of times, and I really like you, I, I can’t explain it, you know, before I told myself to wait all the time, but then I waited too much so I told myself to go for it all the time, but now I’m thinking maybe that if I—”

She’s cut off when Harry’s hands cup around her face, big and gentle. He tilts her face up until he’s looking into his bright green eyes, which are—curious, wanting. Searching hers.

“Yes, you can kiss me, Taylor,” he says, so simply and slow that she half-snorts into his palm.

“Why do you always sound so smooth?” she asks, mostly to herself.

The corner of Harry’s eyes crinkle when he smiles. “Believe me,” he says. “I’m not.”

*

Their first kiss is only that, lingering and innocent in Taylor’s kitchen, and absolutely does not resolve the pool of heat in Taylor’s stomach, that feels stupidly like a little bit of lust and a lot of something else she can’t quite place. She’s felt it before, because that’s what gets these things going, gets her so emotionally invested all the time—the big declarations, the lakeside picnic dates, the two a.m. arguments, blah blah. This is it, kind of, and she can imagine her parents, her PR team, her manager, smiling and going oh no not again. Taylor has started to say it to herself when she’s doing her makeup and thinking of Harry and smudges her lipstick on her grin.

But the kiss hadn’t been much, because they’d smiled at each other afterward and then watched a movie in Taylor’s DVR and neither of them are stupid enough to kiss at the doorstep, so they say goodbye before opening the door. Taylor wraps her arms around herself and watches Harry go and wonders what kind of songs she’ll write about him in the future.

*

The press, of course, are all over it, at least all over what they can scavenge. Harry Styles is the world’s biggest heartthrob and Taylor is the world’s biggest—well, Selena says that there’s no female equivalent of ‘heartthrob’ and that Taylor’s kind of her own category. Taylor says she’ll take it. Selena snorts and says, “Believe me, you’re the only one that would.”

He visits her the week after the next, and they make cookies together and lick the cookie dough off each other’s fingertips and joke about getting salmonella. Harry kisses her against the counter of her kitchen island and whispers that she should come back to his tour bus sometime.

Taylor pulls away and raises her eyebrows at him. “Really?” she says, though a little breathless because he’d just had his tongue in her mouth, after all.

Harry cocks his head to the side, presumably thinking of his bandmates. “On second thought,” he says, “your house is lovely enough.”

“Enough.” Taylor snorts and dabs some cookie dough on his nose.

He scrunches it, adorably. “Hey,” he says.

“My house is extraordinary lovely,” she says, in an exaggerated what she hopes is a British accent.

“Your accent is extraordinary awful.” Harry’s grinning. “What is that, even. Manchester?”

“I have no idea, but you should teach me about all about your British accents one day,” says Taylor, pulling away to check on the cookies under the oven light. “And I’ll have you know that you are a very welcome guest here in my lovely home. Meredith hasn’t peed on your shoes yet.”

“I’ll take that as a good sign,” says Harry, laughing. “How are the cookies?” He bends down to look at them with her.

“Acceptable.” Taylor glances at him for a moment, before poking his side. Harry jumps, clutching his side and pressing giggles into the collar of his shirt.

Taylor’s eyes widen, with mischief. “Oh my god,” she says. “Are you—”

“No,” Harry moans, “I have to put up with this from Louis already—”

“Ticklish?”

What started out as an innocent chase-and-tickle fight ends up in a messy pillow fight on the living room floor, an absentminded make out session with Taylor’s lipstick prints smudged on Harry’s chin, the wrath of Meredith’s claws at both their ankles, and slightly burnt cookies.

They’re delicious, anyway.

*

So this is how her week goes, though Harry isn’t predictable and never comes on the same day of the week. When he texts her one Wednesday with, Are you home? Rang doorbell and stood for 20 mins, but no answer :( she laughs and tells him to let her know first.

They don’t talk about it, and some reporter starts linking her to Connor Kennedy, who’s nice and Harry’s age but not Harry. They laugh about it and kiss on her couch, and one time when they’re both in the same city at the same time she texts him and he texts her and they meet up in his hotel room. “Different scenery,” he says, when they’re lounging on the suite’s sofa.

Taylor laughs and nudges him. “This is the Marriott,” she says. “I’m pretty sure we’ve both seen this before.”

He kisses her rested against his arm and they tell stories about when they were little, when she went to science camp and wore braces and when he sang in front of his class as a five year old and peed his pants.

She still doesn’t look for news about him, or her, or the both of them, but she gets messages sent to her personal email about them anyway. At first she thinks they’re from Harry himself, until she brings up the MTV video awards one. He looks at her with alarm before muttering, “Louis.”

