“Charlotte! Wait a minute!” My full-pelt run had subsided into a brisk walk, the tears still rolling down my face with no intention of stopping. I had turned a corner and noticed the Novotel sign a little way down the street and hoped my mother wasn’t around, taking suitcases into the hotel or maybe even coming to find me. I ignored the concerned calls behind me.
“Char!” Niall said firmly, grabbing my arm from behind and forcing me to stop walking. I refused to turn and look at him and concentrated instead on wiping away the makeup from under my eyes in the hope that I may look less devastated than I felt. A quick glance at Niall’s expression as he moved to face me shattered that glimmer of hope. He looked insanely worried. Still gripping my arm, he spoke quietly but firmly, emphasising each word.
“Char, please. What’s going on?” I bit my lip and shook my head slowly. Even if I had wanted to tell him, there was no way I could have gotten the words out. Recounting everything out loud would have made it seem scarily real and heartbreakingly final. Part of me wanted to keep running, through the streets of Glasgow I wasn’t at all familiar with and therefore guaranteed to get wonderfully lost in. The other part of me was totally reassured by the touch on my arm and the panicked voice that went with it. I found I was able to control my sobs as Niall’s pleas became more feverish. He suddenly grabbed me tightly by my upper arms.
“Charlotte you’re scaring me!” He spoke fervently, the force of his words causing him to shake me a little.
“I can’t, Niall,” I said as though I were begging him, my words coming out in white clouds and dissolving almost instantly in the air. I looked at him fleetingly, noting the agitated look in his eyes, the hard set of his mouth. My arms restricted by Niall’s hold, I raised my hand awkwardly to swipe at some tears.
“Why not?” His voice was strained as he pleaded with me and he was slightly out of breath after having to chase a hysterical teenage girl through the streets of Glasgow.
“I just can’t, okay? Niall, trust me. It’s nothing important and I’ll be alright eventually. It’s something I have to deal with myself.” He looked unconvinced with my shaky voice but nevertheless, he slackened his grip and stepped back from me. He then spoke slowly, enunciating each word in this beautifully heartfelt manner that only he was capable of mastering. Directed at you, his words were so sincere that I had no doubt he could make anyone believe wholeheartedly in anything he said.
“Char, you’re never like this. This isn’t a side of you I’m pleased to see. Just then,” he said, pointing a thumb back in the direction of the buses, “back there on the bus? That looked like something important to me.” I maintained my blank stare at his face, his cheeks flushed, his eyebrows knit together in worry. I pursed my lips and scuffed my fluffy Ugg boot-like slippers on the ground. “You’re not going to tell me are you?” I gave a sympathetic frown as my answer and he nodded slowly as if he’d guessed it long before. “Okay.” Then he raised his eyebrows like a parent warning their child not to do something they shouldn’t. “But you need to promise me some things, Char. First, that whatever’s going on, you don’t keep it to yourself, ‘kay? It never helps.”
I made a gesture of agreement, pouting and nodding in a serious manner though his words were weirdly turning my insides to mush. “And...?”
“And that when you’re ready to talk you come straight to me, alright? No matter what time or where we are. Even if I’m...I don’t know, on stage! I’m here, okay?” I nodded in response, hoping I could convey to him how thankful I really was, though I was unable to put it in words at that exact moment. “Right, then,” he said, shifting his stance and putting his hands in his pockets. “Shall we go back to the buses and then get up to our new rooms?” he suggested, hoping to brighten the mood, if only marginally.
“Niall, I really can’t go back there right now,” I said uncomfortably, knowing his big brother instinct would once again take over and try to dissuade me. “Well what do you expect to do then?”
“Go for a walk, air my thoughts...be alone for a while,” I mused, staring dismally at a brick wall behind him, letting my eyes go out of focus. “Char, you can’t just go galavanting around Glasgow in a top thinner than paper and some old sweatpants.” His eyebrows raised again; this time he looked more doubtful than anything. I shrugged, waiting, as though the answer would materialise out of thin air. And in a way, it did. Niall began to shuck off his coat and he cut me off before I could object.
“I have another on the bus.” Silently relieved, I let him pull the coat around me and reveled in the feeling of drowning in warmth and the smell of Niall’s aftershave. After a second, Niall looked pointedly down at my grey slippers and began yanking off his worn military boots, the laces tied loosely and the leather creased.
“Niall, really,” I began with a short laugh, only to be interrupted once again as Niall raised a hand to stop me.
“Be back within two hours or I’ll assume something’s happened. Oh, and have my phone.”
Shortly, dressed in Niall’s navy coat and brown boots, I watched him walk back the way we had come in my grey slippers. I made the most of the smile that crept onto my face before reality came to hover over my head like a dark cloud and insisted I paid it due attention. Alone, I began to advance deeper and deeper into the city streets, my mind drowning in my own dim thoughts.
