Chapter 1: before.
Chapter Text
The call comes at 6pm on a Wednesday.
There is a category of calls from Niall Horan that can’t really be ignored, even after years of only here and there visits. He will call again. The phone vibrates on the third repetition of the same Britney song, and Rry picks up before it goes again. “Hello gorgeous sunshine,” Niall says, and Rry feels the old warmth, the one that insists upon itself stubbornly.
She says, “Hey, my love,” in a voice she still surprises herself with; soft and honeyed.
He launches into the news, as if afraid he’ll lose his nerve if he stops. “So, I did it. Properly did it. Asked Kait to marry me, and she said yes.”
“That’s beautiful, Niall. Congratulations.” The pause in her voice is just long enough for him to sense something; he never misses a seam.
He laughs, high and boyish. “Means a lot, hearing it from you. Listen, Rry—It’s soon, five weeks, and everyone’s coming. Even Z. And, um—" There’s a short static, as if someone’s switched the station. “You know. I mean, Louis’ll be there. Of course. Thought you should hear it from me, not just, you know, turn up and have it be a scene.”
In the silence that follows, she can feel the weight of a decade condensed into a single held breath. There are memories that resist burial, that jostle against the grave markers of new identities. She thanks him again, promises to RSVP soon, and hangs up before the conversation can deteriorate into pity.
And so it begins; she spends five weeks remembering, pouring over their horrific, beautiful story.
2010 — fifteen years before.
They’d told the boys to hydrate, that day.
It wasn’t kindness, but only because fainting was bad TV. The XFactor production assistant handed them a palette of Tesco bottled water, warm from the van, and sixteen-year-old Harry drank until his stomach hurt.
He wasn’t the best dancer in the room, but he wasn’t the worst. It was the intensity of being looked at that made him sweat straight through his clothes. They'd been at it for hours, until the music slowed and even the ever-present cameras were off.
It was only when the track shut off, mid-beat, that Harry realized how badly he needed to piss. But the judges were still there, and you didn’t ask for breaks during bootcamp unless you wanted your number memorized for the wrong reasons.
He looked at the clock, but the choreography coach barked out, “Last run-through, lads! Make it count!” So Harry made it count by holding it and holding it, legs pressed tight, chin up, mouth an obedient line.
When they were finally dismissed, the rest of the boys collapsed. Harry went straight for the door, ducking the producer who tried to pull him for an interview (“No, thank you. Sorry, sorry, I just—bathroom?”). He jogged down the corridor, steps echoing off the linoleum, knees knocking, and barreled into the men’s before he had time to process the other body at the urinals.
Harry fumbled with his zipper and nearly pissed himself trying to get it down. It was only at the last moment, when the heat of relief turned to a sudden, mortifying awareness, that Harry realized his aim was off. The arc splashed onto the other boy’s shoe, darkening the canvas, and he jerked back.
For a second, nothing happened.
The other boy looked down at his shoe, then up at Harry, whose face was already struck with humiliation.
“Oops,” Was the one and only thing that made it out of Harry’s mouth, breathless.
Then, an amused, “Hi.”
It was not the “hi” that Harry would forget, but the “hi” that both of them would be carrying in their souls for the rest of their lives. The boy’s lips were a tight parenthesis, but the corners tried to lift, as if he knew how utterly irreversible this was.
“Hi,” Harry whispered back, skin still kissed by a soft, pink blush. He had tried to find something else to say: Sorry? Are you okay? But the other boy was already shaking out his foot and zipping up, then turned to the sinks with a smile.
Harry stayed where he was, tucked his cock away, zipped himself back up, biting his grin away. He didn’t know why it was even there. He was certain this would be the end of it. But the boy dried himself with those scratchy brown napkins that never absorb anything, then leaned against the counter, folding his arms.
“Are you gonna wash your hands?” the boy asked, with this breathtaking mix of sass and teasing.
Harry went pink once more, and it took three tries to get the soap to lather. The water was cold enough to burn. He scrubbed until the backs of his hands went raw, then wiped them. The boy watched this entire process, let his eyes linger on Harry’s, then said:
“I’m Louis.”
“Harry,” Harry replied, and there went his bottom lip back in between his teeth.
Louis examined him with smugness, a teasing that was so unfamiliar Harry almost thought he was being flirted with. He realized, years later, that he was. But at the time, he only feared Louis’ perception.
“You’ve got a shit aim, Harry,” Louis said, straight-faced.
Harry felt the laugh bubble up, against his will. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Louis said, and his smile softened. “If I had to get someone’s pee splashed on me, I’d much rather have your pee than his pee,” Louis jerked his thumb backwards, and Harry followed it with his eyes.
“There’s no one else in here,” Harry giggled, he giggled.
And somehow, Louis would continue to make Harry laugh until it hurt. For many, many years.
2011 — 14 years before.
Harry never permitted himself to believe that he was going to be Louis’ boyfriend.
They began touching too much, began sharing beds, and Louis said he’d marry Harry in front of a camera. But Harry had convinced himself they were best friends, and this was all very normal.
But then came the day after their fifth XFactor performance. Louis found Harry outside, where the service entrance was left ajar so staff could smoke. Louis had nicked two cigarettes and a chipping lighter from a lighting tech, and he offered one to Harry with a little smirk.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Louis said, “it’s not like I expect you to inhale.”
“I’m not a baby,” Harry replied, instantly aware of how childish he sounded.
“You are, kind of,” said Louis. “You’re my baby, aren’t you?”
And how could Harry not have fallen in love? How could he have ever said no to anything Louis wanted?
Harry inhaled and choked and nearly coughed his lungs out, and Louis made a big show of patting his back, laughing so hard he knocked the cigarette from his own lips. The butt skittered across the pavement, sparks briefly alive in the darkness, and Harry, impulsive as ever, bent to retrieve it. When he straightened, he found Louis had stopped laughing.
There was a strangeness in the silence. Harry thought, for a moment, that he’d done something wrong, but then Louis reached out and fixed the collar of Harry’s coat. He took a single step forward.
“Come on, then,” Louis said.
Harry didn’t know what he meant, so he just stood there, eyes huge, heart slamming. Louis smiled, and tucked a curl behind Harry’s ear. The touch was feather-light but absolute, as if Louis had always known Harry belonged to him, and was only then choosing to confirm it. Harry would end up belonging to him, for a long, long time.
That was the first time they kissed. Louis had slid his hand down to Harry’s cheek, and just did it. He pressed their mouths together, and it was warm, and it was sweet and naive, with Harry so irreversibly undone that his knees nearly buckled right there. Instead, they held each other and kissed, over and over; they couldn’t stop. In fact, they only stopped because someone was coming.
And so, they weren’t just best friends. But they weren’t boyfriends, either, until the 28th.
The boys had snuck onto the hotel rooftop to watch LA’s fog swallow the skyline. They were famous, already, fresh off the XFactor and ushered in out of meetings and signings and recording booths. One by one they drifted away from the rooftop, called down by texts or tiredness or hunger.
By midnight, only Harry and Louis remained. They had burrowed into a shared blanket, legs tangled, Harry nosing Louis’ jaw as they talked. They sat like that for centuries, or maybe just minutes, while the orange city-glow haloed the ends of their hair. At some point, Harry turned, thinking to make a joke, and realized Louis was looking at him with an intensity that bordered on crazed.
“What?” Harry whispered.
Louis shook his head, barely. “I just—”
The rest of the sentence was lost, because Louis was pressing his forehead to Harry’s temple, breathing in, and Harry wanted to freeze time right there, so fucking bad. Louis’ hands slid up Harry’s arms, and Harry shivered.
“I want this so much,” Louis said.
Harry could not breathe.
“Want what?”
Louis kissed him, which was only part of his answer. Harry had threaded his hand into the back of Louis’ hair and pulled. Louis gasped, bit Harry’s lip, and Harry licked into his mouth, letting him dig his fingers into Harry’s hips.
They broke apart only when a siren echoed in the street below. Louis laughed, soft and breathless, and drew Harry in until their foreheads touched again.
“I want you to be my boyfriend.”
And so, it was 2011, and Harry was a boyfriend.
Three days later, he lost his virginity in a hotel room.
He remembered the hotel as impossibly tall, with carpets that swallowed every step and a view of the city that he swore he’d seen in movies. The room was paid for by the label, but it belonged to them; they asked to share. Nobody cared back then, not yet.
Sex was not planned, except that every moment since the 28th had been foreplay for this. They’d spent nights with their hands hidden under blankets, kissing innocently one second, then Harry jerking Louis off down his pants while Louis gasped into his mouth the next.
By the third day, the hunger for each other consumed them, they were simply ravenous for each other. They had fumbled from a group dinner all the way up to their room, but the fumbling was perfect. Buttons resisted, hair tangled, and every exposed inch of skin was a discovery. Harry had never seen a naked boy in person, but Louis was not a boy, not really, he was some other divine creation, some sweet creature, and so, so beautiful.
Harry didn’t know if he was supposed to feel nervous, but he didn’t. He felt desired and safe and burning from how turned on he was, and when Louis finally slipped inside him, Harry crazily hoped nobody else ever would again.
It hurt. But it was the brief price of his want, and the proof that he could be claimed and marked and made Louis.’
Louis was gentle, but not tame. He held Harry’s wrists above his head and whispered things that made Harry full-body shudder. Harry lost track of where his body ended and Louis’ began, and they had sex all night. They were greedy about it, did not, for a second, want to stop touching, sucking, biting.
By the end, it was hours later, and Harry had came three times. The hotel sheets were damp and halfway off the mattress and Harry knew, with certainty, that he was ruined for anyone else ever again.
The day after, Harry was plastered on Twitter, looking tired and dazed in a candid shot of him bringing coffee back to the hotel. The fans would go insane, completely unfiltered, suggesting that him and Louis filmed a sex tape the night before. They called them “Larry,” and they made art and they wrote stories, and they catalogued observations that were almost always correct. They believed they were being closeted.
They were being closeted, of course. There were meetings and rules and scripts. There were threats, sometimes, and always the promise that things would be “easier” if they could just behave.
But Harry was terrible at behaving, from the very beginning. He tweeted about Louis all the time. He let his gaze linger too long in interviews, he dug his thumb into Louis’ thigh under desks. He lived in a state of constant fear, but also in a state of reckless hope—
Hope that, maybe, he should’ve never had.
2014 — 11 years before.
They were covered in tattoos.
The fever had started mid-2012, after their world tour, when this ungodly, immortal devotion was no longer sweet and private, but transformed, under the white light of scrutiny, into something that had to be hidden, protected, and disguised. So they wrote it into their flesh instead. Harry was the one who started it. It was always Harry, in every way that mattered.
The first ones were cheesy, even for them; an “Oops,” and a “Hi,” first words ever exchanged. But they got better at it; a rope and an anchor came, a ship and a compass came, and when the rose and the dagger came, it was an explosion. It was a way to silently confirm a secret so enormous it was absurd that some people saw past it all.
Harry joked, bitterly, that soon they’d run out of skin, and Louis would have to go outside in an I Love Harry t-shirt.
Yet behind closed doors, everything was better. This was the part people never, ever got a glimpse of. There was softness, domesticity, and a violent obsession with each other that was witnessed only by the universe. It was the nights in expensive villas when Harry would cook pancakes even though it was midnight and Louis would eat every bite just to make Harry smile. It was the shared clothes, the way Louis knew how to soothe Harry’s little tantrums, the way he’d fall asleep with his face in Harry’s hair and wake up, hours later, without ever moving away. When the noise outside became too much, they would light a candle and build a stupid fort and hold each other to the sound of old jazz.
When they fought, it didn’t last long. They always made up by the end of the day, or after some space they needed; sometimes with a kiss, sometimes with a joke, sometimes with the silent understanding that neither of them would ever leave.
When they fucked, Harry wanted to disappear into Louis, with certainty that if he crawled inside, he could wear Louis’ bones and blood and breath, and then nothing could ever separate them again. It wasn’t always sweet; sometimes it was a hunger so feral Harry would end up writhing uncontrollably, full body sobbing and then panting for the next ten minutes straight, on the edge of blackout. Louis always took care of him after. Always. He’d hold him and kiss him back down to Earth, whispering, “Did so fucking good, baby, you’re so good. You’re okay.” And it was true. For those moments, Harry could believe in anything.
It was one of these desperate nights when Harry would be sitting in bed after, sheets twisted around him, and Louis would sit on the edge of the mattress, open his hand, and show Harry a ring.
Louis’ eyes were shining, mouth trembling just a little, and Harry’s heart collapsed.
“I want to marry you,” Louis said, so quietly. “I don’t want to spend a second without you.”
Harry stared at him, at the ring, at Louis again, at the ceiling, then his own hands. He was so in love he wanted to throw up. He was so in love he couldn’t breathe.
“You’re mad,” Harry managed, bringing a hand up to cradle Louis’ jaw, thumb brushing his cheek. “We’re so young, Lou, we’re so…famous and—”
“Then marry me someday,” Louis smiled, shaking his head. “Promise you’ll make me that lucky.”
Harry had nodded, helpless, and let Louis slide the ring onto his finger, even though he couldn’t keep it on. It slipped down to his knuckle, right past the one nail Harry had painted pink and forgot about. Harry looked at the pink, looked at Louis, and felt something inside him shift. He didn’t know what it was, not then. Not until much, much later.
All Louis said was, “Suits you,” and kissed Harry’s knuckles, as if he knew already what Harry did not: that a single pink nail was the beginning of everything else.
2015 — 10 years before.
February of 2015 was the beginning of the end, and the precise moment Harry started wanting to be someone else. Maybe he’s always wanted that, but this is when it actually slotted into his mind.
Harry’s hair had grown all the way to his shoulders. He could tuck it behind his ear, could twist it into a bun, once even had it braided. It had been mindless at first, he just never made time to cut it, but the longer it got, the more he wanted it. It was the only part of himself he could stand to look at.
He liked the way it made him look soft. It was the softness that unsettled everyone else.
They were on a morning show two hours before sunrise and dead-eyed from jet lag, when the interviewer, so casually, mentioned he didn’t like it, right there on camera. Harry didn’t know what to say, he smiled, then plucked a cold grape from the catering tray and rolled it between his fingers, feeling the sticky skin give under his nails. But that night, alone in the bathroom, Harry stared at his reflection until he disassociated.
The hair was just the beginning. He became utterly obsessed with studying himself, scrutinizing everything. He would strip to his briefs, stand in front of the glass, and inventory the whole of him. Squeeze his upper arms, testing for the give of muscle or fat. Cup his own pecs and try to imagine them heavier, rounder, just to see if it would feel good. He’d get on the scale, look down, bite his lip, get off, and back on.
So he made little changes.
Every morning, he would coax his lashes into impossible, desperate curls with an eyelash curler stolen from a makeup artist’s kit. He searched “how to make eyelashes longer naturally” and “can men get lash extensions” and then deleted his search history with a wild heartbeat. He would paint all of his fingernails, usually with the sickly pearlescent pink he loved, point at things just to look at them, then scrub it off in tears.
He shaved almost daily, even when no hair was really visible on his face. He hated it, never wanted to risk being seen with it. Sometimes he’d find himself scrolling through old pap shots, and study how his clothes fit, if his eyebrows were too bushy, if he looked too big. He would stare until he hated himself for looking, then shut the laptop and rub his temples so hard it hurt.
All of this was carefully hidden from Louis at first, and Louis still looked at him like he was art, somehow. Sometimes it was when Harry was half-asleep, mouth open against a train window, or when he was hunched over a breakfast table drawing flowers on a paper napkin. Louis would rest his chin on his hand, stare for as long as he could get away with, and only then let his gaze return to whatever else the world demanded of him.
But Louis eventually saw the ugly moments. The ones where Harry would spend twenty minutes picking at his face in the mirror, or the ones where he’d get so in his head that he’d refuse to leave the hotel room. One day, after a particularly vile interview, Harry locked himself in the bathroom for over an hour, just sitting on the cold tile floor, staring at the grout lines and trying to imagine his life as someone else’s.
Louis tried to pick the lock, tried to talk him out of the bathroom, but the door was solid, and Harry would not answer. Eventually Louis sat down outside the door, knees up, back pressed against the wood, and waited.
They sat in silence for an eternity, and when Harry finally opened the door, Louis was still there. He didn’t ask what was wrong. He just looked at Harry’s blotchy, tired face and said, “Hey, baby.”
Harry tried to walk past him, embarrassed, but Louis caught him by the wrist. He dragged Harry into his chest, and said, “You’re not alone, okay? Never going to let you be alone.”
After that, Harry let his brain slowly convince him that he wasn’t good enough for Louis. That maybe, Louis didn’t find him attractive anymore, and didn’t know how to tell him. Harry obsessed over photos of her, the girlfriend-for-show Louis had kept for four years, and tortured himself with thoughts of how pretty people thought she was, how perfect for Louis.
There was one night in Tokyo when it got so bad Harry thought he’d lose his mind just from ruminating. Louis was in their room, sprawled in his boxers on top of the duvet, watching a documentary with the volume low. Harry had been in the bathroom for half an hour. He stared at himself in the mirror, turning his face left and right, searching for flaws that weren’t really there. His eyes stung. He hated the way his lips went thin when he was anxious, and the way his shoulders looked in his clothes.
He went back out, crawled onto the bed next to Louis, and lay perfectly still, arms tight to his sides. After a while, Louis turned on his side, propped his head on his elbow, and just looked at Harry.
Harry blinked. Blinked again. “Do you think I’m pretty?”
It was nothing but a hoarse rasp, so painfully exposed, that Harry wanted to swallow it back down right after.
“Course you’re pretty,” Louis said. “You’re the prettiest person I’ve ever seen.”
It should have been enough. It should have filled the void inside him, even just for a minute. But it didn’t, the need to be pretty, to be wanted, became a sickness.
He started making Louis fuck him more often. A lot more often, hyper-sexualizing himself to the point of concern. He did it just to prove that he was still desirable, still loved, like this, in this body. Louis never said no. Harry would climb on top of him, straddle his hips, dig his fingers into Louis’ chest so hard he’d leave marks. He’d ride Louis until his thighs shook uncontrollably, then collapse on top of him, still trembling.
Every time, afterwards, Harry would cry, and he hated that he cried. He hated that he needed it so much, hated that every orgasm was followed by a rush of guilt so dense he could barely breathe. But he would cry anyway, and Louis would just hold him, rub his back, whisper that it was okay.
“Why are you crying, sweetheart?” Louis would say.
Harry never had an answer. Sometimes he wouldn’t say anything at all, just bury his face in Louis’ chest and sob, but Louis held him through it, every time.
But there was a night in Paris where Harry lost it completely.
He’d got a nose full of women’s perfume after Louis was back from an outing, and rejected his hug, pushed him off Harry, didn’t even want to talk to him.
“It’s just a scent, baby, come on,” Louis said, “I was crowded in a lift for fuck’s sake, I told you—”
Harry watched him with a feral focus, heart doing the same frantic beat as the time he’d been caught stealing lipstick from his mum’s room.
“You smell like her,” Harry said, words dry and hard. “You don’t even try to hide it.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Louis said, running both hands up over his face, like he could scrape the argument off his skin. “I come home to you, I make love to you, I—”
“Then why do you make me feel like she’s here, all the time?” Harry’s voice cracked on “here.” It sounded childish even to his own ears, high and trembling. “Do you like it when people see you with her, you like pretending you’re straight?”
Louis’ eyebrows shot up. “That’s it, then? Do you think I’m fucking her? Do you hear yourself?”
Harry flinched like it hurt. “Tell me you don’t like it,” he demanded, hating the hitch in his own voice. “Tell me you don’t want her, that you don’t wish I was—” He stopped, shaking, eyes burning. He was already crying.
Louis stared at him, jaw set in a hard line, arms crossed the way he did when he didn’t trust his hands. “You’re being so fucking unfair right now,” he said, low, dangerous. “I wouldn’t have spent five years with you if—”
“You’d spend five years with anyone if it meant you didn’t have to be alone,” Harry said. Too cruel even to himself.
“Fuck, Harry! What do you want from me?” Louis said, stepping closer. “You want me to quit the band? You want me to walk around with your name tattooed on my forehead?” Harry stared at him, whole body vibrating with the urge to end it, to make it so ugly Louis would have to leave, just so Harry could be right about being left. Louis took a breath. “I have nothing else to give you, Harry. I’m bleeding for you. I’m—” His hands came up, fingers splayed, like he might tear his own hair out, or Harry’s. “I am killing myself to keep us.”
Harry could barely keep his hands from shaking. The cold light in the suite rendered everything a kind of vomitous yellow, his own skin sickly against the crisp white of the sheets, the clammy wetness of his palms making the pillowcase cling. He wanted, absurdly, to rip the hair from his head, to claw the bone underneath and see if he could hollow out the parts that would not let him rest. But Louis was still standing there, looming, a shape in motion, radiating such heat that Harry thought the carpet might catch flame.
“Then go!” Harry heard himself yell, his voice a pitch higher than he’d ever known it, echoing off the glass and sharp enough to cut. “If it’s so impossible, if I’m so—” He coughed, breath catching, then spat the word like poison: “Awful, go! Fucking leave!”
Louis looked at him like he might. For the first time in all these years, Harry could see, truly see, how tired Louis had become. There were lines around his mouth, a heaviness to his movement that had nothing to do with jet lag or the endlessness of their work. It was a tiredness Harry recognized from his own mirror. It horrified him and thrilled him at once.
“Don’t tempt me,” Louis hissed, shaking. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re saying!”
“Oh, I do,” said Harry. “I know exactly what I’m saying.” He was panting now, pupils blown so wide he could barely make out the rest of the room. “You want out. You have for ages. I’m just the last thing in the way.”
“God, fucking stop it,” Louis was shouting over him, voice raw, unreal. “You think you’re the only one with feelings, Harry? You think you’re the only one who’s allowed to hurt? Try being your boyfriend. Try waking up every fucking morning and wondering if you’re gonna get to keep the person you love, or if they’re gonna slip through your fingers again. You want to talk about pain? You want to talk about being broken?”
The sound Harry made was not human. The sob stuck in his chest, and when he tried to breathe, it was just a desperate thing: “I never asked for this! I never wanted to be like this! I am trying so hard, Louis, I am trying every day, and it’s never enough for you, it’s never enough—”
Louis wheeled on him, teeth bared. “You don’t even see me, do you?” His voice cracked, and for a second Harry thought he might cry, but Louis was too angry to cry. “All you see is yourself, over and over, like no one else exists. Like I don’t exist unless I’m giving you something, unless I’m—” He cut off, breathing so hard his chest shuddered.
Harry pressed a fist to his mouth, tried to muffle the next words, but they came out anyway: “I think you’re waiting for the day I’m normal. For the day I wake up and stop—” He gestured at himself, at the whole mess of his body. “Stop needing you so much. Stop—being a fucking burden. Like you’d ever choose me if you weren’t constantly guilt-tripped by some pathetic, sobbing mess.”
Louis shook his head, but there was no denial. “All I ever wanted was you. Not the band, not a fake girlfriend, none of the shit that came with it. Just us. But you—” Harry felt the room tilt. The words were coming too fast now; Louis was a blur, every consonant another blow.
“But what? Say it.”
Louis’ face twisted, as if he might spit. “You make it impossible!” he screamed. “You make everything so fucking hard! I can’t even breathe without you having a crisis about it!”
He felt it curdle in his stomach, a sourness that spread outward to his skin. “Fuck you,” he said, voice trembling in a way that made him hate himself more.
And Louis stormed out, door slamming.
