chapter 30

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BE PREPARED TO PLAY THE SONG VERY SOON!!!
(replay if it ends too soon)

ly

***

Harry Styles

"C'mon, Harry!" Amber's laughter is hanging in the air, as she's pulling me by the hand through a darkened street with only a few lamp posts shining down on us.

Unbelievable.

"What? I gotta take in our surroundings." I fight back, "You know, for someone your size, it's pretty dangerous to be running around the streets of Italy in the middle of the night."

"I know! That's why you're with me." A smile is heard in her words, not leaving her face for a second. She ignores all my warnings by grabbing my hand even harder, before pulling me to start running up a hill-like road.

It seems to me that running while grabbing the other's hand is our thing now. We share excitement with one another this way — she wants me to come to see her getting the tattoo filled, like I'd wanted her to come and see stars with me that night on the bridge.

Our hands tend to slip from the other's considering the sweat our skin has collected, but she makes sure to connect our palms even stronger every time. Her curls keep flying in every direction while wrapping around her face, and maybe this is the first time the wind isn't bothering me so much.

*play it NOW, I dare you*

A raindrop. A single joyous drop of rain falls right on my nose, then slides down my chin before hitting the asphalt ground.

She still rushes in front of me, while our connected hands lead me in the back. She keeps glancing to the damp pavement ahead of us, then back to me, then to the pavement again. Every time she turns around to momentarily face me, an even bigger grin glides on her lips than before. I could swear her smiles are contagious because I feel my cheeks hurting from how hard I'm grimacing.

The sky unexpectedly crashes a bucket of rain down on the both of us, soaking our shirts instantly. I watch as Amber's features turn into shock in a matter of seconds, and I can't help but crack a smile at her expressions.

"It's not too late to turn back!" I yell over the wind, clutching her hand as hard as I possibly could.

"No, let's go!" Soon her grins become giggles, and we both become cackling messes, laughing about nothing and everything all at once. Her pink lips couldn't have spread in a bigger expression, as her eyes are squinted from her cheeks being so high now.

She's got that laugh.

The rain seems to join our shrieks, now getting to the roots of our hair. I feel multiple locks stick to my forehead, but I can't discern anything else, as Amber starts speeding through the streets faster than ever. I've got goosebumps on my skin from the rain but we both can't stop our laughter in this situation.

My eyes keep roaming around her illuminated skin under a few lamp posts, as her chestnut waves have become very prominent with the humidity. I stop my laughter for a second to listen to her nice timber chiming through the wet summer air.

She looks so free like that.

My clothes get heavier with each second the rain continues to soak them, as it keeps pouring down on us with no shame. Amber suddenly stops in front of a building with a scruffy sign spelling ''Eclectic'' hanging from the door, making me almost crash into her. She grabs her stomach with the free hand to soothe the pain from all the laughing we did, as we're both taking in deep breaths to calm down from the rush.

Her other hand is still connected with mine, and I pull her closer to me with one soft motion, my hand wrapping around the small of her back. Our bodies are less than an inch apart now, as I feel her soft breath shudder on my chest.

We both become panting messes, and I'm not sure if our breaths are out of control because of the sprinting we just did, the freezing rain crashing down, or if it's the proximity of us.

She looks at me through her soaked eyelashes, a sense of tiredness playing with her irises. With our bodies pressed together, and rain drizzling down my cheeks, I feel words blurting out of me quickly, "Promise you'll wake me up if you have a nightmare ever again."

The corners of her mouth twitch up and down in a blink of a second, before she playfully fires back, "Promise you'll teach me how to play the guitar properly."

The raindrops collect at her lips before sliding down on our connected chests. "I'm serious. Call me in the middle of the night, I really don't care." I retaliate, not being sure if she's taking me seriously.

"I'm serious as well. Teach me — good or bad, I don't fucking care." She raises her eyebrows, her skin becoming paler every second we spend under the piercing water.

