Page 93 of The Sound Between Us

22

if you let me stay

Seren

The drive back through the Hills feels like amber. Still and golden and dreamlike.

LA’s magic-hour haze filters through the town car’s tinted windows, washing the skyline in honeyed light that makes even the ugly things look like poetry. The studio high is wearing off, and what’s left behind is quieter but far more dangerous. It’s not adrenaline anymore. It’s recognition. That what happened wasn’t just professional collaboration. That something fundamental shifted in that room, and now we can’t unfeel it.

Harrison’s head leans against the window, curls flattened on one side, wild and defiant on the other. He looks wrung out by real creation, the music physically pulling something from him and leaving him hollow. Shoulders soft, posture slack, fingers still twitching against his thigh, playing silent chords on invisible strings.

The song isn’t done with him yet.

I watch him in the reflection, safer than staring directly. Sleep has erased the careful edges of the persona. No stage lights, no lenses, no curated angles. Just Harry. Just a boy with too much weight attached to his name and a scar near his hairline that his makeup artist usually hides.

When did he become Harry in my head?

The thought should terrify me. It’s the kind of intimacy that leads to destruction, this casual renaming, this claiming of the private self. Instead, I’m too tired to be scared of feelings tonight, too wrung out by what we created together to maintain my usual defences. So I let myself look. Properly. At the crooked slope of his nose, at how his eyelashes catch the last of the daylight, at the vulnerable softness of his mouth when he’s not aware of being watched.

This is what the fans never see. This version. The one who stops performing the moment no one’s watching.

Our hands rest on the leather between us, not touching, but close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off his skin. Inches, and yet it feels like the edge of something irreversible. One movement, one brush of fingers, and we’ll tumble over a cliff we’ve been circling for days.

He still smells like the studio. Coffee and cigarettes and the faint ozone tang of expensive cables. That particular scent of late nights making something that might matter.

When did I start caring if he’s getting enough sleep?

The protectiveness hits me. It’s not lust, though Christ knows there’s enough of that to power half of Los Angeles. It’s worse. It’s softness. It’s the want to tuck him in and make him tea and protect him from all the sharp things he throws himself against. It’s doomed tenderness dressed up as concern.

I’m so fucked.

“You’re staring,” he murmurs without opening his eyes, and there’s amusement in his voice, sleep-rough and intimate.

“I’m observing.”

“Same thing.”

“Categorically different.”

“Mm.” He shifts, settling deeper into the seat, and his knee bumps mine. The contact sends warmth shooting up my leg. “What are you observing?”

That you look younger when you’re not performing. That you have freckles. That I’m falling for you and it’s going to destroy me.

“That you need a proper meal and about twelve hours of sleep.”

“Very maternal of you.”

The word hits wrong, makes something uncomfortable twist in my stomach. “I’m not your mother, Harrison.”

His eyes open then, finding mine in the window’s reflection. “No,” he says quietly. “You’re not.”

The weight in his voice suggests he knows exactly what I am to him, even if neither of us is brave enough to say it yet.

By the time we reach his house, he’s so exhausted he can’t even hold his keys steady. He drops them, fumbles, tries again. I watch him struggle for a moment, this man who commands stages and interviews with effortless charisma, undone by basic motor function.

I take them from his hand before he can drop them again. The laugh that escapes is far too fond to be safe.

“Feel like you’re taking advantage,” he murmurs, voice thick with exhaustion and something like amusement.