There’s a light, seductive breeze as Harry Styles, pop star, style icon and British person steps onto the beach. The sand, so hot in the heat of the afternoon has cooled in the moonlight and Harry shivers as his toes sink in. It’s well past midnight, but the sky is clear and the moon is full, bright enough that Harry can see the ocean clearly as it laps coquettishly at the shore.
Harry plods down the beach until he reaches the edge of the water. He’s exhausted, he’s had a long day of being compared to Mick Jagger. Not that Harry Styles minds the resemblance, but he bristles at the thought of spending an entire career making era-defining music only to have his legacy be a fucking Maroon 5 song. “No thank you,” thinks Harry Styles. “No thank you, kindly.”
He leaves his clothes in a pile on the sand and starts confidently towards the water. It’s cold. Not freezing, but cold enough to make all four of his nipples stand erect. Meanwhile, thirty yards off shore a shark swims languidly through the turgid Atlantic waters, blissfully unaware of Harry Styles letting his just-shorn testicles hang out in the breeze.
Harry wades into the water and when it reaches his first set of nipples he stops and closes his eyes. The night is quiet, the only sound high tide’s bawdy symphony. He flips onto his back and begins to swim, staring at the stars and wishing, not for the first time, for a tail like a proper mermaid.
Harry Styles, despite being relatively aware of his surroundings for a person and extremely aware of his surroundings for a pop star, remains oblivious to the shark swimming lecherously nearby.
The shark, being a shark, has no way of knowing that the legs dangling so tantalizingly in its periphery are in any way famous or swoon worthy. Sharks, after all, don’t swoon. They sometimes get sex drunk after eating too much bloated whale carcass, but they don’t swoon.
Harry notices the shark at the same moment the shark notices him. Harry freezes, the world seems to slow down and in that moment, nothing else matters. Nothing but the 17 feet of muscle and sex swimming towards him. The shark probably would have frozen too, if it could stop swimming, which it can’t, since sharks never stop swimming. Not ever. Not even for pop stars with nice legs and luscious hair.
Remember, sharks don’t feel. They don’t get sad, they don’t fall in love and they certainly don’t totally freak out about boys. That being said, the shark starts to get a tight feeling in its stomach, its heart starts to flutter and the area around its gills flushes. If the shark had the vocabulary, it would probably say it was super nervous.
The shark swims forward with false confidence, brushing its pectoral fin sensually along Harry Styles’ belly. Harry gasps and the shark worries its been too forward. Taylor Swift probably let Harry come to her. The shark is always doing this! It is not in a shark’s nature to dwell, however, and it curves in a slow, languid loop, turning back towards Harry, who is still bobbing seductively on the surface.
This time the shark dips lower and swims towards Harry Styles, turning at the last moment so its tail flicks against Harry’s hip. Harry Styles, sex symbol, millionaire and noted banana enthusiast giggles despite himself. He thinks two can play at that game as he runs his toe suggestively along the shark’s dorsal fin.
The shark is excited. It hasn’t felt so alive since it destroyed one of Chris Fallow’s styrofoam seals in 2011. The shark knows where this is going. Harry Styles knows where this is going. There’s no need for foreplay. The shark takes one last moment to take in the sight of Harry Styles, dancer, romancer and midnight prancer, as he salaciously treads water.
Harry wonders if the sharks knows it’s beautiful. He hopes so, because he doesn’t think sharks have ears and he’s not sure how to translate his chart-topping number one songs into panicked splashing. That’s the last thought Harry Styles has before the shark sinks its teeth into his pulsing abs.
The first bite is agony, but, like, sexy agony. The shark is overwhelmed by the desire to eat him quickly, but the shark also wants to take its time. This is probably its only chance to eat Harry Styles and it’ll be damned if it doesn’t take the time to savor every moment.
Harry, for his part, is unsurprised by the turn of events. He’s amazed it took this long for a pop star to be eaten by a shark. He hopes One Direction survives without him. Niall will have to be the cute one and the sexy one now. The shark is gnawing obscenely on his hip and Harry wonders if he’s the first boy the shark has eaten. He hopes so.
It could be minutes, it could be hours, neither Harry Styles or the shark is sure, both so consumed with each other, one much more literally. The rest of the ocean fades into a background rhythm of sea water, blood and an increasing amount of bone fragments. The shark eats Harry’s heart last, because it’s symbolic and romantic and also because it tastes the best.
Harry Styles and the shark only spend 37 minutes together. Three days if you count how long it takes the shark to digest him. Three days doesn't seem like a long time, but in shark days, it was almost seven days, a shark week.