He didn’t come back until sunset, and they sat in silence on the bed. After a long, long while, Louis said: “I don’t know what’s happening,” he sounded soft, but defeated. “I don’t know how to help you.”
“You don’t have to.”
Louis ran a hand through his hair, sighing. “I want to. But you won’t let me.”
Harry blinked, tried to swallow around the lump in his throat. “I’ll get better.”
Harry knew he wouldn’t, though.
They didn’t fuck that night, but Harry still cried himself to sleep. Louis woke up to it, and pulled Harry close anyway, lips pressed to his temple, arms wrapped around him tight. Harry held on, even though he knew it was hopeless.
By August, they were shells. They still loved each other, but it was a love built on pain and repetition. Harry couldn’t stop losing himself, he couldn’t stop letting the self loathe explode into horrific fights, they couldn’t stop hurting each other. It was mutual destruction, beautiful only to those who’d never lived inside it.
One night, Harry was lying on his back, sheets tangled at his ankles, sweat cooling on his chest. Louis was beside him, one hand flung over Harry’s stomach, his face buried in Harry’s hair. Harry kept his eyes closed, counting Louis’ inhales.
He thought: We’re not going to be the same again.
2016 — 9 years before.
Somehow, they held on for another year, less than by a thread.
Harry thought the world would end with a bang, but the death of them was a slow-motion suffocation. They went through the motions of making coffee, scrolling through phone screens at opposite ends of the sofa, sharing meals eaten in silence, or if they were lucky, a joke traded like an old version of them. There were weeks when neither of them could remember the last time they’d even kissed for longer than a peck.
It was Harry’s fault. He’d stopped letting Louis see him, in every sense. He’d change in the locked bathroom, he’d wash in the shower with the curtain drawn tight and a towel waiting to conceal him. The sight of his own skin had become a trigger, a reminder of the inescapable failure of it, of how wrong he was, and Louis never pushed. He never even tried to demand the body he once worshipped. He took the new boundaries with a tired resignation that only stoked Harry’s guilt, and so he retreated even further.
There were no more nights tangled with vicious hunger to consume each other. The first few times they’d tried to have sex, after things started to crumble, it ended with Harry dissociating, lying there, unable to get it up while Louis fumbled for ways to bring him there. Eventually, Louis stopped trying. Instead, Harry started giving blowjobs as a mercy, an act of apology; his mouth was all he could stand to give. Sometimes Louis would protest, say “It’s fine, love, you don’t have to,” but Harry would insist, would force a smile, would try to prove that he was still good for something.
The second half of 2016 Harry developed a case of insomnia so clinical it was destroying his entire nervous system; three, four nights a week, he’d lay awake until dawn, then shuffle through the day in a haze of caffeine and anxiety. If he was lucky, he’d pass out on the bathroom floor, the only place cold enough to shock him into numbness. He’d lie there, arms locked around his knees, counting the tiles on the wall, imagining how different it would be if he was someone else, if he had another face and another life.
He didn’t want to wake Louis with his meltdowns, so he learned to muffle the sound, clamping a fist over his mouth, shaking with the force of keeping guttural sobs stored inside. He’d sit there for hours, thinking in circles, until he hated himself so thoroughly that he’d dig lines into his forearm, just to have proof he was still capable of feeling anything.
Harry became too far gone, so deep in his own spiral that he pushed Louis away over and over again. When they argued, now, it wasn’t arguing. It was explosive and ugly, more screaming match than disagreement.
The worst of it came when Louis organized drinks at their place, and invited a girl.
Harry hadn’t known she’d be there, he assumed it was Louis’ usual mates, maybe new colleagues from his new management. But Harry was unprepared for a girl, a beautiful woman, to take up space in their house, to make Louis laugh. He was so, far beyond triggered, and back then, he refused to process why.
As soon as everyone was gone, Harry’s heart pounded with his upset, and he couldn’t stop the flood of words that clawed out of his throat against his will:
“Did you have fun, staring at her the whole night?”
Louis had dropped his head immediately, exasperated, only making Harry more desperate to hurt him.
“Harry,” He said firmly. “I’m not doing this shit tonight.”
“You can’t even deny it, Louis. You called her ‘babe,’ you were laughing all fucking night.”
“Jesus Christ,” Louis shook his head, irritation clear. “We had a conversation, friends laugh, I call even Liam ‘babe,’ d’you think I want to fuck him, too?”
Harry sucked in a breath, feeling that hot, overwhelming loss of control he always did. Totally unreasonable, believing his sick brain and his wild and anxietied thoughts.
“Can you stop fucking gaslighting me?” He snapped, and Louis jerked back in astonishment. “You always try to make me sound crazy! I’m so fucking sick of it!”
“And I’m sick of you doing this to me, Harry! I didn’t do anything and you’re suffocating me again. I can’t have a good time with other people?”
“You didn’t do anything?” Harry repeated wildly, angry tears gathering in his eyes. “ I know what I saw! You don’t—you don’t do that with me,” Harry curled his toes inside his socks, hard, trying not to lose it completely. But he couldn’t help it, he craved reassurance, he wanted this to be Louis’ fault. “You don’t want me anymore.”
The reassurance didn’t come.
“You say that every fucking day!” Louis shouted instead, “I have tried, so hard, to prove it’s not true, and you won’t let me, Harry.”
“Okay. I’m the problem and you’re the saint, like always. When you’re itching to stick your cock in some girl in a tank top on our couch!”
Louis’ fist came down on the table. “Why are you so obsessed with girls! You can’t even fucking get it up for me anymore, what, because you like girls now? Is that it?”
A deadly silence. Harry choked on the sob that wracked his body, and he blindly moved to shove Louis violently, once, then again and again, right in the chest.
“Fuck you! You’re a fucking arsehole! Fuck you!”
He continued hitting him uselessly, but Louis just grabbed his wrists. “Harry, stop.” Harry struggled in his grip, hyperventilating. “Harry, come on, breathe.”
Harry tore free from his grip, and retreated into their room on shaky legs, collapsing in front of the shut door. He sobbed himself dry until all he could do was hiccup. And when Louis never came to bed, Harry laid there and picked his skin until he bled.
That was one of their worst. So by the time Harry started his solo album in earnest, they’d become strangers who shared a mailing address. Harry was always in LA, chasing the only thing that still made him feel real, and Louis was back in London, giving himself a break. They would call each other, sometimes, but the conversations were flat and dead-eyed. If Harry said “I miss you,” it was a performance. If Louis said “I love you,” at the end, it was just out of habit.
The last time they saw each other before it all ended, Harry had come back to the city for only a weekend, and the minute he opened the door it was obvious that nothing was salvageable. They barely made it through dinner before the first argument started, and by midnight, they were screaming at each other so violently that somehow, it topped the last one. And Louis was the one who dared to say the thing they always avoided:
“Why are we even doing this?” He said, voice cracking softly. “You don’t even want this. We’re killing each other.”
Harry wanted to tell him. He wanted to say, “Because I don’t know who I am without you,” but he couldn’t say it around the painful, throbbing lump in his throat. He just stood there, arms wrapped around his chest, trembling. Louis inhaled, tipped his head back to control his tears, and by the time he looked back down, they were streaming relentlessly as he shook his head slowly.
“I think it’s time to let go.”
Harry’s lip wobbled intensely, and he felt like someone had just sheathed a blade through the center of him. His throat closed, he couldn’t fucking breathe, and just as he was about to collapse, Louis caught him, and held him up right. All Harry could do was be held, and they stood like that in silence for fifteen minutes.
So the end was sort of like the beginning, only Harry did not mark Louis with urine, he marked him with an open-fleshed wound.
Deep, ugly, and impossible to heal.
2017 — 8 years before.
It became clear, immediately, that the end of Harry and Louis was not just the end of an era. It was a vicious, irreversible, amputation leaving behind a half-soul that continued, against all sense, to ache for the part of itself that had been cut away.
Harry didn’t know how to mourn someone who had not died, how to reroute the muscle memory of care and need and longing when the recipient of all that devotion had become not only unreachable, but unwilling.
He could not sleep. He could not eat. He drank the wall, instead, because it was easier, because it was numbing, and because it carried the illusion of action; a way to participate in his own destruction rather than simply endure it. He drank all morning, until he was slurring his feelings to the stuffed cow Louis had given him one Valentine’s. Then, he’d usually throw up by 3pm, and start drinking again at 6. After a week of this, he finally woke up sober, and promptly, seriously considered killing himself.
He hovered over the sink, imagining himself at peace, eyes closed, untouched by anything else that could ever hurt him. He almost did it. He thought about it so obsessively that he shook violently as he called his mum. Holmes Chapel is three hours from London, but Anne arrived in just over two, somehow, and kept Harry on speaker the entire way.
She had sat Harry on the couch, cried, and held him just like she did when he was a child and the world was too big for him.
“We’re going to get you through this, baby,” she said, brushing the hair from Harry’s face, “I promise you’ll be alright, my love, I’m here now. As long as you need.”
The days that followed blurred into nothing but pure survival, Anne looking after Harry like he was a sick animal. As he went through the torture of his grief, and alcohol withdrawal, his body reduced to its weakest, most reluctant functions. His mum walked him through the mechanics of eating and drinking and sleeping as if Harry were a convalescent child. The simplest foods: toast, clear broth, bananas in fragile slices. Water, but not too much at once. Anne added electrolyte powder, stirring until it dissolved, and gave it to Harry twice a day.
“Good,” his mum would say, watching him drink. “Again. C’mon, sip.”
Each swallow was an argument with himself, a battle between the basic desire to survive and the more elegant, insidious impulse towards self-erasure.
Night was the worst. Dreams were infested with Louis: Louis at the piano, Louis asleep on his shoulder, Louis laughing with the sun as a backdrop. Sometimes the dreams ended with them together again, and Harry woke up suffocating in the twin sensations of joy and loss. More often the dreams ended with absence, where Louis would fade into a crowd, or step into a black car and leave him. Those times, Harry would jerk awake sobbing, screaming, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” he’d choke. “I’m so fucking sorry, please come back. Please! I can’t, I can’t, please come back for me.”
Anne would always come in, no matter how late, and hold him until her warmth, the smell of her old, lavender sleep lotion, lulled him to quiet.
Once, Harry woke from a dream of drowning. He remembered the taste of river water and the way it stung his nose and eyes, and the sensation of something heavy and invisible, pulling him down by the ankles. He couldn’t tell if he was calling for help, or if he was only listening for it. When he woke, his mouth was dry, his hands cold, and his heart thrumming with the velocity of terror.
The real fear, he realized, was not that he would die from this. The real fear was that he would live, and that one day he would forget, and that the forgetting would be a second betrayal.
After that one, Anne decided that he should leave the house. This was presented as an opportunity rather than an ultimatum.
“We’ll go for a walk,” She said. “Just for the air.”
They walked the block, silent except for the sound of their shoes on pavement and the occasional comment about the weather. Harry felt as if he were inhabiting a stranger’s body, watching himself from across the street, and it was so draining that after the walk, he slept for hours. He slept for fifteen hours.
Anne let him do it, and when he emerged in a blanket afterwards, she just rubbed his back. “You needed it, pet.”
Harry thought he might be able to stop dreaming after that, but they kept coming, so brutal that Harry relapsed over and over, stashing shooters of vodka under his bed. When Anne picked up on the constant puking and slurred insistence that he’s fine, he was gently coaxed towards therapy. Something that he maybe—definitely, needed a long, long time ago, right off the XFactor and thrusted into the machine.
His therapist, Leanna, was expensive, discreet, and shockingly perceptive. In the first session, she asked Harry what he wanted.
“Not to hurt,” Harry said. “Or, if I have to hurt, then for it to make sense.”
Leanna had nodded. “It won’t make sense,” she said, “but you’ll learn to tolerate the mystery.”
It was the first time anyone had spoken to him with such bleak, unvarnished hope. Harry returned the next week, and the week after, and each time it got a fraction of a percent easier to say the words out loud.
“I loved him,” he said, once. “I love him. I’ll never stop. Ever.”
“That’s fine,” Leanna replied. “It isn’t a problem to love someone. It’s only a problem if you can’t love anything else.”
Harry thought about that for a long time. He wondered what else he might love, if given the chance.
2018 — 7 years before.
He finished rehab in the early spring.
The air was new and wet, and every hour not spent in mandatory therapy with Leanna was spent in the garden, alone, killing time and drinking lemonade instead of liquor.
It had been many months since Harry lost the biggest piece of him that ever existed, and he still composed hundreds of drafts to Louis in his head, not a single one sent. He wanted to say: I can’t do it without you, but you knew that, didn’t you? He wanted to say: I’m better now, please, I’m better now, I can be good for you.
But that wasn’t true, so instead he said nothing, and focused on the ice clinking in his glass and the flowers at his feet as if either could save him from the greater hungers inside.
Two weeks after discharge, he boarded a flight to Jamaica. He would finish the album. He would fill the void with work, with focus, and with distance. For the entire journey, Harry picked at the skin around his thumb until it bled. He watched the wound bead and darken, and told himself: You’re alive, and you’re bleeding, and it will get better.
It didn’t get better in Jamaica, but it did become more manageable, the pain evolving from volcanic to tidal. Each morning, Harry woke early, covered in sweat, and went running for miles until his body was sore enough to drown out the rest. He learned to surf. He learned to walk into the studio and pretend he hadn’t spent hours lying face-down on the tile at night, shivering with thoughts of the alcohol. Wondering if resorting to doing coke would’ve made him alive instead of numb.
He worked with the band and the producers in long, silent stretches, letting them fill the empty space with talk about snares and bridges and mastering. He drank coconut water and nothing else. He got a voicemail from Niall and he cried so hard that he shook.
Every day, he wrote. Most of it was garbage: a lurching, unfiltered record of panic and heartbreak so dark that it wouldn’t make it to any album, ever. But some of it was gold, and his team told him so. They cranked out ‘Meet Me In The Hallway,’ and it was so painful to record that during their next session, they fooled around like idiots with instruments and got ‘Kiwi’ in the end, and for the first time in months Harry felt a little sliver of pride. Sometimes, he could almost believe in the possibility of a future self, someone stronger and braver than the one who had crumbled so spectacularly while the ghost of the love his life haunted him.
There was one song that came out of him in a single sitting.
He’d woken in the blue light of four a.m., shaking from a dream of Louis. It wasn’t actually a dream, but a real, horrific memory that visited him often, of the world ending sound of Louis saying: “Why are you so obsessed with girls! You can’t even fucking get it up for me anymore, what, because you like girls now? Is that it?”
So Harry sat down at the piano in the main room in nothing but boxers, wrapped in a blanket, and wrote the entire thing in under an hour, in a blackout:
I'm selfish, I know, but I don't ever want to see you with him.
I'm selfish, I know, I told you, but I know you never listen.
I hope you can see, the shape that I'm in, while he's touching your skin.
He's right where I should, where I should be, but you're making me bleed.
He changed the pronouns in the final cut; her for him, she for he, so that nobody would ever know the truth, that the thing that fucked him up the most, was being jealous of women, in a way that went far deeper than he was prepared to dig up. It was a private, cowardly decision, the sort of thing that made Harry want to rip his own skin off for being too honest and not honest enough at the same time.
He called the song Woman, because that very word was enough.
When they played back the rough demo, Harry had to bite the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood, just to keep from losing himself in front of the others.
“Fuck, H,” said Tyler, grinning, “that’s a hit.”
Harry smiled, and told himself that’s all it needed to be.
He could barely listen to the song, after. When he heard it, he imagined Louis’ hands, gliding up Harry’s naked hips, the way he’d pin him down when he had three fingers inside of him. He imagined his lips, how they closed around Harry’s nipples, the exact darkness of his eyes when Harry gave him head. But then, he always imagined a faceless depiction of a beautiful woman in Harry’s place, Her curvy hips, and Louis’ fingers in Her cunt, full breasts in his mouth, rather than toned chest. Sometimes it burned a strange arousal straight through him, and sometimes it made him so upset that he pulled at the roots of his hair in frustration.
He spent entire nights editing and re-editing the vocals, searching for the exact inflection that might convey the pain without revealing the shape of it.
They finished the album, and Harry spent the following months in a hurricane of press, branding, rehearsals, and endless flights. He learned to perform the mask of Normal Harry: the charming, disheveled, endlessly horny pop star, tailor-made for a public that demanded nothing more complicated than a boy with a pretty face and a body worth ruining.
He could do it, most days. He could laugh at the right places, smile for the camera, talk about the album as if it were a product and not the chronicle of his own undoing. But at night, or in the lonely stretch of morning after a show, he reverted to the more familiar state: silent, anxious, compulsively self-scrutinizing.
He still spent hours in front of the mirror, analyzing every line and contour of his body. Sometimes he would press his pecs together, pushing them up with flat hands, examining himself that way from every angle, just to see if he still liked it. It was an old habit, and he hadn’t done it in years. Now it returned with a vengeance, like all the other things he’d buried. His hands shook a little when Googled ‘workouts for bigger chests,’ and as soon as he imagined someone catching him doing it, he clicked out and flushed down to his toes.
On show days, Harry took a razor and shaved every inch of his body, from neck to toes. It was not about hygiene or aesthetics; it was about discipline, about controlling the only thing in his life that still responded to force. He hated the act itself and he hated the aftermath, the red burns and the constant itch, but he did it anyway. It was easier than wanting to die.
The first time he ordered women’s panties, he told himself it was for comfort. He told himself it was softer material that clung better under his glittery stage wear. When the package arrived, he hid it in his hotel room and tried on a pair in secret. His breath hitched when they fit snug over his hips, and he spent fifteen minutes in the full body mirror looking, twisting, sticking his ass out in awe.
He went to bed in them, ordered more, and then spent the the rest of the tour wearing them. He convinced himself that maybe it was just a harmless kink, but it was getting harder and harder to lie to himself. Especially when every crowd on tour was an ocean of signs: crude jokes, “Daddy” sharpied in bright red, the endless, insatiable hunger for the version of him that was purely, unambiguously, Man.
He hated it. He stopped looking, and he sang Woman every night, and with each repetition, the words lost their connection to the real, and they became a way to survive in a world that would never want the truth.
When he got home from tour, it was raining. Harry walked through the arrivals hall with a single backpack, and for the first time in years, he let himself cry in public. Not because of Louis, or even his own destruction, but because, for a split second, he felt the smallest seed of relief. He had survived. He had made it to the other side.
He went home and showered, dressed, then stared at himself in the mirror for an eternity. He didn’t recognize the person looking back at him. The bones were the same, the lips, the eyes, but the rest was a stranger’s composition, a funhouse projection of who he might have been, if he were allowed to choose.
Harry spent the night on the living room floor, swaddled in a duvet, nauseas as he began to type:
How to know if you’re transgender.
2019 — 6 years before.
It was Japan, that changed Harry’s life.
He was supposed to be writing his second album, but alone in a city as alive as Tokyo, he found himself scrolling obsessively instead. Through anonymous message boards, long reads, medical pamphlets, the clinical and the anecdotal merging into a raw chorus of doubt. Most were earnest, some were vitriolic, and more than one told him he was probably just gay, or else just sick, or else that it was just a phase and would pass if he kept his hands busy. In this case, the hands in question were painted green and had not done a single productive thing for three days except for flick from tab to tab, keeping all the browsers open so he wouldn’t lose any train of thought, even when every thought led right back to himself.
He missed his hair. He missed the way it used to tuck so neatly behind his ears, how it draped down and made him look soft, made him feel—if not beautiful—then at least not monstrous. They had cut it before the first solo tour, and Harry remembered the feeling of cold shears on the nape of his neck, the lightness and panic that followed. It had been a condition of the label: new look, new era, new you. The old you, they implied, was unmarketable.
Every so often, when the loneliness got too loud, he’d spend time in front of the mirror, holding his hair in makeshift ponytails, teasing it out at the sides, trying to simulate what he’d lost.
Makeup was different. At first, it was just curiosity; a tube of lip gloss here, a dusting of highlighter there, but it quickly became more compulsive, a private pass time he performed in the safety of the bathroom. He watched YouTube tutorials late into the night, learning to contour, to line his eyes, to paint his face in whatever configuration felt least like a lie. The results were uneven, sometimes embarrassing, but when he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine waking up in a body that made sense, a body that didn’t require constant negotiation.
He took selfies in it. Dozens of them, maybe more. Some he deleted immediately, horrified by the sight of his own face. Others he saved to a locked folder, never daring to look at them unless he was certain of being alone. In these photos, Harry saw both the person he’d always been and the one he was too scared to become. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, knowing he’d already jumped, waiting for the sensation of falling.
Harry gave up on pretending to work on the album, and filled his time with more frequent trips to restaurants, karaoke bars, theme parks. Once, on a night out, Harry let a friend from the Tokyo scene apply a full face of makeup, liner winged and lips painted and slick. The others were delighted, showering him with affection, and for a moment, Harry felt invincible, more real than he had in months. Then he caught sight of himself in a restroom mirror, and the feeling flipped on its head, dizzying and sick. He scrubbed his face raw before leaving, and that night, he threw up twice from the panic of it.
In between these small humiliations, Harry became obsessed with knowing. He collected stories of trans women, reading their memoirs in the tea shop two blocks from his rental, pretending he was only interested in the sociology of it, not the possibility. He told himself, over and over, that he was just collecting inspiration, that the desire to try on a dress was a relic of childhood, a hangover from some unresolved trauma.
On Sunday, Harry ordered the lingerie set. He spent an hour scrolling online, looking for something that would fit his body without feeling like a joke. He settled on a lacy white ensemble with tiny pink roses embroidered at the cups and the waistband. It was girlish, almost aggressively so, and the moment he entered the delivery address, his hands trembled so hard he had to retype it three times. When the confirmation email arrived, he stared at it for nearly a minute before deleting it from his inbox and his memory.
It arrived on Wednesday, in a small, nondescript box that the concierge handed over without a word. Harry took it up to his room, locked the door, and set the package on the bed like it was a bomb, not daring to open it for nearly an hour. When he finally did, the tissue paper gave way, and Harry was ashamed to realize he was, in fact, in love.
He waited another few minutes. Waited until his heart wasn’t throwing itself into his chest, and he could pick up the set without immediately letting it go again. Then, he peeled off his shirt, his joggers, his underwear. He stood naked, illuminated by the blue light of his phone, and let himself look in the mirror.
He saw a stranger. A ghost in a gorgeous coffin. Harry thought of the body as an inconvenience, a rude suit that had to be endured until the mind inside it could be released.
The first thing he put on was the bra. He fumbled with the clasp, his fingers clumsy and too inexperienced, but he got it after a few attempts, and the sensation of the lace against his skin was so new, so electric, that he almost cried. He slipped the panties on, guiding the waistband over his hips, tucking himself as best he could. Then he sat down, suddenly lightheaded, and pulled the straps tight.
For a few minutes, he just stared. He catalogued his body, the way the cups actually rounded out against his chest, at the smooth, delicate line of the panties. The sight of it was so beautiful, so right, that something in him exploded. He traced his fingers along the hem, up the ribcage, down his waist, and felt something in him begin to thaw, the rigid terror melting into a trembling, impossible joy.
He hadn’t felt desire in three years. He hadn’t been able to get hard since the last time he had sex with Louis, when they had no idea it would be the last time. But now, with the lace pressed close, and the mirror reflecting back a version of himself that was almost believable, the old hunger returned. Goosebumps bloomed all over his skin as his body finally came back to life, his hand touching himself all over.
Harry climbed into bed, the lingerie cool and soft against his skin. He reached for his phone, almost absently, then stopped and exhaled. He reminded himself that nobody was going to know about this. He searched, this time with intent. Guided masturbation video, he typed. For women.
