Heroes of the Orange Skies

Part 16

Niall is looking at Louis with something like incredulity on his face. They’re sitting on the hard floor behind the counter at the record shop where Niall spends most of his days. It’s after closing time, dark outside. The shop is on a busy street, so club-goers and shoppers are still bustling by and they can hear the dull roar of life happening beyond the doors of the shop, but here in the safety of the darkness behind the counter, Louis is comfortable, resting his head back against the side of the counter.

“So what you’re telling me,” Niall says, and runs his hand through his hair while bringing the joint back to his mouth and taking a drag, “is that somebody who seems to get you,” he puts emphasis on the word get, “wants to meet you, and you’re afraid to.”

Louis nods.

“Why?”

“What if the person isn’t what I thought they would be?”

“What do you mean?” Niall passes the joint to Louis. The shop is going to smell disgusting by the end of this conversation, and Louis doesn’t envy whoever it is that has to open shop in the mornings, and will have to air out the vague smell of weed.

“Like, what if,” Louis waves his hand around, the smoke trailing after him, “what if this person is a forty year old pervert?”

Niall just looks at him. “Who do you want it to be?”

Louis sighs and inhales some of the smoke into his lungs, coughing a bit, because it’s been awhile since he really had a conversation with Niall, and thus it’s been awhile since he smoked weed. “I want it to be somebody that I feel, like, an instant connection with, y’know? Like, we’d get on from the word go.”

Niall nods and tilts his head back against the counter, closing his eyes. They sit in silence for a bit, and the moonlight breaks over the lip of the counter making the hair’s on Niall’s bare leg shine silver. His face is in complete shadow from the snapback balanced precariously on his head. “Does Harry know about this?”

No. No, he doesn’t, and it’s something that Louis has been trying not to think about. He shakes his head. “No.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

Louis shrugs.

Taking the joint back from Louis, Niall sticks it in his mouth and crawls over on his hands and knees till he’s sitting next to Louis. He takes Louis’s hand in one of his, and just lets their clasped hands dangle loosely between their knees. His nails are bitten short, and he’s got a list written on the back of his hand. From what Louis can tell, Niall needs to do his grocery shopping, although based on the list, his “grocery shopping” consists of buying beer and cheese and condoms. Louis wonders who Niall is having sex with. He doesn’t want to know.

“I think you should meet this person.” Niall’s voice floats away between them, a little rough from the smoke, and he sounds mystical and prophetic.

“I want to, I think.”

Niall taps his thumb against the back of Louis’s hand. “You can do whatever you want, Lou.”

“The question is, should I do whatever I want?” Weed always makes Louis circular, makes him go on and on about the frailty of human mortality.

Niall looks over at him, half his pale face in moonlight with one blue eye shining out. It’s eerie. The other half of his face is in shadow, dark but for the hint of his jawline. “Life is too short not to do and be everything we want, Lou. If we only ever did what we were supposed to do, we’d hardly be classified as human beings.”

“When did you become a theorist on free will, Ni?” Louis sighs heavily and shifts so their sides are lined up. This is his favorite Niall. Warm and cuddly, handing out wisdom to Louis like he’s got bottomless oceans of it inside of him. He probably does. Probably has seas and rivers and lakes of wisdom just running through him, waiting for people to open the dam and let him say what he wants. Louis feels sad that nobody has thought to unleash Niall on the world, and that he’s stuck in this record shop, selling music he would rather be creating.