No Strings Attached

Chapter One

“Da?”

Louis almost jumped at the voice that was decidedly not Zayn’s. He flung his head forward and looked across the kitchen to the entryway where his daughter stood, bleary-eyed and disgruntled.

“Rosie!” Louis exclaimed. He spoke quickly into his phone, “I’ll see you tonight, mate. I’ve got to go.”

“Give her a kiss for me,” Zayn said before hanging up.

Louis practically flung the phone onto the hard kitchen counter, wincing as he went to scoop up his daughter. But his heart lightened when he saw that her frown disappeared in his arms.

“Morning, lovebug,” he said lovingly, brushing aside a dark brown curl from her forehead. “How did you make your way out here?”

But Rosie ignored the question, instead patting her father’s shoulders with her pink, fat fists. “Borning, bug! Borning, borning!” She always seemed to end up on “bug,” never quite the full word.

Louis couldn’t resist the smile that spread across his face. He should have known that she would be awake earlier than usual since she had fallen asleep early on his bed last night. Rather than taking her back to her crib, he let her sleep beside him. Now, he was only thankful that his bed was close to the ground.

“Someone’s a right ball of energy, aren’t they?” he asked, kissing her on the cheek.

“Hungee,” she said in between her fit of giggles. “Hungee, dada.”

Rosie didn’t have quite a grasp on her words yet, but she was rather chatty for a sixteen-month-old. Even if her sentences weren’t quite coherently strung together or her words properly articulated, she derived some sort of inexplicable joy from repeating phrases endlessly, as if each new syllable was a new discovery that she had to experience over and over. As much as Louis enjoyed this phase of her life, he was on a constant crusade to eliminate cursing from his language. Thank heavens she wasn’t here when I was cooking, he thought.

He pressed a gentle finger into her belly, causing her to scream in delight. “Hungry, are we? Maybe if someone hadn’t fallen asleep before dinnertime, someone wouldn’t be hungry, would they?”

But Rosie only responded by laughing into her father’s neck, causing him to laugh along with her. Moments like this reminded Louis that all the stress – the stress of finding a babysitter included – was worth it somehow. He would gladly go through a thousand contact books to no avail if only to hear his pumpkin laugh like this. Suddenly, the burnt eggs from five minutes ago seemed like a foggy, distant memory.

“Sadly, there’s no food here for us, pumpkin. But what do you say we get you dressed and maybe go somewhere else for breakfast?”

Rosie squealed in agreement and clung to Louis’ neck as he carried her back to the room.

***

Leaving Rosie that evening after a particularly thrilling session of “got your nose” was difficult for Louis. But when Clara – a neighbor from down the street – arrived with a warm smile, he felt slightly more at ease. Still, he would have rather spent the next six hours with his daughter than apart from her.

Louis arrived at the restaurant with five minutes to spare, fastening the last buttons on his shirt and pushing the fringe off his forehead as he entered the kitchen. He spotted Zayn admiring himself, or perhaps adjusting his collar, in the small mirror in the back of the room. No surprises there, he thought.

“Hey mate,” he said, clapping a hand against Zayn’s back. His dark-featured friend jumped in response.

“Oi, you’re too early,” Zayn responded with a wink.