Taylor emails back next time, Thanks for the updates, Louis and gets a winky face and an xoxo back.

Harry is low-profile, when he wants to be. She’s caught candid pictures on the internet, but her PR team never messages her about him leaving her house, and Selena never freaks out at her, even though they all know. She’s really not sure how he manages the sneaking in and out thing, but when she asks him he shrugs and says, “Maybe I have a forgettable face?” He twists his face up a little, bunching his mouth and furrowing his eyebrows.

She covers him up with her hand. “You look ridiculous.”

“Well yeah, I look ridiculous now that I’ve got a hand on my face,” Harry says very pointedly.

Something wet and cold touches her hand.

Taylor yelps and pushes him back, though it just lands her on the floor from where she’d been sitting on his lap and him looking a little dazed in the armchair. “Did you just lick my hand?” she asks, unfazed.

Harry lifts his arms up above his head and cheers, “I’ve got rid of it! I’ve got rid of the face blemish!”

“Oh shut up, my hand is not a blemish.”

She doesn’t think he has a forgettable face but she doubts he does either, really, with the attention they have. They get tired of staying cooped up in Taylor’s house and go out and venture more, though Taylor’s PR team and then later Harry’s both come up to them and tell them to be more careful. They spend one day indoors after that just to appease them, but Taylor’s happy with it if it means Harry trying to feed her chocolate covered strawberries and getting too caught up in eating them himself.

She doesn’t drop the word boyfriend around him, yet, though she thinks it. One day his phone rings while he’s at her house and they’re making pie this time, and he pulls away into the living room to answer it.

Taylor’s heart hasn’t stopped doing the stupid thump-thump thing, though it’s faded into the background, like she’s used to it. She smiles a little and continues on with the ingredients, letting Harry his privacy.

Then while he’s pacing between the open walkway, she hears him say, “—my girlfriend, Mum, but you can’t expect us to—” and stares at the mixing bowl for a bit.

She’s smiling when he walks back into the room.

“Sorry about that,” he says, looking a little breathless. “Just—my mum wants us to fly out to visit my family sometime soon. If that’s okay? They know about us, as I’m sure your family does—”

“They do,” Taylor affirms.

“—but after what happened with.” Harry makes a vague gesture and rolls his eyes. “Anyway. I was wondering if you’ve got some free time in your schedule to fly out to visit. Unless that’s too fast?” he adds, quickly.

Taylor taps her chin, pretending to look thoughtful. Of course it’s too fast, but no one knows and she’s sure Harry’s family is as delightful as he is and she always does things too fast. And he’d called her his girlfriend.

“I mean, between the fashion show, and my tour coming up, and the X Factor,” she says, fighting a smile. “I’m not quite sure if I have room…”

Harry bites his lip, nervously.

Taylor flicks some frosting at him and laughs when he yelps. “Of course I’ll visit your family, if you want me to,” she says, beaming. “We’ll find time, I’m pretty sure.”

Harry’s expression is startled, but it brightens up pretty quickly. “‘Course,” he says, and walks over to her. “I can’t wait for you to meet them.”

“You better show me the bakery you worked in,” Taylor says earnestly, and Harry laughs.

*

The trip to London is sleepy and boring because they have to take separate flights at separate times, in order to avoid getting caught by the paparazzo. Taylor is driven from London to Cheshire, napping on her bag and tipping the driver outrageously when she reaches the stop.

Harry had sent her directions to duck in from the back, so Taylor first makes sure she’s not being tailed before following them. She’d been told that the back door would be unlocked, and lets herself in graciously when she finds that it is.

Harry’s house is clean but lived in, with enough tell-tale signs that it belongs to an eighteen year old boy. Video game controllers lie strewn around what appears to be the living room, and there are empty bags of chips here and there, especially one in the middle of the dining table. Taylor rolls her eyes and tosses it in the trash can, before heading up to where Harry’s room must undeniably be.

She hears footsteps as she’s climbing up and then Harry’s appeared around the corner, stopping at the sight of her. “You made it out safe!” he says, bounding down toward her.

Taylor rolls her eyes as they meet each other halfway. “I’m glad you pointed that out,” she says, dryly.

Harry tucks her hair back behind her ear, some stupid habit he picked up last week. “Oh hush, I’m a worrier,” he says.

She giggles against him. “I’ll bet,” she says. Harry smells a little bit like clean laundry. “Were you just sleeping?”

“My internal clock’s botched because of the time difference, okay,” he says.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t have an internal clock anymore because of how much I’ve traveled,” she agrees. “And let me guess: you ate chips for dinner.”