Her chest rises up and down anxiously, as I lift my closed fist with only my 5th finger up, offering a pinkie promise. She cracks a smile — the genuine kind that makes her eyes glow — at my proffer. She raises up to her tiptoes to reach for a single disordered curl of mine, before combing it back to the rest with one gentle motion.

Her efforts are quickly washed down when the rain stubbornly situates the drenched piece of hair back on my forehead. In an instant, her laughter is back again. This time she shakes her head, her eyes roaming around my face. She glances down at my held-out pinkie, before grabbing my wrist, and pushing my hand back down to my side.

She leaves her hand resting on mine, as she's left me confused at the rejected action. She lets out another chuckle at my grimace, before sinking her teeth in her rosy lip.

And then, without a second thought... She crashes her lips against mine.

In an instant, it's like the rain doesn't make me cold anymore, and my clothes don't feel heavy when I feel her lips on mine again. Hell, the rain seems refreshing in this weather. With the sky falling down on us, this moment feels more than just a promise — it's something like an oath.


My fingers have found their way into her soaked curls, as she smiles into the kiss. This allows me to find her bottom lip, caressing it with soft yet persevere pecks.

Yeah, there are definitely butterflies where my tattoo is.

Heavy pants get more intense with each raindrop, and my hand is so tight around her waist, while her nails have found the back of my neck, drawing random shapes I'm sure will leave red spots later. I keep drinking up the taste of her lips, which have a tinge of strawberry from her chapstick.

My chest feels so heavy with so many emotions being filled up right now, but before I could kiss her more fiercely, she leaves a quick final peck on my lips before pulling back, as I let out a soft groan in protest.

Her eyelids flutter open before she looks at me through her hazels, like trying to take in every inch of my messy appearance.

"We're here, by the way." She shrugs, a sly smile on her cherry-red lips.

"We can fill the tattoo later." I try to have one more taste of her, but she throws her head back while shaking it to prevent me from completing the action.

"It's raining." She states the obvious. "We'll get sick."

We turn to the window underneath the parlor's roof with the worn-down sign "Eclectic. 24h." hung up the bricked wall. Amber cups the sides of her eyes before leaning against the glass to try to get a view inside the building.

I copy her actions, pressing my forehead to the window. I scoot off the rain with my palm, somehow managing to get a peek inside the tattoo studio through the blinds. I take a quick scan over the room, my blood running cold at the sight; every single one of the parlour's chairs is scruffy, the trash can is filled to the brim, and there aren't even a couple of certificate frames hung on the wall — I mean, they're all shouting red flags.

I pull back from the window, my eyes focused on Amber's. "Yeah, I'm not letting you waltz in there tonight." I insist, right as she admits, "Yeah, I'm not so sure anymore," at the same time as I spoke.

Looking at the disappointment in her eyes, I can clearly see she really wanted to get the butterfly filled today. My teeth skate over my bottom lip, before I make an offer, attempting to make her feel better. "I'll take you to a good tattoo artist once we get back to LA."

I feel the sorrow radiating from her as she leans against the wall of the building. A drop of rain bitterly slides down her chin, while I scan around the empty street, looking for anything that could lighten our mood.

"We just did all that running for nothing." She sighs, already thinking about how we have to go all the way back to the house through this weather.

My hand finds its way into my wet hair in thought before my eyes find the thing I'd been looking for. Without a second thought, I grab Amber by the hand and start pulling her to the opposite side of the street. "Come on."

She's quiet the whole time as I drag us both toward a building that seems like a 24-hour convenience store. Obviously, it won't sell anything good, but at least it'll give us someplace to hide while the rain calms down.

With clothes stuck to our bodies, we enter the dim place, having the bell above the door chime through the store. The cashier tiredly pops his head out from the cash register before widening his eyes at our soaked appearances.

"Ciao!" Amber greets, scratching the back of her head.

"Hello." I wave my hand at him, silently thanking him that this store doesn't have an air conditioner working at night, otherwise we'd be two shivering messes.

