Louis hadn’t suffered from insomnia since childhood. He’d always been so bouncy and energetic that sleep seemed like a waste of time – why bother shutting your eyes when there were so many other much more interesting things you could be doing? You only live once. So while everyone else was wasting their time sleeping, Louis was up doing fun stuff. It got to be a habit of his; even when he was exhausted, his eyes wouldn’t close, and he ended up lying and staring at the ceiling for hours on end. Sleep never seemed to come.
The problem had been solved years ago, but that night as he lay in bed, the only thing that came to him were thoughts, and sleep gave him a wide berth. It was frustrating to be awake when he just wanted to escape for a few hours. His head buzzed with confusion and his eyes wouldn’t stay closed. Eventually, he resorted to extremes and went to find some paracetamol, and eventually, drugged up to the eyeballs with medicine he didn’t need, he fell asleep.
When he was driving like a maniac at five minutes to eleven the next morning, battling through the work traffic and struggling to focus through a haze of exhaustion and cold medicine, he decided that the next time he had a group psychology session with the prisoners, he was going to give them all a very long and boring lecture about drug abuse. So cold medicine was strong enough to let you sleep through the alarm! Who knew?
As he staggered through the doorway, a couple of people stared at him and he thought he heard a few people muttering, but he wasn’t in the mood to listen. It was only his third day and already he’d made somebody cry, drowned the plant in his office and turned up three hours late for work. Well, he was definitely making a good start.
“Louis!”
Louis growled and didn’t look around. He wasn’t in the mood for Liam today.
“Louis! Will you wait for a second? I need a word!”
“I’m three hours late, in case you hadn’t noticed. I really don’t have time for a chat.”
“It’ll only take a second.”
Louis stubbornly didn’t turn around. “I’m running late on all of my appointments, I have paperwork to organise and my plant is dead, so excuse me for not wanting to stop and talk to you!”
The plant part made Liam’s mouth twitch, but he forced himself to keep a straight face. “Louis, I really need to ask you something.”
Louis whirled around. “What?” he snapped. “So I overslept! I’m sorry, okay!”
“Oh, no, it’s not that. We’ve all done that.” Liam shook his head and smiled. “On more than one occasion. It’s nothing to do with that.”
“Oh.” All of a sudden Louis felt pretty stupid, and guilty for being so rude. “Sorry.”
“No problem. It’s about Harry.”
Louis felt his insides freeze with worry. “Harry Styles?” he asked casually.
His attempt at nonchalance made Liam roll his eyes. “Is there any other Harry?”
“Um…no, I guess there isn’t. What about Harry?”
“He’s been acting kind of funny ever since he spoke to you yesterday; I was wondering if you knew anything.”
“Me? Nope. No, I don’t. I don’t know anything.” Falling over his words, Louis knew he sounded fake and Liam wasn’t buying it.
“You’ve seen the kid; he never shows he’s upset. He just…sits there. He smiles and he acts like nothing fazes him. For him to let people see that he’s down…it must be something pretty serious.”
“I really don’t know. I mean, we were talking a bit about…the incident; I suppose that could have unsettled him a bit.”
Liam grimaced. “Oh. I wish you’d warned me earlier; that way I could have advised you against it.”
“Huh?” Louis frowned.
“We, ah…we don’t tend to talk about ‘the incident’,” Liam explained. “He’s kind of sensitive about it. We got told that before he even came. Bringing it up unsettles him. He gets upset about it. He has a bit of a history of, um…well, never mind. But it’s not a good idea.”
“Why did no one warn me?” Louis exclaimed.
“I never realized you would need warning. It doesn’t take a genius to know that you can’t really have a conversation about things like that; I already told you how mixed up he is about it. I assumed that you’d have the sense to –” Liam stopped abruptly.
Harry was staring darkly at them from the other side of the room.
His hair was a tangled mess and there were frown lines that refused to go away etched across his forehead. Every muscle of his face was tensed. He looked pale and sickly, and his mouth was set in a harsh line. For once he wasn’t lying sprawled out; he was sat hunched up in a corner with his knees pulled into his chest, arms around his legs. The bags underneath his eyes were more like suitcases, and dark shadows accompanied them, making him look kind of creepy. Louis couldn’t look at him for more than a second without feeling guilty, so he focused his attention on Liam.
“You see what I mean?” Liam asked quietly, turning his face away so that Harry couldn’t see what he was saying.
“He looks…disturbed.”
“He is disturbed. I wasn’t doing the night shift last night, but according to the guys who were, he was prowling round his cell like a caged bear until the small hours. It’s just as well he doesn’t share with anybody. And when they made him get into bed, he screamed for the rest of the night. Not just to spite us, either; he’s not like that. Some of them deliberately make a racket just for the satisfaction of getting on everyone’s nerves. Not Harry. He has awful nightmares; sometimes he’ll just sit and cry because of them. They get to be that bad. Dean reckons he woke up every ten minutes to the sound of Harry howling.”
Louis felt sick. “Does he…does he do that…often?”