Harry frowns for a minute—then clarity. “Breakfast, really,” he says. His arms are still around her shoulders.

She giggles and leans into him.

Taylor joins him in his bed because honestly a nap sounds good to her, too. They wake up later in the day and try to make food in Harry’s kitchen, but as it turns out he doesn’t have much to make with so they order takeout and mess with each other and their kebabs.

She meets his family the next day, Harry’s parents and older sister who are as kind as she’d expected. She tells them that she likes them better than Harry and they say they like her better than Harry too. Harry pouts and Taylor kisses his cheek. They all go out for dinner and Harry’s bodyguards and whatnot ward off the paparazzi.

Taylor’s scheduled to spend only a week with him or else people will notice her absence—personal days are fine and her closest friends know about it, but too long and people will start to wonder. Regardless, Taylor is sure that this is one of the best weeks of her life, hanging off of Harry’s arm and seeing tourist-y U.K. stuff with him, wearing disguises and blending in with the crowd.

“You’ll never know,” Harry murmurs to her as they stroll down the street, “how many comments I’ve gotten about how much I look like Harry Styles.”

“Oh my god,” Taylor gasps dramatically, looking at him through her shades. “Are you Harry Styles?”

“My name’s Frank,” says Harry, seriously, “and I’m a gym instructor.”

Taylor bursts into laughter when Harry starts doing exaggerated squats.

This is it, she thinks, later, when it’s evening and they’re crowded on Harry’s couch and she’s lying on top of him, stomach to stomach. He has to strain to look at her and sometimes his voice cracks when he speaks, but he doesn’t complain after the first time and grins up at her as she attempts to braid his hair.

The rest of Harry’s house is quiet and they have a handful of candles going on the coffee table, even though Taylor has seen him trip over so many things on the ground that she’s pretty sure it’s a hazard. He insists that he won’t knock anything over because it’s on a table, but she made him push the coffee table a safe spot away so they could hang out on the couch.

She doesn’t know where they went from a movie to playing FIFA (which she is terrible at, no surprise) to here, Harry with some hipster polaroid camera and Taylor trying to tie little braids into his hair. He smirks each time her knuckle brushes against his nose and she whines, “Hold still.”

“Shan’t,” says Harry.

Taylor frowns at him and watches as he makes a duck face into the front of his camera. “Are you really taking selfies with that thing?”

“Trying to,” Harry says, emphatically. He snaps and then yelps. “Ah! That’s bright.”

“No kidding,” Taylor scoffs. She lets his hair go, giving up. She picks up the polaroid from his chest.

“This is horrible,” she says, lifting it up and brandishing it in his face. The photo has a bright white spot of Harry’s forehead and a single eye, and the rest of it is blackened out. “That’s why I told you to hold still.”

“Pretty sure you told me that so you could defile my hair,” says Harry, though with a grin. “Come, let’s take one together.”

“Alright, but you better keep a scrapbook of this,” says Taylor.

“Who in the world scrapbooks these days?”

“I do,” says Taylor, before leaning across the front of his chest to angle her face in the camera’s shot.

Harry aims down at the both of them, her face tucked into his neck, and says, “Say cheese.”

“Cheese,” Taylor says, before Harry takes the picture.

The light is really bright, but both of them are ready for it so it doesn’t take either of them by surprise. Taylor gets it first, off of where it’d fallen on Harry’s chest, and looks at it.

This is it, she thinks. Their faces are lit up, from the orange of the candles in the background, bright and screaming happy. The rest of it is dimmed out, and Taylor can watch it turn greyscale, faded into the background, and this is it, she thinks, the night that she will write about, one day, Harry’s heart warm and beating against her own.

*

The first time they have sex is Taylor’s last day in Europe, and it’s the last night and they’re both a little giggly because they had wine over dinner. Anne had told her that she thought Taylor was good for Harry and Gemma had given her a small notebook as a present, along with her own blessing. In good spirits Taylor and Harry had gone back to Harry’s together, kissing and giggling against each other, then slowing and gasping and slipping their clothes off in a beige colored haze.

Afterward, when Harry has tossed away the condom and they’ve cleaned each other up in the shower, Harry says he’s starving. Taylor rolls her eyes and says, “Boys,” but lets herself be led into the kitchen.

Harry prowls through the fridge and eventually decides to cook himself up a sandwich. He’s shirtless and rests his knuckles against the counter as he waits for his bread to toast. Taylor sneaks up behind him and prods the sides of his stomach.

“Ah!” Harry says, crumpling over.

“Man down!” says Taylor, and dives for his necklace. It’s the silly paper airplane one that he’d kept on while they were having sex, and she unclasps it and runs off, cackling in glee.

