T W E N T Y T W O
- N i a l l -
It hadn't been real.
In London and Paris, she had been a hazy memory he would sometimes clarify between the shifting hours of dusk and dawn, with the help of his trusty friend Smirnoff. In Europe her face and her presence was muffled. Sometimes he would catch her face on magazines, but then the more angular face of Gillian would shift into his peripheral vision, and his attention would be forced to focus away. The streets he walked were cold and bare-they held no memory of the girl with life in her every fiber. And London was cold and wet. Much colder than New York City had ever been. Paris was too busy and tainted.
He spent a lot of extra time in London. Two weeks longer than he was supposed to have spent. The city-in its harsh cold bluntness and its ever rainy disposition-was perfect for him. There were plenty of other bleary eyed chaps having a pint in the murky corners of underground pubs-Niall was nobody special.
He felt like he was living his life on mute. People were making noise and talking to him all the time, but he heard none of it, hell-he didn't see most of it. There was one face and one voice that stood out in the crowd, but she wasn't real. Just a vision of somebody he used to lo-know. Gillian and the other business partners trashed their way through London-but he stayed behind. He would wave them on, complaining about important work to be done, and then he would walk.
Up and down and zigzag he would weave through London. He was searching for something. He could catch glimpses of it in coffeehouses early in the morning, when they would play Ella Fitzgerald over the sunrise and talk in earnest voices; in small shops with odd-ended knickknacks that meant no sense; in bookshops with used books whose spines were cracked and pages frayed; on the Thames late at night, when the lights of tall buildings glittered against the river. He could find pieces of it fragmented across the city, but he could never catch the whole thing. So he kept walking. And eventually, on one rainy evening, he stepped into a brewery/bookshop that sold odd-ended bits-like Polaroid cameras, knobby keychains, broken record players-that sort of stuff. He bought a coffee, a polaroid camera, extra film, and a notebook. He borrowed a pen from the barista and stepped back into the drizzle in it, snapping a picture of the coffeeshop and jotting down its address.
And that night, with every place that had a piece of whatever he was looking for, he took a picture of it and wrote its address. He never stayed long, never touched anything, just looked. Sometimes it hurt to look. It cut his heart sometimes and twisted his gut and he didn't understand why looking at a sunrise could bring him to his knees. He would return to his hotel room at dawn, falling into bed alone. He'd started locking Gillian out of his room, there wasn't anything exciting about her presence now, and she'd started shagging Mr. Jones (who has a wife) anyways.
It hadn't been real.
In London it was intangible. It was chasing him, or rather he was chasing it-but it wasn't so overwhelming as this is.
It hadn't been real.
Not in the car, not in the drive back to his apartment he'd been away from for so long. But the elevators had opened to dead silence and the smell of overly clean, stale air. The penthouse was dead empty, not a living soul in the huge expanse.
That made it a little bit realer.
He has one of the doormen put his bags away, and he heads to the kitchen, sock-clad and feeling like a stranger in his own home. The muteness from London is suddenly un-muted, and there is a hallow ringing sound in his ears from the emptiness of space that should be occupied with laughter and voices and happiness. For the modern day king with millions of admirers the silence in his home is deafening.
He gets a glass of water from his refrigerator, noticing the only misplaced item in the whole penthouse probably is the yellow sticky note on the stainless steel door.
Niall-
I quit.
- Phyllis
That makes it more real.
Phyllis had quit? She'd been working for him for more than half a decade. She'd become his second-mother in America. It scares him. He dials her number with the sleek phone that had been built into the wall for kitchen calls. As he waits for her to answer, he paces, walking from the kitchen into the his bedroom. The dial tone is still trilling as his eyes sweep over his room, flickering over a glittering shadow on his nightstand and then back to the kitchen...and then back to the... glittering shadow on his nightstand.
"Hello, Niall," Phyllis's tired voice murmurs into the phone, but the only sound Niall can hear is the muted noise of it clattering to the ground behind his feet as he slowly drifts towards that glittering shadow on the nightstand. With a rush of weakness, he collapses to his knees, his fingers reaching out to pluck the ring that should have been joined by another and never taken off. It glitters in the light and glints as he turns it in his hand.