He found one on the second page of results, something with a good length, a thumbnail of a hand tracing lazy circles on the inside of a thigh. He hit play, and waited, hot all over, breathing harder.
The voice was male, low and careful, and it asked, “Are you ready, sweetheart? Are you ready to be my good girl?”
Harry’s entire body tensed. The term made his heart pound, made hot arousal stir up in his belly. He let the voice guide him, let the instructions float down from the phone into his ears and straight down his body.
“First, tease yourself for me,” The voice said. “Get yourself worked up for it.”
Harry did. He ran his palm over the bra, ghosted a touch over each nipple. The fabric amplified every nerve, and the sensation was unfamiliar but addicting. The voice said, “Good, baby, just like that, let me see you squeeze those sweet tits.” and Harry shuddered an inhale, grabbed a cup in his hand, and squeezed, kneading the flesh. He slipped his fingers underneath and pinched at his nipple, and the sound that left his lips was high, almost feminine, and he startled himself with it, then did it again, desperate to recapture the feeling.
“Now suck on your fingers for me,” The voice told him, “Rub those nipples with it until they’re hard.”
Harry brought his index finger to his lips, let his tongue circle it, sucked it between his lips, then lowered it back down to prod into his nipple. His hips squirmed almost on their own as he rubbed his nipples in desperate circles, precome starting to darken the front of his panties.
He did it until the voice told him, “Such a good girl, why don’t you spread your legs and show me that gorgeous pussy.”
Harry didn’t mean to moan, but it poured out of him as he opened his legs, imagining in the safety of his head that a cunt was in between them.
“There you go, so wet, huh? Get those fingers inside, baby, wanna hear it squelch for me.”
Harry obeyed. He dragged a hand down, slipped his fingers beneath the panties, and for the first time in memory, he didn’t flinch at the touch of himself. He gathered his slick pre on his fingers, and when he used it to finally slide two fingers inside himself, it was like stepping into a new world.
He imagined, with perfect clarity, what it would feel like to have a cunt. To slide his fingers inside of it and find wet softness unlike anything else. That’s how it was supposed to be, Harry thought, so strongly that it short-circuited all fear, all shame, all the centuries of ignorance that had trained him to hate the thing he most wanted.
He came, untouched, with a choked, high-pitched gasp that startled him, a full-body shudder that left him trembling in aftershock. The voice in the video said, “That’s my good girl,” and Harry whispered it back, over and over, not caring how absurd he sounded.
After, he lay there, staring at the ceiling, hands still shaking. For a while, he just listened to his own heartbeat, fast and thin and alive. Then he went to the bathroom, washed his face, and stared at himself in the mirror. He shook through an impossible deep breath, eyes glistening.
“I’m a woman,” She said, barely audible. “I’m a woman.” Her reflection didn’t argue. The first tear fell, sliding in careful slow motion down her cheek. “I’ve always been a woman.”
And the dam broke. Harry crumpled to tears, but for once, it was a joyful release; a life changing freedom so sweet that she felt, for a second, like nothing could ever hurt her again. It took twenty minutes to catch her breath, another ten before she could peel the lingerie from her body, fold it, and hide it in the drawer beneath her socks.
The next morning, she opened her journal and wrote two words: Fine Line.
In that room, in the yellow morning of Tokyo, the truth became real for the first time.
It was not the end of him. It was the beginning of Her.
2020 — 5 years before.
It was fitting that the world ended in the same year she began.
When the coronavirus arrived, Harry had been in London for a writing camp, halfway through an album and mostly unrecognizable to herself. The city emptied itself in days, birds colonized the bridges, the water turned mirror-bright under anemic April sun. What was left was a world whittled down to two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a trembling line of calls to the outside. For the first time since she was sixteen, there was no one to see her, no apparatus to feed, no old rules to obey.
Isolation did to her what years of therapy could not: it carved away the rest of the world until only the essential remained. The noise and the memory and the hope. In that silence, she found her earliest, softest name—“Rry”—tucked between the echoes of who she’d been and who she would become.
She would later realize she’d chosen it long before. Rry. Not a replacement, but a correction. The syllables collapsed inward like a folding star, Harry without the hard edge, the mask of laughter and appetite, the tyranny of maleness. It was the same root, but truer; a name that fit the shape of her longing, elegant and small and beautiful.
She told no one, at first, not even her mum. The words hung in her mouth, foreign and dazzling. A thing to be said out loud only in empty rooms, between herself and the walls.
Rry woke early every morning, hair grown past her shoulders again, and sat at the kitchen window with black tea and a blank notebook. She watched the light shift along the countertop, the slow parade of hours that came and went in identical silence. She filled the notebook with small, futile tasks: water the plants, call Leanna, listen to the voice that would not stop whispering, “you’re almost there.” Sometimes, she wrote the name in cursive over and over, until it looked as natural as handwriting could.
The therapy continued, now by video, and her therapist looked up from the laptop screen with a face of infinite patience. “What should I call you?” she asked, on the second week.
“Just—Harry,” she lied, as if the truth would vanish if she didn’t speak it. As if it was a costume that could be unzipped and hung up with the rest of her past.
Leanna only nodded. “You don’t have to answer right away. You can try out new names, if you want. Or no name at all.”
“It’s not really about the name,” Rry said, lying again, though she’d been tasting that word in her mouth for months. “It’s about whether I can be someone who’s worth loving.”
She didn’t mean romantically. Not yet. She’d seen Louis, months ago, actually. And it was clear she still, 4 years later, was not ready to be loved again. Or let anyone else see her body, or even just look at someone else with desire. She was still irrevocably fucked up by, helpless for, Louis Tomlinson.
She had not anticipated the degree of panic this would inspire at One Direction’s 10 year anniversary reunion shoot. The one-off interview designed ostensibly to satiate the armies of nostalgic fans who’d kept them all afloat long after the music soured. An entire decade since X Factor, since bunk beds and communal toothpaste, since Louis in his saggy American Apparel boxers, since a version of Harry that was not yet Rry. The emails from the management team arrived in bold: Just a quick run-through of the old stories, a little fun, a little closure. Everyone’s in. They’d fly her anywhere she needed, private, masked, no press. She could say no, if she wanted; she could back out at the last second.
One of her agents, a kind-eyed femme named Safi who always wore denim jumpsuits and called her “honey” even when Rry was at her least convincing, offered to pull the plug on her behalf. “If it’s too much, we’ll say you’re sick. You don’t owe them anything.”
But Rry owed the fans. Or what was left of them, the semi-feral, mostly queer, eternally online fanbase that had seen some shard of her long before she let herself see it. Rry couldn’t bear to think of the disappointment if she didn’t show. She couldn’t bear to think of Louis showing up, alone, and having to field the inevitable questions about why '“Harry” hadn’t bothered.
She said yes, and then spent the next three weeks rehearsing how to get through it without throwing up.
The morning of, she dressed in clothes calculated to be both armor and appeasement: a silk blouse with a gigantic, saggy bow on the front, tailored black trousers, and a pair of expensive loafers. She needed to telegraph Harry enough for the public, and Rry enough for herself. Her hair, long again, was pulled into a bun on her head, normal, Harry enough, but safe for Rry.
There was a car waiting. She almost asked the driver to turn around twice before they’d left her street, but she kept her hands pinned in her lap, counting the ridges of her knuckles. She’d forgotten how cold studios were in the early mornings. She expected the on-set chaos, the assistants with their earpieces, the makeup artists with holsters of foundation, the publicists in crisp monochrome. What she hadn’t expected was how, even after all this time, she could sense Louis before she saw him, the static charge of his presence, the exact scent of the cologne he’d used in 2013, the low, specific laughter that ricocheted around the room and made every nerve in her body light up impossibly hot.
She stumbled straight to the green room, sick, and closed the door, pressing her forehead to the glass of a water bottle until the cold numbed her, inside and out, and her breathing slowed.
Niall showed up ten minutes later, knocking twice before poking his head in. “Haz?” he said, “It’s me!'“
Rry found herself smiling. “Hey, stud,” she said, something calming a little inside.
Rry had hung out with him numerous times after the split, but not lately, in the middle of Rry’s life altering discovery. His hair was a bit shorter, still a weaponized, honey-brown mess, and his smile was as wide and foolish as it always was. He’d brought a box of blueberry doughnuts and a bag of grapes, which he set down on the table as if they were a peace offering.
“You look nervous,” he observed, sitting cross-legged. “If it helps, I think everyone’s bricking it.”
Rry almost replied, “not as much as me,” but swallowed it. Instead, she picked up a grape, and said, “How’s Kait?”
Niall beamed. “She hates my guts but still wants to live with me, so, you know. It’s love.”
They talked about nothing, which was exactly what Rry needed. Nothing about the band, or how Rry just got another sobriety anniversary pin, or about Louis or the rumors that “Harry” is fucking Kendall Jenner, or the fact that everyone in the world was probably watching this, waiting to see if Rry and Louis still acted like….that, or if something took them apart. Niall was perfect at it. Rry found her hands relaxing, her voice coming back in dribs and drabs.
When he left, he squeezed her shoulder and said, “You look really good, sunshine. Actually, you look fabulous. If I had your hair, I’d never wear a hat again.”
Rry thought she probably couldn’t live without him, no matter how much the distance stretched.
The time came.
Rry claimed a seat in the front row of the interview risers, a calculated move: less back-of-head for the cameras, less chance of seeing Louis unless she spun around. She could control this much, at least. She perched on the edge of the chair and paged through her phone, feigning absorption, not thinking about the staged exhumation of her entire adolescence.
It wasn’t until the second row began to fill that she realized, with serrated clarity, that Louis would be sitting directly behind her. Of course. He was always behind her, a constant threat and solace, even when they were boys in matching jumpers, even when he was the only voice she wanted in her ear. Now Rry could hear him before she saw him; he was talking to a producer, muttering something about the set lighting, and the sound of it was enough to turn her brain to static.
She pressed her knees together, counted the seams in her trousers, tried to slow the breath that kept threatening to burst out of her in sobs or laughter, she couldn’t tell. What would she say to him, if forced? She had rehearsed it a hundred ways, each more brittle than the last. Maybe nothing.
A hand landed on her knee. Not Louis, but Liam, who sat beside her with the gentle eyes of someone who had once kept her alive, really. Even though the media refused to believe they even liked each other, let alone love. But Rry loved Liam, loved him for all the many ways he’ll always be Rry’s brother. Liam’s face was softer than she remembered, the beard growing in patchy, but his expression still so sweetly the same.
He squeezed Rry’s knee, and she almost cried right then. Instead, she made a joke about hoping there wouldn’t be any trust falls, and Liam chuckled, low and honest. “We’re nearly out the other side,” he said, “Just a bit of nostalgia, that’s all.”
Rry nodded, but her insides had already begun to liquefy. She closed her eyes and counted, ten and then twenty, willing the room and the heat and the chatter to melt into some manageable shape. When she opened them, the crew had begun to position cameras, the director calling out names. Louis, in her periphery, was a blue ghost, a blur of old t-shirt and new tattoos, and she refused to turn towards him.
The interview began with the easy questions. The ones about first impressions, about Simon, about the bootcamp in 2010 when they were all so sure the world would never end. Rry reached inside herself for the old voice, the Harry voice, charming and slightly vapid, and let it out in careful, rehearsed increments. She smiled on cue, told stories about pranks in hotels, carefully talked around the expected questions about Zayn. She could do this, she could disassociate the pain, she could be the version of herself the world wanted, if only for a day.
Every time Louis spoke, she flinched, but it was small. A startled blink, a rigid shift in posture, a tightening of her grip on the water bottle. She knew the cameras would catch it anyway. She knew the microexpressions would be picked apart, frame by frame, by armies of strangers who had spent the last ten years learning to read their faces like scripture. But she was too tired to care.
Half an hour in, the director called for a break. Rry stood up quickly, feeling she might vomit or faint, or both in rapid succession. She made it to the snack table, poured herself a cup of tea, and let her hands shake openly now that nobody was watching. She counted sugar packets; one, two, three, then forced herself to take a sip.
She didn’t see Louis approach until he was right beside her, so close she could smell the bergamot of his cologne, the one he’d worn since the year they fell apart. He didn’t say anything at first, just looked at her, the same way he used to do when he wanted her to open up. They were never good at talking.
Rry tried, she really did, to keep herself in one piece. She forced herself to look up, met his eyes, told herself she was prepared.
She was not. Her knees wobbled, and the cup nearly slipped from her hand.
Louis’ voice, when it came, was devastating in its softness. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked, whispering.
She couldn’t answer. The only thing she could think about was two months ago, the night she listened to his solo album alone in the dark. Walls. The album that ripped her open and stitched her up again, one song at a time. She had sobbed so hard it made her sick, every lyric an autopsy of what they’d been, every melody a wound that refused to scab over. She trembled through some of them:
It’s hard to think you could ever hate me…
"I don’t. I want to. I can’t."
It’s been two years since I’ve seen your face…
“I saw yours, every night, in every dream.”
But I can’t get inside, when you’re lost in your pride…”
“I was lost in my self hatred. I wanted you to love me through it.”
She laughed until she was actually screaming instead through ‘Always You,’ and she paused ‘Habit’ right after a line that punched, about their first flat together, in Princess Park. She left it paused and walked circles around the room for twenty minutes.
And ‘Only the Brave,” was the final nail in the coffin that Rry felt like she was resting in. She sobbed so hard that she couldn’t feel her face or rid it of its puffiness for three days.
when you know, you know.
when you know, you know.
when you know, you know.
Now, standing next to him, she could feel the old stab stinging through her knees, her gut, her frail heart. She turned away, staring at the buffets of nuts and fruit, but Louis reached out, gentle, not quite touching.
“Harry,” he said, and hearing that name from his mouth made her insides collapse.
She bolted. She didn’t mean to, but her body made the decision for her; out the door, barely registering the shouts of an intern or the clatter of the cup on the floor. She found a bathroom, locked herself inside, and leaned over the toilet until she was sure she wasn’t going to throw up again.
She stayed there for a long time. Long enough for the break to end, long enough for them to go on without her, and long enough for the second half to be meticulously edited to conceal “Harry’s” absence.
Rry hadn’t seen or heard from Louis since those 3 months ago, and she never listened to Walls again. She focused instead on her journey with growth and acceptance.
Her therapist told her to practice coping skills for coming out, to write down the phrases that scared her most, then counter them with gentler ones.
But Rry knew it was not that simple. She was haunted by Harry. She felt him in the way she spoke, in the pull of old injuries, in the music she made and the way it always returned to the one who’d left. She mourned him properly, lighting candles, playing old vinyl at dusk, even reading the scrapbooks from childhood until the pages blurred. She did not miss him. But she grieved him, and the grief was a cleaner thing than what she’d felt before.
The first time she tried on a dress, she did it in the secrecy of night, curtain pulled, every light off but the one over the bathroom mirror. The dress was a loose, gorgeous white one she’d bought online, sized too large because she was terrified of being betrayed by her own body. It draped over her, obscuring the lines she hated, and for ten minutes she stood in front of the mirror with hands clasped behind her back, swaying like a girl at her first dance, consumed with euphoria.
She ordered more, each one bolder than the last. A silk wrap, a crushed velvet gown, a sexy, open-legged slip. She filled her closet slowly, wondering how she could have lived a lifetime in the wrong uniform.
By the time it had been four more months since then, she started estrogen. Just for her, just to have it, just for the chance of feeling safe in her body. She refused to think any other steps past the pink oval. The act of swallowing them was a daily act of becoming, a quiet liturgy she performed before breakfast and after the news.
The changes were slow, then all at once. Her skin softened, her body grew curves in places that had never known softness. She watched her face every morning for signs of difference, convinced that each week brought some impossible, fragile beauty closer to the surface. The sight of her own collarbones, her wrists, the slope of her waist; these things became her religion. She pressed her fingers to them, the way a devout might touch a relic, unsure if she was allowed to believe in miracles.
But there were still days she could barely stand the sight of herself. Days when she stared at her reflection and saw only the stubble, the jaw, the thickness of arms that no amount of will could pare down. She wanted to be reborn, but every birth is accompanied by blood and pain and the terror that you will not survive the process. On those days, she put on the ugliest, softest sweater she owned, and wrapped herself in it until the thought passed.
She spent evenings on Zoom with her mum, who remained as stubbornly hopeful as ever. Anne had not suspected. Or if she had, she’d built a careful wall of denial around it, preserving her child exactly as she remembered him: soft, sweet, forever her little boy.
Rry rehearsed the conversation a thousand times. She wrote it down, then burned the page. She tried out the words in the mirror, listening for the point at which they might ring true. The truth was, she didn’t want to come out; she wanted to appear fully formed, to have always been the daughter her mother deserved, with no period of mourning for what was lost.
But the world did not allow for such luxuries. The world required you to kill your old self with your own hands, and then hope your loved ones would help bury the body.
It was almost a year before she told her mum.
Anne had called on a Sunday, and the loneliness in her voice was more than Rry could bear.
“Sweetheart, when this is all over, let’s have a proper holiday. You and me. Spain, or somewhere warm.”
“That would be nice,” said Rry, barely able to get the words out. Her hands were sweating, clutching the edge of the kitchen table.
A pause. “You sound different, Harry. Are you all right?”
She could have lied. She could have put it off another week, another year, another lifetime. But the thought of Anne meeting her on the other side of this, finding a stranger where her son had been, was a betrayal Rry could not perform.
“I have something I need to tell you,” she said, and the words were boulders in her throat.
“Of course, darling.”
Rry closed her eyes. She tried to speak, but all that came out was a wet, childish laugh. “It’s nothing, um, dangerous,” she managed. “It’s just—different.”
Anne was silent, holding her breath the same way she did when the old version of Rry told her she was gay. This does not feel the same. But she opened her mouth anyway.
“I’m. Transgender,” Rry said, stomach shaking. “I’m a woman. I think she’s always been inside of me. I know that’s—hard. But, you have to know.”
It was the first time she had ever said it to anyone, voice trembling with the weight of it, the promise and the shame. She waited for the collapse, the crumpling of an old world. She braced for the sound of her mother’s heart breaking, a sound she had heard once before, years ago, when her stepdad passed.
Instead, Anne started to cry. “Oh, God, sweetheart,” Anne said, and then nothing for a long while. When she found her voice again, it was quieter, as if speaking to a frightened animal. “Thank you for telling me. I love you, always. Do you hear me? I love you.”
It was not relief, exactly. It was something closer to devastation, the sense of a chasm opening and both of them falling in together. There were questions, later, practical ones, about names, about surgery, about what this meant for the rest of their lives. There were mistakes, too, the misgenderings, the stutters over her old name, the persistent, aching uncertainty of how to move forward. But there was love, and it endured, which was all Rry had ever really wanted.
The world remained locked. The pandemic raged. But in her small, borrowed flat, Rry woke each morning and measured her progress in tiny increments. She became herself in centimeters, in ounces, in new skin that belonged to her alone. She learned to cook, and to braid her hair, and to sing in a register she’d once buried for shame. She kept therapy every week, and each session, the space between who she was and who she wanted to be shrank.
She forgave herself. For the pain she’d caused, for the years spent in denial, for the people who would never see her the way she saw herself. She let Harry go, with a ceremony: one last listen through the old albums, one last letter to Louis, never sent. She folded up the boyhood she’d outgrown and placed it gently in a box in the closet, beside the last suit she would ever wear.
There was one more hurdle that loomed over her like darkness; an impossible, heavy weight.
Surgery. She’d known for a while she wanted it, so badly; needed it, so, so badly, but the thought was always buried under the fear of what it might cost. But the more time passed, the more inevitable it became. She wanted it for herself, and for no one else. She wanted it with the same primal certainty that had once driven her to music, to Louis, to every desperate act of self-preservation that had gotten her this far.
Rry researched everything: the surgeons, the clinics, the risks and the horror stories. She made lists, ranked options, prepared for the day she would finally have to fight for herself. She rehearsed the speech she would give her bandmates. She wrote out the answers for every ugly question she would ever be asked by the world. She braced for the backlash, the headlines, the late-night jokes, the permanent, unfixable break in how everyone would see her.
But she didn’t care. Not really. Not anymore.
All she circled back to was the life altering memories of pride flags waving frantically in her very own tour audience. No matter what happened, she still belonged somewhere.
When the vaccine arrived, and the world began to crawl back into itself, she set the date for surgery. She wrote it on the calendar in red ink. The week before, she went shopping with her mum, escorted privately, and tried on every dress in the place, letting Anne fuss and snap photos, a slow, awkward dance that neither of them knew the steps to. It was perfect. It felt like what she imagined the awkward, teen girl phase would’ve been like. She longed for her own memories of young girlhood.
The night before surgery, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, naked, and traced the lines of her body with both hands. She said goodbye to it, gently, thanking it for carrying her this far. She cried, not because it was a tragedy, but because it was another kind of love.
On the morning of the operation, she wore the softest clothes she owned. She signed the forms, met the surgeon, lay back on the table, and closed her eyes. She let herself fall.
When she woke, she was in pain. The first thing she did was run her hands over the gauze, the new geography of her body. She wept, quietly, in the sterile light, in utter, beautiful relief. The nurse asked, “Are you all right, Ms. Styles?”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m all right.”
She spent a long time recovering, learning to move again. She let her hair grow wild, wore lipstick even when no one would see her, and filled her phone with selfies, because she wanted to remember every part of this. The becoming. The impossible, dazzling fact that she had survived.
2023 — 2 years before.
Rry came out, publicly, in the spring of 2023, after 3 years of growing into herself.
It was a Vogue feature. A cover shoot, twenty pages of high-gloss, high-wattage womanhood, all her. There were photos of her sprawled across the carpet in a tiny, silk slip, of her holding a pink, corded phone to her ear, the other hand with a magazine, hair wrapped on her head in a towel. There was a spread where she was in a bathtub, breasts nearly exposed, and holding a crystal flute of champagne. The theme was of self care and womanhood, a theme stemming directly from the endless years Rry had spent in the sanctuary of her bathroom, always her bathroom, where Harry suffered, died, and Rry loved, and became.
The Vogue team had been briefed, of course. There were NDAs and security at the door and a legal team waiting in the wings, just in case. But the air on set was so charged with excitement, with awe, that Rry felt she could inhale it and live for years. She had never been photographed like this, had never allowed herself to enjoy it. The camera had always been an enemy before, some thing that stole her softness and spat it out. But this time, she was in control. She wore what she wanted, posed how she wanted. She wore the black fishnets even when she was warned they might run. She wore the tiny dress with the slit because she liked the way her legs looked in it, and because Magda, the photographer, said, “You are a woman of the future, darling. You must show them.” Rry showed them.
The article itself was an epic. It traced her journey from boyband to solo career to almost-death to rebirth, all in breathless detail. It was honest, it was raw. It named her, it used her pronouns, it quoted her talking about the surgery, the hormones, the loneliness and the terror and the impossible gratitude of surviving it. There was a sidebar about her favorite lipstick. There was a full-page on her custom wardrobe, a dress stitched from the flag of her own design, pink and blue and white and the color of light. There was a line about the fans, how they had predicted this before she had even considered it herself, how an entire circle of them had risen up in her defense and kept her safe, before she even knew she needed it. And at the end, there was a single, devastating quote, in her own words:
“I wish I could go back and tell myself that it gets better. I’d tell her that she’s beautiful, and she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. I’d tell her that one day, people will love her not in spite of who she is, but because of it.”
The world lost its mind.
