He wakes up to his phone ringing incessantly.
That, he’s used to – he likes to sleep in precisely on the days when Niall needs something from him at seven in the morning. It takes him a minute to roll over so he can reach for his phone, bleary-eyed in the darkness.
The darkness. It’s still dark.
His heart immediately flies up into his throat, beating heavy like a hammer as he fumbles out of the sheets and onto the floor, where a ridiculous picture of Niall is lit up to let him know who’s calling.
“Hello,” he gasps out when he finally manages to pick up. He’s out of breath, and on the other end of the line, Niall sounds the same.
“Jesus Christ,” is all he says, so comically exasperated it almost makes Harry laugh. “It’s been twenty minutes, I thought you were dead.”
“I’m here, what happened?” He leans back against the bed, and pulls his knees to his chest. He’s sure he’s not going to like this.
Niall takes a breath, and doesn’t say anything.
“It’s the stalker, isn’t it,” Harry says. Every time he almost manages to forget. “What happened? Do they know where I am?”
“No,” Niall breathes out. “I mean, maybe, but I think I can safely say they don’t want to murder you.” He doesn’t sound the slightest bit relieved.
Harry has to do everything in his power to stop himself from crying. The anxiety is so, so awful, this feeling of not knowing what’s hanging over him, whether he’s safe. It’s been draining him so slowly and steadily he had barely realised, but now it hits all at once like an avalanche.
“I texted you the picture.”
Harry’s hands bypass shaking and go straight to numb, clumsy on the screen while he navigates to the right app. It’s sitting right on the top, without a caption. He takes half a breath and opens it, like ripping off a plaster.
It’s a photo of Niall’s laptop screen, covered in fingerprints. The subject line of the email reads:
LIVE IN THREE DAYS UNLESS YOU LEAVE HIM
Harry’s stomach twists in on itself. He expects something like the image he scrolls down to, but seeing the real thing makes the entirety of his body feel like it’s shutting down.
It’s a front page mockup, red and black and white, terrifyingly real. HARRY LIES, it says in tall letters, and Inside singer’s secret marriage twists like a pit of snakes right underneath. Harry chokes on a sob.
“H, listen,” Niall is saying, quiet under the pounding in Harry’s ears. “I’ll do my hardest to take care of this, I promise you.”
“I didn’t even,” Harry says, but the words are slippery on his tongue and come out jumbled. “I didn’t even read it.”
“You probably should,” Niall replies, low and serious. “Just so you know what we’re up against.”
“I can’t—I—,” Harry stutters, fighting to speak through these terrified half-sobs that are climbing up his throat. “God, hold on.”
He blinks the mist out of his eyes, and does his best to focus on what’s in front of him. Even then, only snippets of sentences make it through and actually register – Harry Styles, Marcus Ward, engaged, already married, lies, deceit, fame.
Louis Tomlinson.
“They know,” he chokes out, as the truth hits him like one freight train after another. He has to set his phone down on the floor, and put his head between his knees; his lungs hurt, his head pounds, and he gets the tell-tale feeling of the room closing in on him. “They know about—they know Louis’s name—“
“Harry,” Niall says, urgently. “Harry, mate, please breathe. We can deal with this, we will, I won’t let them hurt you or your career—“
“They know,” he repeats again, holding on to it until they become the only words he knows. He can hear, vaguely, his breathing getting faster, louder.
“Listen to me,” Niall is saying, somewhere far in the distance. “I’ve got a full day of meetings starting at six, all the major newspapers are willing to work with us, it’s going to be okay. Nobody’ll find out.”
“I,” Harry tries to say, but it dissolves into something between a sob and a scream. He presses his knees against his head, tries to remember Louis’s hands on him, the soothing rhythm of in and out. It only makes him more afraid; if he gets Louis’s name in the papers because of something awful that he did, he can forget—everything. Anything. “Niall.”
Niall’s yelling a little, now, and banging around with something, but the sound sinks further and further away, like an invisible force is pulling Harry across the room. It’s not, or so Harry thinks. The ground is still there, solid under him.
“I’m fine,” he tries to say, but it doesn’t come out. He’s so very, abjectly not fine. He needs to move, needs to get help—
“Harry,” someone says, someone who’s not Niall, not behind a speaker. A familiar scent hits Harry’s nose, grounds him a little, but it’s one that he can’t place. “Not again, come on.”
Louis, it’s—Louis—Harry takes a heaving, empty breath.
Strong fingers wrap around his wrists, get into his clenched fists to loosen them. Harry doesn’t need to be told this time, he knows how to breathe, still remembers the ocean rhythm of Louis’s chest, rising and falling, in and out. He feels it, he thinks, pressed against him though he can’t quite tell where, like the only grounding point in a world of spinning shadows.
“You’re all right, love. Hey.”
He’s got to be hallucinating now.
He tries to get in a slow breath through his teeth, to charge his lungs and apologise, but it escapes him too soon. Louis keeps holding him, somehow everywhere at once, his hands on Harry’s hands, but also in his hair, on the feverish skin of his face.
Niall’s still shouting something on his end of the line. Harry registers Louis taking the phone out of his hand, and then not much else. Everything is blackness, spinning colours, looking for Louis’s voice amongst the white noise while he tries to remember how to breathe.
