I threw clothes out of my closet by their hangers, sifting through the different outfits, not thinking any of them were just right for the occasion. All I knew was that I was going to dinner, but I couldn't wear anything too elegant that outdid the professionalism that needed to match my job title. Nothing too casual, either. I needed to follow a dress code that was almost impossible that I might have only created in my own mind. Styles probably didn't even have a preference to what his interviewers wore since he wasn't used to being around any.

By 5:30, I had decided on a green dress that I had bought around Christmas time that I hadn't gotten around to wearing even though it was July, paired with a lipstick color that was about as pink as you could get without it being blinding.

I wasn't sure if I should bring my briefcase along or not, wondering if it would be rude since we were going out somewhere, but I decided to anyways since he knew that I was a reporter and that we were just meeting so that I could do my job. I threw his book in there, just in case I wanted to ask him about any quotations or refer to any page numbers, but I hoped I wouldn't need it. I wanted to ask him more questions about himself and less about what he had written because that's what people really wanted to know. They wanted to know the personal details of this man who refused to be anything other than a mystery.

A horn sounded from outside my building at exactly six o'clock so I knew it was him, but I still peeked through the window before heading down. He had sent a real town car, one like you would see the big businessmen on Wall Street driving, that had a chauffeur standing outside of it with a cap and suit and everything. My palms were already starting to get sweaty with nerves, struggling to keep a grasp on my bag as I made my way onto the sidewalk where the car was pulled up to the curb.

"Miss Chambers?" the driver asked to which I nodded. He smiled as if we were long lost friends being reunited after years before he swung the door open and motioned for me to get in.

Who I could only assume to be Styles was already there, propped up on the other side of the seat, wearing a freshly pressed black suit that looked rather expensive, which surprised me because his book covered the subject of the rich stealing from the poor in almost every section.

I would be lying if I said I didn't notice how handsome he was, his hair long and his body lean, enough to get my breath lodged in my throat as soon as I lay eyes on him. His face was angular, harsh like the deepness of his voice over the phone and his eyes were a shimmering green. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to write a serious column about him or one of those romance novels that they kept at the back of the library.

"Styles," I said as I climbed into my seat, resting my bag on my feet in the floor as to not take up too much room. His legs were already folded tightly to fit into the small space of the backseat, so I didn't want to inconvenience him any more.

"Is it Miss or Mrs. Chambers?" he asked, extending his hand for me to shake it.

"Miss," I said, simply, rubbing my hands down the front of the tweed of my dress before greeting him with the handshake, his strong grip being something that I was used to since I interacted almost strictly with professional men.

"Have you ever been to the 21 Club?" he asked as if it was nothing, but it was so far from nothing.

The 21 Club was an old speak easy that since the 1920s, the owners had turned into a prestigious restaurant that only the richest and most famous could go to. Presidents and celebrities and people that I would absolutely not ever fit in with frequented there like it was their favorite rest stop and it had always been one of those places that I'd marked off as an 'if I ever get rich I'll go there' kind of thing. It had twinkling gold lights that lined the intricate black metal of the railings and it just looked too expensive for me, even on the outside.

"I'm not dressed for it," I said, suddenly regretting spending all those hours in a fuss over clothes just to end up with my stupid green dress with the stupid gold belt.

"I think you'll be alright," he said, not seeming too concerned. The slack to his shoulders and his indifferent calmness was almost contagious, enough to make me relax into the seat instead of sitting straight as a board like an uncomfortably misplaced mannequin.

I didn't know whether to start asking him questions then or to wait until we got to the restaurant. It was a few miles away, the drive taking even longer with the pedestrian traffic of a Saturday night. It felt weird to be shoved up and surrounded by stuffy silence with a stranger, but he broke the seal of it before I could.

"Your name's Penelope and you're a writer, so people must call you Pen," he said, like he had been thinking about it for a while and had just then gotten around to saying it. I laughed because that's what the girls at school used to call me for that exact reason, but no one had since then. The men at work didn't take well to giving me nicknames other than 'the broad.'

"My friends used to."

"It's quite clever," he said, pressing his lips between his index finger and thumb as if he was deep in thought. I figured that he could've been. From what I'd read from him, he was extremely smart and obviously rather introspective, so I understood that he was constantly riding on his own train of thought.

"Do you want to answer some questions now?" I asked, deciding that it was best to be polite enough to ask instead of just doing it. I did need to tread carefully since this was new for the both of us.

"Wait until we get to the restaurant, eager beaver."

I wanted to know where he was getting all this money to afford a town car and a driver and a spot at the 21 Club, especially if they were just for me, someone he had only talked to the night before. I didn't even think he had had enough time to construct something like that so easily unless he was waving stacks of money beneath someone's nose. This couldn't have all been from his book because that's just not the kind of pay out that writing would have provided, but where could he be finding the time to do anything else if he was so busy shoveling out essays and samples?