The magazine sold out in mere seconds. The story ricocheted from Twitter to TikTok to the BBC to CNN to the Vatican, where a cardinal reportedly had to be tranquilized after reading the cover. Rry’s phone vibrated so much that she had to shut it off. There were hundreds of calls, thousands of texts, a full seven voicemails from Elton John alone. A single one from Stevie Nicks. One that was only 10 seconds in length, from Zayn…..Zayn. Her Instagram engagement quadrupled, and her team shut off the comments when they reached 80,000 in the first 24 hours.
There were threats, of course. There was ugly, vicious hate, and it was rabid, and it made her tremble and chew her nails, until she was no longer allowed to read it. There were memes, and think pieces, and university panels on what her coming out “meant.” There were talk show, radio, and podcast requests from every living celebrity on Earth. Rry shut it all down, and hid in her flat, and let the news cycle run until it ate itself and left her with numb, brittle silence.
But there was a cost, and it fell hardest on Louis.
At first, she hadn’t realized. She was too busy spinning in the aftershock, learning to move through the world as herself, as a woman, as a legend or a freak depending on which side of the feed you read. But during it all, Louis was the unsuspecting target of relentless harassment. Some people, who believed he was homophobic, told him to never go near Rry again. Some people, who believed he was gay, taunted him about his “loss.” Some people told others to stop believing that Rry loved Louis, that Rry would never give someone like him the time of day. Some people made up horrific, vicious theories that Louis was the reason Rry hadn’t transitioned sooner. They flooded every profile of Louis,’ and when his comments shut down, they flooded Lotties, then the twins, even their dad.
The pummeling was so relentless that Louis was seen less than ever. And when he was, the press stalked him, chasing him anywhere from the airport to a cousin’s wedding in Doncaster and back again. He looked unbelievably dead inside in every single photo.
Rry hated it. She hated seeing his pain multiplied and made public, hated seeing strangers dissect every flinch in his press photos, hated that she had ever, for one second, thought that the world would let him move on. She should’ve told him. She should’ve fucking told him herself. It was the worst thing she’d ever done to him.
After the week of blackout, when the story wasn’t so monumentally explosive anymore, she texted his number, the one she hadn’t used since the final disaster years ago.
I’m so sorry, Louis. Please, just don’t look at any of it.
She planned her next escape, after that. First Jamaica, then Japan, now Italy.
She rented a place outside of Florence, a villa crumbling at the seams but so private that you could scream from the second-floor window and the only thing that would answer was a sleepy cat on the stone wall. The isolation was medicine; the sun and the tomatoes and the soft, bashful Italian that she learned at the market, one word at a time. The house was drafty and the WiFi was shit, and the roof leaked, but Rry had never loved anywhere more. She walked barefoot through every room, painted the walls pink and blue and gold, let her hair go wild and wore nothing but slips and huge, swallowing hoodies.
It was here, in a garden grown wild with rosemary and mint, that she met Leo.
He was not her type, except that he was. Really, he was not Harry’s type, but could very well be Rry’s. Tall, sweet, with a shy smile and a gorgeous mustache. He was an actor, a job Rry discovered after Leo had imitated Marlon Brando and then the Queen in the same breath, and Rry laughed until her sides hurt. He was kind. He listened. He complimented her dresses, her hair, her laugh, and when she told him about her past, about Harry, about the surgery and the press and the unholy storm of it, he just said, “Some storms are worth surviving, ” and poured her another glass of wine.
She did not believe it at first, that it could be so simple. She waited for the other shoe to drop, for him to turn on her or expose her or simply ghost. He did none of these things. He made her omelettes in the morning, and picked her up for dinner in a little blue car that rattled when it went faster than fifty. He kissed her, carefully, and held her, and called her beautiful.
In Italy, Rry learned how to be a woman in a way that didn’t require suffering. She learned to dance again, to eat gelato and wear a bikini and drink too much espresso. She went to the museum with Leo and was shocked when the old woman taking their ticket pinched her cheek and whispered, “Such a pretty girl, this one.” The memory burned in her for weeks, in a good way.
The album came next. She wrote it in long afternoons, sometimes in the garden, sometimes at the little piano in the parlor. She titled it Fine Line, it was always going to be that. It wasn’t about the surgery, or the gender, or the world that would not stop asking her to pick a side. It was about everything in between: the longing, the grief, the love, the quiet, the peace. It was a weirder, messier album than she’d ever made, with whistling and “boops,” and a disco track about kindness that was so outrageous that even her label told her, “Don’t you think this is a bit much?” She told them no, and they put it on the album anyway. The album art was pink and blue, and she never had to explain why.
The album went gold in two weeks. The press was better this time, less obsessed with her genitals, more interested in the songs. The fans were split, but she had always expected that. She read the DMs, the comments, the notes taped to the stage door after her first performance. Some were angry, and some were vicious, and some were so sweet that she sobbed until her makeup was ruined. There was a letter from a girl in Ohio, who said, “You saved my life,” and Rry put it in a frame, next to her old sobriety chips and a photo of Anne, and left it where she would see it every morning.
The Grammy was not a surprise, but it still stunned her. She accepted the award in a dress with shaking hands, and didn’t cry until later, alone, when she realized there was no one left in the world who could hurt her like….
before.
Chapter 2: between
Notes:
part of this story where rry finds out about liam passing. skip if you need, it's okay <3
Chapter Text
october, 2024 — between.
It was 2024 when a piece of Rry was ripped straight from her hands.
It was Berlin, late autumn. Rry was at the Berlin Das Stue, its walls hung with overlarge taxidermy and lacquered animal heads. She had just finished a week of writing in the cold, mirrored studio two floors up, a place she liked for the slant of morning light and the way her voice sounded against the glass.
She hadn’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since landing. There was too much to do: demos to finalize, lyrics to refine, press to avoid, interviews to rehearse and then cancel at the last minute. She would have stayed in the room forever, if not for the gentle tyranny of food and the lure of caffeine.
When her phone rang, Rry was hunched over a plate of eggs and soft rye, staring out the window. It was Megan, her manager. This was nothing unusual. She finished chewing before she answered, bracing for some forgotten appointment, a friend who needed a song, a lawyer confirming a trademark. Instead:
"Rry?" It was Megan’s voice, but laced with something wet and ragged.
Rry blinked, alert in a way that was foreign after so many hours of drifting.
"Yes, what’s up?" She trailed.
"I'm so, so sorry to—" There was a pause, a shuffling of air, and in the silence Rry recognized the sound of someone building a wall behind their words. "I have to tell you something."
The next part came out slow, as if Megan was struggling to carry it, a weight too large for any single person: "It's about Liam."
She did not remember the rest of the sentence. It was as if the voice had entered her body directly, bypassing her ears and mouth, settling somewhere between the heart and the stomach, a place where secrets festered and then, in time, became unbearable truths. Later, Rry would reconstruct the conversation from what she knew of Megan; her professionalism, her inability to say anything without rehearsing it first, the way her hands trembled when she was angry or tired or just scared. There was a click, maybe, the static of a cheap landline, the distant undertow of city traffic.
She felt her fingers lose grip on the phone, the glass rectangle sliding from her palm and bouncing once on the floor, landing on the top of her bare foot before clattering off into the thick hotel carpet. The pain was dull and remote; she noticed only the absence of sound, the way the entire room seemed to seal itself off from the world, every voice fading into ugly silence.
A memory surfaced, intrusive and dazzling: the first time she met Liam, in a back stairwell in 2010. Liam had caught her cradling her foot, she had just tripped up a stair and sat there, willing the pain to fade, afraid of being sent home from bootcamp. Liam had sat with her and examined her foot like an older brother, with his sweet, concerned eyes, untouched, then, by the machine of fame. He told her it looked okay, then admitted years later that he made it up to make Rry feel better, and they laughed together about it all the time.
Her mind forces their last interaction into Rry’s brain, too. When they’d both been performers at a radio event, catching up backstage. Liam was so happy to see her, flustered, but so, so happy for her. He told her she was beautiful, and they hugged for a long time, maybe like something in the stars knew it would be the last.
For sixty full seconds, her body washed freezing cold, and she couldn’t move. She watched the clock on her phone's lock screen on the floor tick over from 9:27 to 9:28, and she wondered if this was what dying felt like: a delay, a withholding, the slow pull of reality as it receded from the edges inward.
After the minute passed, her lungs seized. The gasping was feral, unladylike; her body convulsed in time with the air, her throat scraping itself open on each inhale. She tried to hold it in, but the sound forced its way out, raw and strange and huge.
She couldn’t stop. Her hands went numb, and then her face, and then her legs, so that when she tried to move, her knees gave out and she crumpled to the floor, arms folding over her head as if she could hold the grief inside by brute force.
The next four hours were a montage of physical reactions, each more humiliating and unseemly than the last. She clawed at her own hair, pulling hard at the roots until it stung. She tried to pace the room, but her legs betrayed her, so she sat on the cool tiles of the bathroom, arms wrapped around her shins, rocking like a child.
Her phone buzzed ceaselessly: notifications, calls, texts. She refused to touch it. The idea of holding it, of opening herself to another conversation, was unthinkable. She made it as far as the edge of the bed, where she curled up around a pillow, sobbed until she lost her voice, and then stared at the ceiling in perfect, numb aftershock.
It was then, staring at the ceiling, that she allowed herself the terrible, selfish, and sickening thought: Two. There were now two members of One Direction who aren't in this world anymore. Liam and Harry; one dead, and one just buried.
The thought was so intensely horrific, so painful, that Rry finally called her mum back. Anne had called 42 times already.
"I'm coming home, Mum,” She shivers, sniffles. “I'll be on a red-eye—yes, yes. I’ll look after myself on the way." (A lie, but one her mother would recognize and forgive.) "No, I don't need anything. Just—please. Don't tell anyone else yet, okay?"
She hung up and sat very still, a body of water finally frozen over. Then, with a delicacy that surprised her, she picked up the fallen phone, smoothed the hotel sheet, and got back to the work of surviving.
She spent the entire next day locked in her childhood bedroom.
Outside, the Holmes Chapel trees lost their leaves in slow time-lapse, branches shivering bare against the glass, but Rry only saw them as movement, undifferentiated, as if her vision no longer parsed for objects but for absence, the world emptied of all but outline and wind.
She was not sad at that particular moment. To call it sadness would be to afford herself the dignity of emotion, to assign motive or agency to her current state, but this was something more like cellular withdrawal, a mutiny of nerves and organs, as if her entire body had decided to slip into an induced coma in order to keep itself from fragmenting. The body was far more intelligent than the mind in these matters. It knew when to switch off the pain, or at least dull it into a gray, anaerobic hum.
So, she floated. She made her bed for no reason, tucking the corners the way she’d learned from hotel staff in better years. She went out and made coffee and then poured it down the drain, untouched, hours later, when she couldn’t stomach it. She pulled her hair back, then out, then back, unable to bear the sensation of any one version of herself for more than a minute. She lay on the bed for long stretches, arms at her sides.
If you’d asked her, she would not have known what she was waiting for. Some new call, another aftershock, the invasive glow of a news item in the margins of a website. She opened and closed Twitter without logging in. She tried, once, to type a message to Liam’s mum, but her hands stopped at the greeting and would not move. She deleted it, then typed it again, a recursive loop. At last, she wrote nothing.
It was like this until, mid-afternoon, her phone flashed blue in the darkness beside her. She ignored it for a full minute, counting the seconds, giving herself a chance to not care, but of course, she cared. This was the genius of the device: it never needed her approval, only her inevitability. When she finally picked it up, she saw the notification and felt nothing at all.
Instagram. She still kept a private account, one followed by zero, following only one. Louis. Of course. She had never told him about it. She liked to imagine he would laugh if he found out, then let it slide, then later tease her about it for the rest of their lives. She had considered unfollowing him, or at least turning off notifications, but that had felt dishonest. There was loyalty in letting his world break into hers, even now, especially now. She knew exactly what the post would be before she tapped it. She had rehearsed the experience a hundred times in her head.
Still, when the screen loaded, it hit her in the chest, a pneumatic spike. The photo was not of Liam alone; it was of the two of them, a candid from stage, in an embrace. They looked so stupidly young and alive. Louis hadn’t just left a heart or a quote, but he’d written a block of text so long that it broke into a “see more” link before the second line. It was, gentle, it was honest, it was something worse than heartbreaking. There was the word “brother” several times, as if he could will it into permanence by repetition. There was the phrase “Sleep well,” and it was that phrase that broke her.
There was no warning, but the sudden, volcanic force of tears. She stumbled towards the bathroom, nauseas, and doubled over at the waist, head pressed into the basin, water turned on for camouflage. She felt her forehead pulse, the capillaries in her cheeks erupting, the skin stinging. There was mucus, and an awful, guttural sound, and the knowledge that she was alone, truly, completely, alone.
When the attack subsided, she slumped to the floor, back against the cool porcelain, and laughed, a bitter, insane hiccup.
She didn’t remember dialing Louis. She only realized what she had done when the line clicked and someone started breathing. For a moment, neither of them spoke.
She listened to his breathing, ragged and close, a memory made physical. She wondered if he was lying in his own bed, or in someone else’s, or in a hotel not unlike hers. She pictured him in darkness, phone pressed to his ear, eyes closed, the familiar lines of worry etched deeper into his skin. She waited, and so did he. Perhaps he, too, was afraid that saying anything would make it real.
The first sound was not a word, but a shudder. She heard it and felt a terrible, unclean relief; they were still connected, still capable of the same, shared wound.
It was she who broke the silence, her voice so thin it barely made it over the ocean.
“How are we going to survive this?” she asked, and every syllable cracked.
Louis inhaled, shaky. He was crying, too, but for once, he let her hear it. He didn’t try to make it easier.
“In any way we can,” he said, and his accent was thick and slurred. “For him. Everything is for him, now, I think.”
She let the words settle, folded herself into them. There was nothing else to say. They sat in silence, letting the static fill in the blanks of their grief, the occasional sob or gasp a punctuation. It was an intimacy more complete than any conversation they’d ever had, a communion of ruin.
Eventually, her eyes closed. The exhaustion was total, but for the first time, it didn’t feel like an escape, but a small, reluctant gift. She kept the phone pressed to her ear, listened to the sound of his breathing, and fell asleep with the ache of wanting to be in his arms. It followed her into the dark, a tether she no longer wished to cut.
When she woke, the call had dropped, but the phantom of it lingered, a warmth against her cheek, the memory of another heart trying to keep pace with hers. She lay there, unmoving, and for a moment, she felt less alone.
Chapter 3: during
Chapter Text
2025 — during.
And so, after it all, here she was, in the present, preparing relentlessly for a wedding that might destroy her.
In the first week, Rry doesn’t panic, at least not in the way she used to, when panic was a fever that left her sweating and delusional and then, hours later, ghostly and insubstantial. Now it’s subtler, a slow leak of nervous energy that infuses the air with static. She stalks the periphery of her own flat, avoiding the bedroom mirror in favor of the kitchen window, where she watches pigeons.
She doubles her yoga regimen and then triples it. The mat on the living room floor becomes a passport to a different country, one where her limbs don’t remember bending for him, where her body is only present tense, her heart isn’t held captive by him. The first time she almost manages to hold crow pose, she slips and bruises her hip. The next morning, she does it again, because the point is not to succeed, but to occupy the body so completely that nothing else can enter.
At night, she thinks of the time she saw Louis last, 2020, the reunion interview. She’d still been all sharp angles then, the bones of her face still unsoftened, her voice a stranger’s octave. He’d looked at her for a long time, and had no idea what she looked like in person, now.
Weeks two and three, she shops for dresses for the wedding. She tells herself it’s practical, a necessity, but after the fifth boutique she knows she’s indulging in a private performance. Each garment is a possibility, a version of herself to be worn and then discarded.
She grows meticulous about it, the sleeves must not be too tight around her arms. The fabric must not cling in a way that reveals how her ribs still peak through, even after three years on hormones. And, it must be blue, but not the blue of the sky or the ocean, the blue of Him.
Her hands tremble as she unzips a gown in the fitting room, and the salesgirl offers her a bottled water. She drinks, grateful for the excuse to look away from the mirror. The woman says, “It fits you beautifully,” and she wants to ask, “But does it fit me more than it would have fit him?” Instead, she smiles and says, “Thank you. I think I’ll try something else.”
She accumulates three dresses, all three the same shade of blue, and keeps them in their garment bags at the back of her closet. On some days, she puts all three on in succession, standing in front of the mirror for long minutes. She critiques every inch, every seam. “Not right,” she says, a mantra. “Not enough.”
Week four, she throws herself into her work, which is to say, into the safe haven of noise. Megan is delighted with her sudden output; she’s written three new songs, all of them about home, in some way or another. She ignores that this home is not a place but a person, or maybe an overall feeling, something she fears she won’t ever not belong to.
Leo had noticed, a long time ago. She can admit now that he was a controlled experiment, the world’s gentlest man, the kind you could test yourself on. They would sit in narrow restaurants with candles and wine, and he would tell her about his mother, about growing up in the wet Midlands, and she would tell him half-truths about childhood in Cheshire, the parts that were safe for daylight.
They were together for six months. The first time he touched her, he was so careful it made her want to cry. He was not a bad lover, just an indifferent one. She learned to perform ecstasy in small, believable increments; she learned to pantomime pleasure. The first time she faked an orgasm she laughed out loud afterward, in the bathroom, at how stereotypical it all was. She had let Leo finger her that day, and it was unremarkable. She never said out loud that she wasn’t going to let him fuck her, but it seemed like it was perfectly understood, anyway.
It all felt, strangely, like an achievement. A rite of passage, even: to perform pleasure and then discuss the performance with other women, to share the secret shame and make it communal.
She saw Leo twice after they broke up, and the last time, he quietly told Rry he was sorry he was not Louis.
The final days before the wedding, food becomes impossible. Toast tastes like paste. Her hands shake when she pours coffee. On the third night, she gives up on cooking altogether and orders a glass of white wine at the Italian place on the corner. She’d broke her sobriety already, when the destruction over Liam would not stop hitting. But she can handle the drinks better, and when she orders this one, the waiter glances at her, then glances again, uncertain whether she is who he thinks she is. She leaves a generous tip and walks the long way home.
She calls Gemma at midnight. It rings three times, then connects.
“Gem?”
A sleepy hum, then, “What’s happened?”
“I can’t do it. I’m not going.” The confession leaks out, weak.
There is a pause, then the rustle of Gemma sitting up in bed. “You don’t have to decide tonight. You don’t have to decide at all. But if you want me there, I’ll be there.”
“I want you there,” she says. “Please.”
“I’ll bring a hat,” Gemma says, and hangs up.
Rry lies back in bed, pulls the comforter to her chin, and tries to imagine a world where she will see Louis again, and it won’t destroy her.
The night before the wedding, she takes two Benadryl, then a third, just in case. She wants to be well-rested, or at the very least, oblivious to the scraping and clattering of her own thoughts. The last thing she sees before the ceiling blurs is the dress, the midnight blue one, draped across the back of her chair.
——
The morning of the wedding, Rry wakes to a feeling that is not quite terror, but more a thin, cold airlessness.
Her phone is on silent, but she knows the exact hour by the angle of sun on her wall: 7:22. The ceremony isn’t until three, but the world seems to insist she begin suffering now. The first order of business is the shower, the steam and scalding water, the humming of a single note in her throat to fill the tiles with proof she is alive. After, she stands naked in front of her bathroom mirror, towel slung low on her hips, and examines the edges of herself. The years have been gentle, she supposes, but not kind. Her body is neither the one she left behind nor the one she’d conjured in feverish, hopeful sleep. There is an in-between-ness to her, a version that won’t quite settle. She can see every ghostly possibility overlayed on the glass.
She dresses carefully; the blue dress, tailored so exactly to her waist and ribcage that zipping it up is a minor panic each time. She selected it for its severity, the way it refuses to misgender her. Still, there’s a tremor in her hands when she fastens the back, an old muscle memory of wanting to look beautiful. She knows she’s beautiful, fought for it. But there’s a pathetic desperation that has not left her, to be beautiful only for him.
Jewelry next. Simple silver hoops, a delicate necklce, gifts from her mother and then from herself. She puts on rings she won’t remove until nightfall. All of it a promise: I am not unfinished. I am not waiting for you to complete me.
At half nine, the buzzer rings. It’s Gemma, ten minutes early and already bearing two bags of supplies. They hug, and Gemma holds her long enough that Rry feels some of the air return to her lungs.
Gemma assesses her with a smile, then takes charge. “Sit. Let me do this.” She parts Rry’s hair into neat sections and sets about curling them into soft ringlets. The movements are of experience, almost maternal; there is a gentleness to it that makes Rry’s eyes water. Sisterhood. She stares at her own knees while Gemma works, trying not to break open at the memory of Lottie doing it to Felicite.
“What are you thinking?” Gemma asks, soft.
“I’m thinking about running away for good this time. Portugal next, Maybe Amsterdam. I’d dye my hair.”
Gemma grins at her in the mirror. “Your hair is perfect. He’d die, though, you know.”
Rry flushes so quickly she nearly laughs. “Who?”
Gemma looks at her with withering fondness, and Rry does feel like her sister. “You know exactly who, Rryry.”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she watches her own face as Gemma sweeps powder over her cheekbones, tints her eyelids with something shimmery, lines her lips. There is a small triumph in looking better than she feels. Maybe that will be enough.
They drive through London in silence, except for the ticking of Gemma’s left blinker as she navigates. The sky is the color of laundered bedsheets, the streets emptied of everything but delivery vans and the occasional cyclist. They pass St. Paul’s, then Parliament, and Rry tries to remember when these places became so ordinary. The city has made her at home in every neighborhood, yet there are days she feels she doesn’t belong in any.
The venue is a mansion outside the city proper, a sprawling house in Richmond with a backyard that droops into the arms of a lake. The drive is lined with parked cars, none more or less opulent than the next.
Inside, it’s chaos, both beautifully choreographed and entirely unhinged. There are children sprinting down hallways in pressed linen, mothers with clutch purses and anxious faces. The air smells of fresh hydrangeas and champagne, though it’s barely noon.
Rry’s first order of business is the gift. She walks to the designated table, a granite slab covered in white linen, and places her small, wrapped box in the exact center. The card is handwritten. She made herself write it twice, the first time in her own name, the second in the name she’d left behind, and then finally again, as Rry. She wonders if Niall will notice the crossed-out lines, or if he’ll just be grateful she came at all.
She’s about to step away when a voice interrupts: “Rry?”
She turns, and Zayn is there, holding his daughter, his girlfriend Micah trailing behind him.
Zayn looks so much the same it’s disorienting. Same deep eyes, same sullen mouth, but softer now, as if fatherhood has filed down the barbs. His hair is shorter, perfectly shaved on the sides and streaked with a red tint. He is still, and always will be, heartbreakingly handsome.
They haven’t seen each other since Liam’s funeral, when she’d pressed her face to the lapel of his jacket and tried not to think about the nights they never spent together after the band split, or about how nothing ever lasted.
“Hi,” she says. Her voice comes out brighter than intended.
Zayn smiles, and it’s an easy thing. He lets go of his daughters hand and pulls Rry in with an arm around her waist, hers around his neck, and there is a moment when he holds her just tight enough to say I’m sorry and I love you and I see you all at once.
He pulls back. “You look beautiful angel.”
His daughter tugs his sleeve. “Remember Rry, yeah?” he says. “She used to sing with me. She’s very famous.”
She studies Rry suspiciously. Her features are uncanny. Zayn’s nose, Zayn’s jaw, Zayn’s improbable lashes. She wears a dress with flowers on it, and white tights, and shoes that are already scuffed.
