Chapter 3 – In Which There is an Unavoidable Confrontation
A/N: Thank you to all the lovely reviewers who took time out of their busy days to lend words of encouragement – each and every one of you are stars :)
Sorry for the delay in updating this story… uni has been absolutely nuts with end of semester panic and rush!
I promise I will review other peoples' stories soon… I know reviews aren't a one way street and I must reciprocate your kindness.
Not sure if this is the end of this fic or not... need to do a bit more thinking. However, you can now experience first hand just how wayward my muse's moral compass has become when presented with Harry/Nikki.
Harry took a single step through the door and his eyes immediately fell on Nikki's silhouette. She turned in surprise at the sound of the nearby footfall and her eyes widened – startled initially by someone opening the door, and then by that someone resolving into the figure of Harry.
Their eyes met instantly and held. The sparkling tension was almost too palpable and Nikki felt tears pricking at the back of her eyes.
"Nikki..." It was a pained, stretched, almost exasperated whisper of her name.
Caught like a deer in the headlights, Nikki couldn't move backwards and couldn't walk forwards. Her mouth opened, delivered a slight and unintelligible sound, and closed again.
"Oh God, Nikki. Where do I start?"
"The beginning's usually helpful." Now that she'd found her voice it seemed she couldn't help the steely coolness that laced every word. She suddenly felt her initial confusion replaced by raw, burning anger directed solely toward the man stood before her.
"I never meant for this to happen. No…" he corrected himself, "I never meant for this to happen this way."
"Maybe that's the charm that the adoring twenty five year olds see in you." She didn't mean to be spiteful, but was being absolutely poisonous.
"That's unfair. You don't understand…" His voice was even, but his eyes were pleading
"I really don't think it is unfair, you know. And you've made damn sure that I understand just how well your little games work." She was on the verge of shouting, and managed to reel herself in just in time.
"You're different, Nikki."
His statement stung her like a handful of gravel to the face. "I'm not different Harry, I'm just the next conquest in a very long line. It's just that I present you with certain complexities that make me a challenge. Dead Mummy plus criminal Daddy equals messed up Nikki. Something you haven't had the chance to attempt before. Sound about right?"
Harry couldn't believe what he was hearing, and couldn't believe how quickly this situation was unfurling in the wrong direction - from his perspective at least.
"Why can't you just talk to me, Nikki?"
"Talk to you about what?" She was being deliberately obstructionist, trying to draw the words from his mouth so she could hear him try to justify his own actions.
"You know what." He wasn't about to give in to her little game.
"Oh, right… you mean that fact that you kissed your girlfriend, and then immediately looked at me over her shoulder like you wanted to rip my clothes off?"
A burning flush rose across his face, and he struggled to keep his composure.
"Why can't we just discuss this?"
"Discuss this?! What, like the big grown ups that we are? You know why we can't discuss this? Because you did something… unforgivable. And now you've got to fix the mess you've made."
"And what do you do when words fail you, Nikki? How can you possibly understand what it's like to want to tell someone something and not have the first clue how to even start? What it's like to tell your best friend that you're in l-". Harry's sentence was cut short and drowned out by the opening of the toilet door, and without thinking Nikki roughly shoved him into the cubicle in front of them, slipped in herself, and pulled the door closed before the new bathroom visitor could see them. Especially because, as she noticed through the slight opening in the door just before it closed, the new bathroom visitor was Jenelle.
In hindsight, it wasn't the smartest move she'd ever made, because now she was trapped with her back to the wooden cubicle door and her front flush to Harry's chest. The scent of his aftershave was suddenly intoxicating and Nikki was finding it harder and harder to breathe.
When she looked up, she was drawn in by his eyes upon her, his pupils dilated to encompass almost his entire iris. His breathing was as erratic as hers, and the look on his face mirrored the way he'd looked at Jenelle earlier.
Jenelle... shit! thought Nikki, remembering exactly where she was, who she was with, and why she'd got here in the first place. The chemical release in her brain had overloaded all sense of logic, reason and morality, making her forget that this man was her best friend and that his girlfriend was barely five metres away.
She blinked and tried to clear her head, but all she could see before her was Harry staring into her eyes. Images came unbidden to her mind, images of her and him that she knew weren't hers to hold and which could never materialise.
But before she knew what was happening, Harry had pinned her shoulders against the door roughly, and his lips were descending towards hers. The initial contact was dizzying to the point of inflicting phantom pain, and she swore she saw stars. Her eyes fluttered shut instinctively and she was drowning in the sensation of his lips on hers. A little voice of denial was trying to escape the hormones rushing in her brain, tell her what a shitty idea this really was, but the chemicals drowned out the logic.
A sudden break in contact forced her eyes to open immediately, and she found Harry staring down at her with a mixture of pain and reluctance in his eyes.
"I…" he whispered, words suddenly escaping him at this critical point.
"Don't say it… not now," she breathed in reply. "You're breaking our hearts."
He reached up and tucked a blonde curl behind her right ear, eyes tracking down her face to her lips once more. Nikki reached up and smoothed down his tousled hair, resting her hand in the soft black strands as he gently pulled their foreheads together.
"What do I do?" He pleaded, suddenly unsure of himself when before he'd been brave and brazen and kissing the love of his life in the female toilets a few feet away from his girlfriend.
"It's all about the choices we make, isn't it Harry?" she whispered, her hand still in his hair and his taste still on her lips.