Zayn and Niall: Everybody Needs Somebody Sometimes

Pool Day

The hours crawled slowly away, while the hot afternoon sun burned bright outside his window. Niall had been sitting in his chair uselessly for a long time, not energetic enough to do anything productive. He had literally exhausted every source of entertaintment over the past couple of hours. He'd tried drawing, singing, composing, cleaning out his room, rearranging the hair products on his dresser drawer - nothing had worked. He felt sluggish and tired and lazy, too bored for anything at all. 

That was the worst part. Being alone with nothing to do left him at the mercy of his own thoughts, and somehow they always seemed to spiral right back down to Zayn. Sometimes they were tinged with the usual self-digust, but mostly they focused on Zayn's smile and his eyes and his voice when he laughed. 

As if some form of cosmic intervention had decided to either torture him further or alleviate his already painful position, his iPhone lit up with a text. It was from Louis, fraught with his careless typing and complete lack of knowledge on how to use punctuation: "we r going swimming !! Coming ?  :)"

Niall stared at the small font of the text, considering his options carefully. No doubt, Zayn would be there. That would mean more heartbreak, more confrontations that he wasn't ready to face. But staying meant that he was stuck here alone with absolutely nothing at all to do. 

It didn't take long to make up his mind. He replied with: sure , I 'll come . :)

Grabbing a pair of swimming trunks and a polo shirt, he went out the door.

Downstairs, Louis, Zayn, Liam and Harry were all draped in bathrobes over their swimsuits. They smiled as Niall arrived, sure that this was a sign he was returning back to normal. Harry swung his arm around Niall's shoulder and started a bright, lively conversation about the new kittens that his sister Gemma had adopted, how one of them had been not-so-subtly named Harold, and how he'd be happy to show Niall a picture if he so pleased. 

Niall responded appropriately, tensely aware of Zayn's silence as they walked out onto the back gardens. While they made their way to the wide pool, he made a concerted effort to avoid Zayn as much as he possibly could. He didn't look at him, speak to him. He didn't even allow himself to think of him. The pretense and ignorance worked up to his advantage to a certain extent, because he managed to get to the pool without feeling any sense of remorse. While the other boys unraveled their protective layers of clothing, Niall slid into the water, grateful at his decision not to wear a bathrobe.

He was having so much fun that he didn't notice Harry, Liam and Louis creep up in the water behind him and grabbed his foot. He screamed, yanking himself away, only to turn around to find his friends laughing.

Zayn splashed into the water, going in for a moment before surfacing. As Niall turned to look at him, his heart stopped.

Oh, God.

Zayn was shirtless, wearing only a pair of black swimming shorts. Niall's eyes went over his black hair, matted with water onto his forehead as he flipped it out of his eyes. Traveling down, Niall saw the face, brown eyes and smile crinkles at nineteen, chiseled down to the last beautiful detail. Then there was his chest, torso, tanned to a shade of bronze that shouldn't have been possible, but was standing right in from of him.The skin was firm over hard muscles in his abdomen, the spectacular sight of water droplets glistening on his skin, sliding down and dripping off as if he were too attractive to stay on.

The back of Niall's mouth ran dry.

Even standing there, in the pool and staring at this glorious boy, Niall could feel himself grow hard. Every muscle in his body was tightening, and flashes of what he could do with Zayn were appearing in his mind, forcing him to bend down, let out a low moan underwater.

Zayn waded through the water to him, offered him a small smile. Innocent. As if he didn't know how attractive he was, how beautiful and sculpted. "Hey," he said quietly. "I'm glad you showed up. We've missed you, you know."

Niall opened his mouth and no words came out. He was finding it hard to focus when he couldn't forcibly draw his eyes off of Zayn's gleaming pectorals.

Zayn, however, looked right into Niall's eyes, fidgeting around like he couldn't decide on what to say but wanted to keep the conversation going anyway. "I was thinking, about what you said, and--"

A wild, rhapsodic flutter of hope started beating itself around Niall's chest. He tried to quash it, but it was petulant. "And?"

Zayn opened his mouth, eyes soft and warm and kind, and Niall leaned forward, aching to hear what he was about to say, when -

"Look out!" Louis screamed as he hurled a ball in their direction. Niall ducked, and Zayn caught it deftly, before passing it back to Louis.

"Am I a fool for, fool for falling for you gurrrl?" Harry screamed out ghetto version of Greyson Chance. "Please don't break my heart, Cheyenne!"

Niall turned back to Zayn, but the moment had shattered. Zayn's attention was drawn away, toward the ball that the boys were tossing around. Niall's chest deflated a little, but he was grateful for the prolonged opportunity to gaze, like a besotted schoolgirl, at Zayn.

Liam caught the ball from Louis, threw it to Niall, but Louis managed to intercept it and he passed it to Harry. From then, this became a little game, forming teams and passing the ball around. Zayn and Niall and Liam against Louis and Harry. They played for an hour, the game taking several turns as time went on. First the objective was to pass the ball to teammates, then it was to throw it into a designated "net" in the water. They split teams and went solo, then formed a large group and played together.

After a few hours, their fingers started to turn pruny, so they climbed out of the pool and went to sit on the deck chairs. Niall was flushed, laughing and breathless for the first time in a long time. 

"Niall?" Zayn called, his voice ringing out a little, like an angel's - and shit, no. Niall couldn't keep this up, couldn't be as infatuated as he actually was. "Help me put the sunblock, please?" Zayn was flipped over onto his stomach, holding out the tube of sunblock. "You're the only one who gets it right."

"Uh, sure," Niall found himself shaking as he unsteadily made his way to Zayn, taking up the tube and squeezing sunblock onto his palm. He tried to remember how he used to do this, before everything, how Liam and Louis and Harry were awful at putting sunscreen on. The foam was cool in his hand, but as he bent down to apply it to Zayn's back, an unnatural heat filled his body, his throat itching. His hand touched Zayn's back, and he exhaled slowly as he gently spread the sunblock over Zayn's skin.

He continued evenly rubbing foam onto Zayn's skin, but he was trembling, like someone had started off tremors and shivers inside him. Somehow, he managed to finish the job with unsteady hands within five minutes.

"Are you alright?" Zayn turned around, eyes widening as he looked up. And then a sudden realization seemed to strike him, and his eyes opened wider, his mouth fumbling apologetically. "Shit, sorry, I didn't-- I forgot that-"

Niall shook his head, his face heating up, as he dropped the tube of sunblock. "No, don't-- I'm not a--" he stammered, "I'm fine, oh my God, don't--" he took a deep breath, and said, "I'm sorry, sorry, sorry."

Using this as some sort of valid apology, he pulled away and excused himself, breaking into a sprint toward his bedroom, and locking the door, hiding away from everything that he wasn't strong enough to face just yet.

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