salute [h.s]

chapter 18 - drunken debacles & midnight memories

Piper had been diligently ignoring her phone buzzing beside her on the bed, Louis's stupid face flashing on the screen, hoping that he would just give up. She was trying to read Ivanhoe, a classic that she'd read when she was fourteen. It was one of the last books she had read with her dad before he died and she was really missing him lately so she thought she would read it again. She'd forgotten how much she liked it - it was sort of all over the place as novels of that time period tended to be but it was easy for her to sucked in.

Louis's face on her phone was making it very hard to concentrate. She finally got so tired of him that she reached over to pick it up.

"Shut up and stop calling me," she barked into the phone before moving to hang up.

"WAIT!" Louis yelled before she could press the button to cut him off. Begrudgingly, she lifted the phone back up to her ear. Once Louis could hear her breathing on the other end, he started talked again. "Put that book down, Pips. We're going out."

"As much as I appreciate the offer," Piper drawled sarcastically, her eyes skimming the top of the next page, "I'm not sure how Eleanor or Harry would feel about that."

"Do you always have to be so sarcastic and unpleasant?" Louis sighed heavily. Piper grinned, feeling a little bit proud of herself.

"Yes. It's in my DNA." Piper pulled her eyes from the page of the book and looked at the wall ahead of her as something occurred to her. "Hold on. How did you know I was reading?"

"Because you're in your flat alone on New Year's Eve and you're ignoring my kind invitations to go out which means you're either watching some stupid marathon on TV or you have big plans to read an entire book tonight. Based on the size of your bookshelf, I guessed the latter."

"You make me sound like some sort of antisocial recluse."

"You are an antisocial recluse," Louis informed her with absolutely no consideration for the fact that it might hurt her feelings. That was Louis for you, abrupt, upfront, and delightfully sarcastic. "Were you really planning on staying in tonight?"

"What else was I supposed to do? I'm too broke to afford any good liquor and Harry's not..." Piper stopped speaking when she realized what she had been about to say. Harry had been away on assignment - again - and while he was supposed to be home today, he had said they probably wouldn't be able to do anything today because of all the debriefing. She had taken that as a subtle hint that New Year's Eve would be a pretty low key affair this year. After all, if she couldn't kiss Harry at midnight, what was the point? She felt a little pathetic basing her whole night around a guy but she knew she wouldn't have any fun without him.

"You and Harry are so bloody lost for each other," Louis growled into the phone and Piper could picture in her mind the exact eye roll he was doing right now. There was a smacking sound and Louis groaned, and Piper figured that was Eleanor putting him in his place. "Listen, I can probably convince Harry to come out if I say that you're with us. Then you can have your Disney midnight kiss like you've always dreamed of."

"Give me... Louis, give me - Pips, it's me Niall," Niall interjected as if she couldn't already tell by the accent and the completely different tone to his voice. The scuffle she had just heard was most likely Niall reaching from the backseat to take the phone from Louis. "You have to come out. It won't be any fun without you."

"I'm sure it will be plenty of fun without me," Piper shot back, cracking her book open once more, fully prepared to dive back in and ignore the lot of them.

"If you come with us, drinks are on me," Niall offered. When she stayed silent for a moment, he added, "for the whole night."

She was never one to refuse free drinks. "Yeah, alright, I'll come down."