"La pioggia ti ha preso piuttosto male, eh?" The cashier tries to engage in a conversation, making Amber awkwardly smile and nod as she doesn't understand a single word he's asking her.
(transl; The rain got you pretty bad, huh?)

The clerk shrugs, laughing off the situation, then goes back to his work at storing some water bottles in place, leaving the two of us alone.

Amber peeks out the front glass door before stating, "I think it's gonna stop raining soon."

"Let's wait a bit, yeah?" I walk around the store, scanning around the shelves. The layout of this market honestly is just like in a gas station, except this one has a wider selection of summer-related stuff.

She nods in response, before twisting around and strolling to the snack selection, leaving me to hang around the entrance.

I explore a few shelves stuffed with magazines, before passing a Slurpee stand. My fingers trace over all of the stuff, before hitting something that's finally caught my eye.

I get met with a tall frame of a rack of sunglasses in the summer selection. They vary in different sizes and designs, starting from kids' Paw Patrol glasses, and ending in very chic styles.

It takes a while to sort through the tall stand, having to move around the first pairs to get to the bottom ones, but once I finally find what had initially caught my eye, a proud grin finds its way onto my lips.

Blue sunglasses. Bingo.

A pair of teal glasses lay neatly in my hand with its frames curved around the lenses, making it stand out from others. I try them on, looking in the small mirror to see how they'd look on me. They might be a bit small and too summery for me, but, overall, they look very pleasing. Though, I must admit I liked the pink glasses a tad more.

I slide off the spectacles, the trace of color moving with my action, before I make my way to other departments of the confined store, this time stopping at an electronic zone, the product range being extremely small. It mostly contains some USB chargers or phone cases, but having a deeper look, I notice something interesting.

By impulse, I grab a box from the tech counter before striding away to find Amber. It takes me less than a minute to find her short silhouette leaning against the front of the cash register.

She's got a pack of opened sour worms sitting in her hand.

She chews on the candy while looking out the window, watching just a few droplets slide off the glass. She turns to me once she's acknowledged my presence next to her. "I think the rain's officially sto—" She starts her sentence but her voice trails off once she realizes what's in my hands. "Wait. Are you seriously buying a camera?"

She points to the small box between my hands with widened eyes. "It's a VHS camcorder." I correct her, putting the items down on the counter for the kind man at the cash register to scan. "Plus, look what I found."

I wait until the cashier's checked out the products, pulling the black credit card out of my pocket. I scan it to pay for them, before lifting the blue shades in the air, and gently pushing them on the bridge of Amber's nose, immediately making her expression become brighter at my action.

She fixes the glasses in the window's reflection, the lenses being a bit too big for her, so they keep sliding off her nose at times. "Wow! They're really nice. They'll look very good on you." She attaches her hand to remove the shades from her eyes, but I stop her actions by nudging her wrist back.

"Keep them." I leave my hand on hers for a beat too long before finally removing it, and running my rings through my hair. "They look better on you, anyway."

"For somebody that hates gifts, you sure don't mind giving them." She shrugs, her hair still dripping on the tiled floor. "Thank you, though. I really appreciate that."

She turns to the window again, this time appreciating how they look on her frame. She twists to one side, then to the other in a way that makes a smile tug on her lips at the mirrored reflection staring right back at her.

Her hand finds its way back into the pack of sour candy, pulling out a single worm, and biting down half of it, a trace of citric acid following down her chin.

We make sure the weather is good enough to walk through before opening the entrance door. "Grazie! Arrivederci!" Amber joyously waves to the man standing behind the cash register, a fascinating accent heard in her voice.

"Ciao!" I yell out, the door closing behind us, as a wave of fresh summer air hits us nicely. My eyes trace to the box in my hand, before my fingers undo the tape on the edges, carefully taking out the camcorder.

The moon is in the position where it's about to change its places with the sun, and I keep being enthralled by the beauty of the view to our side, which lets us observe a tall gorge.