“Hi, Rry,” she says.
Rry smiles, kneeling down to be eye-level. “I love your dress. I wish I had one just like it.”
She beams and hides her face in Zayn’s trouser leg.
Zayn leans in, quiet, “Let’s find time to talk, okay? After all this.” He gestures vaguely at the chaos.
She nods. “I’d like that.”
He kisses her cheek and, with a soft goodbye, leads his daughter and Micah away. Rry watches his little girl skip in her patent shoes, and for one bright second, the world does not feel so terrifying.
She walks to the foyer where Gemma is waiting, fixing a stray hairpin in the mirror. She glances up, catches Rry’s reflection in the glass, and gives a little thumbs-up.
The guests are already drifting toward the lakeside for the ceremony. The seating is as expected; rows of white chairs, each with a paper fan and a single long-stemmed blue flower. She finds her name on the front row, next to Gemma, with a space left empty to the left.
She doesn’t look at the crowd until she’s seated, and even then, she doesn’t scan for him. Instead, she watches the way the sun glances off the water, the ripple of wind through the petals. For a moment, she is a child again, sitting in the front pew at a Christmas pageant, legs swinging, heart steady.
Then she hears it. A footfall behind, a chair scraping across the grass, a muted “sorry, mate” as someone squeezes by.
Rry can feel him before she sees him, as always. It’s not a sixth sense, but a first, primordial and unkind. He sits three seats down, across the aisle. She doesn’t look. But she can see, in the periphery, the line of his jaw, the fingers drumming restlessly on his knee. He is wearing a suit that fits like he wants the bride to run away with him. Rry thinks, helplessly, that she’d pick him over any groom.
She lasts five seconds before she looks. Just a glance. Enough to catalogue the damage.
His hair is completely different, half shaved, half fringe. It intensifies the expression of his eyes, which are the same impossible blue, even in the gray English light. She feels the shape of every memory they ever made together line up in her chest.
She sees Louis’ world change as soon as he meets her eye. In that infinitesimal moment, Rry is both observer and observed, the scalpel and the wound: Louis’ entire body halts mid-breath, a glitch in the mechanism of time. The restless drumming of his fingers stops. His jaw, unshaven but newly defined, sets itself along a different axis, as if bracing for collision. Even from across the aisle, she senses the dilation of his pupils, the subatomic shudder in the air between them. She watches as the old defenses collapse and the truer version of him, the one that kept hair ties on his wrist for her, and wrote her letters, and made sure to tell her stuffed bear goodnight, scrapes its way to the surface. For that split second, every secret they ever shared, every crazed and beautiful bit of history, condenses into the space of a single glance. It’s not anger or longing or regret, but a pure and murderous recognition: here you are. Here you still are. They hold the stare for a full second, maybe two, and then she breaks away, focusing so hard on the altar that her eyes blur.
There is no time to recover. The wedding begins.
The processional is music, and then people, and then more music. Rry applauds as Niall walks down the aisle, first. He looks wonderful. He always does, because he has a face that cannot keep a secret, and so his joy is visible even from a hundred yards away.
She can feel Louis watching her, and it’s a pressure against the side of her body, as if she’s pinned to her seat. She wants to look again, but she knows if she does, she will not be able to stop.
Then the bride arrives. Kait is beautiful effortlessly, she is laughing as she walks, arm linked in her father’s, veil trailing out behind her like something from a painting. Niall is already crying, which makes half the guests laugh, which makes everyone cry harder.
As the ceremony begins, Rry tries to be present, to witness the joy of her friends, to fill herself with anything other than longing. But the words blur together, and instead she remembers every time Louis ever asked her to marry him. He did it with a small box sometimes, kneeling in a kitchen with flour on his cheek. Sometimes just the ring in his hand, like the very first one.
She feels the heat of her own tears before she notices them, and tells herself it’s for the beauty of the ceremony, for Niall and Kait and the sweetness of vows. She is nearly convincing, even to herself.
She makes the mistake of glancing at Louis, just once. He is looking at her again, but this time his face is open, stripped of anything forced. He looks, for the first time in years, like he’s still head over heels.
It’s too much.
She stands, quietly as she can, and makes her way out. She moves quickly, hands clenched in fists at her side. The aisle feels endless. At the end of it, she finds a door and disappears inside.
She leans against the wall, heart beating in her throat. She thinks: it was always supposed to be me.
She closes her eyes. The noise of the ceremony filters in, muffled. The applause, the laughter, the cheers as Niall and Kait are announced to the world. She does not go back in. She stays in the hallway and waits for the sound to fade, and for her body to remember how to feel like her own again.
She doesn’t hear the approach, not until the door opens with a solid thud, and Louis steps inside. She freezes, mouth parted. He is not a memory this time. He is right there, shoulders sharp and trembling, eyes raked raw from the effort of holding himself together.
She turns away, but he speaks first, closing the door desperately. “Rry. Please.”
She feels herself split along old fault lines. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
“Please.” He reaches, gently. She avoids the touch at all costs. “I just—I will never beg for my life like this again. Just this one time, right here, give me that. Please.”
She bites her fist to stop the quaver in her voice, but it comes anyway, high and breaking. “I can’t—Louis, don’t do this to me—”
He gets closer. “I don’t want to do this to you,” he says, shaking his head wildly, helplessly. “But I can’t not. Not now. I need you to just—just hear me.” His voice is just gasps for air, the familiar Doncaster burr softened by hurt.
She covers her eyes, but he is already closer, so close that she can feel the heat from his body. She braces for anger, for accusation, but it never comes. Just a desperate, collapsing gravity.
“Why’d you leave me out of this?” Louis says. “Why’d you cut me out, Rry?”
She sags against the wall, hugging her arms tight around her ribcage. She doesn’t trust herself to answer, but she tries. “Because I thought it was the only way,” she says, quiet. “You would have tried to fix me. You would have made me stay, and I wanted to go.”
“I wouldn’t have tried to fix you,” he says, voice shaking. “I would have gone anywhere with you. Fuck, you know that.”
Rry laughs, ugly and wet. “You always say that. But you don’t mean it.”
“I do. I always did.”
“Not for this. You couldn’t have.”
“I could’ve. I fucking would have, Rry.” His voice is hoarse, and she realizes, then, that he is crying too. She blinks hard, but the room is already underwater. “There’s nothing you could do to make me stop wanting you. Especially become who you always were. I only left…it was only because you were breaking me, but really, you were breaking him, and I would’ve always stayed if I knew. I would’ve done fucking anything for you.”
She looks at him, finally, and the sight of his tears is a wound. His eyes are rimmed pink and bright, wild and reckless, and his hands are balled at his sides, as if the only thing keeping him from splintering apart is the discipline of his fists.
“Louis.” Her voice cracks again. “It’s too late. It’s so late, I don’t even know who you’re in love with anymore.”
He laughs, then. It’s a broken laugh, but it is real. “You. It’s always you. Even when you hate me, even when you leave me. Fuck, you could show up in a clown suit and I’d want to marry you, I’d have done it right there at the circus.”
She closes her eyes. “You’re making it worse.”
“I know.” He drags a hand over his face, looking for words. “But we used to think we’d be the first, Rry,” he says. “Everyone said it. Liam did, Niall did, even the fans knew, somehow. That we’d be first to get married, first to grow old together, first to flame out. I wanted to make you my wife when you were nineteen, and every time I asked you, it felt like the best night of my life.”
He sifts through his hair wildly. “I’ve never been able to stop wanting you, Rry. It doesn’t make sense, but nothing ever did. Not with you.” He wipes at his eyes, but it’s a losing battle. “And now, I see you like this, and you’re everything I wished for, everything I dreamed about for years, and it’s not fair. It’s not fucking fair.”
She listens, body suspended between flight and collapse. Her own tears have gone cold, but Louis keeps going, as if he must empty himself or die. “It ruined me, not being there. Not knowing. I don’t know how I missed it, but I did. And I hate myself for that. I hate myself for not being there to tell you that you were always enough, you didn’t have to change for anyone but yourself, but—” He exhales, ragged. “But you’re still you. You’re more you than you’ve ever been.”
Rry thinks she could survive anything but the sound of Louis crying. This is proven true in the instant his voice breaks, and she watches him crumple the last of his composure into a handful of shredded air. He stands there in the small, borrowed room, not one bit of him held together, and she finds herself trembling, despite everything, despite every hour spent on posture and denial, because there is only so much devastation a person can reconstitute as beauty before it reverts to pain.
There’s nothing left to do. She breaks.
“Louis,” she says, and her own voice is a ruined church bell, echoing only for him. “You couldn’t have seen it, I never let you. You couldn’t have possibly—” The words catch in her throat. She breathes them anyway: “You could have never possibly deserved to have to handle me.”
He swallows. “God, baby, I’d do it in a heart beat. There was nothing to handle.” He comes closer, feet unsteady on the oriental rug. “There was only someone to love through anything. Through fucking anything. And I’d have done it. I’d have done all of it, again and again.”
She shakes her head, but it’s powerless now. He is within reach, and it is all the world can do to not let them collide.
Louis’ hands hover at her waist, hesitant for the first time in his life, as if he needs permission from her hips and the world beyond them. “You’re so fucking beautiful, baby, so fucking special,” he says, and this time he can’t mask the awe. “Beyond it, even. It’s not just the dress or your hair or anything. It’s—” He has to look away for a beat, the force of it too much. “It’s how you glow. I’ve never seen you more right. I’ve never seen you more alive.”
She doesn’t know who does it; maybe it’s her, maybe it’s both of them at once, as if all the empty years are nothing but the negative space of this singular, quaking moment. Their lips meet, soft at first, unsteadily so, then a sudden, raw violence of need. This is what it was always meant to be: the two of them, breaking themselves on each other, over and over and over.
He kisses her like he’s sorry and then like he’s starving. She gives back every year she ever spent learning how to not be his.
The sideboard behind her digs into the backs of her legs, but she welcomes the bruising, because it means this is real and not some hallucination. Louis’ hands climb from her waist to her ribs, the sides of her torso, the thin flex of muscle beneath the dress. She arches into him and he shudders, and they both go a little wild then, kissing like they could undo the entropy of their twenties in the span of a single afternoon.
She tangles her fingers into the half-grown fringe at the back of his head and pulls until he gasps, and then he’s got her pressed so hard against the table that she has to brace her knee against the wood for leverage. He bites her lip, and she hisses, and he laughs against her mouth.
She pulls his suit jacket off and lets it fall to the floor. Underneath, his shirt is soft and sweat-damp at the collar. She unbuttons it, needy for the memory of his skin, and when her palm finds his chest she feels the living thunder of his heart.
Louis slides his hands up her thigh. She stiffens, then inhales. He pauses. “Alright?” he says, voice so gentle it’s almost unrecognizable.
She nods, feral. “Please,” she says. ”Touch me.”
He moves slow at first. He glides one hand over the inside of her thigh, then two, and then he’s got her pressed against the wood, dress bunched high on her hips, his fingers trembling as he finds the edge of her panties. He teases the line of them, not yet touching what matters, just feeling the new shape of her. She’s wet already; she knows it, he must know it, because he drags a single knuckle over the soaked cotton and breathes out a long, shuddering exhale.
“Fuck,” he says. “God.” He buries his face in her neck and breathes her in, then slides the panties aside, so slow she almost weeps.
He traces the newness of her, the cleft, the slit, the parts she once hated so much they might as well have belonged to someone else. But here, now, with Louis’ hands on her, it is not just a body part, it is art. He dips a finger, slides it through the slick, and Rry’s vision grays out for a moment.
He rubs her clit, once, experimentally, and she jerks so hard she nearly headbutts him, gasping. He laughs into her throat, his tongue finding her pulse, and then he says: “Found it?” And she only whines.
He works her with his fingers, slow and then fast, and she clings to him, arm around his neck, biting down on the lapel of his shirt to keep from screaming. She’s never felt this before, not just the touch, but the absolute rightness, the way his fingers remember every nerve she ever had, even the ones that are new.
He crooks his finger just so, and she loses language, loses her sense of time. She thinks, distantly, that someone might hear, that the guests might be only a wall away, but she cannot make herself care. There is nothing but Louis.
He adds another finger, and she moans, and he grins at her. “You want it?” he says, and she nods, unable to speak. “You can have anything you want.”
He rubs her clit again, over and over, hard, and she feels herself start to unravel. Her thighs shake, hips jerk, and her hands find his hair. She leans all her weight into him, letting him hold her up, letting him be the only thing keeping her from falling.
It happens faster than she expects, or maybe it’s been happening for a decade. The orgasm wracks through her in a flood, blinding and explosive. She sobs into his chest, clutching at him, her body shaking in great, silent waves. He keeps his fingers moving, gentle now, coaxing every last tremor out of her.
When she finally comes down, she is ruined. She is laughing and crying at once, her face buried in his neck, inhaling him.
Louis withdraws his fingers, and before she can even catch her breath, he puts them in his mouth, tasting her, sucking them clean. The sight of it makes her knees go weak all over again.
He tucks her hair behind her ear. She chases the touch, eyes blurry, heart pounding. “I want to stay with you,” she says. The words come out simple, pure.
He kisses her forehead. “Are you saying you want to skip the reception?” he asks, and his eyes are teasing, but the rest of him is desperate, pleading.
“Yes. We’ll come back for the after party. But—” She chokes on the truth of it, helpless. “I can’t be away from you right now.”
He studies her, as if he’s memorizing the moment for when the world inevitably takes it away. “You're sure?” he asks.
She cups his face, thumbs tracing the line of his jaw. “Please,” she says. “It’s too much. I need— I need you, Louis.”
He kisses her again, slower now, like he’s got all the time in the world, like he believes it.
He helps her straighten her dress, smooth her hair, wipe the tears from her cheeks. He does not let go of her hand, not even as they walk to the door, not even as they steal through the corridors.
There’s an urgency in Louis’ gait, the way he draws her close to his side as if she might vanish between doorframes or slip away behind the lacquered stairs. Rry is lightheaded—no, that’s not it; she’s light, period, untethered from the ballast of shame and memory that once chained her to the floor. Every step up the long staircase is a recalibration of what it means to have a body, to be inside it, to have someone still want it after all this time.
He leads her past a grandmother clock that ticks in protest, past oil portraits whose faces must have seen stranger things than this. The upper landing is empty, save for a vase of blue lilies so vivid it hurts to look at them. For a moment, they stop, neither daring to move, as if the flowers might bear witness.
Louis takes her wrist, gentle now, as if having remembered that she is not indestructible. They find a bedroom, one of the many, and he opens the door, then closes it behind them with a click that sounds final. Inside, the bed is enormous, an antique with a headboard of twisted wood, and on it a duvet in some expensive, threadbare cotton.
Louis comes to her, close enough that she feels the halo of heat around his body. His hands cup her face first, thumbs tracing the high point of her cheekbones, then down to her neck, then lower, until they find her waist. He holds her there, fingers overlapping, as if afraid of breaking her in half.
He backs her gently, one foot at a time, until the backs of her knees find the bed. She sits, then looks up at him, expecting—what? For him to hesitate, or second-guess, or to realize what it is he’s about to do and recoil? But Louis just looks at her with an awe that borders on deranged.
His hand slides from her hips up the back of her, until it rests on the back zipper of her dress. “Can I?” he asks, voice low and hoarse.
Rry nods, a single, terrified dip of her chin.
He peels it down. Inch by inch, the dress surrenders her. She can hear her pulse in her own ears, feel the sweat bead between her breasts. When the zipper is all the way down, the dress just slides off her shoulders, onto her forearms, and pools at her lap like a blue puddle.
She lets it fall, just like that, exposing her to him in nothing but the matching silk bra and the panties that are, by now, completely ruined. Louis just stares, mouth slack, as if confronted by an angel or a disaster, or both at once. Rry feels the flush climb up her throat.
“God,” Louis breathes, finally. “God, Rry—” He shakes his head, and the words leave him. He runs both hands through his hair, as if hoping to wake himself from a hallucination, but she doesn’t disappear.
He touches her then, runs his hands over her arms, up to her shoulders, down the lines of her waist, as if studying the new terrain of her. His hands shake, but it’s not with fear. “Never seen anything like you,” he says.
He pushes her gently, but with enough force that she topples backward onto the bed, and she lands in a sprawl. She wants to be shy, but there’s no room for it now. She is a woman, and she is desired, and there is nothing more to prove.
Louis climbs over her, not bothering with his own shirt yet. He leans down and kisses her, as if by pressing mouth to mouth he could teach her the language of her own body. Rry feels helpless in the face of it, as if she is dissolving beneath his touch, as if the lines separating her from the rest of the world have all been scoured away. He traces her jaw with his lips; she closes her eyes and holds on, trying to anchor herself to the physical sensation, the only real thing in the room. He moves, lips finding the hollow of her throat, and she shivers: nerves firing, blood thrumming. He lingers there, breathing her in, and she is aware, with an almost painful clarity, of her pulse stuttering beneath his mouth.
He nuzzles lower, mouth grazing the delicate collar of her bra. A moment of fear; what if he finds her lacking? What if he sees the seams, the scars, the evidence of the rebuilding? But he only hums, and kisses gently over the fabric, as if blessing it. His hands soothe over her arms, her hips, cataloging every minor tremor, every unchecked gasp. She can feel her whole self melting under the weight of his attention, being rewritten into something she’s needed for a long time.
When his lips reach her collarbone, her shoulder, she is certain she will break apart entirely. He lowers, peppering her with small, almost childlike kisses, as if to say: Yes, I see you. Yes, I accept this. Yes, I love every inch.
He kisses her arms, her wrists, the inside of her elbow. He mouths at the skin there until he finds the pulse, and then bites down just enough to make her gasp. He kisses her ribs, her stomach, the borderland between the woman she became and the girl she left behind. He lingers on her hips, tracing the new curve, worshipping it with both hands as if he could memorize the feel of her for later, when he will be alone.
He slides her bra strap off her shoulder, then the other. He looks up for permission again, a silent question, and she arches her back in answer. He unhooks the bra, fumbles it once, then gets it free. Her breasts spill out, soft and round and real, and for a moment he just looks.
“Oh, fuck, sweetheart,” he says, voice trembling. “You’re so perfect.” He buries his face in her cleavage, nuzzling and kissing and making a low, involuntary sound that sends shockwaves through her. She feels herself throbbing between her legs. He palms her, squeezes her, then takes a nipple in his mouth and sucks, slow and hard.
She’s whimpering before she realizes it. Her hands dig into the bedspread, knuckles whitening. He switches to the other breast, lavishing it with the same meticulous attention. She can feel herself leaking through the thin cotton of her panties, slick between her thighs.
He starts to move lower, kissing a line from her sternum to her navel, then down to the waistband of her underwear. He looks up at her, all blue eyes and mischief, but now there’s a layer of awe beneath it that breaks her heart open.
He hooks a finger under the side of her panties and slides them down, slow enough to drive her mad. The cotton clings to her wetness, and when he pulls them off, he brings them to his face and inhales, eyes fluttering closed for a second of pure, raw joy.
He spreads her legs, gentle but insistent, and situates himself between them. He puts both hands on her thighs, kneads them, runs his thumbs in circles over the delicate, shivering flesh. Then he leans in and kisses her there, on the inside of her thigh, so close to where she aches most that she nearly sobs.
He works his way up, mouth hot and wet, until his breath is on her cunt. He pauses. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long,” he says, voice thick with hunger. “Can I?”
“Please,” she manages.
He licks her, flat-tongued, from bottom to top, and then circles her clit, and it’s like the entire galaxy explodes behind her eyes. It is a sensation she never imagined she’d get to feel in her life. Louis moans into her, as if tasting her is a relief, a benediction, an absolution. He suckles her, hard, and she practically whites out.
She can’t keep quiet. Every flick of his tongue, every press of his mouth, wrings a new sound from her. She arches, squirms, tries to close her legs around his head, but he holds her open, his grip unbreakable.
“Louis, fuck, fuck, oh my god, I’m—going to—” she gasps, and he pulls away instantly, leaving her teetering on the edge of oblivion.
She whines, loud, almost a sob. He looks up at her, lips slick and smiling.
“Want it?” he asks, eyes glittering with the cruelty of love.
She flushes, realizing at that exact moment that sex with Louis is going to be the same as it always was. He wants her to beg for it, he wants to edge her until she cries. He always did. He gets so drunk on the control and Rry’s submission, can’t help himself.
She indulges him. “Want it so bad,” she says breathlessly. “You know how bad I want it from you.” She drags him closer, by the hair, to her spread cunt. “Please?”
He goes back in, uses his tongue and his lips and even the slight scrape of his teeth, and she is undone in seconds, crying out as the second orgasm rips through her, a convulsion of overwhelming relief.
Louis does not relinquish her, not even as she crumples, trembling, onto the foreign bedspread. He seems to take deep, perverse pleasure in her wracked, writhing aftermath, holding her open with gentle hands and watching her shudder, watching her try and fail to collect the scattered debris of herself. He kisses slow, sticky circles into the wetness at her thigh, painting her with his mouth, then finally crawls back up her body, peppering her skin with tiny, hungry nips, like a man determined to taste every molecule of her.
He buries his face in the crook of her neck, breath ragged, voice thick and starved. "You gonna give me lucky number three, sweetheart?" His lips brush the shell of her ear, words molten. "Can you do that for me?"
She grabs at his shirt, at the absurd buttons of it, wanting so badly to peel him out of himself, to see him as exposed as she is. "I want you to fuck me," she says, and her own voice shocks her, raw and almost commanding. "Louis." She tilts her head to look him full in the face, lets her words hover in the air between them, and says it again, as if the repetition might render it mandatory: "I want you. I want you inside me."
He flinches, as if surprised, but then recovers. "Yeah?" He strokes her jaw, thumb tracing the line from earlobe to chin. His other hand is already at her thigh, already sliding between her legs, as if he can’t help himself. "Are you sure, darling? You want that?"
She pushes her nose into his, crushes their faces together. "I'm sure," she says. "My body belongs to me now, but I want you to own it again, too.” It's embarrassing how much she means it.
He shakes his head, in utter awe, laughing as tears spring in his eyes. "You always get what you want, don't you?" he whispers, pulling back just enough to steal a look at her.
She hooks a finger into the waistband of his trousers and tugs him down, hard, so that he has to catch himself on locked arms above her. The movement is nearly feral; she is feral. She wants him unmade, wants to see him shattered and desperate, wants to know the taste of his undoing. He lets her fumble with his belt, lets her rip at the buttons, lets her yank the fabric down just enough to free him. She rakes her nails up his thigh, up the flat of his stomach, and feels him shudder. It's intoxicating, the way he responds to her, the way he always has.
She kneels between his legs, drags his briefs down. His cock springs free, darker than she remembered, high and hard against his stomach. She wraps her hand around it, the whole thing, just to see if she remembers how, and is surprised by the wave of memory that comes: every time she ever sucked him off, every time she knelt for him, every impossible time he’d begged her for more.
He is looking at her. Not just looking, but seeing her as she is now, and not looking away. If he is startled by her hunger, or her confidence, he says nothing. She strokes him once, twice, then licks the tip, and he hisses through his teeth, hands fisting the coverlet.
“Should I put my mouth on it?” she asks sweetly, old ways they drove each other crazy still there. She drags the head of his cock across her cheek, then her tongue, then lines him up against her mouth.
“God, yes,” Louis breathes. “I’ll have dreams about it. Please, baby, come on, let me see you take me.”
