you'll know it's just for you (3/4). harry/louis.
parts: 1, 2, 4
(see header post for summary and details)
+
“Don’t judge him without really knowing him first, Louis,” Eleanor warned him, elbowing him slightly as they headed down to the lobby of the hotel to meet Harry and Matt. “Don’t you remember back when Harry and I first met, and he jokingly made that tweet about wanting to shave-”
“-that wasn’t a joke,” Louis cut in.
“-but look at us now,” Eleanor tossed back, lifting her shoulders in a shrug.
Louis snorted, looking back at her and raising his eyebrows at her, amused. “That was a really bad example to use, you know,” he told her. “Harry still can’t stand-”
She grimaced, holding a hand to cut him off from saying anything else and nodding. “Right,” she said.
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell him that he’d had a boyfriend before him,” Louis muttered, his tone laced with bitterness.
Eleanor sighed, reaching lace her fingers very loosely through the gaps in Louis’, squeezing lightly. “Just don’t let any of this get to your head tonight, okay?” she asked. “You know there are going to cameras there, and the last thing that the paparazzi needs is for you to look like a jealous ex-boyfriend.”
“Or maybe that’s exactly what they need,” Louis replied, even though he knew that he wouldn’t do that. Even if he should, even if he knew he should. That’s all it would take, really. A few shots of him and Harry for the entire to façade to shatter once and for all.
Eleanor gave him a small smile, rolling her eyes as a camera snapped a picture of them entering the lobby. Up ahead, Harry and Matt were leaning against a wall, their eyes falling onto the couple and Harry’s face lighting up a little at the sight of Louis up ahead of him - or maybe that was all just Louis’ imagination. It wouldn’t surprise him, really.
“You’re blushing already,” Eleanor teased, bumping her hip against Louis’ and letting out a small laugh. That didn’t surprise him, either.
“Hey you two,” Matt was the first to greet them. His hand wrapped around Harry’s, and Louis wanted to knock him right back into the wall he’d just pushed off of. That was his hand to hold. Not Matt’s.
He hated that he was nearly to the point where he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d held Harry’s hand. It made him sick to his stomach.
“Hello,” Eleanor replied, Louis keeping quiet. She reached forward to pull Matt in for a quick hug. “Welcome to the One Direction Significant Others’ Society, the meetings are every other Wednesday.”
“Christ,” Harry and Louis muttered in unison, both staring back at each other as soon as it happened.
If any of it was suspicious or off-putting to Matt in the slightest, he didn’t let it show. Eleanor, however, allowed her eyes to scan from Harry and Louis and back again before taking a step backwards and clearing her throat. “Anywho,” she hummed, “the reservations are for seven, so we should probably get going, yeah?”
Louis nodded stiffly, taking her hand back in his - loosely, always loosely - and heading toward the door. Harry and Matt were behind them, and as the electric doors pushed open, a flurry of camera flashes were aimed toward them, documenting their “first of many” double dates.
From the corner of Louis’ eye, he could see a girl holding up a sign written in Sharpies and glitter glue. WHAT ABOUT LARRY? it read, and Louis couldn’t help but agree.
What about Larry?
+
Harry had caught sight of the sign, just barely before he’d been ushered into the black SUV that was going to be taking them to whatever restaurant it was they were going. It felt like a slap in the face, really, but it wasn’t something that he wasn’t used to by now.
Ever since he and Matt had first become a thing, the fans had really turned into a constant outpour of outbursts. He grimaced every time he saw a tweet directed at Louis, telling him that he’d missed his chance. He got tweet after tweet from people telling him that Matt wasn’t as cute as Louis, that this wasn’t fair. There was a wide scattering of them that called Harry an asshole for betraying Louis like this (and Louis had replied to one of them, even, feigning curiosity and making a joke about how Harry was always an asshole with a winking emoticon after it). And he didn’t know how to reply to any of them other than to, really, agree with them. So he didn’t say anything at all and let them all roll in with a knot in his stomach.
There was metanalysis, even, written about “the rise and fall of the Larry Empire.” People would chart their body language, the way they interacted at the concert. They could almost pinpoint exactly when the breakup (or whatever it was) had happened - it blew his mind, that people were that aware of their actions, that people knew them that well.
