Capture My Heart (BK3: Niall Horan)

-Ch 16: Absence + Jealousy.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Absence + Jealousy.

-Niall Horan-

I closed my eyes, listening intently to the sound of the raindrops drizzling forcefully onto the glass of the windowpane. I shifted in my space, knowing full well that it was at least another two hours before it would be merely appropriate to be up. Notably, without any sleep fuelling me. Biting down on my lower lip I let my eyes wander the room, draped in darkness it was hard to make out any features at all. I could see the silhouette of my reflection in the mirror, enough to know my hair was sticking up at the back, but I couldn’t really see anything else in the distance.

My gaze flittered back down to Ashley, sleeping soundly beside me. Her hair was spread across the pillow she hardly even had her head on, her lips slightly parted as they exhaled and inhaled every quiet breath. My eyes travelled her face, so delicately at peace while immersed in slumber, her eye-lids pressed tight shut, a heavy door shielding her eyes that had been craving a bit of sleep for a while now. She was always a very quiet sleeper.

I didn’t exactly know just what things were like when she went to America for work, whether she had time to sleep, whether she had time to eat, or whether she just had any time at all. And even though I liked to know what was going on, I kind of didn’t want to know, in case it was not to my liking. Because there’s nothing worse than knowing you can’t even do anything.

I wanted to sleep. Albeit the prospect of making our day together tomorrow the best it could be. But the reality was that I just couldn’t. The main problem for my sleep deprivation tonight being the fact that I could not for the life of me get Ashley’s words out of my head. They kept on playing over and over in her soft, yet so serious tone in my ears. I’d taken the liberty when we got back from the hospital around eleven-thirty to look up what some of the words she had used meant, I had an idea, I just wasn’t entirely sure. I was a bit too stunned to ask her, and besides if I had, I would have just received a lecture about what a short span my vocabulary was on. In my opinion, it had improved majorly in the past few years. But she was very intelligent, so I suppose she was kind of valid to think that for her.

I looked up what credibility meant (I had some vague hint it may have meant the fact that you had earned some kind of standard, and I was not far off) the definition I got was the quality of being trusted. So I had been thinking about it for a while, trying to twist my mind into a way of thinking that would resemble Ashley’s. I had to admit I was briefly proud with the interpretations I had come up with. I had figured that – in the form Ashley used it – it could mean that for our place in the future, we had to earn a certain amount of credibility aka a certain amount of trust, to be there.

Now, I didn’t exactly know who this trust was owed to, if anyone. But I figured that in life we seemed to get an awful lot of sticky scenarios thrown at us, and each time we had different tools to get ourselves out of them. Whether they were people, companionship, or maybe even compassion. We had to learn how to use these tools properly without taking too much, or too little out of life. So in the end I concluded that it probably meant something along the lines of: We have to teach ourselves how to use the elements of life properly while not being selfish or sparing. We have to earn the trust that we won’t abuse benefits, so they can be granted upon us, therefore, deciding our place in the future.

I had to admit that I was proud of myself for spending around an hour thinking about this, and I couldn’t wait to tell Ashley what I had ‘interpreted’ from her words last night when she woke up. I figured maybe she would just laugh, as she had obviously reached this level of reading in between the lines a long time ago. But it was worth it all the same, to feel like I was even merely on the same wavelength as her.