Author's Note: Your comments are gold, thank you for letting me know what you think. And it's my birthday! So to celebrate, have a fun frolic with some of my favorite foods sprinkled into the chapter here and there :)
Two weeks went by in similar fashion. With Melody burying her face in her books, trying to soak up as much knowledge as she could before being whisked off to hang out with her friends. Mostly, they gathered as a group, but sometimes, she and Harry would hang back to have a conversation or walk around the garden after R.O.A.R. practice.
She never asked for the locket back. She nearly did the first day, and then the second. But as more days passed, she started to enjoy their little game. Harry kept the locket close to him at all times, except for when he flashed his winning grin and waved it back and forth inches from her face, just to get a rise out of her.
Sometimes he reached for her hand, sometimes he didn't, but it was never more than that. He flirted though, and not just with her. Harry Hook flirted with anything that had two legs. She was beginning to see that side of Harry would never change and it left her wondering if his hand touches were reserved for her only, or if it was just another Harry quirk.
Wednesday after Oceanography, she was talking with Wesley Darling, Wendy's son, outside of class. They'd met in the cafeteria during Move-in week and they had a lot of classes together.
"How are you doing on your project? I saw you got paired with Hook." He made an apologetic face, scrunching his freckles together. "I would have partnered with you, but my roommate is in the class and we figured it would be easiest if we were paired up."
"I wish I could say it's going great, but we haven't talked about the project at all."
He grimaced. "Ouch. Well, you can always let me know if you need anything, we have a – "
As they were talking, Harry had approached from behind and slung his arm around poor Wesley's shoulder, stopping him mid-sentence. In typical Harry fashion, he got a little too close and Wesley twisted away uncomfortably, excusing himself with a rueful wave in her direction before Harry even had a chance to make the cheeky comment he obviously had ready.
She scowled at Harry, "How am I supposed to make friends with you scaring everyone away like that?"
He shrugged and smiled his insane Harry grin, starting down the shaded path she always took back towards the dorms. She walked beside him, sliding his hook out of her bag as she did. She had taken to carrying the hook out in the open, just to pester him with it, and this particular afternoon she was in the mood to see him squirm after what he'd done to poor Wesley.
She was winning this bet one way or another.
As they walked side by side in the courtyard, Melody held his hook in two hands, twisting it back and forth ever so slowly where she knew he could see it.
"Yer teasing me, lass," Harry said, narrowing his eyes. "And it's nae very nice."
"If you want it back, just say the words," she said, regarding him from the corner of her eye.
He looked particularly swashbuckling today in a brown leather coat over a low-necked linen shirt, paired with his typical quarter-length pants which he insisted were called 'breeches' and not capris. Under his tricorn hat, 'which he didnae often wear on land', he wore a blue bandana that somehow made his eyes appear even brighter than usual.
He pulled her locket from his breast pocket and swung it back and forth by the chain. "I didnae think I could live without me hook at first, sweet gills. But gold is a fine replacement for steel." The golden scallop sparkled in the sun as if to prove his point. Then he gave Melody an enticing side-eyed glance before holding the locket up in the air and bringing it to his lips, planting a taunting kiss on her prized possession.
She tried to ignore what his little show did to her knees, focusing on not looking too wobbly as she shot him an annoyed look at the revival of her old nickname. He hadn't called her sweet gills in a long time, she realized, and she wondered why he'd changed from it.
"Sweet gills huh? Been a while since you used that one." She studied his expression for clues. She'd learned that sometimes his first reaction to a question or situation was visible on his face before he buried it underneath that sinister smile.
He stopped walking, squaring his shoulders to look down at her. "I stopped because you dinnae like it when I called yeh that."
Was she that easy to read?
"Then why did you do it just now?" she asked.
"To tease yeh. 'Cause it's safe to say yer nae afraid of me anymore. Seems yeh understand me teasin' now."
"Why not just use my name, then, like everyone else?"
"Would yeh rather me call yeh by yer name, Melody?"
She almost said yes. It would make the most sense for him to use her name, that's what it was for. But she had begun to like the way his little nickname for her rolled off his tongue. Since they'd become closer, she liked that she was his 'lass.' The back of her neck and ears began to heat up with embarrassment as he waited for her response.
"Or, maybe yeh prefer what I've taken to calling yeh lately?" He closed the space between them, wrapping soft fingers around her upper arm as he held her in place to whisper in her ear, "eh lass?"
