Chapter 4: The Apology at the Oak
The gallery air was cool and smelled of ozone and damp earth. On the walls, Spencer’s mycelial projections pulsed with a soft, eerie light, branching veins of blue and gold that spread and retreated like slow, intelligent breath. I stood before the largest one, trying to let the strange beauty swallow her whole. The intricate, root-like patterns were supposed to represent connection, the hidden networks beneath everything
I stood before the largest one, trying to let the strange beauty swallow me whole. The intricate, root-like patterns were supposed to represent connection, the hidden networks beneath everything.It just made me think of disease.
A voice cut through the ambient synth music.“Nikki?”
I turned. Louis and Zayn were standing there, looking awkward in their jackets, hands shoved deep in their pockets. The gallery’s cool light washed them out, making them look like ghosts themselves.“Hey,” I said, my voice flat. “Didn’t know you guys were into fungal art.”
“We’re not,” Zayn said, shifting his weight. “We, uh, saw you come in.”
Louis’s eyes were on me, serious in a way I hadn’t seen since before everything blew up. He stepped closer, lowering his voice.“Can we talk? Outside for a sec?”
My first instinct was to say no.To let the pulsing blue veins on the wall be my only company. But his expression stopped me.I nodded, following them back through the gallery doors into the crisp evening air.
The sidewalk was nearly empty.Louis turned to me, not wasting time.
“Harry talked to me last night,” he said, running a hand through his hair.“Like, actually talked. Not his usual crap.”
“Okay,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.“He told me everything, Nik. The whole, ugly thing.” Louis’s gaze was intense, unwavering. “It wasn’t just some drunk hookup with Alison. He said he saw it coming, saw her circling, and he let it happen.”
A bus hissed to a stop down the street.I waited.
“He said he was scared,” Louis continued, his words deliberate.“Scared of how much he loved you. Scared it was real. So he blew it up on purpose, before you could.”
The words landed like a physical blow, a sucker-punch to the solar plexus. All my angry, solid theories—his need for validation, his frat-boy carelessness—melted, leaving this raw, pathetic truth.He was terrified of me.Of us.
Something cracked deep inside my chest, a fissure reaching all the cold places I’d sealed shut.
“I have to go,” I mumbled, my voice barely my own.I didn’t wait for their response. I walked back through the gallery, past the pulsating fungi, my vision blurring. I pushed into the single-stall bathroom and locked the door, leaning back against it.
Then, for the first time in weeks, I cried. Not the angry, hot tears from before, but deep, silent sobs that wracked my whole body. I cried for the love he’d been too terrified to hold.I cried for the version of him I’d missed seeing. I slid down the door and sat on the cold tile, letting it all out until my ribs ached and my head throbbed.Hours later, I was still awake, staring at my ceiling. The hollow echo of Louis’s words had taken up residence in me, replacing the anger with a vast, aching understanding.
I got out of bed.I didn't think; I just moved. I drove across town, the streets slick with a recent rain, the world quiet and black.His apartment building was a dark silhouette. I took the stairs, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my ribs. I knocked, just once.The door opened. He stood there, silhouetted by the faint blue glow of a laptop screen from deeper in the room. He looked hollowed out, thinner, a ghost living in his own skin.He just stared, as if I were a mirage.
I stepped inside without a word. He closed the door, and we were plunged into near-darkness, just the strip of light from under the bathroom door cutting across the foyer.We stood inches apart. The air was thick with every unsaid word, every shattered promise, every terrified confession. I could smell his soap, his skin, a scent that still felt like home.It undid me.
I reached out in the dark, my hand finding his.Just a brush of my fingertips against his knuckles.
He broke.A ragged sound tore from his throat, and his knees buckled. He sank to the floor, his forehead coming to rest against my hip, his hands clutching at the fabric of my coat. His shoulders shook with the force of his sobbing, silent and desperate.
I looked down at the crown of his head, his familiar curls, and I didn’t move away. I placed my hand there, feeling the tremors that ran through him.This was the ruin.This was the truth. And for tonight, it was enough that we were both here, in the dark, finally being honest.
The silence between his sobs was a living thing, thick and hot.I felt the dampness of his tears through my jeans. My hand, still on his head, trembled.His breathing hitched, ragged gulps of air that sounded painful.
Then his grip on my coat tightened.He didn’t look up. His voice was shattered glass, ground into the floor.“I’m so sorry,” he whispered, the words muffled against my hip. “I’m so fucking sorry, Nikki.”
