Larry Stylinson - Turning From Praise (AU)

11.

“Then where did you meet these friends, if not from school or church? You don’t go anywhere – or at least, you never used to. It seems like you’re never in the house these past few weeks…” she mused, then came back to herself with a little jerk, eyeing him suspiciously.

If possible, Louis wanted to avoid the subject of where he was spending all his time these days – the fewer lies he could tell, the better. He wasn’t enjoying all of this deception. And he didn’t like having to hide things from his family – they were close-minded, often rude and forcibly ignorant, refusing to eventry to understand other people’s views (having once shared these values himself, he easily recognized them and felt a little sickened) but they were still his family. He did love them, even if he didn’t particularly like them anymore. Which was why he said truthfully, without coming up with an answer which would be more likely to satisfy her and reduce the amount of trouble he was in by at least a tiny bit, “At the music store.”

“HMV?”

“Yes, HMV, why does it matter? What other music stores are there?”

She folded her arms defensively. “There’s…there’s that little music shop next to the library!”

“Mum,” Louis said impatiently, “they sell vinyl records.”

“Don’t change the subject! How do you mean, you met them at the music store? Did you arrange to meet them there beforehand?”

“No,” Louis said, fighting to keep his temper in check although his irritation was simmering closely under the surface, quickly becoming anger as it came to the boil. “We were both in the shop at the same time, looking at the same CD. We got talking about the band, and then –” and then he ran out of the shop in a rush to help an old lady who needed assistance while I ran like the wind in the other direction because I was terrified of him “ – we talked about some other stuff, like school and that, and realized we had quite a lot in common –” I figured out I had a massive crush on him and we both like guys and he taught me how not to be an arsehole about it “ – so we just kind of became mates, really. We hang out quite a lot now.” I go round to his house and we listen to bands that you would disapprove of and if you heard them you would probably fetch holy water to drown the members in, hang out with his friends at places you wouldn’t be seen dead in, and then we slope off to his house and snog while his mother offers me pie and treats me like her second son despite the fact that our whole family is always horrifically rude to her. Oh, and I just gave him a blowjob. This last thought made Louis very nervous; despite having checked his reflection in the windows of every parked car he passed on the way home, he was still paranoid that there might be some kind of telltale stains around his mouth or on his shirt or something. He worriedly licked his lips.

Continuing to eye him speculatively, Jay frowned, clearly lost in thought. All of a sudden, her eyes widened with excitement, and she demanded “Is it a girl?”

He couldn’t help himself; he snorted. His mother had jumped to the obvious – and correct – conclusion that he was having a secret relationship with someone. Thanks to the gender neutral pronouns and his stubborn use of ‘they’ rather than ‘he’, he had an opportunity to hide behind this imaginary girlfriend and hopefully fend off any suspicions that he’d been ‘hanging out with the wrong crowd’.

The negative side, however, was that if he took this chance and ran with it, stringing her along and pretending there was a secret girlfriend in the equation, not only would she be angry that he’d neglected to tell her about said girlfriend, but she would also demand to meet her, meaning that Louis would have to find a girl willing to endure his parents’ scrutiny, pretend to be his girlfriend and maintain the facade for a prolonged amount of time in order to satisfy them, going on hundreds of family outings, attending meals and dates set by his mother in order to judge whether the girl was ‘suitable’ enough for Louis. He could also imagine her relentlessly grilling any ‘girlfriend’ on her religious beliefs, refusing to allow her back over the threshold if she wasn’t a strict Catholic, and demanding to meet her parents within mere days of meeting the girl herself.