Chapter 4: The Quarry's Aftermath
My phone buzzes with a text from Liam:
The screen’s blue light carved a stark rectangle in the dark of Spencer’s apartment, the words ‘He’s gone’ vibrating against my palm. My breath hitched, a sharp, cold spike driving straight into my ribs. Everyone else was just frozen shapes in the lamplit gloom—Aria paused mid-sentence on the rug, Spencer’s hand suspended over the whiskey bottle, their faces tilted toward me in silent question.
“It’s Liam,” I said, my voice strangely flat. “Harry’s missing.”
The room erupted into motion, a sudden chaos of grabbing jackets and car keys. Emily was already dialing Zayn, her words rapid-fire. “Check the field house. The bar on Elm. His usual spots.” I just stood there, the phone a dead weight, remembering the shattered look in his green eyes when I’d called him an acquaintance under those stars. This was my fault. The hollow victory I’d felt on that lawn now tasted like ash and metal on my tongue.
I moved without thinking, my keys jangling in a cold fist. “I’m checking the quarry.” I didn’t wait for an argument. The quarry was ours, or it had been—a secret spot from junior year where we’d shared a single, stolen beer and talked about everything except the way his knee kept brushing mine.
The quarry was ours, or it had been—a secret spot from junior year where we’d shared a single, stolen beer and talked about everything except the way his knee kept brushing mine. The memory felt like a artifact from a dead civilization as I spun my car onto the dirt track, headlights slicing through the inky pine sentinels. Gravel spat against the undercarriage, a frantic percussion to match the drumbeat of my heart. I killed the engine and the silence rushed in, absolute and heavy.
It was colder here, away from the campus grid. The October air smelled of wet limestone and decaying leaves. A half-moon cast the steep rock walls in bone-gray light, the black water below a still and waiting void. “Harry!” My shout echoed back at me, a hollow, mocking chorus. Nothing. Then my beam caught it, a dark lump of fabric on the flat stone ledge we used to sit on. His varsity jacket.
I was running before I could think, my boots skidding on loose scree. The jacket was soaked, one sleeve dangling perilously close to the water’s edge. I snatched it up, the familiar scent of his stupid cologne and clean sweat flooding my senses. It was a punch to the gut. “Harry, goddamn it, where are you?” My voice broke. The only answer was the soft lap of water against stone. A fresh, darker patch on the stone ledge led to the water. He’d gone in.
Panic, cold and sharp, dissolved into a fury so vast it was silent. I dropped the jacket. “You selfish asshole!” I screamed it toward the water. “You want to feel something? Feel this!” I was sobbing now, angry, helpless tears freezing on my cheeks. I kicked a rock into the abyss and listened for a splash that didn’t come. I was alone. He was gone. I sank to my knees, the cold from the stone seeping through my jeans immediately.
A rustle came from the dense thicket of blackberry brambles to my left.
I froze. The sound was too deliberate for an animal. Twigs snapped. A figure, darker than the shadows, emerged. He was drenched. Water streamed from his tousled hair, plastering his white t-shirt to his chest, his jeans clinging heavily to his legs. He shivered violently, his lips a pale blue in the moonlight. Harry. Alive.
For a long moment, we just stared. His electric green eyes were wide, unguarded, stripped bare of all the cocky fraternity bravado. He looked shattered. I stood up, my legs shaky. “You’re a fucking idiot,” I whispered, the rage leaching out of me, replaced by a terrifying wave of relief.
He took a stumbling step forward. “You came.”
“Where else would I go?” The words were out, raw and honest, before I could filter them. He closed the distance between us, his body radiating a cold that had nothing to do with the lake. He reached for me, his hands rough and freezing as they framed my face.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed, his forehead touching mine. “I’m so sorry, Nik. For all of it. For her. For being a coward. For tonight.” His words tumbled out in a shaky, desperate stream. “I just… I needed it to stop. The noise. The fucking… emptiness. I needed to feel something real.”
“So you went for a swim in a quarry in October.” My attempt at sarcasm was ruined by the tremor in my voice. His thumbs stroked my cheeks, smearing my tears.
“I felt it,” he said, his voice low. “The cold. It burned. It was all I could feel. Until right now.” He was looking at my mouth. The space between us crackled, the years of unresolved want and recent betrayal compressing into a single, charged point of air. All my guards, my walls, my sharp-witted armor—they dissolved under the sheer physical reality of him, shivering and broken before me.