“Dean? Oh, yeah, he’s terrible, he wakes up at the drop of a –”
“Not Dean, Harry!”
“Oh! Yeah, he does. He’s only been here a fortnight or so, but…yeah. I did a few weeks on trial at his last place, and he did it there, too. Sometimes they have to sedate him. He’d been doing a lot better lately, but it looks like that’s out of the window now.”
Louis sneaked a look at Harry, who was sitting and staring into space with a fierce expression on his face. You would never have guessed that he had been crying all night. Something held him up straight, keeping his face taught and eyes hard – maybe it was pride. Louis couldn’t help admiring him for it.
“Look, I didn’t mean to upset him,” Louis began guiltily.
Liam held up a hand to stop him. “Don’t. He doesn’t want your pity, or need it. It’ll be alright in the end. Just…maybe stay out of his way for a bit, yeah? I don’t think he wants to talk to you right now.”
That was good advice, and Louis intended to follow it. Spotting a familiar blond head wandering past, he gave Liam a small smile and then hurried off in pursuit.
“Niall! Hey, Niall!”
“Louis! Hey, man, how’s it going?” Niall greeted him. “How’s your plant?”
“Dead,” Louis said gloomily, “unless it’s risen from the grave since last night.”
Niall tutted. “Shame.”
“Yeah.” Louis brightened all of a sudden. “You think you could help me with something?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“It’d be great if you’d help me sort out some of my paperwork. I really need some kind of filing system in place; I’m losing everything. I’m drowning in a sea of paper. I know it’s kind of boring, but it’s got to be more fun than just walking around, right?”
“I’ll do it! If, uh…if the guys will let me.” Niall looked down.
“Let me deal with that,” Louis said firmly. He cupped his hands around his mouth so that the sound would carry and yelled “Oi, Liam!”
About fifty people turned to stare at him. Niall’s ears went red with embarrassment, but Louis was unruffled. Weird, that, seeing as the gaze of just one boy with curly hair could turn him into a quivering wreck. Turning around, Liam caught Louis’ eye and tilted his head questioningly.
“Niall’s going to come help me with my filing system!” Louis called.
Liam gave him a nod and a thumbs up.
“Sorted,” Louis said cheerfully. “Coming?”
It was the first time he’d walked around without Liam escorting him, but as Louis repeatedly unlocked doors and then locked them with the keys he’d been presented with, he didn’t feel that he needed to be at all worried about Niall. They casually chatted on the way, about football and music and what sort of car Niall wanted when he got out. When Louis admitted that he had a Porsche, he saw Niall almost visibly drooling and then he started interrogating Louis about what it was like to drive, what colour it was, even what it smelled like – which was odd, but Louis liked his car; he didn’t mind having a conversation about it.
They had just arrived in Louis’ office when Niall said “What did you do to Harry yesterday, man? He looks freaked. Like…I don’t know, he looks like…I don’t even know. He doesn’t look right.”
Forcing himself to stay calm, Louis sat down in his chair and absently shuffled his papers, pretending to focus on that. “Who’s to say it was me? He’s kind of…different, isn’t he?”
Niall smiled sympathetically. “He’s an odd one, to be sure. I’ve never seen him act like this, though.”
“Well, who knows what goes through someone’s mind?” Louis murmured distractedly, flicking through a few memos.
“Um…you’re a psychiatrist, man. Isn’t it your job to know?”
Louis rolled his eyes. “I’m not a mind reader. I don’t know what’s going through your head; I’m just supposed to know why.”
“Yeah, I guess…”
Before Niall could continue asking uncomfortable questions, Louis hurriedly shoved a messy heap of paper at him. “Hold this for a second.”
Staggering, Niall clung to the pile and looked horrified. “You’ve only been here for two days! How do you have this much paper? Did you chop down a rainforest?”
Louis laughed. “Something like that. Well. Actually, nothing like that. But believe it or not, four people and twenty minutes of psychoanalysis each equals a hell of a lot of paperwork.”
“Yeah, well, I’d noticed.” Niall eyed the stack of papers in his arms with a wary expression. “Do we have to sort all of this?”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to read it. All we need to do is read the names on the top of each sheet and alphabetize them. Horan, Malik, Redshank and Styles – simple.”
“Sounds a bit too simple.”
“No catch, I promise. I’ll even throw in coffee and biscuits afterwards. Just…don’t give yourself a paper cut, okay? I don’t want the wrath of your solicitor when he accuses me of hurting you.” Louis grinned.
“What kind of biscuits?” Niall asked suspiciously.
Louis straightened confidently. “Jammy Dodgers.”
“Deal!” Niall said immediately, hurrying over to the filing cabinet and checking the name on the first piece of paper.
Can’t go wrong with a good Jammy Dodger, Louis thought smugly as he ran a hand through his hair. Things were still a little fuzzy inside his head, but that didn’t mean he’d forgotten how to use bribery. He couldn’t help but smile. Maybe there was no sense of flirtation or chemistry between him and Niall, and no excitement, but at least he knew where he stood.