From the time I was born, I’d practically lived in bookshops. Mum would take me in my pram while she read until I was old enough to venture off among the shelves myself and preoccupy myself with tales of another world. I could be lost in there for hours, my imagination swimming around the words on the pages. I would move subconsciously when I was blocking someone’s access to a shelf, never taking my eyes off the page. I knew the people that worked there would get frustrated with me because of the little huffing noises they made as they passed me but it never discouraged me. I was determined to distract myself before the crying started again. Being a bookshop addict and in search of something that might make me feel more at home, I made a beeline for the nearest store I could find. I was practically in heaven walking into the shop, finding myself surrounded by multiple levels filled with shelf upon shelf of books. It was the perfect place to lose myself for a while, put that boy far from my mind and face real life later. It was always the way with me. Led by an invisible force, I arrived at the ‘Classics’ section and found what I was looking for after some rifling through the titles. I collapsed into a chair with the rigid-covered, new-smelling copy of The Secret Garden and was transported home again; a place where I felt young and ignorant to the ordeals of real life and where there were no irresistibly attractive, two-faced teenaged boys with curls enough to create halos around both of these faces.
At some point of course, I had to resurface; I couldn’t stay there reading for weeks on end as I had so desired to do. I sat down at the bookshop cafe, making a mental note to pay back Niall the money I’d found in his coat pocket. With my brain finally idle, the thoughts I’d tried to bar out began to seep back in through the cracks - slowly at first, but the more I thought about it, the more my mind sped up. It wasn’t a reel of Harry’s cutting words as I’d expected. It was just his face. My mind had decided to show me what I’d lost instead of reminding me of how I’d lost it. His face as he concentrated on reading a new set list, his face as he laughed uncontrollably sitting on a couch backstage, his face as he teased me silently with his eyes from across the room. The eyes that I had been infatuated with from the start. The lips that had once been an inch from mine. The dimple that would appear as he winked cheekily at me while in the middle of an interview. I hadn’t seen his face when he’d said all those horrible things to me that morning and so I remembered him as before; with the face I’d never imagined was capable of causing me harm.
Perhaps still in a shock-induced daze, I was weirdly unsurprised when Louis appeared in the seat next to me, earning himself a few lingering stares from other people sitting at the cafe. He looked at me for a long moment until I broke the eye contact, taking a big breath and repositioning my empty coffee cup in the saucer.
“Your mother’s got half the available crew divided into search parties out looking for you, you know.” I scrunched up my eyes in confusion as I remembered the two hours cover Niall had promised me.
“But Niall said he would-”
“He told us after you’d been gone two hours. Said you’d run off in a right state; he was really worked up over it.”
“He didn’t put it like that to Mum did he?” I asked anxiously. “I dunno,” he replied, “I wasn’t there when he told her.” He wrung his hands almost as if he were nervous. But this was Louis; he didn’t really get nervous.
“You’ve been gone three and a half hours, Char.” I pursed my lips and nodded down at the table ashamedly as if I had known of this already. When Louis spoke again, his tone changed from the indifferent, ‘informative’ one he’d been using. “Love, what on earth happened?” He now seemed as deeply concerned as Niall had been, his thickly accented words spoken in a low voice, cutting through the casual atmosphere of the bookshop cafe so sharply that I was sure people would turn to stare again.
“What did Niall say to you?” I asked tentatively. “Just that you were really very upset and you wouldn’t tell him what was wrong. You don’t have to tell me...but Charlotte, babe, we’re all a bit worried now. The look on Niall’s face when he’d told us - he was distraught. It makes me think something really terrible’s happened...” His watery-blue eyes looked at me in earnest, reminding me of Niall’s frantic expression.
“It would sound trivial to you...to anyone else, I mean.” I heard myself speak, shocked that I wasn’t rejecting him altogether in the fear I would let something slip.
“I highly doubt that. This isn’t normal for you, obviously there’s something big going on. The usual Charlotte Hawthorne doesn’t go running about strange cities, needing to be found by her extraordinarily distressed big brother Louis who just happened to step into a bookshop completely at random,” he grinned, inspiring an unexpected chuckle of my own. His slow, unwavering voice encouraged me to be at ease in his presence; he was so easy to talk to, to listen to. I swallowed, looking uneasily down at the table, knowing what was coming.
“Hey,” he said, reaching out and taking my hand that was resting on the table. “Whatever it is, Char, it’s going to be okay. Things have a way of working themselves out you know.” I smiled through the tears that were welling up in my eyes.