Every time this happens, it’s like a fog that seeps into the spaces in-between his bones, straight into his head, that clouds over his vision and his thoughts until he’s surrounded by a void. With every breath of air now, that same fog clears away. Shadows and shapes come into focus from one blink to the next: still the exact same spot in the guest room where he fell out of bed, the looming silhouette of the wardrobe. Louis’s hand covering both of Harry’s wrists, pressing them to his chest. Harry follows the line of his arm to where Louis is kneeling on the ground next to him, Harry’s mobile pressed to his ear and a wobbly smile on his face.
“Yeah, mate, don’t worry. Nice to meet you as well, do you want to talk to Harry again?”
Niall must say yes, because the next thing Harry knows, Louis is holding the phone up to his ear. Harry thinks he’d be able to hold it there himself – his fingertips are tingling, but otherwise back to normal – but he doesn’t make a move to do it. Louis’s fingers are touching the side of his face just so, warm, soft.
It might be the closest they’ve been in half a decade.
He clears his throat. “Hello?” he says into the phone.
Niall makes some sort of inhuman noise. “Are you okay?” he yells, out of breath. Harry’s lips curl into an involuntary smile.
“I’m fine,” he says, coughing. “Sorry I worried you.”
“No, it’s—oh my God, you’re going to kill me. I don’t have the time to die right now, Harry, do you understand? You’ve got to quit this.”
“Yes, Mr Horan, sir,” Harry laughs, only a little. Louis’s fingers twitch against his cheek. “I’ll buy you a spa day when I get back. Or an entire holiday, even. You can have as much time off as you want.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” Niall grumbles. In the background, his office phone goes off, and he sighs a sigh so massive it makes the connection crackle. “Okay, listen. I don’t want to—to bring it up again, but.”
But.
Harry blinks back to reality; to what set him off in the first place. Inside singer’s secret marriage. It’s not real yet, but it might be. It will be. God.
“I just want you to know that you shouldn’t worry, alright?”
“I can’t not worry,” Harry replies. He puts one of his arms across his middle, anxious again, needing to feel anchored. “I—you know how much this could cost me. I’m so scared, Ni, I can’t—“
“I’ll keep you updated, okay? Every meeting I get out of, I’ll let you know what was said and what kind of deal I made. I will make deals, don’t you worry.”
Harry sighs. He’s got a headache coming on now. “Okay,” he says, finally. “Okay. I trust you, you know that.”
“That I do,” Niall replies. He sounds like he’s moving – a door slams in the background, and the silence around him is replaced with a muted din of voices. “Do you think you’ll be able to go back to sleep?”
“Uh,” Harry blinks. He pointedly doesn’t look at Louis still hunched next to him. “No.”
“Do you have anyone—can Louis stay awake with you?”
Harry chokes on spit. He manages to pass it off as a cough, but only just.
“Are you on a first-name basis now?” he asks, to take his mind off—everything else. The very presence of Louis in the room, the fact of his existence in the universe, makes his skin burn.
“He’s all right,” Niall says reluctantly on the other end. “He’s, you know. I don’t think you should come back home yet.”
Harry’s brain stumbles a little at the sudden change of topic. “Why not?” he asks.
“I don’t think getting the papers signed is as impossible as you think, he’d—oh, okay, yeah. Sorry, H. I have to go.”
“Already?”
“Us Weekly waits for no man,” Niall replies. Harry appreciates the disgust dripping from his tone. “Love you, H. I’ll speak to you soon.”
“Love you too,” Harry manages, and a weak “Later,” before the connection goes dead.
Louis pulls the phone away, and puts it on the bed. Harry hugs himself, a little too tight, as he gets ready to look at him.
To thank him, again.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Louis says. He sounds—mild, pleasant. Tired.
“I feel like we’ve got to stop meeting period,” Harry mumbles, probably too quiet to hear. It gives him courage, though, to lift his chin, turn his head, and look Louis in the eye.
He’s barely visible in the early morning darkness, only illuminated by specks of moonlight that sneak in through the curtains. He’s got bags under his eyes, and wisps of fringe sticking to his face.
He’s—fuck. Harry banishes the thought, locks it away, refuses to entertain it for even a second.
“What’s that?” he asks, eyebrows furrowed. His blinks are slow. Sleepy. Harry must have been loud enough to wake him up, which only makes him feel worse.
“Nothing, sorry,” Harry shakes his head. He feels literally and figuratively broken in several places, and the ground is bitterly cold at this time of night. “Thank you. Again. I’ve really got to stop doing this.”
Louis huffs. Now that Harry’s looked at him, he can’t tear his eyes away. He’s—different. Unguarded, like it’s too early for his walls to be up.
“You know you can’t help it,” he says, picking at something on the bedspread. Inexplicably, Harry still feels the touch of those fingers on his face. “I know you can’t help it. It’s okay.”
Harry clears his throat. “Thank you anyway,” he says. A silence settles between them, sleep-soft and comfortable. Louis stares at the wall for a minute, and Harry watches the pale column of his neck in the dark. There’s a new mole just above his Adam’s apple; he’s got stubble, but only a little bit.
Harry recognises the tense slant of his shoulders, the way he’s ever-so-subtly rocking on his heels.
“You can go back to sleep, you know,” he says, but somehow infuses it with exactly how much he doesn’t want Louis to do that. “I’m—okay now, I think. I can get myself back up to bed.”
“You’re not going to fall back asleep,” Louis says, like he’s sure. He sighs. “I’ll make tea, come on.”
He doesn’t even grace Harry’s original suggestion with a response. Instead, he offers a hand, and Harry barely hesitates before he takes it. He lets Louis pull him to his feet and into his space, close, too close.
There’s a kind of tension rising in Harry that he can’t take.