I pulled him into me. My arms wound around his soaked back, holding him tight as his trembling intensified. He buried his face in the crook of my neck, his cold nose a shock against my skin. “I’ve got you,” I murmured into his wet hair, the way you’d comfort a child. But this was nothing childish. The press of his body, even frozen, ignited a familiar, deep-seated heat low in my belly. I was acutely aware of every point of contact: his hips against mine, the hard plane of his chest, the ragged puff of his breath on my throat.
He pulled back just enough to look at me. His gaze searched my face, desperate, asking a silent question. I answered it. I crashed my lips onto his.
It wasn’t a gentle kiss. It was a collision. A claiming. It was salt from my tears and the chill from his lips and the sudden, explosive heat of his mouth opening under mine. He groaned, a raw, hungry sound from deep in his chest, and his hands left my face to fist in my hair, holding me to him as if I were the only source of warmth in the universe. I kissed him back with every ounce of frustration, every sleepless night spent thinking of him, every jealous ache I’d carried since I saw Kendall Jenner’s hand on his arm at that first party.
His tongue swept into my mouth, and I met it with my own, the taste of him—lake water, whiskey, and something uniquely Harry—driving me wild. My hands slid under his soaked shirt, splaying across the cold, tight skin of his lower back. He flinched at the touch, then arched into it. “Nikki,” he gasped against my mouth, breaking the kiss to trail his lips down my jaw to my throat. His teeth grazed my pulse point, and a bolt of pure lightning shot straight to my core.
“You’re freezing,” I managed to say, my fingers working at the button of his jeans.
“You’ll warm me up.” His voice was guttural, full of a need that mirrored my own. He shrugged out of his soaked t-shirt with a rough pull, letting it fall to the stone with a wet slap. The moonlight washed over his torso, highlighting the defined muscles of his chest and abdomen, the droplets of water clinging to his skin like diamonds. He was beautiful, and the sight stole my breath.
He reached for the hem of my sweater. “This. Off. Now.”
I helped him, pulling it over my head along with the thin tank top beneath. The cold air pebbled my skin, my nipples hardening instantly. His gaze dropped, hungry and dark. “Fuck, you’re perfect,” he breathed. One calloused hand came up to palm my breast through the lace of my bra, his thumb circling the already taut peak. A sharp gasp tore from my throat. He unhooked the bra with a practiced flick, and it joined the pile of clothing. His mouth was on me before I could react, hot and urgent, sucking my nipple into the warm cavern of his mouth.
The sensation was blinding. The contrast of his scorching mouth on my cold skin, the rough swipe of his tongue, the gentle bite of his teeth—it was too much and not enough. I tangled my hands in his wet curls, holding him to me, my head falling back. “Harry…”
He switched to my other breast, lavishing it with the same desperate attention, while his hand slid down my stomach, past the waistband of my jeans. He palmed me through my underwear, and I jerked against his hand, a moan ripped from deep within. “So wet already,” he growled, the vibration against my breast making my knees buckle. “For me?”
“Always for you, you bastard,” I choked out, the truth of it both liberating and devastating. “Always.”
He kissed me again, hard, as his fingers pushed aside the fabric of my panties and found my clit. A direct, electric contact that made me see stars. He circled it, his touch insistently perfect, and I rocked against his hand, shameless, driven by a need that had been building for years. “I need to be inside you,” he said, his voice ragged. “Right now. I can’t wait.”
“Then don’t.” My own voice was a stranger’s, thick with lust. I pushed at his jeans, and he kicked them off along with his boxers. He stood naked before me, gloriously, fully aroused, the moonlight delineating every powerful line of his body. I shoved my own jeans and underwear down my hips, stepping out of them, not caring about the cold stone beneath my bare feet. The only thing that mattered was the heat radiating from him.
He guided me down onto his discarded jacket, a scant barrier between my back and the cold rock. He loomed over me, his green eyes burning into mine. “This isn’t going to be gentle, Nikki.”
“I don’t want gentle,” I said, spreading my legs for him. “I want you. I want all of it.”
He positioned himself at my entrance, the broad head of his cock nudging against me. I was slick and ready, my body aching for him. He paused, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “Tell me you want this.”
“I want this. I want you. Fuck me, Harry.”