One of the rudest things you can do is ask someone about their income, especially if your question is just simply centered around how they're managing to afford the activities that they're doing just for you, so I decided to check that off my mental list of topics I was dying to know more about, even if it contributed to my incessantly growing list of things he did that made him so contradictory in nature.

We arrived to the restaurant with a loud screech of tires, someone cutting us off conveniently in front of the entrance so no one could bother to complain. The driver opened my door for me again and I considered tipping him, but figured Styles already had that covered.

The first thing on my agenda was to find out his real name so I wouldn't have to call him Styles for the rest of the night, not knowing if that's what he preferred to be called. I was about to ask when he lead me into the dimly lit building, the sounds of our heels clacking against the wooden floors and the muffled sound of clattering dishes drowning out anything I could've said. I hoped that it would be easier to talk to him once we were seated.

Our table was right in the middle of the room, only a few feet away from the bar where there were a bunch of tall stools surrounding a man who was throwing up bottles just to catch him with his other hand and making a show out of rubbing the glasses off with his dish towel, swirling them in his hand as if there was no chance of them crashing to the ground. It was hard for me to pull my eyes away from him, this scene being new to me, and Styles had definitely noticed, his hand over his mouth to cover a grin when I looked back towards him.

"Should I call you Styles?" I asked as I sat my briefcase down on the table to remove a pen and paper so I could start gathering information about him. His eyes seemed to reflect the lights of the candles on the tables as if the flames were dancing just for him. I wanted to write that detail down so maybe I could put it in my column, but soon realized that that was creepy and uninteresting and far too poetic to put in the newspaper so I stopped my hand from writing it.

"Harry is fine, between you and me,"

"Is that your first name?"

"It would seem so," he said, tapping his finger on his nose lightly. I didn't understand what that meant, but I chose not to question it because I had bigger things to ask. I didn't want to my waste my time with something so trivial. The waiter was already at our table asking for our drinks, the hourglass in my head that was keeping my time getting emptier and emptier.

He ordered a whole bottle of champagne without even asking how much it was, told them to get him the best in the house and make it very chilled. I had to press my hand beneath my chin as if I was propping my head up in order to keep my jaw from hitting the table in awe.

"So, how long have you been writing?"

"Since college."

"Why'd you start?"

"To pass the time. Turns out, I'm kind of good at it," he winked. The way he talked about himself wasn't like the way the men at work did. When he gave himself a compliment, you could tell that it was in good humor, like any other joke you'd hear, not in a pompous, cocky way that made you want to throw up.

"And so you found out you were good at writing then decided to write your own personal manifesto? I apologize if I struggle to follow that sequence," I replied, honestly. I wanted to know why he wrote what he wrote and published it when he did, not to say I disagreed with him. I agreed with most of his points about the citizens of our country being pawns in the games of government leaders and big corporation owners, but I just didn't understand what had sparked the fire that had started within him that made him want to blow all his smoke onto the world.

He huffed out a laugh with his plump lips pulled into a smirk before answering.
"It's not a manifesto, dear. It's just how I feel. I wanted people to get a different take on things so they wouldn't just be blindly following a corrupt system. I didn't really declare anything, just said a whole lot."

I scribbled down every word that came from his mouth, endlessly grateful that he had a slow drawl to the words he spoke that gave me enough time to follow along with my pen. I nodded, satisfied enough with his answer.

"I agreed with what you said in it," I said because I felt like I needed to let him know that he had at least one person on the same page as him even if the rest of the country saw him as a nuisance that should've been minding his own business. I thought he kind of was minding his business. He lived in the country where he apparently had to experience the underhandedness of it every day, so how could it not be his business?

"You're a smart girl," he said, a sentence I wasn't used to hearing from anyone other than my father. It made my hands shake a little because then I really didn't want him to be unimpressed with me. I put my pen down so he wouldn't be able to tell. The champagne had arrived at our table anyways.

It was tall bottle of effervescent, shimmering gold, like they had managed to liquify someone's most expensive jewelry and turn it into a drink. He filled mine up to the brim to where it was hard for him to hand it to me without spilling, but only filled his flute about halfway. I didn't question why, just scrunched my nose as I let the fizz hit my face a little, trying to prepare for a sip. I had never had champagne. I didn't know what to expect.

"Haven't you ever had it before?" he asked, not judgmentally, just as if he were surprised. I shook my head.

"I'm more of a wine person, I guess."

He laughed before putting his fingers to the bottom of my glass, lightly pushing it to my lips and tipping it so that the drink would fall into my mouth, the bubbles making my tongue tingle but overall not tasting that bad. It was a little sour, almost like lemon, but I liked the way it was kind of sweet towards the end, as if it was confused about what it really wanted to be.