“How is it we always end up doing that?” he asks, even though they’ve been silent for a while.
Louis knows what he means anyway. “Tea’s a cure-all, you know that.”
Harry smiles a little at Louis’s back as he leaves the room, and moves to follow him down the hall.
He’s wearing another hoodie, so big it falls halfway down his thighs, with frayed cuffs and little holes all over from too much wear. It swallows him, makes his shoulders look much narrower than they really are.
They both stop at the white door. Louis doesn’t say anything, so Harry doesn’t either; they’re not even looking at each other, but it zaps through the air between them, an unspoken connection, an understanding.
The downstairs is pleasantly cool. The air there settles in Harry’s lungs with a little less effort, clearing his head. He sits at the table, wordlessly, and watches Louis’s familiar dance with the kettle.
There’s a question hanging in the air.
Harry puts his elbows on the table, intertwines his fingers, and says: “Ask me.”
Louis sighs. He probably thought he was being inconspicuous. “Stop that.”
“Just ask me, Louis. It’s fine.”
He turns around, leaning back against the counter in a way that looks anything but relaxed. He’s pressing his fingers against the countertop – they’ve gone white at the knuckles.
“It gave you a panic attack,” he points out. “The second one in what—five days?”
Harry presses his lips together.
“Besides,” Louis shakes his head and looks at the floor, “I don’t—want to know.”
“You’re a bad liar,” Harry mumbles, looking at him. He’s—comfortable, surprisingly so. Could probably fall back asleep right here at the table.
Louis laughs, only a little, under his breath. He turns his back to Harry to fix their tea, and then finally—“Why were you awake in the middle of the night?”
“It’s a long story,” Harry says, buying himself time to try and think. He invited Louis into this, and he’s surprised to realise that he wants to tell.
It’s just a difficult thing to explain. It’s difficult to tell someone the tale of how terrible a person you are – even if they’ve got firsthand experience of it.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Louis raises an eyebrow, “but we’ve got some time.”
He brings their cups over. Harry takes his gratefully, angles his face into the steam, and breathes. It’s his vocal coach’s favourite way of loosening up his vocal cords when he’s a little out of practice; this time around it helps to untwist his tongue, to put his words in order before he lays his burden at Louis’s feet.
Louis looks at him with patient eyes. Harry can almost feel the gaze like a touch.
“I have a stalker,” he says eventually, when the ticking clock on the wall really puts the pressure on.
Louis blinks. “Pardon?”
“A stalker,” Harry repeats. “Or—that’s what we thought it was, anyway.”
“You’re gonna have to elaborate,” Louis says, and sounds sorry. He’s got his bottom lip caught between his teeth, and all his attention trained on Harry.
Harry sighs, and looks into the depths of his tea. It’s the perfect shade of brown, as usual.
“They’re threatening me.”
Louis straightens up, a little violently. The motion pulls his entire body backwards, and makes him spill a few drops of his tea. He doesn’t reach out to wipe it away.
Harry doesn’t need another question to know that he has to go on.
“It started a few months ago,” he says. “Actually, just—just after Marcus and I got engaged.”
He waits for Louis to frown, to twitch, to give some indication of what he thinks of Harry getting engaged, but nothing comes.
“Niall started getting these calls at his office that were just silent, but there was someone breathing on the other end, so—“
“Wait,” Louis interrupts. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
Harry blinks. “I’m telling you now,” he replies, but it comes out sounding like a question because he’s so confused. Why would Louis want to know?
“I meant before,” Louis says, just this side of gentle. “When you first got here, when we talked, when—when you moved into my house?”
“I didn’t tell anyone,” says Harry, careful. There’s landmines here, and he’d very much like to avoid stepping on any. “And I didn’t. I didn’t think you’d care?”
Louis rubs his forehead. “I care if you live or die, you absolute idiot.”
An involuntary shiver runs down Harry’s back. “I didn’t think it was serious back then,” he says, a weak excuse. “It never—escalated, or anything, they didn’t make demands, and my security never saw anyone. We thought it was safe for me to come here without a guard, since very few people know where I’m from, back in LA.”
Louis raises his head, but keeps a hand over his mouth. The way he’s looking is familiar, but not from recent memory. It touches something much further back in Harry’s mind.
“I assume it got worse,” he says.
“They started sending pictures,” Harry nods, staring into the tabletop. “The first one was the scariest, I think, just because—anyways, um, it was this picture of me from a fashion show I went to, and it had my eyes crossed out.”
Louis inhales sharply.
“Niall got it delivered to his office, and he—actually, hold on,” he says, and digs in his pocket for the phone he’d managed to grab before he went downstairs. He’s got the notes in a separate folder, all the way at the bottom; there if he needs them but far enough that he never has to see them by accident.
He pulls up the first one. I know what he did is still there, black on white, bringing back all that fear he felt when he first saw it. It had been like nothing he’d ever experienced before.
He puts the phone on the table, and nudges it towards Louis. Their hands brush when he reaches out for it.
Harry watches him as he takes the picture in, as a visible tension seeps into him as if it had been injected. His face looks tired in the beam of blue light coming from the screen.
“I know what he did,” he repeats, and looks up. “What did you do?”
Harry’s eyes sting. It feels acutely humiliating to open his messages, and pull up the picture Niall texted him not an hour ago.
“Listen,” he says, and puts his hand over the screen. “I—I just want you to know that I didn’t mean for this to happen. I swear I didn’t, and I’m so sorry.”
Louis reaches out. For a second, Harry thinks he might try to take the phone by force, but instead he touches the back of Harry’s hand, feather-light.
