"What Happened to us Melly?" Those had been Harry's last words while I shooed him away from my door with perhaps no satisfying response for either of us. His eyes had been pointed at the floor, thank god, because the forlorn glow of his green iris' over the course of our retroactive breakup would live inside me like a parasite picked up on a foreign holiday. Nesting down along with happy memories of gilded youth and glossy first love to color the memories with bile and sick.

I hadn't answered and I could tell, because I still knew him, that he ached to hug me. But I didn't open my tightly crossed arms to him. After the night, the conversation, my flinging myself upon him and the way we had just bashed ourselves on the shores of our memories these were the most painful moments since I ran in the first place.I just couldn't. The idea of his arms around me and his smell in my nose and his broad back under my hands would have undone me. His affection was always the key to the lock I kept upon the secret me.

She was a mess right now, I couldn't have her come out, even though I could hear her wailing to break free. I kept my arms wrapped tightly around me so I could keep her inside where she belonged and maybe to give the both of us a second best comfort.

I don't recommend having a breakup three years after the fact. Or breaking up at all when you still intensely love the person because you are afraid. This was not a case of better to have loved and lost. Nobody left my living room feeling like a winner. And I didn't even get to leave.

Why did I run? Move country on him and change my number?

I was scared. Because when we were good we were so good, but when we were bad, there was nothing left of me. I was empty swimming pool, a thing just waiting to be filled with purpose when he was away. He was away alot. The parts of us that fit together were like a my first puzzle, easy and obvious. The problem was we were missing pieces. Some of the missing links may have come with experience. Maybe had we loved later, when we weren't barely out of the womb and thrust into flashbulb lights, we may have survived.

His hand on mine had loosed feelings I thought long-flushed. I didn't talk for some time, and he even in that moment against all of his instincts, knew better than to touch me anymore or anywhere more intimate than my fingers. Even that touch was a trigger, not for my tongue, just for tears.

One night, after, when I was dissecting all the ways he was wrong so I could justify my decision, I realized a fundamental incompatibility of ours; our very own irreconcilable difference. Harry was a great talker, but didn't hear me as time went on. I was a great listener, but when he stopped talking I wasn't able to start.

I sucked up my breath and swiped my dress sleeve under my nose, since he had seen me in every state from ecstatic to enraged, there was no front to put up.

"I.." I gulped. "I don't know."

He gripped my hand and his jaw hardened.

"No, no," I quieted him. His grip remained just the right side of painful. "I mean, Harry." My voice cracked. "We were over, weren't we? Just neither of us wanted to acknowledge it."

He was shaking his head. "No, Melody. You may have been done, but I didn't think we were anywhere near done. You at least owed me the courtesy of a call if not a face to face conversation. Being abandoned--" He sniffed and looked away. "Like, I know things had been rough for a while—"

"Harry, we hadn't spoken, beyond a vague text or two, in over a month. The times we had spoken, we fought. I'm not even sure what we fought over. We may as well have been exploding over jam. We either had nothing to say to one another or we yelled. I understand why you didn't want to call. I wouldn't have wanted to listen to my whining either. And you had no convenient sickness to blame your silence on that time, and," I bit my lip. "And I saw the pictures."

"What pictures?" His brows shot up and crossed.

To be fair, there were so many that chipped at me and built the road away I couldn't pinpoint which ones exactly.

At first they had been easy to gloss over. At least then I figured out who Jeff was. When I say Harry out at concerts and sharing cake with him. But it hurt that I had to do research on my boyfriend's best friend rather than him gushing about it to me, even over the phone, or just knowing because I was enmeshed in the fabric of his life. I never asked though. I should have. If it was important.

"Of you. And your life, in LA. And your friends." I swallowed that last word. I still don't believe he cheated, but seeing him out with beautiful girls who ran in the same circles still stung.

He must have picked up on my tone, because his brow was a picture of confusion. "What friends?" His accent had changed, but he still dropped his t's often. It made my lips lift a little when I noticed the similarities, even if he wasn't exactly who he used to be. My Harry was still there, the bedrock of the sweet hurting man before me.

I liked this Harry, very much, even with all the unfamiliar things about him. He looked so healthy and I was so happy to see him taking care of himself. The sting was that he must be being taken care of, and I wasn't doing it. Maybe I had been so bad at it, he had had to go looking for a better Florence Nightingale. From the looks of his, she was some bed nurse.

"The Azoffs and Jenner's—"

He cut me off. "I wasn't with Kendall." He looked down and broke his sacred eye contact. "Not then."

I knew she had come after me from that. I thought that first cut couldn't get deeper once it scarred over. I was wrong.