“I know,” I said. It was all I had.He moved then.His hands slid up to my waist, urgent and clumsy. He pulled me down. I didn’t resist, my own legs giving way, and I sank to the cold hardwood beside him.Our faces were level in the thin light. His cheeks were streaked, his eyes pools of raw, unguarded agony.I cupped his face. My thumbs smoothed over the wet tracks.He leaned into the touch, a small, broken sound escaping him. I pulled him closer.I kissed his tears, the salt sharp on my lips. I kissed his closed eyelids, his temple, the corner of his mouth where another sob trembled.
He went completely still, as if afraid to breathe. When I finally pulled back an inch, his eyes searched mine, wide with a hope that looked like pain.“Say something,” he begged, his voice rough. “Please.”
I took a shaky breath.The anger was gone, burned out.What remained was exhausted, and real. “Louis told me.What you said. About being scared.”
He flinched, but didn’t look away. “It’s not an excuse.”
“I didn’t say it was.” I traced the line of his jaw, a gesture that felt both foreign and deeply familiar. “It just… it makes it make sense. In the worst way possible.”
A half-laugh, half-groan escaped him.“Yeah.” He leaned his forehead against mine. “I thought I’d feel lighter, telling him. I just feel emptier.”
“You don’t get to feel lighter yet,” I whispered.The truth of it was a simple, cold stone between us. He nodded, accepting it.
We stayed like that for a long time, knees touching on the hard floor.The digital clock on his microwave glowed 3:47 AM. The world outside was silent.“I should go,” I said, not moving.
His hand found mine, lacing our fingers together.A question.“Or you could not.”
I looked at our joined hands. I thought of the empty bed waiting in my apartment, the sterile quiet. I thought of the pulsing blue fungi in the gallery, the hidden networks.
I thought of the pulsing blue fungi in the gallery, the hidden networks. The thought wasn't soothing. It was just true. Some connections are rotten. Others are just buried, waiting.
“My bed’s a mess,” he said, his voice scraped raw. “But it’s… it’s there.”
I pushed myself up, my joints stiff from the floor. I walked past him, down the short hall I knew by muscle memory. His room was exactly as I’d pictured: a duvet shoved into a heap, practice jerseys blooming from a hamper, the faint, familiar scent of his skin and cheap detergent. I stood in the center, unmoored.
He hovered in the doorway, a shadow. “I can take the couch.”
I didn’t answer. I just kicked off my shoes. The act felt monumental. I slid out of my jeans, the denim rough against my skin, and left them in a pile on the floor. I pulled his t-shirt from where it was half-hanging off the bed and pulled it on. The cotton was soft, smelling purely of him.
I finally looked at him. “Are you getting in or not?”
He moved then, slow, like he was walking on broken glass. He stripped down to his boxers and a thin white tee, his back to me. The muscles there were tense, carved from stone. He slid under the covers on his side, keeping a canyon of space between us.
I turned off the lamp. The dark was absolute, a physical weight. We lay on our backs, not touching. The silence was a third person in the bed.
“I’m afraid to breathe,” he whispered.
“So am I.”
The admission hung there. I listened to the furnace kick on, a rattling sigh in the walls. I felt the heat of him along the length of my arm, a magnetic pull I fought against. My fingers itched to reach out, to confirm he was real. I clenched them into the sheet.
“What happens tomorrow?” he asked the ceiling.
“I don’t know.” I rolled onto my side, facing him. His profile was a sharp cut against the faint light from the window. “I’m not taking you back. Just so we’re clear.”
“I know.”
“This doesn’t fix anything.”
“I know that, too.”
He finally turned his head. Our eyes met in the gloom. The pain in his was so naked it stole my breath. I saw the boy who’d driven two hours to bring me soup when I had the flu. I saw the ghost who had kissed Alison to make me disappear.
My hand moved of its own volition. It didn’t seek his hand. It landed on his chest, over his heart. The beat was a frantic, trapped bird against my palm.He froze. A shudder ran through him. Then his hand came up, covering mine, pressing it harder against his ribs as if he could fuse my skin to his.His fingers were trembling.
“I can feel it breaking,” I said softly.
“It’s been broken.” He swallowed. “Since the second I saw your face in that doorway.”
I didn’t move my hand. We stayed like that, anchored by that one point of contact, until my arm grew heavy. Until my blinks grew longer. His breathing evened out, or pretended to. The digital clock numbers bled from 4:19 to 5:03.