"Oh God," he heaves, his eyes blurring. Something tears inside of him. It makes him question everything. It's not something he's ever felt before. It's a burning sensation that ricochets in tidal waves inside him, until a loud, wet choking noise echoes in the room around him and he realizes with blurry eyes and a distorted mind that he is crying-no, sobbing. He slumps against the bed and smacks his hand against mouth to try to stop the pathetic noise from inside of him, but the waves from inside are too strong, and he lays there for God knows how long-heaving and sobbing with one small ring clutched in his hand.
This makes it real.
He gives in, finally. And his mind gushes with memories of her. Her laugh, her voice, her eye roll. The exact color of pink her eyelids turn when she cries. The way her eyes had begged him silently to fight for her-the way he had refused. He realizes now that his days of being king are over. He was a king-but never the way he planned. He wasn't a king when The Economist crowned him the most successful man under thirty. He wasn't a king the night he spent four million dollars in celebrations for turning the company into an internationally known billion dollar corporation. He was a king when he was a common man. He had been a king when he had kissed her for the first time in the rain, when he knew he was asking too much of her and quite possibly ruining her. He was a king the night he rolled over after having-making love to her in the back of the limo and felt something very strong pull in the base of his stomach. He had been a God when she had told him-somehow-she loved him. But he had become a mere mortal when he let her go, his crown and his heart, locked somewhere deep in the recesses of her heart.
She deserves so much more. He knows he's the scum of the Earth for carrying on with Gillian when she'd put her heart on the platter. And for all the good world was worth, he couldn't quite figure out why he'd done it. At some point in his life, he'd become more content with always having the upper hand in the game and being safe than putting himself at risk. He'd closed off his heart and he'd muted the world.
At some point he gets up. He dumps everything out of his suitcase and grabs the journal he'd bought at that dingy cafe in London. Nearly every page is filled. He uses the same stolen pen to write explanations of the photos. Some of them make no sense, he knows that. Their vague and stupid mostly. But for some reason he knows that they belong in her hands. On the last page he writes the only thing he can think of that could possibly explain to her how he feels.
Then he shuts the book and heads for the private bar in his kitchen, grabbing the first bottle of liquor he can find. He drinks it down as fast as he can, waiting for the world to collapse unto itself.
***
"Does he always pass out like this?" Niall's eyes open to a pair of scuffed brown Chelsea boots with a pair of black skinnies tucked into them. The voice is deep and Cheshire filled, and Niall immediately knows who it is.
"What the hell are you doing in my apartment?" Niall asks, his eyes closed and the vein above his left temple throbbing.
"Told you he's pleasant in the mornings," a softer voice says. His heart leaps for a minute and his eyes open, but it's Calinda who stands above him. For a minute her voice had sounded exactly like... Elouise's.
"How did you two get in?" Niall asks between gritted teeth, his head pounding. Calinda hands him a cup of hot tea and a bottle of aspirin. He realizes he's laying in the middle of his kitchen, his shirt torn and unbuttoned and his pants somewhere beside him.
"Phyllis gave us her key. El-I know this is your hangover remedy, so here."
He takes a long sip from the cup. The tea is sweet and minty, the perfect way to get rid of the stale taste of vodka from his mouth. This remedy, simple yet successful, had been his way of curing hangovers since he'd discovered vodka with Greg at age twelve in their father's basement. He remembers a morning a few months ago, in which he'd held Elouise's hair back while she puked after he'd kissed her in the club, and he'd made her a cup of peppermint tea and made her take two aspirin for her headache. The memory isn't anything spectacular or important, but it reminds him of a time when he actually helped Elouise-not hurt her.
"How is she?" Niall asks after a long moment of silence and awkward glances between the three.
Calinda's eyes have a fierce protectiveness to them that scares him a little. "Her uncle's in the hospital and getting worse. She's heartbroken, stressed, thinks you never gave a flying fu-"
"Calinda," Harry murmurs, placing his hand on the small girl's shoulder.