“Just show me.”
Harry does. He passes the mobile over again, noisy on the tabletop, and then looks into the ceiling.
Louis hisses. “Jesus,” he says, and Harry can’t get himself to move—“How did they find out?”
“I have no idea,” Harry shakes his head. He concentrates on Louis’s warmth, right there just across the table, to stop himself from crying again. It’s difficult to speak. “They must’ve got hold of the record somehow, but I just don’t know—I don’t understand—“
He loses the fight then, and his throat swells. “I don’t know what to do.”
Louis touches him on the shoulder. It’s barely fingertips, he probably changes his mind halfway through, but it helps to break Harry away from obsessively counting the ceiling tiles.
“Does Marcus know yet?” he asks, simple. Harry meets his eyes, looks away, then meets his eyes again. He must look as guilty as he feels – Louis sighs, and taps the screen of Harry’s phone to have a look at the mockup again. The light of it makes his lashes cast shadows. “You have to tell him, you absolute wanker.”
It’s the gentlest way anyone’s ever called Harry a fuckup.
“I know,” he says, bracing his elbows on the table. He runs his hands through his hair, over and over, until it feels limp and slippery between his fingers. “I know, I—I swear I was going to. As soon as I touched down back home with the papers, I was going to tell him everything. I never meant to keep it a secret.”
“That’s a lie,” Louis points out, mild.
Harry almost laughs, but he’s worried it’d turn into a fit of hysterics if he gave it a voice. “Yeah,” he says. The word tastes bitter. “Yeah, you’re right. I thought this was going to be easy back then, I was just gonna—do it. I didn’t think he needed to know.”
Louis makes a face. He passes the phone back to Harry, and takes a loud sip of his tea. “And you do now?”
Of course, is on the tip of Harry’s tongue, but it gets stuck there, enormously heavy with meaning. He’s let Louis back in in some way, no matter how small. He’s let him matter again.
“He’s met you,” he tries. “And it’s been so long, he deserves to know why I’ve been gone for months.”
“But not until you’re actually divorced.”
Harry has the decency to blush. That’s all his body does, though – he doesn’t feel anxious, uncomfortable, fidgety. Angry. If this is an attack, it’s half-hearted at best, and they both know it.
“Show me again?” Louis asks, pointing at the mobile, dark on the table between them. Harry types in his passcode.
Louis sighs as he reads. “That’s—that’s just fucked up. Do you have a lawyer ready?”
Harry blinks. “I haven’t thought that far ahead. Niall probably has, though.”
“Good,” Louis nods. He mulls his next words over, pursing his lips as if he’s trying to stop them from slipping out. “You might need a London-based one, though, for the—the divorce. I’m sure they can speed it through, that way this person doesn’t really have anything on you by the time someone buys the story.”
It takes Harry a full minute to register what he’s just heard.
“The. The divorce?”
Louis hides his face behind his mug.
“Louis, did you just say—“
“I can’t ruin your career,” he says. His hands are shaking, badly. “It’s—past time I got over myself, really. This,” and he waves a hand to indicate himself, “isn’t worth putting your entire livelihood at risk.”
Harry’s immediate reaction is to say no. No, you can’t do that.
Then he realises where he is, and who they are, and why he was ever here in the first place.
Still. “Are you sure?” he asks, as a hesitant bubble of happiness inflates in his chest. God, he can fix—absolutely everything, fuck—
“I’m sure,” Louis replies. He sounds a little like he’s hyperventilating. “Do you have a copy of the papers?”
He looks so utterly lost when he catches Harry’s eye. Harry, for a bizarre moment, wants to hold him.
“I—yeah. Yes. Give me a second.”
He pushes away from the table noisily, and clambers up the stairs on clumsy feet. His head is spinning.
He’s got two sets of papers, and both have somehow fallen through to the very bottom of his little suitcase. He has to grab clothes by the handful and throw them out, flinging them into every corner of the room like he’s in a movie. There, bent underneath a pair of shoes he’d bought just after he arrived, are the folders.
The one on the top is a highlighter-bright green, pristine and still unopened. Harry clutches it like a lifeline, presses it to his chest, and gets to his feet.
But—but.
There’s the second folder, the blue one. It’s missing a corner, somehow, and the papers sticking out of it are all dog-eared and muddy. The stains on them build a tentative memory in his head – Louis’s gaunt face underneath his hood, his blazing eyes, the anger that seemed to coil around every muscle in his body; move your fucking car; his drooping shoulders, and the way he avoided Harry’s gaze.
Do you have any idea—
Harry had been so angry that day, so incredibly full of bitterness. He can still feel it, like an ache that’s embedded into the walls of his veins, but the blood that runs through them is clear. He’s let it go, and he’d barely realised.
He’s been here for two months, and seen Louis almost every singe day, seen him angry and resigned and smiling in that soft, crooked way to which Harry’s yet to assign a meaning; seen him so frighteningly close to tears—
Do you have any idea of the kind of hell you put me through?
He grabs the other folder, too. The mud cracks and crumbles under his touch, flakes off as he tucks it close and walks out.
He’s careful as he walks down the stairs. With one hand, he traces the bright spaces where pictures used to be.
“I don’t want to pressure you,” Louis’s voice carries out of the kitchen, deceptively light, “but you’re kind of in a hurry, here.”
Harry can’t stop a smile.
He slides back into the kitchen through the half-open door, and lets the papers fall softly onto the tabletop. Louis doesn’t comment on the pool of dried dirt that comes with them.