Exhaustion won. My consciousness frayed at the edges, dissolving into the warm, dark smell of him. The last thing I knew was the slow, deliberate shift of his body. He curled toward me, carefully, his forehead coming to rest against my shoulder. Not an embrace.A docking.
The faint gray light of morning painted the room in shades of ash and regret. I awoke to the solid heat of him pressed along my back, his arm a heavy, familiar weight around my waist. His breath stirred the hair at my nape, deep and even. For one suspended moment, the world was just this: the dry warmth of his t-shirt against my skin, the quiet rhythm of his sleep, the impossible illusion of safety.Then memory flooded back, a corrosive tide.Alison’s smirk in the doorway. The pulsing blue veins of the fungal artwork, mapping a decay I could feel in my own chest. Louis’s words: He was scared of how much he loved you. The hurt crystallized, sharp and fresh, piercing the warm haze of shared sleep.I tensed. His arm tightened instinctively, a sleep-slurred murmur vibrating against my spine. “Mmm.”
I couldn’t breathe. The room, his smell, the possessive curl of his body around mine—it was a beautiful, suffocating trap. I started to shift away, to extricate myself from the tangle of limbs and history.His hand splayed flat against my stomach, holding me in place. He wasn’t asleep anymore. The energy between us shifted, the drowsy warmth igniting into something else, something taut and desperate.His nose traced the line of my shoulder through the thin cotton. A confession.A question.
“Don’t go,” he whispered, his voice graveled with sleep and something raw.“This is a mistake,” I said, but the words had no force. My body was betraying me, arching back almost imperceptibly into the solid wall of him. The hollow ache that had been my constant companion for weeks had mutated, warmed, become a thrumming need.“Probably.” His lips brushed the sensitive skin below my ear. “I don’t care.”
His hand slid down from my stomach, fingers slipping beneath the hem of the shirt, finding the bare skin of my thigh. The calluses on his palms from endless hours on the pitch were rough, deliciously abrasive.A shiver tore through me.My breath hitched. Every rational thought screamed to pull away, to preserve the fragile distance I’d built.
My hand came up and gripped the back of his neck, holding him to me. I was the one who turned my head, who found his mouth in the half-light.The kiss was not soft. It was a collision.Teeth, salt, the sharp gasp of air shared between us. It tasted like forgiveness and revenge, all twisted together until you couldn’t tell one from the other.
He rolled me onto my back, his weight settling over me, a welcome anchor. The haunted look in his eyes was gone, replaced by a fierce, focused hunger.He looked at me like I was water in a desert. He tore his own shirt over his head, the fabric whispering away, and then his hands were on the hem of mine.“This,” he said, a ragged command. “Off.”
I lifted my hips, my arms, letting him pull it away. The cool air hit my skin, raising goosebumps.His gaze was a physical touch, traveling over my breasts, my stomach, my face. He didn’t speak. He just lowered his head and took one nipple into his mouth, hot and wet and insistent. A sharp cry left my lips, my fingers tangling in his curls, not to pull him away but to press him closer.
He worshipped my body with a frantic intensity, as if memorizing it anew. His mouth was everywhere—the soft swell of my stomach, the inside of my thigh, the frantic pulse at my wrist. Each kiss was a punctuation mark, a silent, feverish sentence of apology and want. I was dissolving under it, the last walls of ice melting into a scalding pool of pure sensation.
“Harry,” I gasped, beyond words, beyond thought.He understood. He shifted between my legs, the rough denim of his boxers a maddening barrier against my bare skin. I hooked my thumbs into the waistband, yanking them down over his hips.He kicked them off. Then he was there, the hard, hot length of him pressing against my core, slick and eager.
He paused, his forehead damp against mine, his entire body trembling with the effort of holding still.“Look at me,” he breathed.
I opened my eyes.His were dark, dilated, utterly shattered.“I see you,” I whispered.
It destroyed him. With a broken sound, he pushed inside me, one slow, inexorable stroke that filled the hollow places, that stretched the ache into a blinding, perfect fullness. We both cried out, a ragged duet of pain and relief. He buried his face in my neck, his breath coming in harsh pants.
For a moment, he didn’t move, just let us feel it, the brutal, beautiful fact of being joined again.Then he began to move. There was no tenderness, only a raw, driving need.Each thrust was a confession, a punishment, a prayer. The slap of skin, the creak of the bedsprings, our mingled grunts and gasps—it was filthy and honest and real.
