I can’t go in there. I can’t go in there. I can’t go in—
Fuck it. I’m going in.
He needs to understand it can never work between us. I need to resolve this.
End this, right now.
I yank open the door and Harry’s right there, still fully clothed, which is kinda jarring since I’m used to him stripping naked the second he’s alone. My fist closes around his shirt, and I tug him into my room.
“Lando, before you can tell me we can’t be together like that, I need to say one thing.” Harry’s out of breath, as though he’s been running laps. I wonder if he’d been pacing too, practicing what he needed to say.
It won’t make a jolt of difference. Whatever he’s going to say, however he’s about to convince me we could work, he’s wrong. Nothing can ever happen between us. We’re simply not compatible like that, and it wouldn’t be fair to anyone.
“Sure,” I say. I sit down at the end of the bed, leaving a gap for Harry, but he doesn’t join me.
“I just want to say that I . . . understand. You’ve told me before that we can’t be anything more than friends who fuck around now and then, and I thought, okay, maybe one day you might change your mind.”
I open my mouth to reply, but Harry holds up a palm.
“Please. You can say whatever you need to afterwards, but I’ve been thinking a lot of thoughts recently, and even though I don’t fully understand your reasons for not wanting to be together, and there are definitely some things you haven’t told me, I wanted to let you know that you don’t have to. Tell me, that is. You don’t need to explain why you don’t want to be with me. That maybe it’s not something for me to understand. You’re my best friend, but you don’t owe me an explanation. And you especially don’t owe me a relationship.
“I love you, Lando, as a mate of course, and it kills me to think you’re sacrificing some part of yourself just to stay as my friend.”
I’m on my feet already, but I can’t remember standing. “Harry, it’s not—”
“I’ve thought a lot about what you said earlier, about Lionel, and I’m going to accept a date offer, if he makes one, and if he doesn’t, I’m going to actively look for a boyfriend or girlfriend. You’re right. I need that kind of . . . physical connection. I’m fucking lonely. And I have been for so long. Since April, really. And you are too, I know you are, but I don’t see why you can’t . . .” He physically shakes the notion from his head. “It’s not about you. It’s about me. Tomorrow, I’m gonna get the train back to Bath, and maybe . . . we just don’t see each other again.”
“Harry.” His name is barely a whisper on my breath. “Are you being for real right now?” Why am I saying this? I’m the one who wanted to force this rift between us. Now I want him sticking around, torturing me?
“Hate me if you want,” he says. “I . . . I guess I need to put myself first for once. I’m wasting the best years of my life waiting for you to change your mind. And I’ve been so . . . stupid and naive and . . . I . . . yeah, this needs to stop.”
I swallow the building emotion. Harry is doing what I should have done four months ago. Six months. A year, even.
“Why wait until morning? The trains go all night. Hell, I’ll order a taxi for you all the way back to Bath. Why put off the inevitable?”
He stares at me, into my soul, and I swear I see the exact moment his heart breaks. I fucking hate myself.
“So, that’s it, then?” He pushes the hair off his forehead. “This . . . whatever it is we’ve had for the last year is over?”
“It’s been over since April.”
“You won’t fight for me?”
Why is he breaking me like this? Why is he trying to hurt me? “You already know the answer to that.”
Harry nods. His face crumples, lip pouts, and I think he’s about to cry. Instead, he lunges forward, locks his hand around my nape and slams his mouth into mine.
I’m the one crying. My damp skin pushes against his, and the kiss is salty, and urgent, and desperate, like the last kiss of a dying love. His shirt buttons find their way in between my fingers and I’m unfastening them, pushing the fabric over his shoulders, massaging the muscles on his back with my palms.
I skate my lips and tongue and teeth over his earlobe, down his neck, along his collarbone. He cries out and pushes me backwards, and backwards, until my legs hit the end of the bed and my knees buckle. Then he’s placing his thighs either side of me and roughly manhandling the tie fastenings on my silk Balenciaga shirt, as he brings our mouths together again.
I want him to rip it open. A twelve-hundred-pound shirt torn apart because he cannot control himself around me.
I want him to need me that much.
If he’d been like this that first night, we would never have reached this point right now. I would have fucked him and kicked him out of my house the next morning, and never spoken to him again.
And he went and ruined it all by being nice.