Harry lets out a playful growl and chases after her as she runs all around the first floor, narrowly dodging him in the living room, unsuccessfully trapping her around the base of the stairs, and finally catching up with her in the sitting room. He catches her by the waist into his arms, and she puts his necklace around her neck, grinning up at him.

“No matter what you do,” she says, as it falls into the low dip of her camisole, “it’s mine now.”

“But you’re mine,” says Harry, smiling into her face.

Taylor hums, pressing her fist against her chin. “You’re mine, too,” she says thoughtfully. “So who does your necklace really belong to?”

Harry bends down and takes the metal paper airplane part of it out with the chain between his teeth, which is kind of unbelievably hot. “You said ‘your necklace,’” he says. “So you meant mine.”

“My necklace?” Taylor says, raising her eyebrows.

“My necklace,” Harry emphasizes. “Because you said it was ‘yours.’”

“So it’s mine,” says Taylor.

“No, it’s—”

Harry makes a little growl of frustration. It’s cute, so Taylor leans in and kisses him. She’s still in his arms, big and warm, and not complaining because Harry nips at her bottom lip and kisses back.

When they break apart, Harry says, “You know what we never got to do this week?”

Taylor’s head is spinning a little still from their kiss. “Mm?” she asks, blinking into Harry’s face.

“Dance,” says Harry. “We didn’t get to go out.”

“Oh,” says Taylor. “But we can dance right now, can’t we? Put some music on, and,” she wiggles, the best she can do when he’s holding her.

Harry lets go and claps. “That’s a brilliant idea!” he says, excitedly. “C’mon, there’s not enough room around, we should—”

So they push the furniture away and Harry dashes upstairs and comes back down with an aged boombox and an even older CD with 80’s rock music on it, plugs it in and gets it playing. Taylor isn’t surprised by the choice of music but they dance to it anyway, doing silly old dance moves and then spinning and twirling each other around and laughing. They forget about Harry’s sandwich until much later and decide to keep the mood by bringing out the candles again instead of turning on the electric lights like normal people. They are basked in orange and brown and glowing, and Taylor twists her fingers around the edges of Harry’s necklace.

*

When she flies back, she gets swamped with work and performances, only natural after skivving off for a whole week. She complains to Harry about having him distract her, but he says that his workload isn’t any better and that he misses her and she admits that she misses him too.

A couple of weeks later, she gets a small package in the mail. It’s a silver metal necklace, with a paper airplane charm on it.

Not mine, but your own, since you liked it so much.

x H

Taylor wears it, naturally, usually keeping it tucked under her shirt. She tells Harry this, too, and he promises to visit her when she performs for the X Factor later that week.

He keeps his promise, appearing afterward and lighting up when they lock eyes. She runs into his arms and lets him catch her, laughing. The tight knot of heat has not changed since they had sex, and she loves this, loves him, she knows; she’s loved all her boyfriends, but none of the old ones matter when she has one right now. She plants a colorful kiss on his mouth and whispers that he should take her home.

Harry does, headlights off and unable to stop glancing at her. She tells him he’s a terrible driver and he says, “I haven’t seen you in so long, alright?” and she kind of wants to kiss him then. But that wouldn’t help his driving, so she lets him take her to her house, and then they have ridiculous, half-laughing sex on her couch, and then they talk about the X Factor contestants and make bets on who they think will make it to the next round.

Taylor says, when she’s wearing Harry’s white t-shirt like out of some sort of old fashioned romcom, “I wish we could go out somewhere together,” and Harry asks, “Out?” and she says, “Yeah.”

“Out, as in…?”

“Vacation, or something,” Taylor says, shrugging. “I don’t know, going to each other’s houses is fine—”

“Don’t forget the hotels.”

“The hotels.” Taylor rolls her eyes. “Don’t you want to go out to the Alps with me or something? Hunt for the Abominable Snowman?”

Harry furrows his eyebrows. “I thought it was called a yeti.”

“Or Bigfoot. I think they’re all the same,” Taylor says thoughtfully.

Harry shoves his foot up. They’re lying longways on her couch, their heads on either end perched on an armrest. “I have big feet,” he says. “What if I’m bigfoot?”

Taylor throws her arms out dramatically. “Then I don’t need to go to the Alps,” she says. “I have the love of my life here.”

Harry giggles and tries to shove his big foot up her nose. She makes a disgusted noise and tries to slap him away.

*

It’s not long until their PR teams sit them aside together one day and tell them that it’s time for their relationship to make it out into the public and official. Harry opens his mouth like he wants to say that they’ve been pretty public in the past, just good at keeping it hidden, but Taylor kicks him under the table.