He does swallow, though, so loudly it must hurt. He raises his mug to his lips, and puts it back down when he realises it’s empty.
“Do I need to sign both of these?”
Do you have any idea, Harry hears instead. It plays on a loop inside his head, echoing into itself.
“Tell me,” he says. It slips out entirely on its own, and it takes him a second to realise the words are hanging between them. He considers taking them back, but.
“Tell you?” Louis repeats. He can’t seem to stop staring at the folders.
Harry sits down.
“You said,” he starts, then shakes his head. “When you first invited me inside, do you remember what you said?”
Louis pinches the bridge of his nose. He looks at Harry, finally. “I said a lot of things.”
“Yeah, so did I,” Harry bites his lip. He’d been so needlessly awful. God, he’d told Louis he never loved him. What an utter fucking lie. “And you asked—you asked me if I had any idea of what I put you through.”
“Ah,” Louis raises his eyebrows. “So I did.”
“Tell me, then. I want to know.”
“I don’t think you do,” Louis replies. The morning has started crawling in through the windows, orange and yellow and molasses-slow. The sunlight has just reached Louis’s back, his neck, the tips of his hair, lighting all of them up like a field of golden wheat. Harry itches to touch that one long strand of his fringe, the one he wears tucked behind an ear when he’s at home.
“I don’t think you know what I want,” he replies. Selfish, he’s always selfish. Louis should be used to that by now. “I—I want you to have a chance to tell me whatever you want. Don’t mince your words.”
The look Louis gives him looks like pity.
“I’m a grown man, Louis. I can take whatever you’ve got to say.”
“I need a pen,” says Louis. “For the papers.”
There’s anger, a small bubble of heat at the base of Harry’s throat. He keeps a tight rein on it, but it would be so easy—
“Please,” he says, instead of something hopelessly infantile like fuck a pen. “Every time I see you, you look like you want to tell me something, like you’re just holding back to spare my fucking feelings, but I don’t deserve that, and I don’t need it, I can take—“
“You ruined my life,” Louis interrupts, calm, but only on the outside. “Is that what you want to hear?”
This time, Harry sees through him. “I want the truth,” he says. “Please, Louis. I think—I think you’ll feel better.”
Louis laughs. “So generous of you to consider my feelings.”
“Don’t do this,” Harry asks. He lets his shoulders drop, lets his face fall. Shows Louis the tendrils of exhaustion that are wrapped all around him like vines.
Louis softens. “You’re going to be gone by tomorrow,” he says. “You’ll never see me again, you’ll probably forget that I exist, so it’s—redundant, really. You don’t need to know.”
“I want to,” Harry replies, looking Louis in the eye. “I want to.”
Silence. Louis closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose again. “A pen, please.”
Here Harry is, sitting in a kitchen that used to be his, entirely determined to stop his husband from signing their divorce papers. And he isn’t dreaming, either.
“Louis,” he says, putting on his best Rational Voice.
“It’s in the past, isn’t it? All of this, us, it’s gone now. It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” Harry counters. “Sometimes I wish it didn’t, believe me, but it matters. I’ve badgered back into your life asking all these questions, and you never got to say your piece, so please, please do it now. Do it while I’m here to listen.”
Louis groans. The angle of his shoulders changes, though, curving down and away from his body like a drooping tree branch. The sun has enveloped him whole now, and is reaching its golden fingers towards the table.
“I made it sound more dramatic than it was,” he says, fidgeting in his chair. Harry highly doubts that. “It’s just—I don’t know. What normally happens after the breakup in every terrible romantic comedy.”
Harry sighs. “Louis.”
He doesn’t get it, is the thing. All this time, Louis had been bursting with barely-contained anger, and now that Harry’s given him a chance to vent it, he’s just—running away.
“I couldn’t sleep, okay?” he says finally, too loud for the room, his fingers woven together in a death grip. “For—two years, probably, I just wouldn’t sleep through the fucking night. I’d go down for two hours, then end up wandering around the village at four in the morning, calling Liam at ridiculous hours, throwing stuff and punching walls because I was seeing things, it just—I don’t know.”
Dread, cold and electric, trickles down Harry’s body like ice water. It starts at the top of his head, like someone’s cracked an egg there, and slides down the sides of his neck, under his t-shirt, the small of his back. It makes him shiver.
Louis is holding his forehead in one of his hands now. Underneath, his eyes are closed.
“I’d do sleeping pills, and they wouldn’t work, then I stopped taking them because they gave me nightmares, or I’d wake up on the floor in the morning not knowing how I got there, it was—so scary, you can’t imagine. You have no fucking idea. I wanted to hurl myself out of a window, some days, just to make it stop, but then Liam slapped some sense into me, so,” and he laughs a little, somehow, staring down at the tabletop with a soft look in his eyes. “I found out that booze made me just pass out cold, so I overdid that for a while, but I also got a therapist, which was surprisingly helpful? Who knew that talking about things makes them better.”
The expression on his face seems more like an illusion, a thin smile that’s pulled over the anguish that he’s remembering. That Harry made him remember. That Harry caused in the first place.
He’s not surprised to find that he’s got tears pooling in his eyes, but he rubs them away with clumsy fingers.
“Anyways, she made me admit that I was really angry at myself, and I somehow got it together right around the time your second album came out, so you were in all the papers. The first thing I learned about your career is that you were going by Styles,” and he smirks, joylessly, at the ceiling. Sadness pulls at the soft lines of his face, and the sheer depth of it punches a hole straight through Harry’s chest.