He drove into me in one deep, relentless stroke, filling me completely, stretching me in a way that bordered on pain before melting into a devastating, full pleasure. We cried out in unison, a ragged duet swallowed by the indifferent night. For a second, he didn’t move, buried to the hilt, his body trembling with the effort of holding still. I wrapped my legs around his hips, locking my ankles at the small of his back, pulling him deeper. The feeling was profound, a shocking intimacy that went beyond the physical. He was inside me. Harry was inside me.
Then he began to move.
It was a punishing, desperate rhythm. He pulled out almost completely before slamming back in, each thrust jarring through my entire body. The crude, wet sound of our joining was obscenely loud. He braced one hand beside my head, the other gripping my hip hard enough to bruise. “Look at me,” he commanded, and I did. I let him see everything—the pleasure, the surrender, the love, the fury. His face was a mask of agonized ecstasy.
“You feel… so… goddamn… good,” he grunted with each thrust. “Tighter than I… fucking… imagined.”
“Harder,” I begged, arching to meet him. “Don’t you dare hold back.”
He obeyed, his pace becoming even more frantic, a brutal piston motion that chased away all thought, all past hurt, leaving only the white-hot present. The cold air was forgotten. The world narrowed to the slap of our skin, his guttural curses, my escalating cries. The rough wool of his jacket scratched my back, a counterpoint to the incredible friction building between my legs.
“Touch yourself,” he ordered, his voice strained. “Come for me. I want to feel you come on my cock.”
My hand slid down between us, my fingers finding my clit, swollen and throbbing. The added pressure was immediate, coiling the tension tighter and tighter. He watched my face, mesmerized, his thrusts becoming more erratic, losing their rhythm as he neared his own edge.
“That’s it, baby,” he panted. “Make yourself come. Come all over me.”
His words, filthy and perfect, pushed me over. The coil snapped. Pleasure detonated through me, a vicious, racking wave that stole my breath and my vision. I convulsed around him, a raw scream tearing from my throat as the contractions milked his length.
The sensation pulled his own release from him. With a choked roar, he buried himself as deep as he could go, his body stiffening. I felt the hot, pulsing rush of him inside me, and the profound intimacy of it sparked a second, softer ripple through my core. He collapsed onto me, his full weight a welcome anchor, his face buried in my neck. We lay there, entwined, breathing in shattered, syncopated gasps as the universe slowly reassembled itself around us.
The cold began to seep back in, a gradual, insidious return to reality. The ache in my back from the rock. The chill on my exposed skin. The sticky wetness between my thighs. He was still inside me, softening, but he made no move to withdraw. His breath was warm on my skin.
“Nikki,” he mumbled, the word thick with emotion.
I didn’t answer. I just held him, running my fingers through his damp hair. The aftermath was a quiet, fraught space. What did this change? What happened tomorrow when we saw Kendall? When we faced our friends? The questions loomed, but for now, I silenced them. He shifted, finally pulling out, and rolled onto his back beside me, staring up at the indifferent stars. He found my hand and laced his fingers through mine, gripping tight.
We lay in silence for a long time, listening to our heartbeats slow. The heat of our bodies created a fragile pocket of warmth in the vast cold. He turned his head to look at me, his expression unreadable in the dim light. “I’m not letting you go again,” he said, his voice low but firm. It wasn’t a request. It was a declaration.
Before I could respond—to agree, to argue, to question—the beam of a powerful flashlight cut through the trees, sweeping over the water and then pinning us where we lay, naked and exposed.
“Holy shit,” Liam’s voice echoed, stunned, from the tree line. “We found them.”
Behind him, I could make out the silhouettes of Zayn and Louis, their faces hidden in shadow. The real world hadn’t been waiting. It had arrived, flashlight in hand, to witness the complicated, naked truth of us. Harry’s grip on my hand tightened to the point of pain.
The light was a physical violation, bleaching the intimate shadows from our skin. I flinched, trying to cover myself with hands that felt useless and small. Harry’s body jerked over mine, a shield, his back taking the full brunt of the beam. “Turn it off, Liam!” His voice wasn’t angry. It was flat, dead, the aftermath of our fury leaving his words hollow.
“Christ, Harry.” Liam’s voice shifted from shock to something harder. The light wavered, then dropped to illuminate the gravel by our feet. “We’ve been looking for you for two hours. Your phone’s blowing up. And you’re out here… fuck, man.”