"Good?" he said as he sipped his own. I nodded, downing another few gulps before realizing that I should probably pace myself a little better. I didn't need to be getting drunk at a meeting like this.

The waiter came back to ask us what we were ordering, but I had no idea because I hadn't even bothered to look at the menu. Harry just ordered for me, telling him to give us two of something that I didn't quite catch because of all the commotion coming from the bar. I really didn't care if I liked the food or not. I was just happy to be there.

"You're not as quiet as I had expected," I told him, wondering why he didn't do this for everyone because he was actually delightful to be around.

"I'm not a quiet person. I just don't get out much. There's a difference."

"Why'd you get out tonight?"

"I thought that a lady reporter might be a good omen. You don't come across people like you very often at all."

Our food came before I could say anything else, the waiter spinning our plates around on his palm and chanting some ritual that sounded like Italian, before sliding them over to us. It looked good, like something I would've ordered if I had done it myself, a pasta with white sauce and green garnishing around it. I had never eaten food that looked like a painting before, but I figured I could get used to it if I had to. I was from a small town in Pennsylvania, only being out of the state for the years I went to college and came to work. They didn't have fancy things like this there and even if they did I don't think I would have been able to afford them.

I almost couldn't suppress a moan, managing to keep it as a hum that vibrated against my lips, as I took a big bite of my dinner. The cream sauce was rich enough to be considered a soup, bursting with a salty flavor that wasn't strong enough to be assaulting but was more intense than anything I had ever had. Harry pressed a napkin to his chin to try to cover up the smile on his face, obviously rather amused with just how much I was enjoying my food, probably so used to delicacies like that that it didn't even faze him.

"I'm sorry again about Pollock the other day. He gets whiny when he doesn't get his way," I said, trying to talk so I wouldn't be shoving forkfuls into my mouth one after the other. I wanted to come off more poised than that. After all, the only reason that I even landed the interview was because of how ungracefully my coworker had behaved.

"It's fine, really. It happens more than you'd think."

The rest of dinner was quiet, occupied by a few strings of small talk that didn't give me any information other than that it rained more on his side of the street than the other and that he was so sure of it he even bought a book about the weather from the print stand. I didn't think excerpts like that would work well for the column, but all I really had to put in there was that his name was Harry, not just Styles, and that he wrote in college. Neither of those made for a really good story, so my heart sank when the check came and I still had virtually nothing.

We took the same town car back home, my briefcase still on my shoes, but he was busy carrying on a conversation with his driver, whom I learned was named Charles and lived relatively near me even though I had never seen him before.

"You alright?" he asked, probably noticing the shift in my mood. I was no longer excited to go home and type up this story because it wouldn't take long and it was just short enough that if I handed it to my boss, he would hand it right back to one of the guys so that they could finish it. I knew Harry would deny them any chance to ask more questions, but it would still hurt seeing something that I had started, that I had been so hopeful for, be slid over the top of a metal desk that was just as cold as the hearts of anyone who could rob me of something so easily.

"Just full," I lied, not wanting to seem like I hadn't enjoyed my time because I really had. As a girl meeting a nationally headlining author, I was very satisfied with my night. But as a reporter, I just wasn't.

"Maybe we can meet again sometime since you didn't really get a lot of information tonight. Sometimes I can get a bit carried away when I'm being a show-off," he said as if he could read my mind. I couldn't help but smile one of those cheesy, ear-to-ear grins before nodding so quickly that I thought I might've given myself whiplash.

"Yes, yes, perfect. I'm off every Saturday."

"Then, I'll see you then," he said as we pulled up to my apartment, Charles letting me out with a smile and a soft goodbye.

I raced up the stairs to my floor, balancing everything in my hands while trying not to let my heart explode right out of my chest, almost in complete disbelief that the night I had just lived had been truly mine, like it easily could have just been a motion picture that I'd gotten too invested in.

I kicked off my shoes and plopped down on my couch, my head feeling as if it were floating on a cloud of contentment, as I read over the report Pollock had started on Harry.

It just said that it was a hopeless lead and to mark it off the possible headline list for the foreseeable future. I couldn't help but laugh, the paper in one hand and my other hand busy waving its middle finger in the air as if Pollock could see me.

"Those corporation leaders and government officials, the wealthy in general, sit on stacks of money so high that the middle class and below just look like little ants to them, ants that they can step on to solve the problem."
-Styles, 1959

{this was originally two chapters but I ended up just shoving them together so I hope it isn't too long or boring.

dedicated to my love @-midnightstyles she's the best ever and i'm very thankful for her feedback on my previous works.

how do we feel about meeting styles? do we like him so far?

regardless, thanks for reading and giving me your votes. it means loads.

all my love.}