“That was what got me, more than anything else. I dealt with the bed being too fucking big, with the fact that you didn’t say a single word goodbye, with being afraid to wake up in daylight because it reminded me of reaching out to your side of the bed in the morning and finding all of you gone—“ he pauses, and takes a breath.
A noise escapes Harry’s lips, but he’s not sure what it’s meant to convey. Louis doesn’t really pay it any mind anyway.
“I got over all that, eventually. But then Harry Styles put out his massively successful second record, and I just—I realised that I had no idea how to do any of this. My entire life was built on the foundation of you and me, because we were going to be forever, right?”
He waits, then. Maybe he’s waiting for Harry to speak.
“It never even occurred to me—it just wasn’t a possibility. We were never going to leave each other, so I never needed to figure out how to do life alone, except then you just—you,” he swallows. Blinks, a little too rapidly. “Well. You know what you did.”
“I left,” Harry supplies helpfully. His voice comes out a garbled mess.
For the first time, Louis looks at him, and must find something in Harry’s face that keeps his eyes there.
“Yeah,” he nods. “Yeah, you left. And I had to deal with the implications of that beyond me, beyond this house, so that’s when—that’s when I started with the drinking. Did anyone tell you about how Barb’s lost their license?”
“Gemma said,” Harry says. It sounds like someone else is speaking.
“That was because of me,” he quirks his lips. “Well, technically it was Liam, but I was the one who pulled him down with me.”
“What did he do?”
Louis wrings his fingers. Takes a breath, sighs, makes like he’s going to speak and then presses his lips back together.
Harry has changed his mind.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he gets out, through whatever horrors are happening in his lungs at the moment. “If you don’t want to, I—I’m sorry I made you do this.”
I don’t know if I can take any more, is what he doesn’t say.
Louis shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says, and he’s soft, like he actually means it. Still, his skin has gone pale with more than just the bright light of the morning. “He, um. He made a bit of a scene. Fought someone, actually.”
Harry forgets to choke on tears for a second. “Liam?” he asks incredulously, blinking to bring Louis’s blurry face into focus.
“I know,” Louis replies. “I know, but it was because of me.”
Of course it was.
“I was—a mess, yeah? I’d get drunk every time I went anywhere, just to make it easier, and people talk here. They’d run out of pity at that point, and I wasn’t welcome in a lot of places, like Barb’s. But I went anyway,” he rolls his eyes. “And I’d split a bottle of bourbon with Liam on that particular day, so we were both completely fucked. We got kicked out one drink in, and we actually turned around to go, I think, but someone called me a sad poof as we were leaving,” he smiles, small, bitter. “Liam flew off the handle, and I was too drunk to even hold him back, and—I don’t know if I remember, actually. I just know that someone reported it, and they got their license taken away after that. Liam and I went home, slept it off on the front lawn, poured out all my booze in the morning, and that was the end of my love affair with unbridled self-destruction and ruining Liam’s life.”
Harry’s shaking his head, perhaps in a vain hope that Louis’s words won’t get into his ears that way. He can’t imagine Liam in a fight, can’t imagine Louis going wild like that, can’t imagine any of these things for which he’s directly responsible.
There’s a soft, animal-like hurt right in the centre of his chest, pulsing into every corner of his body. How can he possibly be discovering more ways in which he’s fucked everything up, after all this time?
“Are you,” he starts, but has to clear his throat, cough the sadness away. “Are you okay now?”
Louis looks down, scratches at the tabletop. Smiles. “No.”
Harry’s heart does a painful somersault. “That was a stupid question.”
“Yeah,” Louis says, through an inhale, and looks back up at him. There’s not a wall in sight; the vulnerability in his eyes steals the last of Harry’s breath. “You’ve asked stupider ones, though. It’s okay.”
Harry wants to scream, but all he can do is shake his head. “It’s not,” he manages. “It’s not, it’s not, I’m sorry.”
“I appreciate that,” Louis replies. “I really do, but please—don’t blame yourself again. It’s done now.”
“How can I do that? How can I possibly—“
“You can because I need you to,” Louis interrupts. He reaches out slowly, like he’s forcing his way through the thick air between them, and brushes the pads of his fingers over Harry’s forearm. “I’ve dealt with all of this, and I’m sorry that you found out all at once, but you asked, so please. Please don’t put your guilt back on my shoulders.”
Silently, Harry nods. This is on him, all on him, but he can’t suffocate Louis with how sorry he is, can’t make him relive things again and again—
“And also, it’s not really your fault.”
Harry scoffs.
“I’m serious, Harry. I told you, I just wasn’t ready to live without you. Not thinking of the possibility, not being a person outside of LouisandHarry, that—that was me.”
“You’re still angry at me,” Harry shakes his head. “Or you were, just a—“ he’s about to say a few days, but then he actually counts back in his head. The second panic attack, which Louis literally held him through. The lunch with Marcus, where he laughed and joked and looked every bit as comfortable as Harry had wished he could feel. The moment he let Harry’s new fiancé into his house, and covered for him, and barely blinked an eye. He’d been curt, sure, but that ice-cold spark of anger that had slept inside of him was nowhere to be found.
Louis gives him a second to finish the sentence before he shrugs. “I’m not,” he says, simply, and it’s true. It’s true. “I think I was, when you showed up. And I was angry at the situation. At myself, for still letting you in here after everything, but I’m just—tired. I want to stop this.”
Harry nods, patting at his swollen face. He’s got what he wanted. “I’ll get a pen,” he says. “And then I’ll…get out. I’ve already intruded on your life too much.”
