April

Replaying saved voice message from: March 30th at 02:47

"– fuck it, I don't know how to work this fucking – oh shit, Isabel hey, it's Harry! Harry Styles, in case you know more than one, I'm the – 'm the one who's a total bellend, yeah? I'm in Manchester and it's cold and I was wondering if London's cold for you? I've on-only been once really so I think about what it's like when you're there. I'm just – just thinking about you because I'm out and it's late and I feel really bad and I – fuck, sorry mate, didn't see you – I just want to say sorry cos I upset you and I know it doesn't take back what I said but I – I was going to text you a few times but I was scared you'd... and everything you said about me's true, I'm a worthless piece of shit and I just got – just got mad cos it really hurts but I ... fuck, anyway, I'm really drunk so ring me. Or don't ring me. I don't know. Have a good Easter, yeah? I'll see you."

Message deleted.

~~~

On Isabel's first week back to uni after the fortnight off for Easter, her life fell into a monotonous crawl that felt like she was dragging herself through mud. On a good day she would wake up, go to her lecture or seminar, go to the library, come home and get into bed.

On a bad day, she would do all of that with a shift at work in between, in which she and Harry didn't even look at each other. It felt like they had been in this position endless times before, she and Harry ignoring each other with every ounce of effort they had, but this time it felt final. There was no way back.

It wasn't even the weekend yet, but she knew life would be even worse once it hit. Her friends – well, Millie, Liam, Lydia and Scarlett, the only ones she had left – would go out with the same guilty expressions they'd worn before the holiday, and she knew she would be left to

sit alone in the quiet, empty house, and even the thought of it left her with a crippling sort of loneliness, emptiness, that felt like it would never get better.

And as if this wasn't enough, she had impending exams, seemingly endless essays, and her first Action in the Community session. The date of the first session, April 14th, had been written in her phone for so long that it had seemed like it was never going to come, but now it was here all of a sudden and it left Isabel sick with nerves.

It was at a local high school, set up for anyone in Years 10-13 considering taking anything English, film or media related at degree level, or studying those subjects at GCSE and A-Level. Mel and Rory had come along on Thursday afternoon to the school with her at 3:23, both of them hiding their nerves a lot better than Isabel if they had any, because she was completely terrified to the point where her hands were shaking and she kept dropping everything.

When they walked into the classroom and found no less than thirty-one students aged thirteen to eighteen staring expectantly at her, she wasn't sure whether this was a blessing or a curse. On the bus on the way there, they had thought ten students was an optimistic number.

Isabel gave what she hoped was an inspirational speech about film – the places it can take you, how much you can learn about society and politics and history, how important the entertainment industry is in each and every single person's life – and collapsed in a chair next to Rory as Mel pressed play on their first ever Action in the Community film screening: Brighton Rock.

"Hey," Rory whispered, nudging her. Isabel turned, surprised. Rory hadn't willingly spoken to her in months. "This is really cool, Isabel. You've done a great job."

"Thanks," she whispered back. "I can't believe they're actually doing it!"

"You gave a pretty great speech back there," he grinned. "It made me want to give up my Accounting degree and become Martin Scorsese."

"That was the goal," she joked. "Although I don't know if the world needs another one."

Rory smiled, then bit down on his lip. "I heard about you and Louis breaking up," he ventured, and Isabel looked away from him, her heart plummeting. "I hope your Easter wasn't too rubbish because of it."

"It's okay," Isabel shrugged, pretending to be nonchalant. "I think you were right about me before. I used to care about being popular and whatever, but now I'm nobody and I realise how stupid all that was."

He blinked at her. "You're not nobody, Isabel. You're definitely somebody, you just haven't worked out who that is yet."

Isabel stared at him, dumbfounded. "When did you get so smart?"

Rory grinned. "It's the Accounting degree," he said.

~~~

Nearly a month after Isabel and Harry's final argument – not that she was counting or anything – Isabel was trudging up the road from the bus stop to the bowling alley when she saw him.