She breathed in his closeness, his scent, the tickle of his warm breath against the sensitive skin at her neck and something lurched in her stomach. She had to remember how to breathe. Even though the courtyard was bursting with activity and students were crowding the sidewalks, all of it stopped for her in that moment and it was just Harry and his body, very, very close to hers.
And he stayed close, looking down at her with those intolerably gorgeous eyes and curse it all he had to know what he was doing to her. She swallowed, trying to unstick her voice. "That's fine."
"Fine, eh?" he said, an injured tilt dampening his smile before he replaced the expression with standard wild-eyed Harry again and stepped back, smiling.
She panicked a little then. She hadn't meant to come off as defensive. She'd just been too embarrassed to admit exactly how much she liked the little nickname, especially when it was whispered into her ear like that.
Seas, how could she fix this? She was really not good at this.
Taking a deep breath, she steeled herself for what she was planning to do. Then without warning, she yanked at the lapels of his coat, bringing his face down to her level again. "What I meant to say, Harry Hook, is that I like the nickname very much." She added a flirtatious tone of her own on the last part and pulled back a little to see his reaction.
Wide eyes and a quirk of a smile.
Good. That's better.
"I thought yeh might, lass," he said, taking her hand. "Come on, I've got a surprise for yeh down at the beach later. The whole crew is meetin' us there. But first, let's go find some lunch. I could eat the scabby head off a wee'un."
A tingly warmth enveloped her as his fingers laced between hers. She must have had the stupidest grin on her face as she walked beside him, but she couldn't care less.
"I have no idea what that means, Harry. But I'm hungry, too."
He insisted on buying her lunch in the cafeteria, though she knew there was no way he could afford it. Since he'd stopped stealing, he'd actually had to get a job. He told her about how he and Gil worked some nights at the pub where he said the tips were 'leagues better' than what he'd earned at 'The Chip Shoppe' on the Isle.
They'd found an outdoor table on the patio together and sat across from each other. Harry's wide smile as Melody informed him repeatedly about just how delicious the nachos were, made her glad she'd given in and let him pay.
She was piling extra jalapenos on the next bite when he narrowed his eyes at her plate.
"What are those?" he asked, one eyebrow raised.
"You've never had one?" she asked, stabbing a jalapeno slice with her fork and waving it around with a flourish.
He shook his head. "They look like wee pickle slices. Do they taste like pickles?"
Harry Hook was still naïve in so many ways. There were so many things he hadn't experienced here in Auradon. Melody smiled wickedly, unable to resist. "Yup, just like pickles. Here try one."
Harry pinched the jalapeno slice between his fingers and popped it into his mouth. He chewed normally a time or two before cringing, eyes watering as his hand shot out to grab for his water.
"Yer one connivin' little pixie, yeh know that?" He finally stopped coughing and glared at her plate of nachos. "Cheese that isnae really cheese and devil pickles that'll burn the skin off a wee bairn's arse." The face he was making, of absolute disgust and disbelief, had her laughing so loud, people at the tables around them were beginning to stare.
"I can't believe you've never had a jalapeno," she said between bouts of laughter.
She had almost caught her breath when Harry launched into a second coughing fit.
"Don't be so dramatic, they're not that spicy," she said, wiping the tears from her eyes. "Wasn't there any spicy food on the Isle?"
"Nothin' strong as that," he said, his voice still not back to normal. "But if it would make yeh laugh like that again, I'd eat a whole barrel of devil pickles for yeh."
"Devil pickles," she repeated with a smirk, popping one of them into her mouth and chewing as if it was the most wonderful culinary delicacy she'd ever tasted.
He had that look again, watching her.
"You are not what I expected, Harry Hook."
"Yer right," he said, straightening his collar. "I'm much more fetchin' in person."
She rolled her eyes, but she could see her response had satisfied him in the way he leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest.
He was certainly not what she had expected. But what exactly had she expected? Two weeks ago she'd thought he was an egotistical sadist with a strange fashion sense. And who knows, he might still be all of those things with a talent for acting to mask it all. She just wished she could pull some real feelings from him in more than tiny flashes so she could find out more.
"Tell me what it was like," she said. "I want to know what life was like for you on the island."
He frowned at that. "Yeh dinnae want to hear about that. I'm glad to be here now and that's enough."
"No, it's not," she said, finishing the last bite of nachos. "And I do want to hear it."