They play a game of footsie until the head of Harry’s PR clears his throat and glares at the both of them.

Taylor doesn’t mind terribly, because it’s not like much will be different; people will see them together and know who they are, that’s all. When they’re asked how they want to go about it, Taylor turns to Harry and asks, “Still want me to show you around New York?”

Harry brightens, even though Taylor knows that he’s been in the city many times before.

They settle on a date and she sneaks into his hotel every day, through back entrances and leaving so early that he doesn’t even shift when she rolls out of bed. She leaves smudged lipstick kisses on his cheek and calls the car service in the dark. It’s sneaky, it’s exciting when they’re about to go public and she’s still lurking about like this. She likes it, a little, the excitement of it all.

On the day of the event, she settles on a cute fox sweater and meets Harry beforehand, on the doorstep of the hotel. He presses a light kiss into her forehead and she giggles.

“Ready?” she asks.

Harry holds his arm out for her. “Never,” he says, grinning.

They walk, faces uncovered and cheerful, heading towards Central Park. Harry’s stylist is with them with her daughter, who’s adorable and Taylor can’t stop cooing at her until Harry tugs her away and whines, “Stop, I thought this was a date between us.” Taylor laughs that she’s only using Harry to get to cute babies, and Harry pauses for a second before saying, fair.

The paparazzi follow them to the park, but Taylor talks to Harry about her friends’ babies and kids she used to babysit and Harry laughs at all the right spots. She asks him if he’s been to the zoo before and he says no so she takes him, poking him toward the direction of the bears and frogs. “We should take a picture,” she says, as he poses in front of them.

Harry nods, looking over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure that’s already taken care of,” he says.

Taylor turns around to see some cameraman lurking in the bushes.

Rolling her eyes, she grabs him by the arm. “Come on,” she says, tugging him away and holding onto his arm again. “Let’s go get a snack.”

“From a food truck?” Harry asks, lighting up.

Taylor laughs. “I don’t know what’s with you and food trucks, but yes,” she says. “Let’s go before the monkeys decide to fling poop at you.”

They eat and talk and it’s almost like a normal date, save for the feeling of having cameras directed at the both of them. Taylor’s long used to it, used to these people caring about something so trivial but significant to her anyway, and just puts on a brave face and doesn’t kiss Harry. Harry seems to be pretending that they’re not here too, though he’s a little more shifty and at one point leans in to her mouth that she inches away, imperceptibly.

“What’s wrong?” he says, warm against her cheek.

“Maybe not here,” she says, smiling.

*

The press blows up, and suddenly Taylor can’t turn around with someone asking her about Harry Styles, hashtag Haylor, all of it. Taylor rolls her eyes and crashes at Selena’s one day and says, “Haylor.”

“Haylor,” Selena agrees, painting her toenails.

“Sometimes,” says Taylor, lifting her head up from the couch, “I wonder if I made a mistake with dating him.”

Selena hums. “If you say that, you should say that about everyone you dated.”

Selena’s right. Though Taylor doesn’t feel too regretful about it, Harry, Jake, anyone. (Except for maybe Joe, but for different reasons.) She ducks away from questions and lets PR handle it and texts Harry and meets up with him at his hotel. He’d gotten the gist after the first time around and only swoops her into a kiss when they’re inside and surrounded by four windowless walls. He says he misses her and she says that she misses him too.

They go on more public dates, to the chagrin of their PR teams, who continue to bribe the paparazzi who find them. Taylor says to Harry one day that it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, because both of them have plenty of money and the paparazzi are only taking pictures for the money, so they can go out on their dates and everyone wins. Harry smiles at her and Taylor can hear her words sound a little silly in her ears, but she means them.

It’s not easy when strangers are following their every move, and family and friends are following their every move, and one time they go to an amusement park full of people and another they fly back out to England together and there are cameras everywhere they turn. Taylor knows; she asked for this when she started recording at sixteen, and Harry was that age too when he was on the X Factor. They both know it. But it’s suffocating, knowing that there isn’t anywhere in this universe she can turn with Harry without every excruciating detail between them being examined, and Taylor’s not much of an indoors person, at the end of the day. She’d rather eat from food trucks with Harry every day than bake a pie with him.

The running around and laughing when they barely get caught doesn’t get old. The coil in Taylor’s chest loosens a little.

“I was thinking,” she says, a couple of weeks later when they’re sprawled on Harry’s hotel suite couch and staring up at the ceiling. Taylor’s begun to hate ceilings. “We could follow through with that vacation I was talking about earlier.”