He was leaning against the wall by the carpark, a beanie pulled down over his hair and his fingers tugging his bottom lip. When he saw her he smiled slightly and straightened up, digging his hands into his pockets.

"Hey," he called when she nearly reached him. "You okay?"

"Harry, why aren't you inside?" she asked flatly.

"I wanted to talk to you."

Isabel raised her eyebrows. She was already nearly late, and that meant Harry was making himself late – unprecedented for him – by waiting for her.

He lingered expecting her to say something, but when she didn't he took a deep breath and started speaking. "I'm sorry I haven't spoken to you since Easter, I've been trying to work out what to say and I ... well I've got it now."

"Okay."

"Okay. I'm sorry I was such an arsehole. I'm a fucking idiot and I know I'm unfair but I swear I tried to fix it so many times and I just got frustrated because you weren't letting me in," Harry said slowly, evenly, like he'd rehearsed this hundreds of times. "But that doesn't excuse it and I'm sorry. I don't mean to be like that with you, I'm not like that with anyone else – I don't – I can't understand why I –"

He broke off and laughed nervously, clearly going off script. Isabel said nothing, acutely aware that this was the first time they'd spoken about something not directly related to bowling shoes all week. The only other thing she'd heard him say, the only other piece of him to cling onto, were his voicemails, which she'd played over and over and over again until she knew the bits when he'd pause to swallow, to repeat himself, to stumble over the words.

"Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm trying so hard, Isabel, I really am." He took a hand out of his pocket and rubbed it across his face tiredly, looking down at his shoes. "There's, um, well I think there's a reason why I'm like this. I don't like letting people in and I just get scared sometimes because..."

He looked up at her suddenly, his eyes so anxious and frightened that she wanted to pull him towards her and wrap her arms around him and squeeze every worry out of him until they pooled at his feet.

"I want to tell you something," Harry said lowly, stepping towards her. "I haven't told anyone else this and I – I just think you deserve to know after everything because it's why I'm ... like this. Stuff happened with my brother that –"

"Harry," Isabel replied quickly, stumbling back away from him. "I don't ... I can't hear this."

He blinked at her, his face draining of colour until he looked faintly grey. "Oh."

"I'm really sorry, I just – I don't know if I want to hear it."

It would hurt too much if he told her, if he pulled her back in with the promise that she was the only one that knew this about him, the only one he wanted to tell, and then he dropped her again. She was so, so scared of how much it would hurt and so she just crossed her arms and looked back at him with what she hoped was a blank expression.

"Okay," Harry said, running his hand across his face and then dropping it limply to his side. "Okay, alright."

His pale face started to redden with embarrassment, rejection, and for a moment Isabel's heart jumped when she thought he might shout at her like he had last time he felt shunned, his hands balling up and his jaw clenching. Now though, he took a deep, shuddering breath and then just looked deflated, staring at the ground and shuffling his feet.

"Is this because of that whole game bullshit?" Harry asked quietly.

"Maybe," Isabel answered, digging her nails into the skin of her crossed arms. If they talked about this too much she might start crying. "Look, Harry, shall we go inside?"

"Isabel, I didn't mean it," he continued. "I didn't mean it, I tried to tell you."

Isabel nearly scoffed. "What, so you don't play games?"

Louis' friends played games. They'd go out and pick a girl and bet how long it would take her to fuck them. They would have one girl on the go but play her against another, make her jealous. They would compete to see who could get with the targeted girl first. She knew what some teenage boys could be like, and she wasn't about to assume Harry was any different.

"No," Harry said quickly, swiping his tongue over his lips. "Well yes, I mean I do, but not – I didn't mean to say that I was playing one with you, it just came out and I –"

"Let's go inside," Isabel suggested desperately, turning away from him. He reached out and grabbed her arm quickly.

"You don't want to try and fix this?"

She waited for a second, memorising that look in his eyes that always made her feel weak, that complete uncontrolled fear and panic that made him seem so young and terrified.