I set up the video camera to capture the sight, opening the flip part of the device, and pushing down the button to start recording. In this dawn darkness, something peculiar overtakes me, and I twist the camera to capture Amber strutting ahead of me, the sunglasses sliding off her nose, as she takes a bite of two of the sour worms at the same time.

Her nose scrunches up a bit at the taste, but she keeps staring up at the sky, her cheeks having a never-leaving rose tint. "Look at the sky, Harry!" She points to the dim luminaries. "It's so blue."

"Yup." I agree, not once looking up to glance at the clouds, as my sight is drilled to the viewfinder.

"No, I'm serious." She turns around to face me, before pulling the glasses off of her face. "You gotta see it to believe it."

She smoothly takes the camera out of my hands, now twisting it to capture me, as I put the blue sunnies on my face. Right as the shades make their way over my eyes, my breath gets taken away from my lungs, as the lenses really add a new shade of color to my vision.

Dumbfounded, I look up at the sky, turquoise all over the clouds. My eyes trace over the tiny stars, then finally find the brightest moon floating over the canyon on my side.

"That's the prettiest canyon moon I've ever seen, Amber." I hear her nod in response, though I've got the inkling she isn't looking at the sky this time.

"Very beautiful, indeed." She agrees, now walking ahead of me. There are still some drops of rain in her hair, now getting more illuminated with the lamp posts and my cyan shades.

We continue to walk in silence, just appreciating the almost-early-morning sun, and the moon hung up high over the ravine. Gravel crunches between our shoes and noise from the pack of worms lingers in the air, as Amber tries her best to capture the view.

A few steps later when I've finally reached her pace, I speak up, "Here you go. Thanks," before taking the shades off my nose. Her face immediately frowns in protest, like she didn't want me to do so.

"What do you think you're doing? Wear them!" She insists, her brows scrunched up in a worrying light.

"No, you've gotta see this as well!" I try putting them on her eyes, but she squirms away, putting her hand over her face to prevent me from doing that, as my action has risen a laugh out of her.

"I'm not letting you miss out on this!" She's rushing a bit ahead of me now but still turned to me.

"So we share custody then."

"...Over a pair of sunglasses?" She raises her eyebrow, clearly amused by my request. "Fine."

She lets me put the shades on her, pulling her sour worms and the video camera in my hand in return. I grab a few candies, finally getting a taste of the delicious sweets.

In this late-night walk, we finally get to zone out from the world a little. We step into a few puddles created earlier, and I watch as Amber's enlivened features light up at all the small things on the way to the beach house. She takes a bigger glance at the sky once more before mumbling under her breath;

"I don't think I hate the color blue anymore."

Her sentence, once again, doesn't make any sense to me, but it sounds like the words mean a lot to her by the way she let out a sigh of relief. I mean, even her shoulders peacefully deflated. We keep calmly walking like that, until slowly we get met with familiar objects and signs, meaning we've come close to the house.

A few more minutes pass with us switching roles of carrying the candies and wearing the spectacles until we're standing in front of the yellow main door of the house.

Entering on our tiptoes, we come to the conclusion that everyone's still sleeping. The residence is so damn quiet that a needle dropped here could be heard upstairs.

What now?

I turn to Amber, who has the same question written on her face, before I quietly speak out, "Well..."

"I feel so gross in these rain-drenched clothes." She whispers. "I don't think I'll go to sleep. I'll make too much noise searching for sleepwear, and end up just waking everyone up."

She tiredly rubs her eyes, about to spend the rest of the dawn alone in the kitchen. Something about this situation makes me blurt out, "Come to my room then. I'll give you a shirt or something."

Her eyes widen a bit at my offer, but she pulls it off by letting out a sleepy yawn and tiredly taking out her golden earrings. "I'll come just for the shirt, yeah?"

"Obviously," I assure, quietly leading a few steps up the stairs, as I hear her lightly follow behind me.

Entering my room, I go straight to my bag to dig out something that she could borrow. My fingers sort through multiple shorts, boxers, and socks, only to find a white dress shirt.

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