Harry glances over at her. “Really? How will we go about doing that?”

“Well, you know, there are private ski resorts and stuff.” Taylor pokes his leg. “Besides, don’t you get tired of staying cooped up all the time?”

“Oh, definitely,” says Harry. His arm is rested around the back of her waist, gently. “But I don’t mind too terribly if I’m with you.”

He grins, and she pokes him again. “Stop, you’re not allowed to be romantic right now, I’m serious,” she says.

“Well you’re being awful romantic asking me,” Harry says, sitting up. “But yes, I’d love to. How should we make the arrangements?”

And that’s not easy, either, convincing both their teams that yes, they want to take some time off for each other, and no, they don’t want it to be photographed or reported on or anything. Taylor calls her people and talks to them very patiently; Harry watches her from across the living room, an absent smile on his face. Between phone calls she leans in to kiss him on the mouth, and he presses back, unwillingly secret.

Right now, she does not think about the songs she will write, the plans she never made, the dreams that look so far away they’re almost like a waste of time. Right now, she watches Harry across the carpet, speaking in his steady voice on the phone, rifling through their calendars to find a time when they’re both free.

*

They get through to the lodge eventually, photographed such a number of times that both Taylor and Harry have gotten into helping their teams with paying the paparazzi off to not publish them and leave them alone. The non-disclosure agreements help, too.

As soon as they’re inside the lodge and alone, Harry drops his things on the floor and flings himself on the bed. He’s wearing a large fleece jacket and a beanie.

“Reporters are mad,” he says. “If I was one of them, I would’ve given up or gotten bored.”

“I guess,” says Taylor, unwinding her scarf. “It’s us, though, so they probably care more.”

“We’re boring,” says Harry, staring up at the ceiling.

Taylor grins and then jumps on the bed to join him. There are two beds, for the sake of convenience, but Taylor knows that they’ll only be using one.

“We are,” she says, before bending down to kiss his mouth.

There are a lot more people around, but the non-disclosure agreements keep them secure, plus that Taylor and Harry make sure to tip everyone who works their ridiculously high, because they can. Skiing and sledding with Harry is fabulous, in a clumsy snowy sort of way, because Harry seems to have two left feet and mostly just braces himself and yells as he races down mountains. Taylor laughs and watches him attempt to snowboard for the first time, but Harry barely makes it thirty feet before he trips over his feet and faceplants on the ground.

It’s when he’s picking himself up Taylor notices a flash of color in the bushes—there’s a flash, and Taylor blinks. Realizing what just happened, she kicks off her skis and runs into the trees, shouting, “Hey!”

The colorful jacket continues to dart around, but Taylor and Harry had gone through hiking here yesterday and she has a good sense of direction. Soon enough her hand is on the collar of the guy’s jacket, who’s struggling both with her and his precious camera.

Taylor drags him out to the clearing, where Harry has gotten himself up and is dusting himself off. “What’s this?” he asks, glancing curiously between Taylor and the cameraman.

“Sorry, man,” the cameraman babbles. “I was just, in the neighborhood—”

“You were just in the neighborhood,” Harry repeats, fixating him with a glare.

“We should get our PR teams out here,” Taylor suggests, letting the guy go but not taking her eyes off of him. If he tries to run, well, he knows that she’s faster than him.

Harry nods, taking out his phone. “Already on it.”

They take care of the camera guy, but it kind of kills the mood for the rest of the day, so Taylor and Harry go inside and drink hot cocoa and try to throw marshmallows into each other’s mouths. The fire is hotter than the heat in her stomach, which is burning so low and feels like the wood has already cooled over, black and charred.

The next day Harry manages to persuaded the driver of the snowmobile to let them drive, and Taylor laughs into his side as Harry tries to navigate his way around. She dares him to go too fast and he dares himself to weave around bushes and obstacles and trees—

—and then Taylor is thinking about the paparazzi guy from yesterday—

—and trees and snow and blood, where did the blood come from—

—her friends and family and someone groaning in pain next to her—

—Harry—

Harry is lying beside her, body twisted in a way that makes Taylor wince when she looks at him. She barely manages to get her hand in her pocket before she’s calling for an ambulance, and then everyone else. Harry looks to be in more pain than she is, eyes fluttering open and shut like his body can’t make a decision with whether he should be unconscious or not.

Taylor watches him sadly.

“Harry,” she says quietly. The sun is peeking out from the treetops, letting the side of his face aglow. He groans and rolls his head a little, so he can look at her.

“That was stupid,” he says, smiling.

Taylor chuckles a little, feeling the pain blossom in her head. “It was,” she agrees. “We’re stupid.”