It was always hot when she could make him beg for her, but it’s far, far better now. She takes him into her mouth, immediately wet again at the weight on her tongue. She flattens it, and swallows him down, and he groans, loud. His hands tangle in her hair, guiding her just enough, just the way he always did. She bobs her head, working him deeper, listening to every shift in his breath, every tremble in his voice. There’s a moment where she starts to gag, tears pricking her eyes, but it only makes him harder.
“Fuck, baby, I’d fall to my fucking knees for you.”
She moans, sucking harder, letting her tongue drag up along his slick shaft. His eyes pinch shut. He thrusts into her mouth, a little whine at the back of his throat, and then pulls out, shucking his pants the rest of the way off, boxers too, so that he is naked except for the open shirt. It’s ridiculous how hot he is.
He leans over her, catches her chin in his hand, and kisses her, deep and slow, tongue licking the crest of her teeth. "If you want to stop—"
"I won't," she interrupts. "I won’t, Lou, please."
He nods, and kisses her once, then draws back, bracing himself above her. She clings to his shoulders, heart ricocheting. For a moment he just hovers, looking down at her, and in the limpid blue of his gaze she sees all the years, all the aftermath, the entire history of their impossible love. He guides himself with one hand, slow, knuckles white as he lines up against her, his cock heavy and flushed, glistening where her spit still shines. He strokes the blunt head along the slick seam of her, and for a moment she flinches—she’s never had anyone inside her, not really. The closest she came was solo, but it was much smaller than the shape of Louis. Nothing has ever felt like this, this weight, this terrifying and perfect pressure.
The first push makes her arch, a gasp leaving her lips before she can catch it.
Louis stills entirely, chest heaving. “Alright?” he asks, voice thin, as if he’s holding himself back from shaking apart.
She nods, eyes wide. “Yeah.”
He goes slow. She clutches tighter, nails digging into his back, and at some point the pain dissolves into an electric fullness, a joy so sharp it nearly unseams her. He works deeper, stops, backs out an inch, tries again. She’s trembling, legs wrapped around his waist, and when he finally bottoms out, the world goes white at the edges.
“Oh God, my love,” he whispers into her neck, kissing it, shuddering. “You’re—Jesus, I can’t—”
She rocks against his hips, urging him, and soon he’s fucking her, gentle first, then with more urgency, hips pistoning in a rhythm as old as everything. She counts the beats under her palms, the slow build, the way the friction builds and builds until it’s nearly unbearable. She is present, absolutely, not a ghost or an echo but a creature made for this.
Louis bends to kiss her, mouth wide and hot and nearly unhinged. “I love you,” he says. “I love you so fucking much. God, I won’t ever stop, ever.”
She sobs, but it’s not a sad sound; it’s the sound of someone being consumed, and loved, realizing that her body is real, that it works, that it can give and take pleasure. Every time he thrusts, she feels it everywhere. He grinds into her, forces her legs farther apart, hands tangled in her hair, and she feels herself getting closer, the spiral tightening, all the past and future coiling in her belly.
He rubs her clit with his thumb, never taking his eyes off her face, and she shatters. She honest-to-god screams, clenching tight into her third orgasm. He fucks her through it, through the aftershocks that leave her wrung and messy, through the trembling that doesn’t stop.
“Want to come inside you,” he says, and it is not a question but a plea. “Yes,” she whispers. “Yes, yes—Louis—”
He slams in twice, and spills hotly, hips stuttering, teeth clenched as if he’s fighting off the rapture of his own release. “F—ffucck, fuck, Rry, God.” He stays still, buried to the hilt and shuddering, with Rry still clenching around him, still utterly drunk on him. He collapses onto her, breathing like a man at the finish line. Sweat slicks their skin, pools in the hollow between her breasts. He holds her face in both hands, kisses away the tears on her cheeks. She can’t stop crying. She’s not even sure when she started. He kisses her over and over.
She cries for long minutes, and doesn’t recognize the sound at first, the abject, wild hiccuping that claws its way out of her throat. Louis just holds her, tighter and tighter, and lets her weep until her chest seizes and her vision clouds.
The body is so unreliable, Rry thinks. How it remembers grief with an accuracy the mind is incapable of, how it will keep shuddering even after the event is years gone, or the wound is theoretically healed. She thinks of all the times in her life she has been told to be strong, all the times she has told herself the same, only to have her body give out when faced with the smallest act of mercy. It’s not mercy, though. It’s Louis. The fact of him. The irrefutable presence of him, sprawled half-dressed beside her in a stranger’s guest room, the sweaty taste of his neck still blooming on her tongue.
His shirt is still open, damp at the collar where she’s pressed her face. She wants to disappear inside the cotton, to slip her body between the warp and weft and become a part of him in a way that is beyond repair. Instead she just sobs, clinging to his chest, nails digging crescent moons into his back.
He doesn’t try to make it pretty. His hand strokes her hair, the same hand that once strummed a borrowed guitar in a basement in Mullingar, the same hand that wrote songs about her for over a decade. He rubs small circles into the space between her shoulder blades, the way you would for someone terminal. He shushes her only once, and when he does, it’s not to silence but to soothe, his voice a hush: “Shh, love, it’s okay, now, ‘s all gonna be okay.”
The words hollow her out. She is at once eight years old again, and sixteen, too, and new, and old, and some third thing that has never existed before.
When the storm inside her finally dulls to a tremor, Louis props himself up on an elbow. She does not let go. His hand migrates up her back, into her hair, and combs it gently, slow, as if to undo every knot left by the world. He’s quiet for a long while. Then, soft, “You know I’m never going to let anything hurt you again. I’d do anything—God, I’d do anything.”
She believes him. She always has, even when she didn’t want to.
She lifts her head from his chest. She is a disaster, smeared in sweat and tears, but Louis does not look away. His thumb comes up, swipes under her eye. He does this so tenderly that she could die from it. She doesn’t know how to survive this kind of care.
He looks at her for a long time, then kisses her knuckles. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She shrugs, sniffling. “There’s so much to say,” she croaks. “But I don’t know how to say any of it.” Her voice is nearly gone. She feels the apology in her chest, the way she has for every year she left him behind.
He strokes her hand, then just holds her face between his palms, his own eyes going red and wet at the edges. “Doesn’t matter,” he says.
She shakes her head, mouth opening, searching. “All I have is—” She stops. Swallows. “Is that I love you.”
He closes his eyes, and for a second she thinks he might break apart. He leans their foreheads together, nose to nose, like they’re kids again in a stairwell somewhere, hiding out from the world. “That’s all I’ll ever need from you.”
She almost laughs, because it’s so simple, so small, after all this pain. But her voice is gone.
He keeps his face against hers, and then—almost too quietly to hear—he says, “Would you marry me?”
It’s so unceremonious she almost doesn’t catch it. He’s not joking, though. The words are as old as the two of them; she’s heard him say it in the middle of traffic jams, in the aisles of supermarkets, on the phone from different continents, half a hundred times in different forms, but never like this. Never when she knew it was real.
She laughs, startled, a new wave of tears chasing the old. She buries her face in his neck, as if she could hide from the question, as if it isn’t already a part of her, forever. “You’re not supposed to propose at someone else’s wedding,” she says, but it comes out all warble and ache.
He grins into her hair. “They never have to know.”
Chapter Text
2025 — after.
If she ever had the courage to tell the true story, it would begin on the Monday after the wedding. Or more precisely: the moment she awoke, for the first time in years, in her own skin.
She remembered the sun, how it braided itself through the east window, yellow and coarse, illuminating dust above the mattress. Louis was half-under her, a knotted limb at each of her edges, his face collapsed into the hollow beneath her throat. She could feel his lips, soft and asleep, pressed there. They were bare and red from having pressed too hard all night, through words and weeping and (at last) the gentle overwhelm of reunion. The scent of him, tobacco and cedar, sweet sweat and the faint remnant of aftershave, she would have bottled it, if such things were possible.
They never left that bed. Not for days, unless you counted the brief interludes when Rry stumbled into the kitchen in one of Louis’ old shirts to pick up their takeaway and pour two glasses of whatever they were drinking. The room itself was barely familiar, except for the pile of a record collection in the corner and the window with the crack she’d traced a million times at night. The rest was altered by the void of their old lives, as though someone had stripped every surface of excess and left only the echo, the negative space, for memory to populate.
The first day was feverish, delirium stitched to clarity. They were both terrified of sleep; terrified, perhaps, that the other would vanish when the eyes closed and the mind loosened its grip on the physical. So they lay pressed together, thigh to thigh, wrist to wrist, and talked through the hours that bled into each other, until the distinction between sunrise and sunset became a matter of indifference.
Louis spoke first, just after dawn, with his cheek warm against her sternum. “I used to sleep on this side,” he said. “Because I liked your heart in my ear. It’s slower now. Or maybe I’m faster.”
She smiled sadly. “I think I forgot how to do this.”
“Do what?” His breath moved against her, eyelashes tickling as he blinked up.
“Feel alive,” she said, and the words hung there, half-true, half-joke, fully hers.
He shifted to look her in the eye, hand smoothing the hair back from her forehead. “We did a pretty shit job at dying, too. Still here, both of us.”
“I tried,” she whispered, as if she owed it to the room to say it aloud. “Thought about it a lot in London, at our house, after everything. Then, I tried, after Tokyo. The doctor said I’d be lucky if I made it out of the hospital. I was lucky.”
Louis was silent for a long, thrumming moment, eyes watering. His hand did not stop stroking, but his mouth pressed flat, searching for the correct arrangement of sorrow and gratitude. “I know,” he revealed at last, swallowing hard. “I was always so scared of—that. But they said not to ask. That you needed space.”
“Space almost killed me.” She burrowed into his chest. “I wanted you to save me.”
He let out a helpless shudder. ”I let go because I thought it was what you needed. I thought you’d hate me if I held on too tight.”
“I hated you anyway.” She meant it as confession, not cruelty. She needed him to understand: her hatred was never about him, never about his hands, his voice, the press of his presence in her life. It was about the circumference of her own skin, about the impossible hunger for another existence. “I hated everything, even the things that made me happy. Maybe especially those.” She breathed in, slow. “That’s why I hated the…girls. I hated when you were with girls,” she said, “I wanted to be them. It made me crazy. My head wouldn’t let me accept that I could possibly be better for you than them.”
He drew her in, so, so close. “You were always enough. You were always better. Than anyone. Always. Even when you hated yourself, or hated me, you were the only thing I ever wanted.”
She let the tears fall, hot and embarrassing. “You say that now.”
“I said it then. You just couldn’t hear it over the noise in your own head, baby.”
They made love like it was the only language they spoke, as if people who had lost and found each other in the debris of ruin. He kissed every scar on her body. She clung to him as if he might evaporate in the sunlight, too beautiful to stay for long.
That night, they curled up in the tangle of sheets, and Rry traced the veins on Louis’ forearm, the tattoos that matched Rry’s and never left his skin.
“Are you still scared?” he asked, voice a murmur.
“Always,” she said. “But less now.”
“Me too.” He let her fingers rest at the pulse in his wrist. “It used to be the only thing I felt. Scared of losing you, scared of fucking up, scared of waking up and realizing it was all a dream.”
She smiled. “It’s not a dream.”
“No?” He nudged her, playfully. “Prove it.”
She nipped at his arm, leaving a gentle imprint of her teeth. “Didn’t feel like a dream, did it?”
He laughed, and rolled her onto her back. For a moment, she thought he’d pin her there and never let go. She’d be okay with it.
They talked through every night. About the hiding, and how it had rotted them from the inside, turned their love into a secret worth more than their own lives. About the way fame had made them into strangers to themselves, performing versions of love for an audience that was never allowed to see the truth. About the fights, the nights she locked herself in bathrooms, the mornings he woke up and reached for her only to find cold sheets and silence. They named every wound, and refused to turn away.
Louis told her, on the second morning, about the cigarettes, the drugs. How he’d chain-smoked through every sleepless night, sitting on the floor of his kitchen with the lights off, waiting to feel something. How he’d ruined his throat screaming at empty rooms, writing songs he never released because they tasted too much like blood. He’d told her that her relationship with Leo tore him inside out.
He didn’t say it with accusation, but with a simplicity so honest she felt it cut through the buffer she’d lovingly lacquered around all her old selves. She hadn’t seen Leo in years now, or even thought about him, hadn’t uttered his name aloud in front of Louis. It wasn’t just jealousy, she realized, but grief, a mourning for the version of her that might have loved Louis honestly, without the detour into self-immolation. The knowledge of that wound itched between their bodies, just under the skin, irreparable but also, by some miracle, no longer fatal.
Louis went on, quietly: he admitted that the hardest part wasn’t the public spectacle, not the headlines or the way fans speculated about every new photo, but rather the mundane, private moments she’d never see. The way he’d catch a glimpse of her old mug in the cupboard and have to steady himself against the counter, or how he’d walk home at night, imagining her laughing with someone else, and feel his insides twist until he was certain he’d be sick.
“That’s when it hurt,” he said, “It was the silence after. The part where you’re supposed to be with someone and you realize you aren’t. That’s the bit that killed me.”
Rry had crumpled, desperate for him to know that Leo was a small imprint where Louis was her whole being. She remembered a phone call from Leo, years ago, she remembered the darkness in her own voice, the way she’d spoken in monosyllables until Leo, frustrated, said, “He’s not the only person who ever loved you, you know.” And she had hung up, because it wasn’t true.
There was only Louis, even in absence. Not a singular obsession, not a first-love fixative, but the molecular truth of her. She’d worn other bodies and other names, tried on different incarnations and ambitions, but the center was always, always him. Even when she’d forced herself to stop believing in the future, she couldn’t dislodge him from the past. It made her reckless, sometimes. It made her vicious.
“I never loved him,” She whispered. “I was just lost. And you were gone. And I needed to feel like I could be loved again. But I just kept looking for you in someone else.” She pressed her forehead into his pec. “I let it be public to make myself feel better. To show the world that someone could want me, still.” She let the confession hang between them, her face flushed with shame.
She could feel her hands going cold. She could feel the way her body tried to fold in on itself, to hide from the enormity of her own longing. She wanted to collapse into him, to let him pull her in and fix it, but she was terrified that he would recoil from the ugliness, the neediness, the entire spectacle of her.
Louis reached for her then, and he tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “It doesn’t matter now, baby. I’m here, you’re here, you’ll always be wanted.”
She had told him everything, finally. About the terror of living in the wrong body, the way it gnawed at her. About the years of therapy, the medications that dulled her voice and blurred the edges of the world. About the way she still woke up, some nights, convinced that she was a lie and everyone else could see it.
Louis listened, every word, and didn’t try to fix it, just let her pour her truth safely. They fell into the same routine; talk, weep, touch, sleep, repeat. By the end of the third day, the wounds had not closed, but they had stopped bleeding.
On the fourth morning, Rry found Louis in the kitchen, barefoot and shirtless, making coffee. The sight was so domestic, so achingly normal, that she nearly burst into tears. He grinned at her over his shoulder, messy hair falling into his eyes.
“Morning, angel,” he said. The words felt so easy, as if they’d never been forbidden.
“Morning.” She stood in the doorway, unsure what to do with her hands, her body, the years of longing that still sat somewhere deep inside her.
He crossed the room and pressed the mug into her palms. His hands lingered, covering hers. “We can stay here forever, if you want.”
“I want. But our loved ones don’t.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. But I want to be selfish for a little while. Just us.”
She sipped the coffee and watched him, and the way his mouth quirked, like it always did before he—
He reached into the pocket of his sweats and pulled out a ring. A new one, even after all this time, delicate and breathtaking. He held it out to her, between thumb and forefinger.
“Wear it, this time?”
She inhaled, eyes watering, and took it. “Yes. I’ll wear it.”
He slid it onto her finger, and kissed the knuckle, then the palm, then the tip of every finger.
2026 — after.
It only took a few more months before everyone was together again. No longer staged, or in a magazine spread, or the unreality of a talk show couch. It was ex-bandmates coming together privately, in a London townhouse, to sit with the weight of what they had lost.
The house was new, Rry and Louis had moved in during winter, giving themselves a place to begin again without the stains of what their old house carried.
On the appointed day, Niall arrived first, half an hour early. He let himself in, as instructed, calling out a soft “hello?” into the cavernous hallway. Rry found him there with his hands in the pockets of a cable-knit cardigan.
He hugged her tightly, one hand cradling her head affectionately. “Hi gorgeous,” he said. “House is cute.”
“Thanks, babe,” Rry smiled. “You look good, I like the fashion.”
“I always look good.” He pulled back, and they both giggled.
Louis appeared at the top of the stairs, hair still wet from the shower, and he took the steps two at a time. “Nialler, you fucking legend,” he said, and wrapped him in a brief, bone-tight embrace. When he let go, he held Niall at arm’s length, studying him. “Married life changing you?”
Niall snorted, “I hear you guys will be finding out soon,” He gestured at Rry. “Congratulations are in order, I guess?”
Rry glanced down at her hand, where the ring sat snug on her finger, so delicate she sometimes forgot it was there. “Yes. Thank you.”
Louis’ face softened, a silent exchange of gratitude between him and Niall.
Zayn arrived last, but it was okay. Louis went to retrieve him, and when the door opened, the four of them stood in the foyer, shuffled in a rough semicircle. For a moment, nobody spoke.
“Hey,” Zayn said, smiling shy.
“Hey, Z.” Rry hugged him, and Niall slapped him on the back, rubbing his shoulders, and the faint sense of sorrow eased, just a little.
They migrated to the kitchen, where Louis had set out a half-hearted charcuterie board and a row of mismatched tumblers. The overhead lights were too bright, and Rry flicked them off, opting for the gloom of the rainy morning filtering through the glass. She accepted a glass from Louis and settled herself on his lap, balancing the tumbler on her thigh. His hand found the curve of her waist, thumb circling lazily against the worn cotton of her jeans. She could feel the vibration of his voice through her bone as he leaned in, amused, to murmur in her ear.
“Love your arse in these, darling.”
She blushed, and it was not missed by the others. “Oh, you two,” Zayn said, grinning at the tableau. “Absolutely shameless, still.” He reached around for a slice of cheese and topped it onto a cracker.
Louis only grinned and pressed a kiss into the crook of her neck, lips parted enough to leave the suggestion of teeth. “Wouldn’t be us if we weren’t,” he said, muffled by skin.
Rry flushed harder. “Sorry,” she said, not sorry at all, and made a show of stretching her legs out, draping them across the table.
Niall groaned with exaggerated dismay and flopped backwards, draping his arms over the back of the kitchen chair “God, some things never change,” he said, but the jest was softened by the tremble in his voice. Rry, sensitive to such shadings, wondered if it was nostalgia or relief. Niall, who had always been the group’s ambassador of feeling; its buffer, its sponge, its unofficial therapist, looked at her now with eyes gone soft. “We’re happy for you, you know,” he said, “it was never easy for ya, but here you are. It feels right.”
Zayn set his glass down. “Yeah, he’s right,” he said, voice a little different, deeper than Rry remembered. “I missed seeing you like this. Nobody could ever be you two, honest,” He looked at Louis, then at Rry, his stare unblinking but gentle. “Some people, they get a thing so strong it fucks them up for years. They spend their whole lives trying to feel that again. Or they run from it, thinking it’ll ruin them. But it didn’t break you. You just had to see what you were when you weren’t together. And now that you’re back, it’s like—” He trailed off, searching. “It’s like the world snapped back into place. That’s how it feels, anyway.”
Rry collapsed a little at their words. They had made sense in the world, even ugly, even ruined. She remembered the years of pretending otherwise, of forcing her love for Louis through a sieve fine enough to catch all the sharp bits, letting only the palatable through for the public, for her bandmates, for herself. What a waste. What a small, needless destruction. She slipped her hand down to cup the back of her fiancé’s head, thumb settling against the damp hair at his nape, and she wished they’d always been allowed this naked, ordinary joy.
Louis, covered in goosebumps now, reached up to press his mouth to Rry’s shoulder. And Niall blinked hard, then grinned at the ceiling.
“Oh to survive the burn,” He said. “Vulnerable, Z, I love it.”
Zayn nodded. “Yeah—I mean it. I was a shit friend sometimes, I let us drift apart because I thought it was easier than saying what I actually felt. But—” He glanced at Rry, then at Louis, and his voice wavered, just once: “You two taught me what it means to fight for something. Even when it seemed impossible. Especially then.”
The weight of it pressed against Rry, urgent and overwhelming. She felt every scar, every hidden thing, surface and shimmer in Zayn’s open acknowledgement. She did not want to weep in front of everyone, but her eyes burned and her breath snagged.
Louis reached for Zayn’s wrist and squeezed. “You know that nothing was ever one person’s fault. We were just surviving,” he said. “But it means the world.”
There was a slow, gradual exhalation as the group recalibrated itself, as if four compasses had been shaken and set to align again. The hour blurred, voices rising and falling in tandem with the flicker of traffic on the wet street outside. They moved from kitchen to sitting room, hands clasping mugs or tumblers or each other’s wrists as they crisscrossed old memories and stitched them into new territory.
It wasn’t until the sun breached the clouds that anyone mentioned Liam, though they were all thinking of him. His absence was a deep stab wound that they’d never be able to really move on from, impossible not to notice, not to mention.
It was Niall, eyes suddenly damp, who said, “He’d have loved this. Being together like this. He’d have inhaled all the cheese by now.” It should have been a joke, but it landed with such force that nobody spoke for a minute.
Louis cleared his throat. “He’d have found something to complain about. Probably the wine. Said it was too posh.”
Rry imagined Liam as he’d been at nineteen, knees tucked under his chin, brow furrowed as he dissected every new sensation the world had to offer. She remembered the way he’d call her “H,” even after, even when she corrected him a few times, but helplessly fond about the way he’d try.
“I brought flowers,” Zayn said, abruptly, and produced a small bouquet from inside his jacket. It was slightly crushed, but the gesture was so sincere that Rry almost wept. “For after.”
Niall nodded, mouth pressed flat. “We should go soon.”
The drive to the cemetery was silent, mostly. Zayn and Niall rode in the back, shoulders nearly touching but neither looking at the other. Rry sat in the front with Louis, hands clasped together on her lap, eyes fixed to the wet blur of city through the windshield.
The cemetery was old, with ancient trees and the smell of turned earth. Liam’s grave was easy to find, set apart under a willow whose branches scraped the grass like a curtain. The four of them stood there, shifting their weight from foot to foot. Nobody had prepared words; there was nothing to say that hadn’t been thought a thousand times in the restless hours before sleep.
Niall was the first to kneel, setting a hand on the headstone. “You missed a lot,” he whispered. “You missed us. We miss you, mate.”
Rry’s vision blurred. She stepped forward and crouched, running her fingers over the inscription.
Louis rested a hand on her shoulder, squeezing. “We’re alright, Payno,” he said. “We’re still here.”
Zayn placed the flowers, fussed with the arrangement until it was perfect, then stepped back, shoving his hands into his pockets. He didn’t cry, but his jaw trembled and clenched so tight it could have broke.
For a long time, they just stood, the wind biting at their ears, the damp soaking into the knees of their jeans, until Niall said, “Remember that time, at that shit hotel in Madrid, when Liam tried to—”
“Climb into the pool at three a.m. and got stuck in the filter?” Louis finished, grinning despite himself.
“Oh shit, yeah, he screamed for help,” Zayn laughed, “but we were all too gone to understand, so he had to sleep there, ass-up, until morning.”
Niall laughed, a hoarse bark that twisted into a sob. “He was so angry.”
Rry closed her eyes, letting the memory play out. She could almost hear his voice, that familiar whine, calling out for rescue. When she opened her eyes, the others were smiling, too, the shared recollection stitching them together in a way nothing else could.