I could make them out now, three dark shapes at the tree line. Liam, solid and tense. Zayn, a quieter shadow, looking away as if granting us a shred of decency. Louis, whose usual smirk was absent, replaced by a stark, assessing stare. The reality of our position crashed down—naked, wet, sticky with sex and lake water, sprawled on the ground like animals. The heat of what we’d just done curdled into a sharp, clinical shame.
“Give us a minute,” I said, my own voice surprisingly steady. It was the voice I used with professors who challenged my thesis. It felt absurd here.
They turned their backs in unison, a practiced movement. The silence they offered was almost worse. Harry rolled off me, the cool air rushing to assault my exposed skin. We didn’t look at each other. We moved in a frantic, silent ballet of retrieving clothes. My fingers fumbled, numb and clumsy. My jeans were damp inside, a disgusting clammy feel as I pulled them up over my hips. I couldn’t find my bra. It was just gone, swallowed by the darkness. I yanked my sweater on, the wool scratching my bare, sensitive breasts.
Harry found his boxers and jeans, shoving his legs into them with sharp, jerky motions. He picked up his soaked shirt, looked at it, and threw it back down in a sodden heap. He was left bare-chested, shivering in a way that was only partly from the cold. He stood there, pale in the residual moonlight, muscles taut.
“Okay,” he said, the word directed at the trees.
Liam turned back first, his flashlight now pointed at the ground. His gaze flickered from Harry’s bare torso to my disheveled hair, to the jacket we’d just been lying on. His jaw worked. “Kendall’s called me seven times.”
The name was a bucket of ice water. Harry went utterly still. I felt my own breath lock in my chest.
“What did you tell her?” Harry asked, his voice low.
“I told her we were out looking for your drunk ass, which was the truth.” Liam ran a hand over his face. “She’s at your house. In your room, Harry. Waiting.”
The image was precision-guided torture. Kendall, with her razor-sharp cheekbones and effortless cool, perched on the edge of his frat house bed, the one I’d never seen. The one where he’d probably fucked her. My stomach turned. The physical satisfaction I’d felt moments ago morphed into a sick, heavy weight.
“Let’s go,” Louis said, his tone leaving no room for discussion. “Before someone else decides to join the search party. Campus security’s already circled the field twice.”
We walked back to the cars in a silent, ragged procession. Harry and I followed Liam, our footsteps crunching loudly in the quiet. I could feel the others behind us, a silent audience to our walk of shame. The warmth of the car interior was a shock. Liam’s Jeep smelled like old coffee and his leather jacket. Harry got in the passenger seat. I climbed into the back, behind him. Zayn and Louis got into Louis’s car behind us.
Liam started the engine but didn’t put it in gear. He stared straight ahead through the windshield. “What the hell was that, Harry?”
“Don’t,” Harry said, the word a warning.
“Don’t? You disappear. You scare the shit out of everyone. And we find you raw-dogging Nikki at the quarry?” Liam’s voice was tight with a mixture of concern and fury. “What about Kendall?”
“I don’t want to talk about Kendall,” Harry said, his knuckles white where he gripped the dashboard.
“Well you’re gonna have to!” Liam finally looked at him. “She’s not some random hookup you can ghost, Harry. She’s in your goddamn room. This isn’t high school anymore. This is a ticking bomb.”
In the backseat, I curled into myself, pressing my forehead against the cold window. Each word was a stone thrown at the fragile glass of whatever had just happened between us. It hadn’t changed anything. It had just made everything more violently complicated.
“I know what it is,” Harry whispered, so low I almost didn’t hear it. He glanced back at me, just a flicker of his green eyes in the rearview mirror. A look of sheer, unvarnished pain. Then he faced forward. “Just drive, Liam. Take us to Spencer’s.”
The ride was a study in tension. The heater blasted, but I couldn’t stop shivering. My body was a archive of sensation—the deep, throbbing ache between my legs, the chafe of denim on tender skin, the ghost of his weight on me. I could still smell him on my own skin, a mix of lake and sex and that stupid, expensive cologne. It clashed with the pine air freshener dangling from Liam’s mirror.
Nobody spoke. The silence was a pressurized container. Liam drove with aggressive precision, his hands at ten and two. Harry stared out his window, a monument of quiet turmoil. I watched the back of his head, the damp curls dark against his neck, and wanted to scream or touch him or vanish.
We pulled up behind Spencer’s apartment. The lights were on, a warm, guilty glow from the windows. “I’ll handle Zayn and Louis,” Liam said, killing the engine. He didn’t move. “But you two… you need to figure out what you’re doing before you walk in there. Aria and Hanna and Emily are in there. They’ve been worried sick. And they’re not stupid.”