Harry makes a small noise. In the distance, they can hear the sound of sirens.

A desperate sound comes out from Harry’s mouth—the next thing she knows, silent tears are streaming down Harry’s face, and Taylor wonders if he thought about the guy from yesterday too. Thought about her, and this, and everything they’ve been ducking around, and accidents sometimes aren’t really accidents, but inevitable from the start.

She’s crying too, cheeks wet and voice surprisingly clear when she says, “Everything about this is stupid,” and he turns to look at her.

“Being with you,” she says, “makes me as happy as I’ve ever been. But it feels like we’re running away all the time and still getting caught in every corner, you know?”

Harry nods. He has an awful gash at the corner of his forehead, the blood trickling into the white snow. “I know,” he says.

*

Their injuries aren’t as awful as they feel; twenty stitches in separate rooms, and being yelled at by their managers. They walk out a day later with their foreheads pressed against each other, and have quiet lazy sex and stay in, like they are used to.

It’s never going to work, though Taylor has resigned herself to the idea that none of her relationships will ever work, like this. It’s fun to pretend, she tells herself, and Harry when they’re lying next to each other in bed and her lips are at the shell of his ear.

When they get back from their vacation they are more deliberate about being hidden, no longer torturing their teams and actually sneaking into each other’s hotel rooms instead of poorly disguised public outings. It gets more and more suffocating and the sparks in Taylor’s chest from long ago have turned into asphyxiating knots and she had to bury her head in Harry’s chest to remind herself to breathe.

Harry says against her lips one day, “This isn’t going to work out, is it?” He looks sad.

Taylor smiles and runs her hand down his thigh, to his knee. “Does it matter?”

Harry rubs at the space around her waist. “I still like you,” he says. “I really like you. A lot.”

“I really like you too, Harry,” says Taylor, and the admission comes out easier than she would’ve thought. She rests her head against his shoulder and breathes in his scent.

On New Year’s Eve they both perform at Times Square and he kisses her when the ball drops. They are in the crowd, pretending to be normal people, but Taylor hears the sound of a phone camera going off anyway.

Later, on New Year’s Day when they are lying side by side and half-naked in Harry’s hotel bed, she sits up and slips her socks on.

Harry is dazed and sated next to her. “Taylor?” he mumbles, sleepily.

Taylor watches him, the way he blinks at her, an absent glow spreading across his face like it’s muscle memory when he looks at her. Her heart knots and it feels more like guilt than anything.

“Hi, Harry,” she says. “We should—it’s the new year.”

He nods, though she can’t tell if he knows what’s she’s saying.

“I should let you go,” she says, quietly.

Harry watches her as she puts on her clothes and wrestles her jacket on. She doesn’t know if he knows what she means by let and go with set free in between, but she can’t bring herself to turn around to see the expression on his face. He doesn’t call after her when she disappears into the hallway to call her car service.

It does not feel definitive, but Taylor stares out the window and her heart does not stop burning with desire, even if low.

*

Taylor talks it over with her PR team about how they want the breakup to go. To her relief, they don’t cast her with pitying stares and only her manager touches her shoulder, before leaving the conference room.

She doesn’t wallow. She thought that she would at least cry a little, but her insides feel empty and not at all in a depressing way. When Harry calls her and asks, “We still on for the Virgin Islands?” there’s a weight to his voice that tells her that this is hurting him too. She tries not to overanalyze it.

“Yeah,” she says. Her voice sounds wrecked. She wonders if Harry overanalyzes it, too.

Meeting up with him the next day is surprisingly not stifling, because seeing Harry again makes her chest wind up and seize up again, all at once. They talk, like normal, and while they are on the boat Taylor leans against his arm and says kind of morbidly, “We’re kind of like Romeo and Juliet, huh?”

Harry looks at her.

“You know, aside from the part where they never broke up and both died dramatic deaths,” she finishes.

“So,” says Harry, chuckling and nudging up against her. “Not like Romeo and Juliet at all.”

She laughs into his neck.

A day later he leaves early, and she is riding the same boat across the canal. She watches the reporters on the balcony and thinks of everything they know, and don’t, and she smiles.

*

After that, she dives into songwriting immediately, if only to make her team and family and friends laugh. Selena makes cookies with her and Emma is only too ecstatic to help her bake a pie. Nothing replaces the memories, or makes her forget about them, but as she watches Emma try the the frosting and laugh at how cold it is, she decides that there are worse coping mechanisms.