They stayed until the sun started to dip, until their bodies grew cold and their eyes had run dry. When they walked back to the car, Louis slipped his arm around Rry’s waist, holding her close. She leaned into him, grateful for the solidity of bone and muscle, for the assurance that at least one thing remained unbroken.
They drove back through the city in silence, each lost in the echo of what had been. At the house, Niall and Zayn said their goodbyes quickly, the way people do when more words would only unravel what little composure remained.
“Don’t wait so long next time,” Niall said, clinging to Rry one last time. “Don’t make it a whole fucking year.”
Zayn pressed a kiss to her cheek and muttered, “Take care of yourself. Take care of him.” His hand lingered at her elbow, then he moved to hug Louis.
When the door closed, Rry and Louis stood in the kitchen, looking at each other softly.
“You okay?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
“No,” she said, and laughed. “Not at all.”
He nodded, and just brought her impossibly close.
And after that day, the hiding ceased.
It was, perversely, a negotiation. In the way that everything between them had been, for as long as Rry could remember. The details were old hat: which photos could be published, who retained “first rights of refusal,” what category of intimacy was too much, too raw, too likely to result in some embargoed legal breach. She had heard all this before, first as a boy, later as a woman, but it was different now. The goal wasn’t to hide but to admit, delicately, their existence.
When the meeting adjourned, Louis slipped her a pinky under the table, the pad of his finger pressing just enough into her hand to say we’re done, it’s real, we made it. She squeezed back, then stood and smoothed her skirt. The publicist hovered. “We’ll email you both the summary.”
Rry only nodded and let herself be led, Louis’ hand at her elbow, into the corridor and out into the day. She let herself laugh. “Two decades of plot, and the finale is a meeting about who gets to see us in a Pret a Manger.”
He looked at her, feigning disappointment. “Didn’t even get a biscuit out of it.”
The first photograph of them was so casual, and yet, still an explosion. They were leaving the same cafe, the same side street, arms nearly touching but not quite. The camera caught the space between their fingers, that intimate negative, and the tabloids had a field day. The internet broke in half just as it did the day Rry came out. Rry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, together, alone, for the first time in a decade.
The second was at a football match, her coat barely enough to keep out the cold, Louis pressed tight to her side. They were both shouting, mid-laugh, his hand braced against her thigh. Not even a pretense of separation, there. She screenshotted the image before it was buried under the day’s wild, unhinged discourse.
Sometimes, she wondered if it would have been easier to just say it. To post the photo, to stand on a rooftop and announce: It’s us. It’s always been us. But she found there was something almost beautiful in the not-saying. The fans who had always known were ecstatic and alive. There were montages and tributes, slow-motion GIFs, academic essays about longing and liberation and the recursive nature of pop culture. Rry read some of them in the blue-light hours after Louis fell asleep, scanning for phrases that sounded like her own heart, like the voice she could never quite find for herself.
It was the third photo that really undid her. They’d been shopping, of all things, in a boutique off Soho where Rry liked to buy shoes with heels high enough to make her legs something worth looking at. The pap got them mid-step, Louis at her back, hand poised at the slope of her waist as if to steady her. She hadn’t seen it happen. But the image, when it hit the internet, was inescapable; her body, claimed and beautiful, and his, braced to catch her if she fell.
She sent it to him, the evening it went viral. Just the photo, no caption.
He replied in seconds: you’re perfect.
Once, at Louis’ show in Madrid, a fan breached security to press a bouquet of violets into Rry’s hands, where she stood in VIP. “For you both,” the girl said, her English shaky but sincere. “I love you, I love you together. You are so important.” She didn’t ask for a selfie or anything, really just stood there, eyes enormous.
They took the flowers home. Louis put them in a glass of water and left them on the windowsill, where they lasted weeks, more defiant than any florist’s arrangement.
The internet had opinions, of course, and sometimes Rry let herself read the comments and taste the temperature of it, but mostly she found it best to ignore. She realized, at last, she was no longer at the center of the universe, and this was relief, not loss. It meant her happiness could coexist with the world’s, neither requiring the sacrifice of the other.
What surprised her most was the way interviewers responded. They had learned, after years of crushed feelings, not to ask directly. But they never failed to sneak in a hint, a sly reference to “your other half,” as if participation in the great riddle was itself an act of solidarity.
Once, on French radio, the host asked if she still had time for romance. Rry was caught off guard, almost laughed, but instead said, “I think I have a romance that survives everything.” The host, a woman with a face made for disbelief, smiled and said, “I think I know what you mean.”
They learned to be ordinary, however they could. This was the greatest freedom. Grocery runs, late-night McDonald’s, shoving two trolleys side-by-side through the aisles and trying to beat the algorithm of the express checkout. Once, Louis put a bag of frozen peas down her shirt at Sainsbury’s, and she shrieked, too loud, drawing stares from a couple of university students who recognized them but weren’t brave enough to approach.
“I’ll kill you,” she hissed.
He just grinned, pressing his forehead to hers. “You’ll try.”
She liked this version of them. She liked that nobody else would ever get to see it, not really, even if they thought they knew them.
2027 — after.
There is a certain memory that comes to Rry whenever she thinks of her own soul, as if, beneath the skin and the stages and the untellable distance between child and woman, she is constructed entirely of that afternoon in the bridal boutique.
Even now, years on, ring embossed into her finger like a second pulse, marriage both anchor and lifeboat, she finds herself brushing fingertips over silk and lace in department stores, letting her hand linger on the seam, as if, by some miracle, she could draw forth the feeling of that day and slip it on again, just for a breath.
It was six months before the wedding. She remembers the time precisely: the sun performing for Notting Hill, streetlight clean and yellow, every puddle on the pavement shallow enough to be navigated in a borrowed heel. She had made a secret of the date, less to shield it from paparazzi than to savor it, unphotographed, for herself, but of course, nothing escaped Lottie, who texted, “See you at 2. Wear nothing under x” before Rry was even out of her morning bath.
Gemma met her at the tube, cheeks flushed from the air and a smile so wide it made Rry want to cry. “Let’s get you ruined,” Gemma said, squeezing Rry’s elbow through the sleeve of her jumper, and together they drifted towards the shop, three women buoyed by the possibility of new skin.
The boutique was bright and impossibly curated, racks and racks of white whispering in the air. Rry ran her hands along the rails, letting herself be led, letting Lottie and Gemma pull dresses in heaps, stack them on the fitting room armchair. She expected to feel alienated; that old panic, a boy in a girl’s world, fraud in the holy of holies, but the shopgirl, a sleepy-eyed blonde with impeccable manners, called her “darling” in a way that was so casual, so right, that the world shifted minutely, like a painting set straight on the wall.
She tried on eight dresses, and hated seven. The last was simple: a white slip of matte silk, bias cut, no corsetry or bone, just fabric that slid and fell in a line from her shoulders to the sharp taper of her waist, the sweet flex of her hip. There was a collar of lace at the neck, nothing extravagant, and a teardrop opening down the spine that ended at the lowest possible point the dressmaker could defend. She stood before the mirror, breath locked at the back of her throat. Lottie hovered, hands gentle at the zip, eyes careful.
“Turn,” Lottie said, voice soft.
She turned. The dress moved with her, liquid and forgiving, and for the first time in memory, she could not find the join between her body and the thing that clothed it. Gemma covered her mouth, then crossed the threshold of the changing room to stand behind her, so they appeared as a triptych in the glass. “Jesus,” said Gemma. “Rry. You look—” but the sentence failed, then rebuilt itself, stronger. “This is you. This is exactly you.”
A memory within a memory: at that phrase, a catch in her chest, a warmth that rose from heart to cheek and spilled, unbidden, out of her eyes. She hated to cry, hated the press of it in public, but the tears came anyway, effortless, and Lottie caught the first of them with her thumb, laughing, “Don’t get it on the silk, you’ll leave a watermark,” but her own voice was choked, too. Gemma, ever the pragmatic, reached for tissues and dabbed the cheekbones of both bride and sister-in-law.
“This is so embarrassing,” Rry managed, trying to smile.
“You’re in love it’s fine,” Gemma corrected. “I’ve never seen you stand up this straight.”
It was true. Her whole life, she’d made herself smaller, averted her profile in mirrors, slouched against the eyes of the world. In that dress, she felt elongated, ordinary, inevitable. She belonged, at last, to her own body. She wanted to wear it home. She wanted to wear it everywhere, to every meal, to every empty hotel room and every red carpet, to sleep and to shower and to haunt the music venues that still woke her up at three a.m., memory throbbing.
The shopgirl brought a glass of prosecco, and the three of them toasted, pressing their knuckles together, wrists encircled. Lottie paid the deposit without asking, scolding Rry for even reaching for her purse. “Consider it your fucking dowry,” she said, “and you’re welcome.”
When they left, Rry walked behind the others, the dress now double-bagged and slung over her shoulder. She wanted to preserve the sound of Lottie and Gemma, her sisters, plotting table arrangements and wedding shoes. It was a day that would never be publicized, never become a story, never even be transcribed; it belonged to her, a gift of memory, and she would revisit it, again and again, until the silk wore thin.
The week before the wedding, she barely slept. Her body hummed with nervous energy she hadn’t felt since the earliest stadiums, the first time she’d stepped into a place so large she could not see the edges of it. She wanted to rehearse, to run drills, to test every permutation of disaster that might befall a bride and her man and the infinite number of eyes that might wish them ill or joy.
One night, three days before, she found herself in their kitchen, making banana bread. She needed to measure something, to pour and to stir and to fold, to impose order on the air. She baked two loaves, and then, unable to wait, brought one into the bedroom where Louis lay, awake and scrolling his phone, shirtless, chest still flushed from the gym.
“Gift from my sexy wife?”
Rry rolled her eyes, setting the slice on the duvet. “Not your wife, yet.” But she was smiling, she always did. They tore into the loaf with their hands, neither bothering with a knife.
“Are you nervous?” she asked, hoping for reassurance.
He shook his head. “Never about you. Only about the after.”
She didn’t need to ask what he meant: the press, the parents, the people who believed the world owed them access to every last joy and scar. She nodded, then crawled up the bed until their faces were close, his hand anchoring her wrist, her knee digging into the mattress between his thighs.
“It’s never been anyone else,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Even when it was. Even when I thought I could survive it, alone.” She pressed her forehead to his. “You’re the only thing I know.”
He kissed her, once, twice, then held her so tightly. “Don’t ever doubt it,” he said.
They finished the loaf, then fell asleep with hands clasped, fingers greasy with butter and sugar.
The night before the wedding, though, they didn’t sleep at all.
They went, at first, to the restaurant where they’d had their first real date, as teenagers, in 2011, a lifetime ago. The restaurant was tiny, a basement with low ceilings and tablecloths that had not been replaced in twenty years. Nobody there recognized them, or if they did, they pretended not to, and the privacy was intoxicating.
They ordered everything: wine, bread, a bowl of olives, pasta for the table, a steak that Louis sliced into perfect pink discs and fed to her, bite by bite. They intertwined legs under the table and laughed until they cried and felt, for those few hours, like nothing could ever touch them again.
They walked home, arms knotted, the city more forgiving in the darkness. Louis tripped on a crack in the pavement and nearly went down, and Rry caught him, hard, and they both stood there, laughing, breathless.
When they got home, they didn’t even bother with the bed. They spread a pile of blankets and pillows on the living room floor, and lay there, facing each other, knee to knee, mouth to mouth, until the world collapsed to just the two of them. She could see the green of her own eyes reflected in his, the impossibility of their shared life compressed into this one, absurd, perfect moment.
They fed each other the second loaf of banana bread, piece by piece, until it was gone. They whispered promises: I’ll always love you, I’ll never let go, I’ll find you again in every other life. They said it, and meant it, because they’d survived everything else, and nothing was as hard as being apart.
The day itself arrived not as a sunrise but as an intrusion, a soft knock at the door of her existence, and when Rry awoke she felt, briefly, that she had returned to the blue-lit airlessness of youth: her bones were electric, her breath shallow, her mind unable to comprehend that after all the years of promise and famine she had made it to the threshold of a world she never truly believed she would live in.
The morning was thick with fog. In their home where they’d spent their last unmarried night, the windows beaded and pearled with condensation, as though the very air was refusing to permit this transformation. She rolled over and found Louis, splayed on his stomach, face pressed into the pillow. He was so profoundly asleep that it took a full minute for her to convince herself that this, too, was not a hallucination. For a moment she just watched him, chest rising and falling, lashes casting delicate shadows over the cut of his cheek. If she could have preserved a single cell of this memory, she would have, just to keep in her pocket, to draw out and inspect during the next epoch of drought. But this was real, and she had the right to touch it.
She pressed her palm to his shoulder and shook, softly, until he groaned into life. "Time, sweetheart," she said. He peeled one eye open, considered her, and then tugged her bodily under the covers, pinning her there until she felt the shape of herself, the shape of them, coalesce and solidify.
"I dreamed you left," he muttered into her hair, voice thick with sleep.
She tried to make a joke of it, "Not before the deposit clears," but the truth was she hadn't left. Would not, could not. Not ever again. Not even if the ceiling caved or the headlines returned, not even if the universe took them apart atom by atom.
The first thing they did was shower. It seemed at once too intimate and too necessary, as if the years of grief and strange women and stranger men, the years of muscle and testosterone and the wild cellular revolution of transformation, all needed to be sluiced away, so that they could walk down an aisle as two beings entirely new to one another. The bathroom steamed instantly; they stood under the spray, and Louis washed her hair, lathered her from scalp to sternum.
He palmed her hips, turned her around, brought her close. “‘M finally marrying you,” He whispered. “I’ve spent a decade trying to marry you.”
Rry buried her face in his neck, inhaling the warmth, the graphite hush of his skin, the comfort of him so near. She traced his collarbone with a thumb, up to where his pulse beat frantic against the pad. “I dreamed about it for so long,” she said.
He kissed her cheek, then her jaw, then her neck, and it made her knees soften. “We could just stay here,” he said, “skip the whole thing and just sign the papers.”
She laughed, hair wet and streaming over both their shoulders. “Tempting.” He squeezed her hips lightly, a gentle claim. “I want the world to see you, though. I want them to know I’m yours. That’s all I’ve wanted.”
He moves to nip her collarbone. She let her head drop back so her throat was bared to the ceiling’s pale fog, and he washed it with kisses, slow and lazy.
"You’re going to make me late,” she murmured, dizzy.
“Let them wait,” he said, “let the whole world wait. You’re the only thing I want to see today.” He flicked his eyes up as he mouthed at one of her tits, and she gasped.
“Louis,” She warned half heartedly, “You can fuck me when you make me a Tomlinson.”
He laughed, dragging his mouth back up. “Not tempting me to keep my hands off.”
She closed her eyes at that, felt herself blush even in this most private of rooms, and realized he’d done it again, left her breathless and new, a coin polished bright and spent only for him. “Will you still love me when I’m old and faded?” she asked, wanting to hear him say it again, as if it might anchor her to the years ahead.
He kissed her. “When you’re old, when you’re young, when you’re every version you’ll ever be. I love you in every tense, Rry.”
When she was rinsed and wrung out and half-dazed, he turned off the tap and wrapped her in a towel, tucking the edge under her arm. Then they just stood there, in the aftermath of heat, her head under his chin, and it could have lasted forever, but the world had other plans.
They dressed together. He wore a tee and joggers, for then, until he’d be in a suit Rry had not seen yet. He hadn’t shaved, and Rry insisted he leave the stubble. She wore a robe and slippers, and it was only when Louis sat on the edge of the bed, clutching his knees to his chest, that the enormity of the next hour seemed to find them both.
They arrived early, before the guests. The venue was in the countryside, a converted estate with gardens and a wild, unkempt sprawl of green lawn that ran, uninterrupted, from the back of the house to the line of ancient oaks. There were white petals scattered over the grass, and an archway at the far end, smothered in pink roses and creeping ivy. It looked, she thought, like a place someone would get married if they actually believed in forever. She did.
Louis parked the car and turned to her, his hand shaking as it reached for hers. He didn't speak for a long time, but the look in his eyes said everything he couldn’t. She was about to say something—anything, please, before I lose my nerve—but he beat her to it. "You're not allowed to cry before I do," he said, voice breaking. "It's in the rules."
She wanted to smile, but her throat was thick and unwilling. "We can both cry," she said. "But only a little."
He kissed her, fast, like a bandage being ripped off. "I'll see you at the end of the world," he whispered, and she couldn't stop herself, she reached for him, yanked him in again, and held his face in her hands, memorizing the exact shape of his mouth, the soft grit of his stubble. He kissed her back, and then, gently, they untangled.
The next hour was blur. She was led to the suite where she would get ready; a room with a bay window and a chaise lounge upholstered in something so pale it might have been woven from clouds. The stylists had already laid out the hair tools, the brushes, the little vials and pots of paint and powder. Her dress hung from the curtain rod, a spectral presence, waiting for its moment.
She sat in the makeup chair, fingers tight around the stem of a wine glass. She allowed herself to be powdered and curled and lacquered, eyes closed. Someone brought grapes, a bowl of them, washed and still cool from the fridge. She ate them one at a time, savoring the burst and slide of each, and wondered why she felt so violently alive. She was supposed to be nervous. She was supposed to be radiant. She was supposed to be the bride. But she was only herself, knuckles white around a glass, belly full of fruit and nerves, legs covered in goosebumps despite the summer air.
Her mother came in. This was the part she had struggled with, the moment where the woman who had built her, molecule by molecule, would see her not as a daughter but as a bride, a grown thing. Her mum was already crying, a tissue clamped to her nose, mascara dotting her cheeks in a way that Rry found perfect.
"Rry," she started, and then stopped. "Oh baby. You look like—" The words collapsed, a landslide of pride and regret and maternal awe.
Rry just smiled. "It's okay, Mum. I'm happy. I'm ready."
Her mum did what all mothers do: she fussed. She dabbed at Rry’s eyes with the corner of her sleeve, she straightened the seam of the robe, she tutted over the length of the lashes and the height of the shoes. She adjusted the jewelry, making sure the tiny diamond at Rry's throat was perfectly centered.
When it was time, her stylist returned, and the dress was slipped over her body. It fell onto her body like it was poured there, every line and curve smoothed by the memory of the last time she had worn it, in the boutique, with Lottie and Gemma standing sentinel. Her mum zipped her up, hands trembling so much that it took three tries to find the tab. When the zipper slid home, Rry felt something internal align, as if, for the first time, the exterior matched the architecture of her insides.
"Jesus," her mum said, stepping back. "You’re going to kill him."
There was a veil, of course; a tiny, wisp of a thing, clipped into the back of her hair so it fell in a gossamer arc, barely brushing her shoulders. She had not wanted a veil, but Gemma insisted, "It’s tradition, but not the stifling kind, the elegant kind," and when she saw it, Rry agreed.
She allowed herself a minute in the mirror. It was not the first time she had seen herself as a woman, but it was the first time she believed it. She ran her hands down her hips, smoothing the silk, and met her own gaze with an unfamiliar confidence. She was beautiful, and it was not a lie.
She looked away before she could cry, but the tears were already forming, a swelling behind her eyes that threatened to break the surface of her makeup. She exhaled, held it in, counted to ten, then squared her shoulders.
Her mother offered her an arm. "Ready?" she asked, but it was more than that: Are you ready to be loved, truly, and without condition? Are you ready to forgive yourself for every year of pain, every failed attempt at joy?
"Yes," said Rry. "I'm ready."
The song started, their song, that Louis had suggested; a slow, devastating piano version of “You’re Still The One,” meant nothing to anyone else but would, forever after, be the only music she could hear when she remembered this moment. The first steps were shaky, but as she reached the edge of the lawn, and the white petals came into view, and the archway of flowers, and the blurred faces of friends and family, the world narrowed to a point of dazzling, searing clarity.
She found him instantly. He stood at the far end of the aisle, solid, hands clasped in front of him, hair mussed in the exact way she liked it best. When he saw her, he went to pieces. His eyes shined instantly with blurry tears, openly, face in sheer awe, and she thought, That’s my man, my whole heart, right there, perfect.
The guests blurred to insignificance. She saw, in flashes, Lottie and Gemma, their faces lit with something between glee and awe. She saw Niall, grinning and glassy-eyed, clinging to Kait. She saw Zayn, impossibly elegant, mouth quirked in the barest smile, as if to say, See, I told you so.
But mostly she saw Louis, falling apart with joy.
At the end of the aisle, her mother squeezed her arm, then passed her hand to Louis, who took it in both of his, trembling with the force of the moment. He pressed a kiss to her knuckles, then pulled her close enough to breathe her in.
"You’re here," he said, as if she might still vanish.
"I’m here," she answered. And she knew she would never leave.
Their friend Johnny officiated. Nobody else would have been permitted to touch this day, to stitch it into the record of their lives, but Johnny was harmless, wise, and sentimental, with a voice soft and a presence that would never draw focus from the real show. He wore a suit two decades out of date and, in a lapse of judgment, paired it with a tie so pale and blue it seemed a relic from some extinct species of joy. His eyes twinkled when he saw Rry reach the altar.
He folded his hands over his heart, looked at the assembly, and exhaled a long, audible sigh, as though the moment required a cleansing.
“There’s no need for a preamble, not really,” he said. “Everyone here has witnessed the shape of this impossible love. You’ve seen the years of it. How it began, how it rebuilt itself.” His eyes lingered on Louis, then Rry, then the audience. “We’re not here to invent a story. We’re here to honor what’s already written. What’s been rewritten, and rewritten again, until it was indelible.”
He turned to the couple. “So, we’ll skip the rest. Rry, Louis, you may address each other. And—” he faltered, searching for the word, “—if you cry, you cry. That’s what happens at the end of a good story, isn’t it?”
There was a ripple of laughter, low and warm. Rry inhaled sharply. She had written and rewritten her vows a hundred times, but when she tried to summon them now, the words sat heavy and inert in her chest, resistant to motion, as if they’d rather stay hidden than risk the air.
Louis watched her. He squeezed her hand, gentle but grounding, and mouthed, “Go on, then,” with a crooked smile. She fell apart and was comforted at once.
She found the paper, folded once, in the palm of her hand. She opened it with trembling fingers and glanced up, meeting Louis’ eyes, before beginning.
“When I first met you, I believed in nothing,” she said. “I mean this sincerely. Not in God, not in myself, not even in luck.”
There was a pause; she blinked, steadying herself.
“But you saw me. You saw through all the mirrors and the tricks and the layers, right to the part of me I kept hidden for years, the part that wanted to be loved, desperately, but didn’t know how to survive it. You saw me, and it scared the hell out of both of us.”
Here, her voice wobbled, but she pushed through.
“We’ve spent more than half our lives together. Sometimes in the same room, sometimes on opposite sides of the world, sometimes strangers to each other. There were years I thought we were lost for good, that you’d never forgive me, or yourself, or the universe for what we became. But every time, even when it seemed impossible, you found me. Or I found you. Or we crashed into each other again, and the world made a little more sense.”
A wet sniffle from somewhere in the crowd, then another.
“You taught me that love isn’t always a safe thing. It’s not always soft, or easy, or always beautiful. Sometimes it’s losing, over and over, until you learn how to stay. But you never let me go, not really. Even when I left, you kept a piece of me safe. And because of you, I learned how to come home.”
The tears came then, slow, hot. Louis reached up and, with a thumb, wiped a bead from her chin. She took a breath and let the silence fill, heavy and unsparing.
“I love you. I have loved you every day since the first. I will love you when we’re old, and angry, and when we forget the words to our songs. I will love you when you are gone, and when I am gone, and in whatever comes next, I will love you still. This one thing, I can promise.”