"I don't think I want to," she said, and she wasn't sure if she was lying or not but she pulled away before Harry could figure it out, turning away from him and his sad eyes and hurrying off into the bowling alley without a backwards glance.

~~~

Isabel was leaving work to meet Scarlett and Millie for shopping and dinner, a forced excursion on all sides, but Isabel appreciated the effort nonetheless. She was shrugging on her coat in the employee common room, trying to shake the guiltiness she'd felt since her conversation with Harry outside, when she heard his voice.

"I know," he said lowly, and she paused in the act of pulling a scarf on. "Shhhh, you have to be quiet."

She looked around, completely confused, but she couldn't see him anywhere. The room was empty, the television off, the couches vacated.

Harry had spent the whole shift frowning, staring absently at the table when there were no customers instead of working on art stuff like he usually did, pulling his bottom lip between his fingers until it was bright red. He kept getting things wrong, getting the incorrect shoe

size or forgetting what he was meant to be doing. He didn't even interact with the little children, only sent them a vague sort of smile before stumbling off to make another mistake.

Isabel hung back when the shift was over, pretending to clear up her stuff for a lot longer than it should have taken so he would be gone by the time she went to the staff room. She'd never seen Harry like he had been today, and she felt so bad that she was starting to regret not hearing him out, even if it would only inevitably end in disaster.

She shut her locker quietly, feeling bad for eavesdropping but sort of curious as well. But she didn't hear him again, and assuming Harry was gone she went round the corner to clock her hours out, shrieking in surprise and being met with a loud yelp in return.

Crammed into the tiny little crevice with the wage sheets and machine to clock in and out employee's hours were Harry and Briony. Isabel stared in complete horror as she noticed Briony's hands up the back of Harry's shirt and his hand trailing up her skirt.

"Isabel," he breathed, pulling his hand away from Briony's thigh and drawing away from her quickly.

Isabel was frozen to the spot. She remembered how much Harry liked brunette girls. She remembered the way Harry had chatted up Briony, the arcade girl, the day they went paintballing. And she remembered what his hands felt like on her skin, and she remembered what his lips felt like on her mouth, and she wondered whether Harry had been thinking about touching and kissing bloody Briony all this time, too.

Harry swallowed, stepping towards her slightly. "Wait, it wasn't –"

"Don't tell Dan, please," Briony begged, swiping her hand over the back of her glistening mouth, but Isabel wasn't looking at her. She was staring at Harry and his swollen lips and his messy hair and his dark circles and his guilty expression, wondering how on earth it was possible to feel worse than she had all Easter, but somehow Harry had made that happen. He was right – he always knew how to win.

"It's okay, I won't," Isabel said shakily, dragging her gaze away from Harry. "I need to clock my hours, then you guys can get back to it. I'm – I'm going out with my friends."

"It just happened," Briony babbled, laughing nervously as Isabel squeezed past her to swipe her card through the machine with trembling fingers. This space was tiny for two people, let alone three, but Briony and Harry didn't seem to have a brain cell between them to think to move out and so Isabel was left with no choice to brush right by Harry, ignoring how being so close to him made her skin burn.

"I see your hand healed, Harry," Isabel said evenly, trying her best not to vomit right there on the carpet. "Is this part of your prescribed healing exercises for the tendons, yeah?"

"Isabel," Harry said pleadingly, his voice low and gravelly but before he could say anything else Briony was talking again.

"He wasn't... he hadn't got there yet," she said with a shrill laugh, and Isabel could have cried. "You know how it is, Isabel –"

"Please don't," Isabel said, smiling tightly at her. She dropped her card on the floor her hand was shaking so hard, and Harry bent down to get it before she could even consider moving. Their fingers brushed when he handed it back to her, and she snatched it from him before she had a complete break down.

"You didn't have to do that," she told him, avoiding his gaze.

"You're ridiculous," he replied, and she felt a lump form in her throat.

"I'm sorry for interrupting."

She turned on her heel and marched away, trying to shake the image of Harry kissing Briony, one hand pressed to the wall by her head and the other moving inside her skirt, her hands clawing the skin of his back underneath his t-shirt. She had no right to be jealous, but it was making her feel sick.

