Night Air

Chapter 54

Ryan glanced over to me with a raised eyebrow. "Alright. Go on."

I shifted in my seat. "It's about Niall." He didn't say anything and just silently encouraged me to continue; so I closed my eyes for a second and sighed. "I'm in love with him."

*Niall's POV*

"This is fucking stupid," I mumbled as I was taken to the side by airport security.

"Spread 'em," the old, black security guard demanded and I did just that for him while he use his stupid little medal detector to see what was metal on me.

It started to beep as his hand waved just under my chin and I sighed. I forgot to take something off. The man gave me a look and then pulled Alyssa's necklace out from underneath my shirt.

"You know you're supposed to take off all metal before going through the metal detector, right? That includes jewelry."

I just rolled my eyes at him and reached up to unclasp it. "Sorry. Just forgot."

Five minutes later I finally caught up to Stan on the other side of security and was mumbling every swear word I knew under my breath. Stan, however, looked anything but amused as he flipped through the pages of a magazine carelessly, ignoring my existence as if he didn't even know me. I rolled my eyes at him. Dickhead.

The ride passed by uneventfully as I slept most of the time and Stan continued to pretend not to know me. Was it because of my black eye, or what? I wasn't sure but for some reason Stan wasn't much for speaking to me unless he was telling me something about how I better behave when I get back to the hotel.

After arriving at the airport, I saw Tom was there to take me back to the hotel while Stan disappeared. "I've already been informed on everything by Stan. We aren't going to talk to any of the girls, and hopefully we won't see any of them anyways." I nodded my head and slowly started to take my neck-pillow-thing off from around my neck.

"If anyone asks about your eye," he continued, "you tell them you got mugged while visiting family in the big city since you spent time off to go visit your dying grandma." I nodded once more and sighed. He continued to tell me more and more about what I was to do and how I was to behave as we walked off to find his waiting taxi. Eventually, I got the hang of not really listening but still knowing when the appropriate times to nod my head were.

He did this until we finally got into the taxi, but then he resorted to not talking to me at all. At the beginning of this whole tour thing,  Tom would always be talking to me about something but then I think once he starting noticing just how much time I started to spend with Alyssa and once the rumors started flying, he stopped doing that. I missed happy and fun Tom.

But I guess it doesn't really matter what I liked. Never really did mattered. Just like I would prefer to have Alyssa with me but instead she's probably never going to talk to me again.

That made my heart sink as I thought about Alyssa. Fuck. How could I ever face her again? I just up and left without telling her why I was doing so and I just left her sitting there on the front steps of the hotel back in New York crying and begging me to stay. I just her there hurt and confused. I left her burnt.

I remembered back to that night in New York when we were out there on her balcony. I had just thrown up and she ran downstairs to find me crackers. When she came back, she must have been shocked to find me smoking a fag on her balcony. I was talking to her about how must she trusted me and I remember asking her if she had ever been burned; if she had ever gotten too close to someone or something or worked so hard for something just for it to fail.