Calinda takes a deep breath to contain herself before turning back to Niall. "We came here because El is falling apart and as much as I can cuddle her and give her wine and tell her she's beautiful and will fall in love many times, she doesn't believe me-because she-" Calinda shuts her mouth and Niall wonders what Calinda knows about the girl he doesn't.
"What Calinda is trying to say is we're going to help you win Elouise back." Harry clarifies, coughing into his elbow.
"Why would you want me to win Elouise back? I would've thought you would've taken advantage of this opportunity. And who says I want her back?" He can't help but ask.
Calinda's glare could kill him. She turn to Harry with her shoulders rigid. "I have to go help El with some paperwork. Could you take care of this?" She asks angrily, jerking her thumb at Niall.
Harry chuckles and reassures her, looking over Niall like he's some pathetic child they have to babysit. "Where's a good place to get breakfast in this city?"
Niall sighs. "I don't want her back, you know. You should just go back to her and marry her and be the man she deserves."
Harry laughs loudly, causing Niall's eyes to narrow. "You know so little about it don't you?"
"About what?" Niall asks, grinding his teeth.
"Love," Harry replies, his eyes on Niall's.
Niall winces. "I thought you wanted breakfast?"
"Oh, I do. Let's go." Niall watches the energetic lad bound towards the elevator, his chelsea boots clicking against the wood. He pulls his pants up and buttons up his shirt, before heading into the elevator, vaguely able to tell from the fuzzy reflection in the elevator that his hair is sticking up on one half of his head.
He directs Harry down the busy city streets. Both boys are surprised to find that they have a lot in common and that finding stuff to talk about isn't that hard. It's a little bit awkward, considering one of them is desperately in love with the girl the other has, but they make it work. Niall still wants to be left alone, but Harry is very good at getting just about anyone to talk. Harry's warmth is a little annoying to Niall because it fills up the places in him where he likes being callous and cold, and it reminds him of how easily Harry could love Elouise the way she loves everyone and everything.
As they're eating, a quiet moment of silence befalls the pair and Niall feels Harry's intense eyes on him. "You know I don't believe that you don't love her?"
Niall's chewing slows as he meets Harry's eyes. "Why do you think that?" He asks, swallowing slowly.
Harry removes something from his jacket. It's a slender manilla envelope with a packet of papers inside. "I know you knew about this."
"How did you even get this?" Niall asks, his eyes scanning over the papers as his hands shake.
"It was the reason all along, wasn't it? Calinda found them in Paris."
Niall sighs heavily. The papers before him hold the power to collapse everything around him and Elouise too. "I don't know how to protect her from this. She's good and kind and loves openly, even when I don't deserve it. And so I-" Niall's throat clenches, choking his sentence off in the middle.
"You're going to get her back. But you've got to deal with this first."
"How? You've seen everything, it all points to me."
Harry smiles slowly, leaning back in the booth seat. "Have you ever played a fair game, Niall? Because we're about to play a really unfair game with your little friend Mr. Jones. Calinda's finance, Liam, is a lawyer and is prepared to help you. Calinda has a lot more evidence and a hell of a plan. Do you want in or not?"
Niall bites his tongue and examines Harry's earnest face. "On one condition," he negotiates, his chest heavy. "I want to be the one to tell Elouise when it's all over."
Harry grins and chuckles. "Deal."
***
#mystery
lol i'm not sure i like this chapter's ending but i needed to post a chapter so yeah!
i want to warn you all that chapters are going to be really slow for the next month or so because i have exams coming up and they are literally going to kill me! but then it's summer and i will be able to write EVERYDAY ALL DAY
yesssss.
okie. question: what do you think niall did? what do harry and calinda know?????!!!!!! what did mr. jones do?!?????!!??!??!??!?!?!?!?!?
special shout out to my friend for@BritishIrish for always commenting, voting, and posting onto my wall. so sweet and such a great emerging writer, please go follow & read!!! and s/o to those of you who have been so diligent about reading and commenting y'all are too kind and it makes my day to read your comments (i try to reply to all of them!!!)
love you all-
mads xoxo
ps.- this song is my favorite (;