Like A Hole In The Head → [Lilo] ✔️

Chapter 2

The first reporter comes round on Monday, like she's starting a new week right by driving down to Wolverhampton to harass a police officer.

That's not fair, though: she's not harassing anyone, really. She's just standing outside the station, checking her phone and waiting for Liam to come out. He's told her twice that he's not got anything to say, but she's literally not taking no for an answer. The next time Niall comes back from a call, he sticks his head into Liam's office.

"Still there, mate," he reports. "You wanna tell me what that's about?"

He says it like it's no matter, either way. Liam could probably just say no and never hear of it again, but he's known Nialler three years now and if one of them's going to have to cite her for loitering then Liam might as well make clear why.

"Yeah," Liam says. Where do you start with something like this? he thinks. When he looks up, Niall's in the extra chair, picking his fingernails with a paperclip. "You know that bloke Louis Tomlinson," Liam says.

"Everyone does, yeah," Niall says, like that's a perfectly reasonable way to begin a conversation about a tiny newspaperwoman stalking Liam at his place of work.

"I was married to him," Liam rushes out. "Like, just for a bit, we got divorced."

Niall looks at him for a good three seconds before he says, "Before he was famous, or in secret, like?"

"Before," Liam says. This is -- this probably how he ought to have predicted things might go: just Niall asking all the logical, pertinent questions like everything that'd transpired made plenty of sense, if you'd got the details, like murder or arson or petty larceny or marrying your pre-uni drama-camp summer fling was the sort of thing anyone might do.

"How long were you together?" Niall asks, tossing the paperclip on Liam's desk.

"Six -- seven months, about, if you count before we actually got married." Liam shouldn't feel ashamed of it, he knows; it was ages ago and he was young and dumb and all that. Still, he can't help feeling there's something wrong him, that any of it happened. He knows it was stupid, eighteen or not, to marry a bloke a month into knowing him, and he knows it was well doomed to fail, but there's -- maybe he's being regressive, as Dani used to say, but somewhere in all the leftover mess of it is a niggling sense of failure at not making it work.

"What happened?" Niall says, and Liam should've been expecting that too. Always saving the best for last, leading up to the hard ones like they're just the next rational question.

"Em," Liam twists his fingers. "We fought a lot. He got bored. Got tired of me, I guess," he says.

In retrospect, he's never been really sure what did happen. It didn't make any more sense for them to break up than it had for them to get together, honestly: they'd been fueled on hormones and in-jokes and really, really fantastic sex and none of it had gone away or anything -- they'd fought a lot beforethey'd gotten married, and they hadn't fought more afterwards. Liam had driven Louis up the fucking wall and Lou had made Liam want to scream, and the best Liam could figure was that, at some point, it just hadn't been worth it for Louis anymore.

"Hm," Niall says. "Well, I don't like him," he decrees, mystery solved. Liam loves him for it, he does, but he also doesn't want anyone hating Louis over this. Not wanting to be married to Liam isn't a crime.

"Niall, it was a long time ago. I was eighteen," Liam says. "I wasn't much of a catch back then." Self-deprecation never goes over that well with Niall, but sometimes he can slip it by, as a joke.

"We met when you were nineteen, mate. I was there," Niall laughs. "Did he -- did it change you?" he asks, too fucking sharp for someone who's just given himself an office-supplies manicure.

Liam can feel his face scrunching up while he thinks, but it's not -- it's not that simple.

"I don't think divorce changed me," he says, finally.

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-MAY