Jealousy wasn't something she'd often dealt with before and it was horrifying, searing through her like acid, turning her limbs into water as she tried to stride away as fast as she could, but all she wanted was to go back and rip him away from her. The moment she caught them was replaying in front of her in a tortuous loop, and each time she noticed something different – the swipe of his tongue across her lips, the curve of his wrist as he moved his hand higher, the tightening of the muscle at the top of his arm. It was suffocating, allconsuming, and she tried to catch her breath but she felt like she'd never be able to ever again.

"Isabel, wait!"

She stopped abruptly, knowing that if she kept walking he would grab her, and she wouldn't be able to deal with him touching her. She turned to look at him, hurrying after her looking entirely breathless and pale, the sleeves of his sweatshirt falling over his hands.

"Yes?" she said.

He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, struggling to find the right words to say what he wanted to, or maybe trying to force himself to say something in particular. Everything hung heavily in the air between them, suspended, waiting, and she held her breath.

"Please don't tell Dan," he said eventually, his tone disappointed and utterly defeated.

"I said I wouldn't already," she answered flatly, turning away.

"No really," he pressed, his hands twitching as though he wanted to reach for her but thinking better of it. "I know you hate me already, and I'd understand if you're thinking about telling him just to get me back. But please, I need this job. Just – fuck," he swore desperately, raking a hand through his hair. "Please, please don't tell him."

"Maybe you should have thought about that before you did it."

"It happened out of nowhere, she just came over and I..." He trailed off and looked at the floor. "I don't know how to talk to you anymore. You don't want to hear anything I say, I know, but just this once please listen. Please don't do this to me."

She stared at him, overcome all at once by how much she wanted to kiss the skin of his bare neck and bite down on his collarbones and run her hands through his citrusy hair. Sometimes it was like that with Harry: there were moments when suddenly she was left breathless. He wasn't the sort of guy you caught a glimpse of at the supermarket or on the street, hurrying past you on Southbank with a look in his eye and a hardness to his jaw that made you turn back to stare after him. He was the sort of guy you thought about long after he'd gone, the sort of guy who made someone's girlfriend's head turn, loosening their grip just for a moment on their boyfriend's hand.

Because Harry had lips that could make you cry, the colour of raspberries, chapped and bitten so that there were splotches of red where he'd broken tiny little blood vessels underneath the skin. He had dark, murky shadows under his eyes that looked like bruises, that made you wonder what he stayed up for, who he lost sleep over, and you caught yourself thinking about it much too often for it to be okay. He was all wide eyes and cheekbones and eyelashes, and then he smiled and flashed his dimples and crinkled the corners of his eyes and broke your heart.

And he knew it. He knew it, he knew it, he knew it.

Briony didn't know that Harry's bed smelt like his hair, of citrus that was both sharp and sweet at the same time, and she didn't know about the painting on the chimneybreast or that his favourite food was flapjacks or that he liked his tea the way Isabel did or that he'd never had feelings for anyone. And maybe Isabel had never thought about it, but knowing all of those things had let her pretend he was hers. In her head, Harry was hers in the way that she'd never been Louis' and he'd never been anyone's at all, because he looked at her like there was nobody else on earth and kissed her like he needed her to breathe. But now, in his rendezvous with Briony, he had taken away the ability to let her pretend that this was all for her, that he wasn't like this with everyone, and that he had belonged to her for even a second.

"I won't tell him," she said. "I don't play games."

And this time she really did turn around and walk off, leaving him to watch her go with his own confession thrown back in his face.

~~~

Isabel couldn't help but feel for Millie and Scarlett. They were caught in the middle – they couldn't really drop Isabel, seeing as they lived with her, but they couldn't exactly hang out with her now that nobody else liked her.

So they were taking her out for the evening to try and keep things even, and that was how Isabel found herself in HMV, rifling through the sales racks in the films section and biting down on her lip in concentration, when she felt a tap on her shoulder. Turning, she saw Zayn standing behind her in his HMV uniform