“You used to be my life, Harry. I think I can handle you staying one more day.”
There’s this big, unspoken thing that passes between them as Harry gets up, a ball of heaviness hanging in the air. Their past, maybe, with nowhere to go now that Louis has put it out there.
Louis has a purposeless, messy desk tucked in the corner of the living room. It’s where Harry goes to raid the pen cup, studiously ignoring the empty frame above the fireplace. Louis, as it turns out, follows him in from the kitchen, and settles on the sofa with one foot tucked underneath his thigh.
He looks up when Harry stands behind him, and the morning sun turns his eyes azure. Harry finds it hard to breathe again.
“There you go,” he coughs out, holding out a beautiful black pen he’s found. It’s got a little LT carved into the cap.
“Thanks,” Louis bites his lip, and rolls the pen between his palms for a second. The cleaner folder is resting on his lap, open on a pristine white page. “I forgot that I had this thing,” he smiles a little. Harry chases it as it plays around his mouth; walks around the side of the sofa and sits down, and watches it until it’s gone.
Their knees are a breath away from touching.
“How many places do I need to sign?” Louis asks, and brings Harry back to the present. Right, he thinks, yes. The divorce.
“It’s three copies, so,” Harry reaches out, straight into Louis’s personal space without so much as stopping to think about it. Louis lets him find the correct three pages, and slips a finger under each to mark them. His breathing is scared, shallow, but it still stirs the hair on the back of Harry’s neck. “There.”
He pulls away then, a little awkwardly, his limbs heavy with how close they were.
“Thanks,” says Louis. He’s blinking a lot, scanning some of the lines in front of him. “Harry Tomlinson.”
Harry smiles.
He watches Louis write down his name slowly, carefully, with strokes so long they go over the line a little. There is no name he can put to what he’s feeling, but it tastes sweet on his tongue, bitter in the back of his throat, burns in his chest. This is what he’s come for.
“All right,” Louis says quietly, putting an unnecessary flourish on the last n. He keeps the pen against the paper for a few more seconds, until an inky flower blooms underneath the tip of it. “There you go.”
He snaps the folder closed, and holds it out to Harry.
They’ve been in this position a fairly ridiculous amount of times, Harry realises. From that very first morning down on the muddy road, he’s been putting these papers between them, and Louis has been running. Now that it’s the other way around, he can’t help feeling a little victorious when he gets his hands on the folder.
“Don’t you want your copy?” he asks.
“You can just leave it when you leave,” Louis replies, avoiding his eyes. “Is there anything else or is that it?”
“That’s it. We’re divorced, I think, at least on paper.”
Saying the words makes his lips go a little numb. Louis, too, looks a little shaken. All the blood in his face has drained to his mouth, and he bites at it over and over until the skin all around it shines red.
“Louis,” Harry says, and waits until they’re looking at each other, really looking. “Thank you.”
He blinks. “Of course,” is what he says, and even though his eyes are wet, he sounds sincere. “Like I said, I can’t ruin your career.”
“It would’ve been my fault if it got ruined, you know,” Harry says. He’s being serious, but a smile is fighting its way onto his face, apropos of nothing.
Louis smiles back. “You’re right,” he says. “You owe me now.”
Finally, unbelievably, Harry feels settled. Content. Happy, almost.
“I hope that look means that you’ve figured out how to tell your fiancé,” Louis crashes into his bubble. “Good luck with that, by the way.”
Harry rubs his forehead. “I’m working on it,” he says. He’s not, in fact, working on it, but he will once he’s on the plane. “I definitely want to do it in person, so I should probably—get my things together.”
“There’s no rush,” says Louis, mild and searching for something on the other side of the sofa. He comes up with an old copy of Rolling Stone, uncaps the pen, and scribbles something straight across Dave Grohl’s forehead. “Here’s a lawyer I know, down in London, he owes me a favour. Have Niall call him, he can probably get all of this done before you even touch down in LA.”
Harry takes the magazine, and presses it to his chest without thinking.
“Thank you.”
Louis shrugs a shoulder. “Don’t mention it.”
A door opens somewhere on the second floor. They both look at the ceiling, and listen to footsteps as they thud above them and fade out in the direction of the bathroom.
Silently, they get up and move outside. The sun greets them there bright and hot, already well on its way across the sky. The very last wisps of dark blue are just fading above their heads, circling the pale crescent that used to be the moon.
Harry settles in the front garden, sitting in the grass. Hesitantly, Louis sits down beside him, reaches into an empty flower pot, and pulls out a freezer bag. Inside of it is a pack of cigarettes and a cheap, see-through lighter.
Harry squints. “I thought you quit?”
“I did,” Louis grins. “These are for emergencies and special occasions.”
Harry doesn’t dare ask which one this is.
He tries to close his eyes, to relax, to enjoy the last minutes of early morning before mum wanders down into the kitchen and sees them out here. They keep opening against his will, drawn to the intimately familiar ritual of Louis lighting up. It does seem a little clumsier now – his fingers slip on the wheel of the lighter, and he coughs when he takes the first drag.
When he inhales properly for the first time, he closes his eyes. He leans back on his elbows, angles his face into the sun. Harry swallows.
“How long has it been?” he asks, because he needs, needs to disturb this silence. “Since you last had one, I mean.”
Louis opens one eye. “A while,” he says, tilting his head, tipping it back. “I reckon a year or so.”