“Not this time,” I shook my head at him. With his eyes, he coaxed me into elaborating. “I met this guy a little while ago, see.” I drew in a long shaky breath, reluctant to meet Louis’ eyes just in case he could somehow already find the hidden meaning in my story. “He’s not the kind of guy I would usually be interested in; he has girls constantly fawning over him and I’m sick of liking guys that I feel like I have to compete for. But this guy was different...I still don’t know exactly why.” The world around seemed to fade as I talked about him; my words flowed without any effort on my part as I painted the picture for the boy in front of me, whose existence I’d all but forgotten. I realised I’d never talked about Harry in this way out loud before. “I guess maybe it was because he has this way of...drawing me in. I don’t think he even notices he does it.” I drifted off at the end of the sentence, thinking hard about the way Harry was so unbelievably ignorant as to the effect he had on people.
“I’ve never been an expert with boys exactly,” I explained somewhat awkwardly. “It’s my best friend who’s always the one with the boyfriend. I’ve watched her go through quite a few relationships and I just became used to that - watching, I mean. For a long time I tried hard to find someone that would care about me like those boys cared about Sara but it was so difficult feeling like second best. I just gave up one day. I realised I would literally force away feelings I had for any boy after that because it was Sara who got the boyfriends, not me.” I could tell by Louis’ face that he was practically bursting with the need to interrupt me but he was tactful enough to let me finish. “So I drifted along with the pattern. It took me a while to realise I wasn’t exactly content with the way things were but even then, I didn’t have the confidence to change it. I tried to put things like that out of my mind, focus on schoolwork, get good marks, stay away from any potential dramas. And then I met the guy. It’s funny how you can search so hard for something, give up when you believe it’s impossible and then have what you were looking for fall right at your feet without any effort on your part whatsoever. That’s how it worked for me, anyway. He took me completely by surprise,” I murmured shaking my head slowly. “No one has ever treated me the way he has...taken an interest like he does. But...there are certain things that keep us apart and if we were to overstep the line...well, we’d both be in huge trouble. I was in a position where I couldn’t help seeing him every day and over time it just got worse and worse. I tried to remind myself of the things that would stop us from having a real relationship but it didn’t help. Instead, I grew closer to him, more attached.” I glanced up at Louis who encouraged me to continue, squeezing my hand that still lay limp on the table. “I never once entertained the idea that he would ever like me back in the same way. I mean, of course when you have feelings for someone, the ideal outcome is for them to return the feelings...but I always felt that he was on such a completely different level to me, like it was unreasonable for me to even imagine he could like me. But then little things started happening...and one night he almost kissed me. It was so surreal. Even though technically nothing happened, we both knew what nearly did. I’d been trying so hard to hold him at arm’s length and then he goes and does that. It did things to my head. It gave me ideas that I’d wanted so badly to keep myself from thinking. Then...one morning something inside me just switched on. I felt different. Brave, somehow. It was like...if I didn’t finally admit to my feelings, I would explode. When I woke up I was just so determined to forget everything that kept me from being with him. We’re the impossible couple...but no matter how severely the odds were set against us, he just had to know. I wasn’t even scared of what his reaction was going to be, I guess I was just focused on telling him the way I really felt.” I clenched my teeth and extracted my hand from Louis, unsure of how I was going to get the next part out.
“Char,” Louis began sympathetically. I shook my head and crossed my arms almost defensively as tears began to cascade down my cheeks again.
“When I reached him, I was ready to tell him everything, I was...excited, almost.” My voice was cracking in the middle of words but I was determined to finish. “And that’s when I heard him telling his best friend what he really thought of me. How ironic that at the moment I’m going to tell him the truth about how I feel about him, he’s saying how much he doesn’t want to see me, how much he hates me.”
“Sweetheart...” Louis dragged his chair closer to me and put an arm around my waist as I again began to properly cry. “He said he was pretending to like me and that he was sick of seeing me and didn’t want to be around me anymore. I just don’t understand it!” I exclaimed helplessly. “It seemed like he genuinely liked spending time with me. I thought we were getting close. I’d finally let myself think that maybe, just maybe he felt the same way as me. He was keeping up some sick act this whole time. How could I disgust him that much?”
“Hey, hey. Charlotte, don’t you dare even begin to think like that. Don’t you blame it on yourself. The only person at fault is that boy,” he said insistently, rubbing my back in circles. All I could do was nod, I had no energy left for disagreeing with him. “I don’t understand how he could do such a thing to a lovely girl such as yourself. That’s deceitful that is, in the most awful way possible. But you’ve got to believe it’s nothing to do with you. There’s guys out there who act like that because they want to look like the big guy in front of their mates. It’s not because of anything you’ve done, Char.” He breathed out exasperatedly. “What a lying son of a-”
“Louis.”
“Sorry, sorry. I forgot you like him.”