"I've done a lotta things I'm nae proud of, lass. Things that would make yeh want to run away from me and never look back. I'm me Dad's only son, which meant he expected a lot." Harry exhaled, pushing a clear plastic to-go box of brownies in her direction. "I dinnae often please him and he was drunk more often than nae. If it wisnae for Uma and Gil, I wou'dnae have come out of that Isle in one piece."
His hands were in fists on the table now, knuckles white with tension. Thankfully, Melody had the sense not to press him further.
She opened the box of brownies and took the biggest one. "How did you meet Uma and Gil?"
"We've been chasin' each other at the Isle shipyards since we were wee things. Uma always had a way about her, made us run her errands and do her biddin' back when we were knee high. We grew up together, watched out for each other," he said, taking a brownie for himself. "We won her a ship one summer in an Isle-wide boat race, then wrecked it lookin' for your grandfather's Trident. Best time of me life," he said, grinning.
"You and Uma seem close," she said, not sure she wanted to hear the answer he would give.
He answered around a mouth full of brownie. "We are. Always have been and always will."
She tried to ignore the sinking feeling she got with those words. Uma. Of course he had feelings for Uma. Melody had been stupid to even consider that their hand holding could be anything more than Harry being Harry. She had known there was a long history there with Ursula's daughter and getting jealous over someone who meant so much to Harry was foolish, considering she'd known him for only a few weeks and Uma had known him since they were kids.
His brows softened as he studied her from across the table.
"Uma is like a sister to me, lass," he said. "And Gil is like me brother. We're family."
He had now shoved the last of the brownie into his mouth and was going for a second one.
"Sink me," he drawled, eyeing his brownie in a way that sent a tingling heat up the back of her neck. "These tiny cakes are amazin'." How did he make stuffing his face look so damned attractive?
She made a joke to keep from getting too excited. "Should I leave you two alone?"
He laughed, offering her the last brownie in the box.
"No thanks, I think you need it more than I do," she said with a wink.
He shrugged, taking another bite. "Anyway, I'm sure yeh knew me and Gil and Uma used to be crewmates, too."
"Used to?"
"I told Uma this summer I cou'dnae be her first mate anymore. I've been following her since I was a wee lad and I need to have me own adventures. I want to be me own captain someday."
She could imagine no less for him. "There is nothing in the world like being out on the sea," she agreed.
"Aye, me next job is trainin' Gil up to replace me. But sailin' isnae easy work. Gil's a hard worker but he has to do things a hundred times before it sticks."
"My father used to take me sailing, felt a lot like flying when the wind really picked up. I've always wanted my own ship, too. Of course, not for pirating."
"What else is there?" he winked.
"Research."
He pretended to fall asleep on his hand, but after a quick snore or two, he was back. "Really though, yeh've got the smarts for it," he said. "Maybe if I stay close to yeh I can soak up some brains myself."
"What are you going to do with your own ship?"
"I want to be a trader and sail away toward more legal endeavors. No more stealin' for me. And so, here I am at University, studyin' the ocean alongside a true gem of the sea."
He gave her a look with those wide, blue eyes that felt like an electric shock and she stopped fiddling with the hook in her hands. She hadn't even realized she'd been nervously spinning it as they talked, until he glanced down at her hands.
"Must be awesome to have such a close-knit group of friends," she said, trying to pick up the conversation again before she managed to make him feel awkward. "I feel like I'm just learning how to have that. It's always been hard for me to open up and meet people."
"Not for lack of trying on the part of the people around yeh, lass. I'd almost given up on yeh me-self, to be honest. Took yeh a full week before yeh'd even look at me," he said.
"I thought you were a brainless, ego centrical flirt," she said, matter of factly.
"And now?"
"Now I know you're a brainless, ego centrical flirt."
It was Harry's turn to laugh. He threw his head back and the laughter came in waves, a musical sound that reminded her of how beautiful his voice could be.
He let out a shaky exhale after catching his breath. Then he gulped down the rest of his water and fixed her with that stare. "I have to say that I was just as confused with yeh at first. Yeh were meek as a dormouse, until yeh unleashed yer vengeful mermaid side," he said, leaning forward to offer his hands to her from across the table. She placed his hook in one hand and clasped his other with her fingers. "Yeh know, they say mermaids hold a grudge the longest of any creature in Auradon, so I'm glad yeh got yours over with fast."
"If I hadn't heard you sing, I'm not sure I would have ever gotten over that grudge," she admitted. "So, you're lucky you've got a good voice."
He broke their gaze, glancing down at their clasped hands, and released his hold on her, standing quickly.
"Let's go, lass," he said. "Yer surprise is waitin'."