I wrapped my legs around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back, meeting him thrust for thrust.The coil of pleasure tightened, vicious and swift. I was chasing it, chasing the oblivion, the moment where feeling would eclipse remembering. He fucked me like he was trying to outrun his own shadow, his rhythm becoming erratic, punishing.
“You feel…” he grunted, words failing. “God, Nikki…”
“Don’t talk.” I clutched at his shoulders, my nails biting into his skin. “Just… don’t stop.”
My climax ripped through me without warning, a violent wave that shattered my vision into white static.I convulsed around him, a silent scream locked in my throat. The intensity of it was almost unbearable, wringing tears from the corners of my eyes. He felt it, watched it happen, and his own control shattered.
“Fuck!” he shouted, his body slamming into mine once, twice more, before he stilled, buried deep. I felt the hot, pulsing rush of him inside me, his release a distant echo of my own. A final, frantic claim.He collapsed atop me, sweat-slicked and heavy, his heart hammering against mine. The room came back in fragments: the sound of a distant siren, the patter of rain starting against the window, the smell of sex and sweat and us. We lay there, wrecked and breathing, for a long time.
When he finally rolled to the side, the cold air rushed in to separate us.The silence returned, but it was different now.Laden.Sticky. I stared at the water stains on his ceiling. The high was receding, leaving a clearer, colder landscape behind.He reached for my hand.I let him take it.Our fingers linked, damp and loose.
“What does this mean?” he asked the ceiling, his voice hollowed out again.
I watched a drop of rain trace a crooked path down the glass. I thought of the fungal networks, the ones that looked beautiful but could leech the life from a tree.Connection wasn’t always growth. Sometimes it was just a different kind of consumption.
“It means we’re both lonely,” I said, my voice surprisingly steady. “And we know how each other’s bodies work.”
He flinched as if I’d struck him.I pulled my hand from his and sat up. The sheets were twisted, the room a testament to our animal need. I stood, my legs unsteady, and began searching for my clothes in the gloom. I pulled on my jeans, my bra, his discarded t-shirt.Each article felt like armor.
“Nikki,” he said from the bed, a plea.I stood by the door, one hand on the cool knob. I didn’t look back.“The championship is in six weeks, Harry. Coach needs you focused.”
“That’s not what I need,” he said, the words barely audible.I closed my eyes. For a second, I saw him on his knees in the foyer, sobbing into my coat. I saw the fungal blue light.I saw Alison’s perfect, poisonous smile.
“I know,” I said finally. Then I opened the door and stepped out into the damp, grey morning, the ghost of him still warm on my skin.
Then I opened the door and stepped out into the damp, grey morning, the ghost of him still warm on my skin.
The door didn’t slam. It clicked shut, a soft, final sound. I made it three steps down the echoing hallway before I heard it—the frantic scramble inside, a thump, a muffled curse. My pace didn’t change. The stairwell door groaned open behind me. I took the steps down, my sneakers silent on the concrete.
“Nikki, stop.”
His voice bounced off the cinderblock walls, raw and shredded. I pushed through the heavy exterior door into the mist. The rain was a fine, cold spray. I walked, heading nowhere, just away.
Bare feet slapped on wet pavement behind me. I turned. He stood ten feet away, breathing hard, wearing only his boxers. The rain darkened the fabric instantly, plastering it to his skin. He looked feral, exposed, water dripping from his curls onto his shoulders. A curtain shifted in a neighboring apartment window. He didn’t seem to notice.
“Get inside, Harry. You look insane.”
“You left.” He took a step closer, his chest heaving. “You just… fuck. You can’t do that.”
“I just did.” I turned to walk again.
He moved fast. His hand closed around my bicep, not hard, but unyielding. The heat of his grip burned through my sleeve. I jerked my arm, but he held on. We stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, in the soft rain, him nearly naked, me clothed in the evidence of what we’d just done.
“Let go.”
“Tell me what that was.” His eyes searched my face, desperate for a map. “In there. Was that just… biology? Just ‘knowing how each other’s bodies work’?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say it meant something!” The words tore out of him, loud in the quiet street. “I want you to say it was a start. A fucking horrible, ugly, perfect start. Anything.”
I looked at his hand on my arm, then back at his face. The haunted look was back, mingled with a wild, rain-soaked hope. It made me cruel. “It meant I was wet and you were there. It meant I wanted to forget my own name for ten minutes. Congratulations. You’re a useful distraction.”