He got out, slamming the door, and walked toward Louis’s car, holding up a hand to intercept them. Harry and I were left alone in the vibrating silence of the parked Jeep.
The space between the seats felt like a canyon. I watched the muscles in his shoulders move as he took a deep, ragged breath. He didn’t turn around.
“Nikki.” My name was a rough scrape of sound.
“Don’t.” I echoed his earlier word back to him.
“I have to.”
“What?” I finally said, the word cracking. “What do you have to do, Harry? Go back to your fraternity house? To her? Was this just your grand, fucked-up way of saying goodbye?”
He turned then, twisting in his seat to look at me. His face was ravaged in the dim dashboard lights. “You think that was a goodbye?” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “That was… that was the only real thing I’ve felt in months. Years.”
“It didn’t feel real to me.” The lie tasted bitter. “It felt like revenge. For both of us.”
He flinched. “It wasn’t.”
“Then what is it?” I leaned forward, my voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “What’s the plan? You walk in there, we pretend nothing happened? You go back to Kendall and I go back to ignoring you? Because I’m really fucking good at that, Harry. I’ve had practice.”
His hand shot out between the seats, grabbing my wrist. His grip was firm, grounding. “I ended it with Kendall. Tonight. Before I left the house. That’s why I…”
He trailed off. That’s why he’d spiraled. That’s why he’d gone to the quarry. The information landed, but it didn’t settle. It floated, unstable.
“You ended it,” I repeated, numb.
“I tried.” He looked down at his hand on my wrist, his thumb stroking the frantic pulse there. “It was a shit show. She didn’t believe me. She thinks it’s a fight. That’s why she’s there, waiting. She thinks I’ll come back and apologize.” He finally met my eyes. “I’m not going back.”
The declaration hung there, fragile. A possibility. A different kind of bomb.
“You expect me to believe that?” I asked, my throat tight. “After everything? After watching you with her for weeks? After you let her touch you like that?”
“I never wanted her!” The words burst from him, too loud for the car. He lowered his voice, a pained, urgent rasp. “I wanted you. I’ve always wanted you. And I was too much of a coward to do anything about it, so I picked the easiest, shiniest distraction I could find. She was a placeholder. A terrible, fucked-up placeholder.”
I wanted to believe him. The want was a physical ache, worse than the one between my legs. It was a flower opening in a dark room, desperate for light. But the room was full of broken glass. “Words are easy, Harry.”
“Then this isn’t.” He released my wrist, but only to fumble with his door handle. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Inside. We’re doing this now. In front of everyone.” He got out of the Jeep, standing in the cold parking lot, shirtless and resolute. He came around and opened my door, offering a hand. It wasn’t a request.
I stared at his hand, then up at his face. The devil-may-care grin was gone. The cocky fraternity president was gone. This was someone else, someone raw and determined and terrified. I took his hand. His skin was still cool, but his grip was electric.
We walked toward the apartment door, hand in hand. Our joined hands were a message, a flag planted in uncertain territory. Liam saw it first, standing with Zayn and Louis on the sidewalk. His eyes widened slightly, then narrowed, calculating the fallout. He said nothing, just fell in step behind us.
Spencer opened the door before we could knock. Her eyes, red-rimmed from worry, took in the tableau: Harry shirtless and disheveled, me with wild hair and his jacket draped over my shoulders, our clasped hands. Her gaze flickered to Liam, who gave a slight, grim shake of his head.
“Oh,” she said softly, and stepped aside.
The warm, cinnamon-scented air of the apartment felt like a different planet. Aria and Emily were on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. They both went still. Hanna stood by the kitchen island, a mug frozen halfway to her lips. Every eye was on us, a palpable, suffocating weight.
Harry didn’t let go of my hand. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I worried everyone.” His voice was clear, carrying in the quiet room. “That was shitty of me.”
Aria stood up, her protective instincts overriding her shock. “Are you okay? What happened? You’re soaked.”
“I’m fine,” he said, though he clearly wasn’t. He took a breath that seemed to cost him. “I broke up with Kendall tonight. Or I tried to. It didn’t go well. I freaked out. I went to the quarry. Nikki found me.” He squeezed my hand. “Something happened. Between us.”
The room was so quiet I could hear the hum of the refrigerator compressor. Emily’s eyes were like saucers. Hanna slowly set her mug down.
