Broken (a Niall Horan love story)

Chapter 27

***Niall's P.O.V.***

Navaeh slept a lot. When she was with me she was usually curled up next to me or on top of me while she slipped into a dream state. The doctors had warned me about that kind of behavior; they said that she might be that way for a few day. I was glad that I was able to keep her in the flat with me while she was in such a state. It was better that she got her rest, and I made sure to give her her peace. Whenever she would doze off I would turn down the TV and try to relax as much as I could. Even though the days were pretty empty without her conversation, I couldn't complain about the close proximity that she was keeping. It was like I had my own cuddly penguin with me half the time.

Quite often when she was sleeping, I would play with her hair and think while the sound of people talking on the TV drifted through the room. It was a nice, calming place to think about what plagued my mind, and at that moment it was what I had seen a few days prior. When Navaeh had taken off her shirt in front of me, I hadn't looked away. No, I wasn't trying to sneak a peek of anything; my eyes had just caught on a mark on her back.

Navaeh had changed in front of me before; we were close friends and neither of us really had a problem with it because we knew that the other would turn away to give some extra privacy. However, I had never actually paid very close attention to the faint marks on her back. There were scratches and scars there; the once perfect canvas had been ripped in places from abuse that I had just recently found out about. There were even bruises that were just starting to fade, and looking at it all just made me want to kill her step father even more. I'd never say this about anyone except for him: there was a special place in hell for him.

Navaeh was so wonderful; she had this little thing that she did in her sleep where she fisted at my shirt and her nose would scrunch in her sleep. It was one of the most adorable things that I had ever seen, and the innocence of it all was hard to handle. I'd look down at her with a smile, but it would soon be wiped away at the dominant thought; how could someone hurt Navaeh like that? How could you see someone so perfect and precious and just want to hit them or scratch them? How could you even think about hurting them?

A dull ringing came from Navaeh's back pocket, and the sound made her stir in her spot. Without opening her eyes or looking up at me, she reached her hand back into her pocket and got out her old flip phone. She flipped it open before pressing it to her ear, but she didn't lift her head from my shoulder. Because of our close proximity, I could hear the other side of the conversation fairly well, and I listened in at first just to see who it was.

"Hello?" she greeted and the groggy tone of her voice was very evident in the words.

"Hey, Navaeh, it's Cody," the person answered, and I tried not to let my muscles tense too noticeably. Since my arms were wrapped around Navaeh protectively, she probably felt the change. "I wanted to apologize again for missing the movie; I really wish that I could have gone." My ears perked up at his words, and the frown on my lips deepened. They had had a date? I understand why I didn't know about it; after all, we hadn't been talking at that point and he was the reason. The idea of them being alone in a dimly lit theater wasn't very comforting, though. My fists clenched despite my greatest efforts to get them to relax. Hopefully, Navaeh hadn't seen the reaction; I didn't want her to think that all of this upset me as much as it did because I was fearful of another fight or that she would push me away because she couldn't talk to me about things like that. I was supposed to be there for her, and I couldn't do that if I was letting my judgmental side get to me.

 "It's fine, really," she assured him with a smile seeping into her assurance, "if you're sick then you're sick."

There was a chuckle from the other side of the phone, and then he spoke, "speaking of being sick, did you catch the bug? I didn't see you today at school." What a weak way to transition into a different subject. Plus, could he have said anything that would have made him seem any more desperate; he had been seeking her out at school and he was going to bring that up? And I couldn't be sure, but it sounded like he had an American accent. That would really just explain everything about why I didn't like him; the teenage boys in that country seemed like the worst.