Unrequited

Chapter 18 (Part 1)

“Niall, I really can’t go back there right now,” I said uncomfortably, knowing his big brother instinct would once again take over and try to dissuade me. “Well what do you expect to do then?” 

“Go for a walk, air my thoughts...be alone for a while,” I mused, staring dismally at a brick wall behind him, letting my eyes go out of focus. “Char, you can’t just go galavanting around Glasgow in a top thinner than paper and some old sweatpants.” His eyebrows raised again; this time he looked more doubtful than anything. I shrugged, waiting, as though the answer would materialise out of thin air. And in a way, it did. Niall began to shuck off his coat and he cut me off before I could object. 

“I have another on the bus.” Silently relieved, I let him pull the coat around me and reveled in the feeling of drowning in warmth and the smell of Niall’s aftershave. After a second, Niall looked pointedly down at my grey slippers and began yanking off his worn military boots, the laces tied loosely and the leather creased. 

“Niall, really,” I began with a short laugh, only to be interrupted once again as Niall raised a hand to stop me. 

“Be back within two hours or I’ll assume something’s happened. Oh, and have my phone.”

Shortly, dressed in Niall’s navy coat and brown boots, I watched him walk back the way we  had come in my grey slippers. I made the most of the smile that crept onto my face before reality came to hover over my head like a dark cloud and insisted I paid it due attention. Alone, I began to advance deeper and deeper into the city streets, my mind drowning in my own dim thoughts.

From the time I was born, I’d practically lived in bookshops. Mum would take me in my pram while she read until I was old enough to venture off among the shelves myself and preoccupy myself with tales of another world. I could be lost in there for hours, my imagination swimming around the words on the pages. I would move subconsciously when I was blocking someone’s access to a shelf, never taking my eyes off the page. I knew the people that worked there would get frustrated with me because of the little huffing noises they made as they passed me but it never discouraged me. I was determined to distract myself before the crying started again. Being a bookshop addict and in search of something that might make me feel more at home, I made a beeline for the nearest store I could find. I was practically in heaven walking into the shop, finding myself surrounded by multiple levels filled with shelf upon shelf of books. It was the perfect place to lose myself for a while, put that boy far from my mind and face real life later. It was always the way with me. Led by an invisible force, I arrived at the ‘Classics’ section and found what I was looking for after some rifling through the titles. I collapsed into a chair with the rigid-covered, new-smelling copy of The Secret Garden and was transported home again; a place where I felt young and ignorant to the ordeals of real life and where there were no irresistibly attractive, two-faced teenaged boys with curls enough to create halos around both of these faces. 

At some point of course, I had to resurface; I couldn’t stay there reading for weeks on end as I had so desired to do. I sat down at the bookshop cafe, making a mental note to pay back Niall the money I’d found in his coat pocket. With my brain finally idle, the thoughts I’d tried to bar out began to seep back in through the cracks - slowly at first, but the more I thought about it, the more my mind sped up. It wasn’t a reel of Harry’s cutting words as I’d expected. It was just his face. My mind had decided to show me what I’d lost instead of reminding me of how I’d lost it. His face as he concentrated on reading a new set list, his face as he laughed uncontrollably sitting on a couch backstage, his face as he teased me silently with his eyes from across the room. The eyes that I had been infatuated with from the start. The lips that had once been an inch from mine. The dimple that would appear as he winked cheekily at me while in the middle of an interview. I hadn’t seen his face when he’d said all those horrible things to me that morning and so I remembered him as before; with the face I’d never imagined was capable of causing me harm.