She folded the paper closed, lump lodged in her throat, and finally allowed herself to look up at him, wholly, with nothing left to shield.
Louis, tears streaming, just shook his head, dazed and open. He fumbled with his jacket pocket, pulled out a slip of notebook paper, and unfolded it. He stared at it for a moment, as if unsure the words would obey him.
His voice was a quiet, shuddering marvel. “It’s mental, standing up here with you,” he started. “We’ve done a lot of weird shit together, but this is the first time I’ve been absolutely sure I was in the right place.”
Laughter again, muffled and tender. He licked his lips, keeping his eyes on hers.
“I was a stupid kid when I met you. I didn’t know what to do with someone like you—someone so alive, so bright. I wanted to hold you, but I was scared I’d drop you, or worse, ruin you.” His hand, holding the paper, shook visibly. “But even when you went to the ends of the earth, I’d look up and find you on every horizon.”
He paused, and the room seemed to pulse with held breath.
“You’re the only thing that’s ever made sense to me. Even when you were angry, even when you were silent, I knew you loved me. You are the center of my universe, and everything else just spins around you.”
Rry, openly weeping now, could not have spoken if she tried.
Louis continued, voice gaining strength. “You made me a better man. Not because you asked me to change, but because I wanted to be worthy of the way you looked at me. I’ve never loved anything, or anyone, like I love you. And I never will again. You’re my first, and my last, and my always.”
He let the page drop. “So, yeah. I do. I do a million times, every day. I do for every year we missed. I do for every year we’ve got left. You’re the love of my life, Rry. You’re the whole thing.”
He reached for her, and their hands met between them, trembling.
Johnny, trying to hold his own voice steady, said, “Beautiful. Thank you, both.” He cleared his throat, letting the weight of what had been spoken settle over the crowd. “Rry, do you take Louis to be your—” he choked, and for a second, had to start again. “—your one, your everything, your husband, for every day left to you?”
Rry’s lips parted, but the answer was already in the air. “I do,” she said. She squeezed Louis’ hand, and he squeezed back.
Johnny turned to Louis. “And Louis, do you take Rry to be your wife, your one, your everything, for every day left to you?”
He didn’t even wait for the cue. “I do. More than anything.”
“Then by the power vested in me by—honestly, not even the Queen, just a very relaxed local magistrate—I now pronounce you husband and wife.” Johnny’s eyes shimmered with the effort to remain composed. “Go on and kiss your bride, Tomlinson.”
Louis did not hesitate. He cupped her face fiercely, tilted her backwards, and kissed her stupid. The sound of it was lost in the wet, joyful chaos that erupted from the guests; clapping, howling, the keen of a hundred repressed sobs finally loosed.
For a moment, they were alone inside the bubble of that kiss. Rry felt her legs give, and Louis held her up, and she realized, distantly, that this was how it had always been: her losing herself, and him, always, there to catch.
They turned, blinking and radiant, to face the world, and the world, for once, did not ask them to hide.
The rest was a blur of hands, of arms around shoulders and waists, of tears and laughter and the taste of champagne from sticky glassware. They danced all night, unable to stop touching, but so in love it barely mattered, and even as the night spun out into glitter and blur and the promise of tomorrow, she knew she would remember every second.
The send-off was almost farcical, considering the clutch of damp friends with sparklers, and Rry’s mother weeping noisily into the crook of Lottie’s arm. The car was white and small and impossibly clean, and Niall had written “JUST WED” on the rear window in a scrawl of lipstick. There was a tin can, too, though Louis, with impeccable timing, managed to kick it loose before they reached the end of the gravel drive.
He glanced at her, dark and shivering in the passenger seat, and grinned.
“Wife,” he said, as if testing the word for splinters. “My beautiful wife."
She laughed, overjoyed. “Husband,” she said, and he reached for her hand, squeezing hard. “My gorgeous, sexy husband.”
The cottage they’d rented was hidden behind a screen of old holly and tangled bramble. In daylight it might have looked bucolic, but at night it was just a dark house, hunched and waiting. There was a porch light, but Louis ignored it, unlocking the door by feel and shepherding her inside. She knew what was coming.
Once the door was shut, and the suitcase dropped by the radiator, the silence pressed down. They were alone in it, finally, and the realization seemed to hit them both at once. Rry thought she might vomit from nerves or joy or both, but then Louis was on her, like a man who had survived centuries in the desert of want and finally found water.
He pressed her into the wall, mouth finding the delicate bones just under her jaw, hands hard on her hips. The wedding dress was sleek and simple but it was an obstacle; he clawed the zipper halfway down, found the curve of her spine, and moaned into her hair. “You wore this for me,” he said, tongue wet in her ear.
“For you to take it off me,” she whispered, desperate, unable to resist winding her arms around his neck and pulling him closer.
He groaned and shifted to lift her off her feet. She let him, and wrapped her legs around his waist, feeling the panic dissolve into something feverish. The world was reduced to sensation; his hands, the wild scrape of his stubble against her cheek. If she’d ever believed in God, this would have been the argument that changed her mind.
He carried her to the bedroom, bumping her knees against every available door frame, and let her drop onto the quilt. For a moment, he just looked at her, chest heaving, eyes as bright and insane as she’d ever seen them.
“My wife, god,” he said again.
He pushed the dress up, exposing the soft white of her thighs. The panties were lace, and he tore them off in one gesture, discarding them on the floor.
He hovered over her, kneeling between her legs, tracing the inside of her knee with a thumb. “How many you gonna give me tonight?” he asked, voice low.
She bit her lip, then let it go. “As many as you want,” she said, which could’ve been a mistake, considering he’s made her come four times before, hours and hours of sex.
He kissed the inside of her thigh, dragging his mouth up until he reached her cunt. There was really no prelude; he licked a stripe upwards, slow, then closed his mouth over her clit and sucked, hard. She gasped, hips jerking, but he held her down, fingers digging into the flesh of her thigh. He mouthed at her, relentless, not pausing for breath even as she writhed against his face, his nose pressed flat to her mound. When she looked down, his jaw was slack with hunger, eyes glassy and wild, the slick of her already painting his stubble.
She grabbed his hair, wrenched it just enough to make him gasp, and the sound went straight through her. He looked up, victorious. “Will you sit on my face baby?” he said, hoarse. “Let me have you, fuck, just need your pussy smothering me.”
She was halfway off the bed before she realized what he’d said. The words triggered something reckless, and her knees shook as she crawled over him, straddling his chest, the wet silk of her dress bunched up around her hips. He put his hands on her arse, and then helped her lower herself until she hovered just above his mouth. He licked his lips, then looked up at her. "Please," he said. "C’mon, miss Tomlinson.”
She felt a hot, dazzling arrogance at the title, the name, the out-loudness of it. She barely had time to brace herself on his chest before he pulled her down, settling her, open, onto his mouth. She relaxed her thighs, and his tongue darted up and found her, nose pressed into the crease, and the groan he made vibrated straight through her entire body. She rolled her hips, whimpering.
“Mpphh, you take it so good,” She moaned, head going back as Louis buried his tongue inside of her, barely able to breathe. “Love you all helpless underneath me.”
He moaned, lapped at her, relentless, switching from slow, teasing flicks to deep, obscene sucks that made her bite down so hard on her own forearm she nearly drew blood. She looked down again and saw the whites of his knuckles on her thighs, the desperate grip, the way his chest heaved like he was drowning and needed more of her to breathe. She let go, completely, and ground down in filthy movement, chasing the edge. He doubled his efforts, delighted, tongue flattening and then curling up to chase her clit as she rocked above him.
“Fuck, Lou, I can’t—” she tried, but he just gripped tighter, tongue working her clit until the world pinwheeled. She came so hard she forgot how to breathe, twitching and choking on her own gasps. He didn’t stop, not even when she tried to pull away, not even when her whole body went rigid, not even when she sobbed his name into the dark. He held her there, pinned, arms banded around her hips, and just kept licking until she had to beg, voice breaking, “Louis, please—” but she didn’t know if she wanted mercy or more.
He let her up, eventually, face shining with her slick, mouth red and ridiculous. She collapsed, trembling, lungs stuttering in the aftermath. He cradled her, softly, for a moment, but then, with a low, wicked hum, shifted them both sideways, tangling their legs together so she was on her back and he was kneeling between, palms braced on her thighs, holding them apart.
“Not done with you, sweetheart,” Louis said. He sounded tender, but there was a note of possessiveness she remembered from the darkest, oldest days, the version of him that wanted to drown her, just to see if she’d come up gasping.
She whined. “Can’t—”
“Yes you can, baby.” He slid two fingers inside her, slow at first, then all at once, curling up, making her kick and arch in the sheets. “You’ll give me another. Said you would, didn’t you?”
“Louis, Jesus Christ,” she managed, clutching his wrist. He was merciless, pressing up and in and then fucking her with his hand in the practiced, obscene way that always leveled her. He watched her face the whole time, rapt, and she could feel herself coming apart under the force of his attention.
He leaned down, mouth at her ear. “That’s it, pretty girl. All for me,” he whispered. His other hand went to her tits, mouth following, tongue lathing over her nipple until she whimpered. He bit down, gently, just enough to hurt, and she canted up off the bed, nearly sobbing.
He couldn’t stop. He took her apart with his mouth, kissed her sweat-slicked chest, her collarbone. Her second orgasm came up fast, a shout that ripped through her as she clawed at his hair and spilled around his fingers, soaking his hand, the bed, everything.
He kept her pinned, licked the tears off her cheek and said, “One more, for luck, yeah? Gonna fuck you so good, need you ready for me.”
She shivered, liquid and ruined, but nodded, because there was no point in pretending she didn’t want it. He let her hands ride up his arms, the ridges of muscle under skin. He was hard against her thigh, and she tried to reach for him, but Louis caught her wrist in his free hand and kissed the inside.
“Don’t need to do anything,” he said, voice dark, “just lie there and take it, for me. My perfect girl.”
She felt the third one building before the first had even finished fading; he shifted his hand, thumb pressing into her clit in aggressive circles, and she saw white, knees knocking together so hard she thought they’d leave bruises. He rubbed so hard that she came again, wailing, squeezing down so tight she nearly forced him out. This time, he didn’t slow, just stroked her through it until she was sobbing with pleasure, her whole body jelly.
He finally, finally pulled his hand out, and kissed her, the taste of her on his lips. She dragged his shirt up, frantic for the heat of his skin. She wanted to be obliterated. She wanted to be a creature made only of his hands, of the mess between her legs and the rough, sweet scrape of his stubble against her cheek.
He was so hard against her thigh now it was almost painful, and he pressed into her, gasping, “Fuck, need to be inside of you, god I need to fuck you.” before even managing to shuck his trousers down past his knees.
She giggled, the sound half-mad, as he kicked them off. His hands moved quickly as he tugged himself free of the briefs, and the sight of his cock, flushed and desperate, leaking already for her, made her cunt clench.
He hovered above, stroking himself, just once, before she stopped him with a hand on his wrist. “Give me my wedding present,” she said, and pushed him onto his back, kneeing her way between his legs. He let her, moaning, “Jesus, Rry,” and the sound of her name on his lips, low and utterly gone, made her dizzy all over again.
She licked a stripe up his cock and wrapped her lips around the head, tongue swirling, and he gave a ragged, pleading gasp. He let her play for a minute, let her drag her tongue under the vein, circle the head with her lips, take as much as she could, but then he pulled her up, grabbing her under the arms and flipping her so she landed with a thump, spread and helpless. He crawled over her, caging her in, and lined himself up with blind accuracy.
“Don’t be gentle,” she said.
He looked at her, eyes dark and shining. “Oh, I won’t be,” he promised. He pushed her back, gentle but so sure, until her shoulders rested against the headboard. His hands roamed, then found her ankles and lifted them, folding her almost in half. He lined himself up, cock dripping, and pushed inside. She sobbed at the stretch, still so slick, still trembling from the last orgasms. He filled her in a single, brutal thrust, then bottomed out, hips pressed so tight to hers she felt the bones grind.
“Fuck, this pussy was made for me,” he said, lost, guttural. “You feel so fucking good, god, buried inside my wife.”
He rocked into her, fast and hard, and the sound of their bodies was wet and frantic, and she wanted it burned into memory. He pressed his forehead to hers, sweat already gathering at his temple, and fucked her through the mess of silk and tangled limbs, not even trying to hold back.
“Oh fuck, oh my g—od, Louis,” She sobbed, clutching him. “Yeah, fuck me, fuck me—”
He went wild at the sound, fucked her harder, faster, mouth never leaving hers except to curse, to praise, to whisper the filthiest, sweetest nothings she’d ever heard. “Take it, baby, take all of me. So perfect. Love you, love you so much, my best fucking girl.”
She could barely breathe. The pleasure was a knife-edge, too much, too good, and she felt herself soaking wet around him, the squelch so entirely filthy it almost made her laugh if she wasn’t so desperate to come again. “Louis, I can’t, can’t, can’t.”
“Need to come baby? Want to give me that fourth?”
She shook her head, incoherent, already sobbing. “Louis, please, I can’t—” but her cunt was fluttering, close, the muscles clenching down so hard that she was seeing stars behind her eyelids. He let go of her ankles, braced his arms around her head, and the new angle forced him even deeper, she writhed, tried to twist away, but he held her there, relentless, pounding into her until she broke.
Her whole body snapped tight, and then the orgasm shredded her; white hot, volcanic. She screamed, uncaring, not muffling it, and her vision went black at the edges as her body convulsed, milking him in a series of spasms so intense she felt herself gush around him, soaking the sheets anew.
He kept going, gasping, “That’s it, fuck, you’re unbelievable, never seen anything like this,” and the words made her come again, somehow, a second peak riding the tail of the first, almost painful in its intensity.
She came back to herself to find him still fucking her, slower now, but with a wildness in his face she’d never seen before. He was close, she could tell by the way his jaw clenched, the way his grip on her thigh was bruising and desperate. She pulled his head down and bit his shoulder, hard, and he made a sound that was not quite human, hips stuttering.
“Inside,” she whispered. “Come on, come inside your wife, need to feel you.”
He groaned, pulled her in tighter, folding her in half, and rammed into her as he came. The pulse of it, hot and thick, filled her, and he sobbed against her neck, every muscle in his body going rigid as he emptied himself inside.
The world refused to move for a second.
In the unfamiliar hush of the cottage, a thousand particles of dust drifted through oblique moonlight and laid themselves down over the evidence of disaster; her body, collapsed, his breathless silhouette braced above her, both of them trembling, sweat chilled on every inch of skin. The wreckage of what they’d done together still vibrated through the air, as if the echo of their voices had been tattooed into the beams and the sheets and the bone-deep velvet of the night.
He stayed inside her until the aftershocks dulled. The fullness of him was only now beginning to subside, though her cunt still throbbed, overfull and leaking, every inch of her body humming in that gorgeous, annihilated way. Her thighs shook, twitching involuntarily; her hands were lead weights on either side of her head. She tried to push the hair from her face but her arms would not obey, so she just blinked up at the ceiling and let her mouth hang open.
Louis, chest heaving, kept both hands on her hips. For several breaths, he only looked at her, eyes unfocused and wet, jaw set as if against the threat of tears or speech. He was still inside her, so deep that the thought of separation made her clench involuntarily, as if she could keep him lodged there forever.
He moved first, eventually, with a soft, strangled curse. His hands slid up, kneading the trembling muscles above her hipbones, his touch rough but so careful. He eased himself out, slow, and the sensation made her spasm again, a bright twist of pleasure and loss.
“Fuck,” he said, hushed. He collapsed forward, arms braced to either side of her head, and pressed his forehead to her brow.
He kissed her, hard and open-mouthed, then drew back just enough to see her face. “You’re unbelievable,” he whispered. “Gave me five. Jesus Christ, baby.”
She grinned, the effort nearly killing her. “Just lucky I married a man who can please his woman.”
Louis laughed. He kissed her again, softer this time, and lingered at her jaw, lips moving lazily down the column of her throat. “Did so good for me,” he mumbled, voice frayed at the edges. “My good girl.”
She flushed all over again, still incapable of moving, so she just looked at him, crazy with the knowledge that this was hers, that he could see every wound, every ugly history, every ruined thing, and want her still, want her even more.
Louis moved first, again, rolling onto his side and pulling her with him so her back pressed against his chest. He palmed her belly, hand splayed over the curve of her waist, and tucked his chin into the notch behind her ear. His breath slowed, gradually, the erratic panic of climax fading into something almost serene.
When the tremors finally ebbed, he propped himself up and stared at the ceiling, then looked down at the mess between her legs. “Christ darling, did we flood the fucking place?”
She surveyed the damage. The sheets were soaked, a wide, viscous stain radiating out from the center. She wiped the hair from her face, smearing more sweat than anything else. “That’s your fault,” she said, and turned to look at him, eyes gone sly. “You did that to me.”
He grinned. “I’ll change the bed,” he said, and then bent to kiss her again, a chaste brush of lips to her forehead. “Want some water?”
She nodded, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth had become. “Yeah. Please.”
Louis rolled off the bed, stumbling as his foot caught in the tangle of sheets. He was still hard, barely flagging, and she admired the rise of his arse as he made his way to the bathroom, naked and beautiful in the half-light. She watched him go, then turned her attention to the aftermath; her thighs sticky, her skin tacky with sweat, the whole bed reeking of sex and devotion. She pressed her palms to her face and exhaled, not sure whether to laugh or weep, and settled for both.
She heard the water run, then the soft clatter of glass on tile. When Louis returned, he carried two tumblers, condensation beaded on the sides. He handed her one, and she gulped it gratefully, feeling the cold sluice down her throat and pool in her belly. He watched her, eyes never leaving her face, and when she finished he set both glasses aside and crawled back onto the bed.
“Come here,” he said, and pulled her close again, tucking her head under his chin. She let herself float into the heat of him leeching into her, and the press of his heartbeat against her.
Eventually, Louis spoke. “Can I tell you something?”
She closed her eyes. “Always.”
He drew in a breath. “It’s just strange,” he began, “how you can have a whole life with someone, and still feel like the best part hasn’t happened yet, I guess.” He didn’t let her respond, just pressed on. “I mean it. I know we spent half of it apart, and the other half just trying not to break each other, but…” He paused. “Every day from now on is the only part that matters to me. I want to wake up next to you and not have to look away.” His hand tightened at her waist. “I want to watch you grow old. I want to be old with you. And I want to remember this night, this hour, every second—” He broke off, shuddered, and buried his face into her neck, words evaporating into skin.
She lay there, leaking tears into the crook of her elbow, letting them pool on the sheet until they ran cold. She reached up and traced the violet half-moon under his eye, a gesture of helpless worship. Her thumb swept back and forth, small and slow, as if she could erase every shadow that ever touched him.
She said, “Thank you for loving me before I could love myself.”
He shook his head, still pressed close. “I’ve only ever loved you,” he whispered. “There’s never been anyone else. There never could’ve been.”
She kissed the place behind his ear, the place where his pulse ran frantic and true, and she inhaled the scent of him, willing it to etch itself permanently into her blood.
Eventually she slipped from his hold. “I’ll be back,” she murmured, voice hollow with aftermath.
He nodded, only half awake. “Don’t disappear,” he said, childlike. “Promise.”
She promised.
The house was ink-black, save for a triangle of moonlight spilled over the landing. She padded down the hall, the cold tile biting at her bare feet, and let herself into the bathroom. She turned on the light, and for a second it stung, the brightness was an assault after the hush of the bedroom, and she winced, shielding her eyes.
When she looked up, her own reflection blinked back at her, unfamiliar for a moment. She took it in: the wreck of her hair, curls stuck damply to her cheek; the flush at her throat, the purpling bites along her collarbone; the faint, swollen outline of her mouth, already bruising into tomorrow. She looked like someone who had survived a catastrophe, or maybe caused one. She looked, in a word, alive.
She studied herself the way she used to, back before, in the sterile hours before a show or after a fight, the old habit of dissecting every inch of her face for evidence of fraudulence or failure. But tonight, it was different. There was no mask to realign, no angles to adjust. The woman in the mirror was exactly who she wanted to be, maybe even more than she dared hope.
She pressed her palms to the counter, bone-white knuckles clenching against the porcelain. She stared at her own face, searching for any sign of the boy who’d haunted her, the echo of the old machinery grinding inside her skull. There was a time when the sight of her own jawline, the harshness of her nose, would have sent her reeling, desperate to unmake herself. Now she saw only the gentle slope of her cheeks, the fullness of her lips, the hair she’d grown out for years and years, every stubborn strand a monument to survival.
She ran her fingers under her eyes, smudging the mascara further, and for once she didn’t care. She let the tears come, not the hot, frantic weeping of pain but something slower, vaster, tectonic. Crying that remakes a landscape.
She saw the wedding ring on her finger, absurdly delicate, shining under the fluorescent bulb. She turned her hand, studied the way it caught the light. She thought about everything she’d ever lost, and everything she’d clawed back, and the incalculable luck that had brought her here, to this night, to this body, to this love.
She remembered the first time she tried on a dress, how it felt like trespassing, a crime. She remembered the shame, the guilt, the fear that she would never be beautiful, not really, not enough. She remembered the way Louis had looked at her even then, hungry and awestruck, like she was already the most impossible thing he’d ever seen.
She remembered every fight, every leaving, every time she’d sworn never again, only to find herself at his door, begging for a second chance. She remembered the years of emptiness, the years when she thought she’d never be worthy of love, not from anyone, least of all herself. She remembered the nights in hotels, lying awake, cataloguing every reason why she should not exist.
She remembered the way it felt, just now, to be filled by him, the absolute rightness of it, the certainty that this was what she was made for. Not just sex, not just the violence of bodies, but the annihilation of every old script, every bad ending, every hateful thing she’d ever thought about herself. She remembered the look in his eyes, the way he’d wept as he said I do, the way his voice shook when he told her he’d love her in every tense.
She remembered, finally, the girl she used to dream about being, the one who could walk through the world with her head up, the one who could wear silk and cry at weddings and laugh at the dinner table and be loved, not for what she might become, but for exactly what she was.
She stood there, at the sink, and wept for all the lives she’d lived and lost and outlived. She wept for the years of hunger, for the years of pretending. She wept for the boy who had to die, and the woman who had to fight for the right to be born. She wept for every time she’d thought about quitting, and every time she didn’t.
She wept, too, for the impossible luck of finding her way back to the one person who had always seen her, even before she knew how to see herself.
When the sobs faded, she rinsed her face, patted it dry with a towel, and stared at her own reflection for a long, final minute. She tilted her head, smiled, and mouthed, “I love you,” just to see if it was true.
It was.
The rest, as they say, was history.
Notes:
all i can say is i hope this stays with you. thank you. id love to post more things, soon. come say hi @scenesofblue on twitter, im posting this with 0 followers <3 until next time.
coolest on Chapter 4 Thu 11 Sep 2025 06:33AM UTC
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matchailatte (worthallthistime) on Chapter 4 Thu 11 Sep 2025 09:05PM UTC
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serpensss on Chapter 4 Fri 12 Sep 2025 01:05AM UTC
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eversincezourry on Chapter 4 Fri 12 Sep 2025 05:49AM UTC
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lightyhouis on Chapter 4 Fri 12 Sep 2025 04:07PM UTC
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emmea_22 on Chapter 4 Fri 12 Sep 2025 07:58PM UTC
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followtheeesun on Chapter 4 Sat 13 Sep 2025 02:05AM UTC
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floatingsalad on Chapter 4 Sat 13 Sep 2025 08:03AM UTC
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