Harry watches the long column of his neck, how pale it looks against the grass, the way his Adam’s apple bobs when he chuckles for no reason at all. He can’t look away.
Louis opens his mouth a fraction, just enough for the smoke to escape in small tufts. They used to be like this all the time, in gardens and parks and the forest a mile down the road, lying in dew-damp grass and watching the sky change colours. Louis would come meet him after footie sometimes, smelly, with his knees stained green and telling Harry all about how Liam kicked his legs out from under him. And Harry—Harry was usually preoccupied with how the light touched Louis’s face.
“I’m glad you did it,” he says, and watches the smoke rise skyward soft like cotton wool, then disappear. “Quit, I mean.”
Louis lies down. His hair tangles with the grass, and Harry is still looking. “Shut up, Harry,” he says, soft and good-natured, almost—teasing?
Does he feel as light as Harry feels? Was this a burden off his shoulders, too?
Harry has half a mind to ask, but the weight of their last conversation is still very much present on his shoulders, wrapped around his neck, running down the middle of his back sticky-slow. Besides, he’s overstaying his welcome right now. They don’t need to talk about anything else.
In the end, he tears his eyes away from Louis’s slack expression, and lies down beside him. The clouds overhead are torn into pieces, wispy, like milk disappearing into tea. There must be wind up there, though Harry can barely feel a breeze.
He closes his eyes. Lets the early coolness of the earth wrap around his shoulders like a blanket.
“I can’t believe we’re divorced,” Louis throws into the tranquil air.
The word sounds—different, coming from his mouth, than it does in Harry’s head.
“I know,” he says anyway. He turns his head, presses his cheek into the grass, to look at Louis; he’s already looking back. Harry’s close enough to smell the cigarette smoke on his breath.
“I, uh,” he says, and looks down. “I hope your wedding goes well.” He takes a drag, and blows the smoke away, up into the air.
“You don’t have to say that,” Harry replies. He’s slightly dazed by their proximity, and trying to discreetly shake himself out of it. It’s just—if he reached out right now, he could touch Louis’s face, the almost-bare curve of his shoulder. “I’m really, really grateful that you did this for me, but you don’t have to—pretend.”
Louis tries to shrug, then remembers he’s lying on one of his arms and abandons the movement. “I’m not,” he says. He doesn’t sound convinced. “I hope it goes well. You deserve to be happy, you know. Clearly you weren’t, here, so I hope you find it in LA. Or London, or New York, or wherever, since you’re a popstar now. ”
Harry’s eyes sting. “Louis,” he says, but he doesn’t know how to continue. Doesn’t know what to say to stop Louis from looking so small.
Louis sighs. He puts his cigarette out, reaches out with the same hand, and runs it through Harry’s hair.
It’s brief, barely a second, but his fingertips brush Harry’s forehead, his nape.
Harry’s breath freezes in his lungs.
“It’s all right,” he says, with a sad smile tucked into the corner of his lips. He’s taken his hand back, busied it with pulling grass out of the ground. “Everything’s fine. You get to go off and live your life and forget about me, like I should have let you years ago.”
Harry’s not going to cry again. He’s not. There isn’t much else to do, though, because he has no idea what to say to that.
“I’m sorry,” is what he settles on, hopelessly, woefully inadequate.
Louis smiles again. It brings out the faint crow’s feet around his eyes. “I’m sorry, too.”
He plucks a small yellow flower out of the space between them, and tucks it behind Harry’s ear. Then he turns onto his back again, hands across his chest, chin pointing at the sky. Like nothing happened – and nothing did, except Harry’s insides have all been swept up by an earthquake.
Gingerly, he touches the flower. It’s small enough that the single touch dislodges it from its place, and it gets lost in-between Harry’s curls.
He doesn’t mirror Louis, doesn’t turn on his back. He stays on his side, watching the line of Louis’s profile, the slope of his nose, that shadowy space where his lashes touch his cheeks. When mum comes out into the garden, he hears her before he sees, and just manages to sit up.
“Morning, boys,” she calls out. Harry doesn’t miss the befuddled look on her face, but he tries his best to smile.
“Hey, Mum,” he replies, slowly getting to his feet. One of his hands slips on the grass, and he has to dig his fingers into the dirt to stay upright. It gets underneath his fingernails. “Good morning.”
He doesn’t look back at Louis when he walks up to the front door and gives her a kiss on the cheek.
“What are you doing out here?” she asks, with a line between her eyebrows, but smiling. “It’s really warm already.”
“I, um,” he starts, tucking his hair behind his ears, patting down his clothes, trying to fight off the feeling that he’s been caught. “We—I, I guess, I’ve got some news.”
She tilts her head. The way she’s looking at him tells him that she already knows.
“Why don’t you come and tell me about it, then,” she says anyway, squeezing his shoulder. “I’ll make breakfast.”
Harry grins. It feels a little plastic, like that’s not what his face was made to do.
“That sounds amazing,” he says, and follows her when she turns to go inside. As he bends down to take his shoes off, the yellow flower flutters to the ground, a speck of muted colour in the windowless front room. He looks, stares at it, but leaves it on the ground.
Mum’s already got two pans on the stove when he makes it to the kitchen, and she’s opened the window to let some air inside.
Harry reaches for the fridge to take out the eggs. He can’t help squinting out into the sunshine as he does.
There’s Louis, still in the front garden, the earthy colours of him drowning in a sea of bright green grass. His hands are folded over his chest, still, his face relaxed, lips parted just a little bit.
Harry recognises that look, in some all-but-forgotten part of himself.
He’s asleep.