“Something happened,” Spencer repeated, her voice flat. “You mean you had sex with her while your girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, or whatever, is currently sitting in your bedroom?”
The bluntness was a mercy. It sliced through the euphemisms.
“Yes,” Harry said, without hesitation. “Kendall is not my girlfriend. Not anymore. What happened with Nikki… it wasn’t a mistake. It was something I should have done a long time ago.”
I felt exposed, dissected under the gaze of my best friends. This was the part I’d always feared—the messy, public unveiling of a heart I’d kept locked down. Aria looked from Harry to me, her expression softening with a dawning, worried understanding. She knew what this cost me.
“So what now, Harry?” Liam asked from the doorway, his arms crossed. “Kendall’s waiting. The whole Sigma Chi house probably knows she’s there by now. This is going to blow up.”
“I know,” Harry said. He finally turned to face me fully, both of his hands now holding mine. His green eyes were intense, unwavering. “I don’t have a clean plan. This is messy. It’s going to get uglier. But I’m done hiding. I’m done choosing the easy thing.” He swallowed. “If you’ll have me. In all this mess. That’s what now.”
It was the worst, most public, most imperfect proposal imaginable. No promises of forever, no grand romantic gestures. Just an acknowledgment of a mess, and a choice to stand in it together. The silence stretched, taut as a wire. All my instincts screamed to pull back, to rebuild the walls, to protect myself from the incoming shrapnel.
But I was tired. I was tired of guarding a heart that only beat fully when he was near. I was tired of watching from the sidelines. The memory of him inside me, of the raw, broken honesty in his voice by the water, was more real than any fear.
“Okay,” I said. The word was quiet, but it echoed in the still room.
A soft exhale, a collective release of breath, came from the couch. Harry’s shoulders slumped in relief. He brought my hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to my knuckles, a gesture so unexpectedly tender it made my eyes sting.
Then his phone, which Liam must have given back to him, buzzed violently on the coffee table. We all looked at it. The screen lit up, illuminating the darkness.
KENDALL.
Then again. KENDALL.
And again. A cascade of notifications.
Harry didn’t move toward it. He just looked at me. “It starts,” he murmured.
The phone finally stopped buzzing, and for a second, there was peace. Then it rang, a shrill, persistent sound. Liam walked over and looked at the screen. “It’s not her. It’s Niall.” He answered, putting it on speaker. “Yeah?”
Niall’s voice, usually so easy-going, was strained and tight. “Liam? Is Harry with you? You all need to get back here. Now.”
“What’s wrong?” Liam asked, his voice hardening.
“It’s Kendall. She’s not waiting in his room anymore. She’s in the living room. And she’s… she’s telling a story.” Niall’s hesitation was ominous. “She’s got a bottle of tequila and a very captivated audience. She’s talking about secret hookups. And promises. And she’s naming names, man. She just said Nikki’s name.”
The ice water was back, flooding my veins. Harry’s grip on my hand became vicelike.
“What exactly is she saying, Niall?” Harry’s voice was dangerously calm.
Niall’s sigh was heavy over the speaker. “She’s saying you’ve been cheating on her for weeks. That you and Nikki have been sneaking around. She’s painting a pretty detailed picture, Harry. And half the fucking fraternity is listening. The other half is filming it on their phones.”
The image was immediate and vivid: Kendall, cool and wounded and elegant, weaving a devastating narrative of betrayal to a crowd of brothers who lived for drama. My name, my reputation, being dissected in that neon-lit warzone of a living room. The grilled cheese smell, the spilled shots, all of it a backdrop to my character assassination.
“We’re coming,” Harry said, his voice leaving no room for argument. He looked at me, at our friends. “This is mine to clean up. But I’m not going alone.” He wasn’t asking. He was stating a fact.
I nodded, a strange calm settling over me. The fear was still there, a cold knot in my stomach, but it was outweighed by a rising, fiery defiance. She was telling a story? Fine. So could I.
“Okay,” I said again, and this time my voice was strong. “Let’s go hear her story.” I shrugged off his jacket and handed it to him. “But you’re putting on a shirt first. We’re walking in there together, and we’re not starting from a position of looking guilty.”
A flicker of a smile, the first real one, touched his lips. He took the jacket. Spencer was already moving, heading to her room. She returned with a simple black henley and tossed it to Harry. “It’ll be tight. But it’ll do.”
He pulled it on. It was