She and Harry don’t text because then it wouldn’t feel real. It is real, she reminds herself, on the days where the silence sounds like pretend. It is real in the way she’d been pushed backstage that first time to meet the One Direction boys, “because chemistry, who knows,” someone had suggested; it is real in the way when her housemaid washes her sheets and she is pathetically, inexplicably disappointed at the smell of detergent in place of boy cologne.

Her first songs aren’t very good, with the lyrics saying the same things over and over again and the beat going too fast. Taylor wishes they had some routine to go on in the first place, so the days of waking up and not knowing would feel more like something new, than every other day in her life. Everyone close to her knows how it really happened, but Selena offers to tear out pictures of Harry’s face and throw darts at them with her, and Taylor’s mother sends her an email and says, I knew he was no good for you in the first place, anyway.

Taylor laughs and lets them. At the end of the day, the only thing she wishes for is that they had more time.

*

The world keeps turning and Harry Styles still exists and his name slowly starts sounding less like my ex and more like Harry Styles, Harry Styles.

She gets a text from Harry Styles, Harry Styles, five months after.

Miss you x

The low pool of heat that has simmered down like an inactive volcano rises somewhere at the bottom of her stomach. Miss you too, she texts back.

In town today, want to grab lunch? x

The x’s, Harry had once explained to her, are symbolic of kisses, which Taylor knew and had never seen anyone use them like Harry before. She wonders briefly if he’s using them again on purpose or out of habit. To her surprise, she hopes that it’s only out of habit.

They get lunch and he walks her to her home and she should tell him goodbye. She lets him in and then they’re kissing against her front door and her body feels hot with need and the appeal of something they really shouldn’t do.

They do, anyway, and she doesn’t see him for a good while after that. She tries not to think about it though she tells Selena shortly afterward, and Selena talks her through it—“So like, what was that, breakup sex?”

“Not technically,” says Taylor, flipping through her phone’s camera roll. “Closure maybe.”

“Closure,” Selena says, wryly. “A booty call after—how long was it?—of silence.”

Taylor shrugs, even though she knows Selena can’t see her. “I’m not complaining,” she says. “He was good—better actually, even, there’s this thing he does with his tongue—”

“Oh god, don’t tell me,” Selena laughs.

“—with his lips, you know, it feels amazing—”

Harry doesn’t call or text her after that, but it’s easier writing the songs now. She drags out every aspect of their relationship she had catalogued, writes and composes and sings, and remembers, once, when Harry said, “I hope you write a platinum album about me.”

*

She hears about One Direction’s interview with US Weekly because of the usual anonymous email in her inbox, and smiles. Guys hit on her as often as they do, but she thinks of snowmobile accidents and kisses half-hidden behind hotel buildings and concludes that she doesn’t want to go back to it, yet.

When it’s awards season, she’s at the same parties as him again, but she’s also at the same parties with her friends, so she hangs around them instead. They keep her company and don’t try to fit her in with awkward conversations and Taylor is grateful.

She meets his eyes once and it’s shocking—she does not feel the want, almost painful like it used to be in her belly. There is nothing, and she smiles at him, and he smiles back.

Then “Shake It Off” is debuting and “Best Song Ever” is still playing on the radios and it’s like cohabitation. Taylor imagines another world where neither of them are famous nor millionaires and she met him while studying abroad in England and they had a fantastic year long romance. In this daydream they break up, yet again, but beyond that Taylor imagines that years later they’ll run into each other in the streets of New York and end as good lifelong friends, or maybe something else. She doesn’t let her mind wander farther than that.

Her world is the same and different without a boy and it’s okay. When she remembers Romeo and Juliet, Meredith snarling at Harry every time he came over and whining for the weeks when he stopped, the upturn of his mouth and the sadness in his eyes lying sprawled next to him in the snow, the reminder hits more like anything.

The reminder that they shouldn’t have, and couldn’t have, and getting together and breaking up are a couple of those inevitable things in the world.

She misses the way he’d make puns into her mouth and she’d laugh despite herself, sometimes. She misses the times when, yeah, it’d be two a.m. and he’d complain to her about jetlag and she’d let him drive them around and fall asleep in the passenger’s seat when the roads are dark and empty. She misses how they would talk about after like it’d never happen, platinum albums and, “pretty sure the lads would roll their eyes at me if I wrote a Taylor Swift song,” “do it anyway,” and now, in the back of her mind, she is waiting for it, for him.

She misses when it’s been over a year and they’re at another party together except this time they come to each other.

Harry says, “Hi Taylor,” and smiles, rocking his drink in his hand.

She says, “Hi Harry,” and her tongue does not feel too big when she says his name and the heat in her stomach is gone, has fizzled away into nothing.

They look and talk to each other and say goodbye, later, like they are normal people.

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