"Honestly , H." He sucked in a breath at such a little letter. But it was a lead balloon in the air between us. "I knew that even then. But, the idea of you with other girl's kept me up at night. Came into my dreams and theived my rest." My voice broke a little over the revelation. "The worst part was then I was awake though. I could see why you wanted someone with a bigger life and ambition if you did. Someone with a life like yours. Somebody better."

He was shaking his head at me. "Somebody better?" Can a scoff be comforting? "I wanted you, and us. I thought that I had, like proved that to you. I tried so hard to prove it. Like, to show you I loved you in all the little ways you loved, and in big ways too. Melly, I flew across space and time for you." He gave me a sad smile.

"Did you ever think we maybe tried to hard.... Like maybe we weren't meant to be and I shouldn't have pushed you to be with me. Maybe that was our first mistake, not staying just friends." I'd thought so much about this. He never wanted to be mine, I made him think he was in love with me, I'd decided. He was reluctant to have me, and then I offered my virginity up on a silver platter. Of course he found a few feeling to press together to make something up. He stuck around after because Harry didn't like to hurt people. I'm sure that's why he stuck around so long. It's also was why it was so easy to leave me behind and forget me when he had to go away. And I was so arrogant, I thought the enormity of my feelings could cover us both.

"Melody," He rubbed over the ring on my finger, and started to trace the familiar letters. I wondered if he worried his ring too. "Angel, we were never friends. I was so happy to see you in that hallway that night. I could have sent Michael a thank you. I'd been watching you for weeks, I'd even started reading the book you had one day so I could start, um, a conversation with you. But the next time you had another book I hadn't read. I, like, knew right away that I should know you. That I wanted to know you. You seemed like a rock tour was the last place you wanted to be, so cool and more grown up than the bunch of boys dancing around the world. Like, I tried to read every book you did, but I couldn't give up, so I started to try to wear shirts from like, the same bands as you." His cheeks glowed with his admission.

"You never told me that." The idea that he always saw me as more would have made a difference, at some point. Not today though.

"I think our, like, biggest problem was that I didn't tell you enough. We skipped over some, um, some really important conversations. Like, how scared I was to lose you after I got to know you. Ran from my feelings for a long time because of it. But I was afraid I'd fuck it up. Big mistake that," He looked at me. "Think it's why you have trouble trusting my feelings. I am shit at relationships."

I gulped. He was right. I hadn't always trusted him with my heart, because I doubted his feelings. But I never asked, just like I didn't ask about his expanding universe.

"Seems like you have some good ones now." I let it hang in the air.

"Do you mean, my, um, my girlfriend?" He avoided my eye line.

"Kind of, maybe?" I looked away to. "But we don't have to talk about her if its make you uncomfortable."

"No Melly, No more avoiding uncomfortable things! I don't do that anymore, learned my lesson." He rose his voice and pinned me with a glance and didn't have to say he meant me. He sighed. "You still havent told me why though, love. Why did you leave me?"

"Harry, did you ever consider that maybe you left me first?" I met his gaze with a fire of my own. How dare he!

"No Melody. I did not leave. Especially didn't leave you without even a fuck you have a nice life like you did."

"Harry, you had an entire life you excluded me from."

He looked like broken bobble head. "No, I didn't. Never hid anything from you on purpose."

I could eccept that. That it was an extreme form of compartmentalization. The way he had his life in LA, and his family and London, and is sad little girlfriend all the way in Australia.I was trying to be mature enough to understand. Hell, I was guilty of it these days.

"Baby, " I ran my finger over his letters. "It was this whole other world, other life, that I wasn't part of." The next part was the sharp bit. "That you didn't talk to me about. That you wouldn't share with me."

"I couldn't, I wasn't—" He squeezed my hand. "We were just friends then. I mean we talked about now, and it wasn't meant to be public—"

"Baby." I choked on that word. "When did I become public?"

His color left him then. And he hung his head, like an alter boy caught stealing from the offertory. I think that is when he got it, but instead of a light bulb turning on, it went dim.

"See, Harry, we were already over. We just never said it." Like everything else.

"Melody." He looked up at me and he was weepy too. "You couldn't have talked to me about this? Instead of running?"

"What was there to say Harry?"

"Apparently goodbye, Angel." He took my other hand then and he was whispering. "Did I not deserve, like at least that? Didn't we deserve at least a goodbye? Melody, we deserved a last chance."

"I couldn't have said goodbye to you, not even," I bit my lip and looked up, "Not even over the phone. I would have just heard your voice and done whatever you said." An edge came into my voice at that. "And I still would have been there, in my parent's house, waiting."