He recoiled as if I’d spat acid. His hand dropped. The pain in his eyes was so acute I had to glance away, over his shoulder, at the flickering neon sign of a diner down the block.
When he spoke again, his voice was low and dangerous. “You’re a liar.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah.” He stepped into my space again, the rain running in tiny rivers down the cut of his collarbone. “You came to me. You touched me first. You tasted my skin. You came so hard you cried. That’s not a distraction, Nikki. That’s a confession.”
Anger, hot and immediate, flushed through me. It was the truth, and I hated him for seeing it. I shoved his bare, wet chest. “Fuck you.”
He didn’t budge. He caught my wrists. “Tell me to walk away. Right now. Look me in the eye and tell me you never want to feel me inside you again.”
My breath hitched. I couldn’t say it. The refusal lodged in my throat, a tangible betrayal. He saw it. A grim, triumphant understanding hardened his features. He backed me up, two steps, three, until my shoulders pressed against the cold, wet brick of the building beside us. The rough texture scraped through the thin cotton of his shirt.
“Say it,” he breathed, his mouth inches from mine. His thumbs stroked the frantic pulse in my wrists.
I shook my head, a tiny, furious motion.
He released one wrist. His hand slid down, over my hip, cupping me through my jeans. He pressed the heel of his palm hard against me, right where I was still tender, still throbbing from him. A sharp gasp escaped my lips. My head fell back against the brick.
“You’re so fucking wet for me still,” he murmured, his voice thick with a possessive awe. He worked the button of my jeans, yanked the zipper down. The sound was obscenely loud. His fingers, cold from the rain, pushed inside my underwear, finding the slick, swollen heat. I cried out, my knees buckling. He held me up, his body pinning mine to the wall. “Is this just biology? This?”
“Stop talking,” I choked out, my hips rocking against his invasive, knowing hand.
He withdrew his fingers, bringing them to his mouth. He sucked them clean, his eyes locked on mine, watching me watch him. The depravity of it, here in the open grey morning, sent a violent thrill through my core.
“Mine,” he said, simple and absolute.
He spun me around, facing the wall. My cheek pressed against the cold, gritty brick. He kicked my legs wider with his foot. He tugged my jeans and underwear down just enough, the denim catching at my thighs. The air bit at my exposed skin. I heard the tear of foil—he must have grabbed a wallet, something, on his mad dash out. A brief, frantic rustle. Then the blunt, hot head of his cock was pressing against me, not asking, telling.
He entered me in one brutal, deep thrust. The stretch was breathtaking, a shocking fullness that forced a ragged shout from my lungs. He didn’t pause. He set a ruthless, driving rhythm, his body slamming mine into the unyielding wall. One hand fisted in the shirt at my shoulder, the other braced flat against the brick beside my head.
This was nothing like the bed. This was raw commerce. A punishment and a claiming. Each plunge was a word in an argument we couldn’t have with language. The wet slap of our bodies mingled with the patter of rain. My fingers scraped for purchase on the brick, nails breaking.
“You feel that?” he grunted in my ear, his breath searing. “You feel how deep I am? Remember this. Remember who fucks you like this.”
It was degrading. It was exquisite. The coarse brick abraded my skin. The pressure built, a coiling, electric tension that had nothing to do with tenderness and everything to do with primal release. I was fracturing against him, pleasure sharp as shattered glass.
“Come for me,” he commanded, his rhythm faltering, his own end nearing. “Come on my cock, Nikki. Show me it’s just a distraction.”
The command, the sheer arrogant need in his voice, detonated it. My climax was a short, brutal seizure, a silent scream that locked my throat and turned my vision to grainy static. I clenched around him, pulsing violently. The sensation ripped a guttural roar from him.
He shoved in one last, devastating time, hips stuttering, and held. I felt the hot, urgent spill of him, the intimate flood. His forehead dropped between my shoulder blades, his whole weight sagging against me for a moment.
The world seeped back in. The sound of a car passing slowly. A distant shout. The chill of the rain on my burning back. He softened inside me, slipping out. A slick, warm trickle followed. I pushed back from the wall, my muscles trembling violently as I pulled my clothes up with clumsy hands. They were damp, stained with brick dust and rain.
He was leaning against the wall now, head back, eyes closed, spent. The foil packet lay in a puddle near his bare feet. The reality of what we’d just done—against a wall, in the open, like animals—crashed down. The useful distraction had become a public obliteration.