She thought of Kit and how attractive and friendly they were, and yet, she wasn’t all that sure she’d been seriously into them, and why having thoroughly scared Kit off, she’d insisted on flirting so madly. She’d wanted to push Harri, she supposed, after the whole ‘Annwyl’ revelation.
In the dark, Harri rolled his head to look at her. Annie flicked her eyes shut.
‘I’m sorry about tonight. I was being a twat,’ he said.
‘You were such a twat,’ Annie drawled, her eyes still closed, her body still. ‘But I forgive you.’
She heard him chuckle, hoping he would drop the touchy subject of how she’d liked him back in third year. She didn’t like to remember it, the way the crush had struck her, all of a sudden, back when fancying Harri had been the strangest, simplest thing.
It had come towards the end of the May break, the night before their assessment results were coming out. Harri had been confident he’d be fine; Annie, less so. She’d worked hard enough but had missed a few Classics lectures and had only read theSparkNotesonThe Oresteia Trilogyinstead of reading the plays.
Harri had been confident generally that spring term. She’d noticed a change in him. He was smiling more readily, his body seemed relaxed in a way she’d never noticed before, and yes, his shoulders were noticeably broader, and she was sure he’d grown taller. He’d been making more of an effort picking out clothes too.
One day, as his Waterstones shift was ending and hers was beginning, he’d breezed past her in a rush, the neck of his shirt open. She’d never noticed the thickness of his throat or the hard curve of his Adam’s apple before. He’d had his hair cut with velvety-looking buzzed sides that seemed to her in that moment very strokable. He’d smelled good too, of something new. ‘No time to stop,’ he’d said, and he’d kissed her cheek as he ran past, and she’d felt a curious weakness in her knees.
That had been her first inkling of reallynoticingHarri. Then, waiting for their results to come out that night in the flat when everyone else had gone out to the pub, she’d been struck with the period cramps that could ruin whole days at a time, and he’d not even had to think about it, hadn’t even asked, he’d just grabbed his wallet and disappeared, coming back half an hour later with a box of Cadbury Creme Eggs (one of her absolute favourite things about living in Wales), salt ’n’ vinegar Chipsticks, and, bless him, a big blue packet of Bodyform Night Time towels. For some reason he’d gone for the twenty-four pack, not the eight, and somehow that had made her glow with affection. He’d stood there, not wanting praise or thinking he’d done anything particularly special, and he simply handed them all over and said one word, ‘Tea?’, and that’s when she melted for sure.
It had been, she could admit to herself now, excitingly painful to fancy her friend. She’d talked it over with Cassidy on whispered Skype calls late at night.
‘You gotta tell him!’ Cassidy had insisted.
‘But how do I tell him? He sees me as a friend. He’ll think I’m a creeper, crushing on him all this time. I’m like a sister to him!’
‘He’s a guy; he’ll love it.’
‘Harri’s not like that.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says twelve yellow roses on Valentine’s Day. Says him brushing his teeth and scratching his butt in front of me for two whole years. Says us being work colleaguesandroommates. If it was going to happen it’d have happened by now.’
Annie conveniently left out how she’d only recently started to like him, and she’d never even considered sweet, funny, friendly Harri as a potential boyfriend until then, and that she’d never given him any indication she liked him whatsoever, so how could it have happened before now?
Besides, this was Harri she was talking about. Lovely, nerdy Harri. Her best friend on this side of the globe. She could flirt with other people around campus, but not Harri. It’d feel artificial somehow and, well, icky.
Annie distinctly remembered Cassidy accepting her list as very good reasons not to tell him, and instead of protesting that if she liked him she should tell him, Cassidy told her it’d be best not to blow the friendship.
Undergraduate Annie, only just embarking on her twenties, had let it go, suffering in exquisite silence for weeks until the reason for Harri’s newfound confidence presented herself in the flat one morning.
Annie had heard the giggling and Harri’s throaty laughter over the sounds of the shower running. Later, they’d emerged, their hair wrapped up in matching towels. Harri had introduced the woman wearing his Swansea City football top as, ‘Paisley, my girlfriend.’
Annie had to throw her hands to her cheeks thinking her reddening face was about to crack from smiling so fixedly. Paisley must have read the situation correctly; she hadn’t liked Annie on sight.
So, she’d deliberately shrunk into the background, minimising her feelings, trying to ignore how mortifying it all was, staying late at the library to avoid overhearing Harri and Paisley in the room next to hers. It had been kind of hideous, but come autumn when the new semester began, after a summer of angst and longing, mixed with Harri-avoidance and self-denial, Annie told herself sternly that enough was enough.
Paisley was hanging around every day by that point and Harri was happy, which was all that mattered. Annie congratulated herself on beating her crush, and she didn’t dare think of it again. Not until Sunday night at the village meeting when Jude was prying it out of her, and the confession had felt innocent enough. She’d liked him once, but they were better off as friends. She hadn’t intended him to overhear. That had been stupid of her. But what she’d said remained true, nonetheless. Friendship was all that mattered.
Tonight had proven that Harri wasn’t emotionally equipped for a relationship, even a casual date had been too much for him. The last thing he needed was more complicated feelings on top of his Paisley heartbreak, and god knows, she couldn’t bear to lose another friend after the mess with Cassidy.
‘We okay?’ Harri was asking now, lying by her side in the dark, a large expanse of no-man’s-mattress between them.
Annie considered for a millisecond addressing the way he’d let her think ‘Annwyl’ was just his cute nickname for her when all along it may have signified something more, but she squashed the urge.
‘We’re good,’ she told him, walking her hand along the top of the covers to his. She closed her fingers over his and squeezed them tight, hoping Harri, who had fallen silent now, couldn’t feel her body sending out hot crackles of electricity, surprising in their intensity. She released him, just in case.
She glowed wordlessly in the dark until, deep in the night, she finally fell asleep, forgetting all about their guest in the room downstairs, thinking only of the next ten days of bookselling and how she was going to get through them unscathed.
Chapter Twelve