His voice had a pointed tip too, "I wasn't worth waiting on? We weren't?" He skid his teeth together so hard I heard it.

"Had I felt like I was waiting on you, and not a phone call, a text, some fucking form of long-distance communication, but you! It might have been. All I did was wait for you, think of you! Did I even cross your mind? For fuck's sake, Harry! You were supposed to love me! You wrote me songs, you called me your angel. God dammit, you told me I was home, and you couldn't pick up a phone, for fuck's sake?"

"Melody!" He rose his voice and took a breath to calm it back down. When he spoke my name again it was a pleading, "Melody, phones work both ways. I was still running on the hamster wheel. I'm selfish, I know," he emphasized. "But I needed you to carry me, us, a little, because I wasn't able to."

"So, since I loved you more and you were somebody, I should have done it all for you? That's so fucking unfair!" I'd yanked my hands away and flashed them as high as the volume of my voice.

"No-I-I don't think I mean that." I turned my body into him.

"Harry, but you do. And, Baby, I did." I was a butterfly with dampened wings, "I looked through, my old phone. When I was angry and needed to find some guts or a bloody backbone. That last break, separation, um." Why this still tore my guts out, I couldn't fathom. I put an arm across myself to hold them in "I initiated contact all but twice." I hung my head.

"That can't be true." He was shaking his head, but he knew it was. What profit would it be to lie about it now?

"Harry, my whole life was you. But I think I was a smaller and smaller part of yours. And you didn't try to fix it. Didn't care to." This time I gripped his hand. Harry was good, and hearing his faults always led to him reciminating himself endlessly. I didn't want him to feel like that.

"But why didn't you talk to me? Why didn--?" He looked up and his eyes glowed a new green when the light hit the damp of them. "Why, Angel?"

"Because I needed to save me. Your indifference--"

"I'm not indifferent to you, never."

"Not on purpose, Harry. But in practice..I think you were just falling out of love with me--"

"No." He let go of my hand and struck my statement out of the air. "I was always in love with you. Like, I thought about you all the time." His face softened. "Melody, how can you not know that?" He waited and swallowed. I had no answer. "But things were so crazy out of control. It's why I'm so protective of my time now. So I can give the people I have time. Back then, there was never enough to give you the share of it I wanted."

"Harry, I would have taken anything." Pathetically me I heard the sad break in my voice and wished it was not true.

"You deserved more than two minutes in the back of a car before I had to be somewhere!" Harry swore and rubbed my ring like it was a bible he was taking an oath on.

I took my hand back. "No, I deserved at least that."

He sat back then and laid his head over the back of the couch. "How can this still hurt so bad?" He looked at me like I knew anything.

"I don't know, baby." And I really had not a clue. We had years, miles, and continents of separation and we were both still being bashed upon the rocks of our heartbreak.

But maybe I did.I hurt so bad, because it was him. Because it was me.

Because it WAS him.

Because it WAS me.

"Maybe I did us a favor, when I ran. Imagine how much more it would have hurt then." I tried to smile, really I did.

"No! You're wrong there, angel. You were always the smart one. But you're wrong. It would have hurt, but, um, we wouldn't have three years of misunderstanding between us now. I know you feel like you waited on me. But I spent years waiting on you. I, I.. I even called your old phone sometimes, to hear your voice." He drew himself up. "Still, and then I went to Jamaica, and you." He brought his hand to his face, like he couldn't stand me looking at him. And you, um, came out. Like only you. I thought I was over it. Really, it had been years. And I'd." he bounced his knee. "I'd gotten good at not thinking about you. Maybe that's why I was so blocked. All my best songs were you, and I was trying desperately not to um, even think about you. Or your face, or us" he sat up abruptly then, and pinned me to the wall with a stare, like an entomology specimen. "I go to Jamaica, and all I can think is of us there. How we never got even a holiday. Because I hid you. Why, Why--why did I do that Melly? I cut us off at the knees so many times. So, all my regret, all my ache, everything came out. It was you and me and us. And I couldn't shut it off. I wanted you to hear it and come to me. But instead, you broke me again. How could you move on like this, Angel? Do you love him?" I had not time because he just kept rambling, blubbering. He was in a right strop. His voice going up. "Living with him. You were supposed to be for me, Melody, Me? You can't love him, not really, not like me?"

That time he waited on me. But I had no words. None to say, none to write and none to offer. I didn't want to love anybody like him. Not ever again.

"Why did you break me?" And then he sobbed in earnest.

Why did I break me?