“It’s okay,” I croaked quietly looking down at the table reaching for my empty sugar packet, not sure of how to react to Louis’ words. “I just don’t get how he could do that to you!” He began again in the same outraged tone.
“I don’t know,” I replied wearily, tearing the sugar packet into tiny pieces. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Wish I could.” Louis laughed without humour. I dropped the remaining shred of the tiny paper packet.
“But you can.” After I’d said it, I looked up to see Louis’ questioning expression. I added somewhat nonchalantly, in a grave tone, “He’s your best friend”. Louis narrowed his eyes, his questioning expression slowly morphing into one of confusion...and then realistion; I could practically hear his brain ticking over, trying to find an alternate meaning to my words.
“Harry?” The name shot from Louis’ mouth like a bullet, tearing further the wounds I’d already received. At the same time Louis spoke, my name was called from across the shop.
“Charlotte?! Oh, thank God!” Mum threw her hands up to her forehead, looking especially bat-like in her black woolen poncho. She then called over her shoulder towards the stairs, “Sam, she’s here.”
“Not a word,” I shot at Louis threateningly as he sat there stupefied. I stood up to be engulfed by the bat poncho that was dusted with raindrops, never breaking eye contact with Louis over my mother’s shoulder.
The rest of the day passed by in a blur. Niall was there at intervals, the majority of the time I spent alone in my hotel room, struggling to focus my thoughts on anything but Harry. My mind was entangling itself in a mess of whys and hows and what ifs. I was able to convince Mum that I’d just gone for a spontaneous adventure around Glasgow and gotten lost yet again - she was so flustered with the prospect of that night’s concert, it didn’t take much effort. I continued my unconcerned act throughout the day with Mum, right through to when she came to pick me up to leave for the show. I had gone through the motions of getting ready, pulling on a half decent outfit of dark jeans, a light grey fitted coat and lace up boots with a wedge heel.
Mum was conveniently exiling me to the boys’ huge dressing room during the concert, but unfortunately this didn’t prevent me from having to see Harry before they performed. I sank into a giant velvet couch, wishing the cushions would swallow me whole. I flicked blindly through the assortment of magazines provided for the boys on a glass coffee table, wondering why whoever put them there believed a band made up of teenage boys would want to read Vogue Living. It was easy to look engrossed in an article when the boys entered the room after having been off somewhere with Sam. The chatty girls from wardrobe who had been waiting in the room with me immediately pounced on them. I looked up to give Niall a somewhat forced smile and proceeded to go back to my ‘reading’ while really monitoring Harry’s path around the room out of the corner of my eyes. After getting changed in a bathroom, he collapsed on the couch opposite me, legs lifting off the ground with the force of the movement, Liam doing the same next to him. “How’s the headache?” he asked Harry.
“No better.” His voice sounded flat and disinterested on the verge of rudeness. He reached over to take a bottle of water off the coffee table that apart from the magazine stack was filled with rows of colourful drinks and in response, I lifted my magazine a little higher. The lid clicked as he broke the seal and he tipped the bottle up to his mouth. I took my chance to look at him secretively over the top of the magazine but failed dismally - his big green eyes swimming with the reflection of the fluorescent lights against the upturned water bottle, were staring directly into mine. I retracted my gaze immediately and then realised I’d been intently staring at an ad for men’s suits from the time the boys had walked in. I’d always been quite the genius.
After our awkward fleeting eye contact and the lack of our usual playful conversation throughout the day, I was sure Harry would realise something was up. I hoped he might just brush it off. I hoped he wouldn’t try to talk things out of me as he had done in the past. I hoped that Louis wouldn’t reveal to him the real reason for the glaring tension between us. I’d never be able to look Harry in the eye again if he knew; I barely could now.
“Harry?” My eyes snapped up to the sound of Liam’s voice, purely because the room had been almost totally silent until then, the cackling wardrobe girls having done their job and left. Harry was sitting up now and leaning over slightly, his cheeks flushed, his eyes glistening and his expression twisted into a grimace.
“I think I’m gonna be sick.” This abruptly stopped Niall and Louis’ game of ‘hit each other as many times as you can with empty water bottles’ as they turned to look at Harry, their laughter dissolved in an instant. Any of them getting sick before show time was obviously very bad news. Harry got up swiftly and made his way to the bathroom, Louis following him. Niall made an obvious effort to drown out the less than pleasant sounds coming from the bathroom with small talk about how the chicken Harry had had for lunch looked a bit dodgy. I bit my lip hard and tried to force away thoughts of how Harry had helped me both times I’d been sick on this tour. Those acts had been false, made for personal gain only and no matter how hard I tried to convince myself it was all a misunderstanding, it just wasn’t. I knew I wouldn’t be able to be around him when he came out of the bathroom; I slapped the magazine down on the stack and excused myself from the room.