His thoughts were all cut off abruptly by the feeling of Matt’s hand slipping into his once more, giving him a light squeeze. “This should be fun, yeah?” he asked.
Harry nodded back at him, gave him a soft “yeah,” in response. But the only thoughts going through his head at the moment were about how wrong this was.
His first big public date since coming out shouldn’t have been with anyone other than Louis. And yes, Louis was here. But he wasn’t here the way he should have been. He wasn’t here with Harry.
+
The dinner turned out to be not nearly as torturous as it could have been - which wasn’t to say that it was exactly pleasant, but it wasn’t miserable, and so far, no screaming matches had occurred.
“How much of the Up All Night tour did you follow, Eleanor?” Matt asked, looking over at Eleanor as a refill on the bread basket was sat down in the center of the table. The four of them were sectioned off in a private backroom at a local restaurant, away from the crowds and the cameras - save for a few shots for the newspaper and magazines.
Eleanor paused before answering, taking a sip from her drink. “I was here for quite a bit of it,” she said with a small shrug. She leaned in against Louis for a moment before swaying right back away from him as she caught the look that Harry hadn’t even realized he’d been sending her. “I liked spending time with Louis in the States.”
Harry scoffed, low and hardly noticeable under his breath. He reached forward to grab a roll out of the basket, his hand falling on top of another’s with similar intentions, the sparks shooting up his arm on instant. He looked forward, feeling Louis’ eyes on him before he actually saw him, and he could feel a slight flush to his cheeks as he pulled his hand away. “It’s all yours,” he said.
“No, you can have it,” Louis assured him.
But Harry shook his head and Louis wasn’t budging, so the bread just sat between them, untouched until Matt declared that if nobody else was going to eat it, he would.
“These two once got into a breadsticks sword fight at an Olive Garden,” Eleanor said with a laugh, nodding between Louis and Harry and looking back over at Matt.
Harry’s heart sunk a little in his stomach - why would she bring that up? Why would she even think she had the right to bring that up? When he looked at Louis, he saw that Louis was staring down at the table cloth.
“Oh yeah?” Matt asked, missing the looks on Harry and Louis’ faces entirely. “Who won?”
“I did,” they both replied before staring up at each other and shaking their heads, almost like a mirror reflection. “No, you didn’t.”
From out of the corner of his eye, he could see Eleanor smirking to herself, smiling slyly down at the table and scanning her eyes across the menu.
“You lot probably have a lot of tour stories,” Matt carried on with a shrug. “You two especially, I’m sure.”
Harry almost choked on his soda and Louis cleared his throat. Harry looked back at Matt, raising his eyebrows. “W-why do we get an especially?” he asked.
Matt shrugged. “Just that you two seem the closest…or you used to, at least. Maybe you had a spat or something, but you two seemed a bit attached at the hips.”
Eleanor was giggling freely at this point, dodging the glares that Louis was sending in her direction and covering her mouth with her cloth napkin.
“They’re kind of you-had-to-be-there stories, I guess,” Harry finally spoke up, giving a shrug as he looked between Eleanor and Louis before bringing his eyes back to Matt. “Why dwell on the past when you can focus on the future, right?”
“How would it be dwelling?”
Harry’s gaze was ripped away from Matt, brought back to Louis, and he blinked back at him with wide eyes. “What?”
Louis only shook his head back at him. “I don’t see how it’s really dwelling on the past,” he repeated himself. “We had some fucking good memories last year, Haz.”
Their 2011 memories had been better, though, and they both knew that. In 2011, things had been simpler. In 2011, they didn’t have management crawling up their asses at all times and telling them that they needed to tone down their friendship before it became far too obvious that it was much more than friendship.
Harry shrugged. “I was just saying-”
“That you’re looking more forward to the tour this year with Matty boy over here than last year’s tour? Last year when we got to headline for the first time? When we-”
“Lou, I didn’t say that.”
“Well you might as well have,” Louis spat back at him. “You know we had some good times last year, times that you don’t look back and dwell on - things that you actually like to remember…” he paused, looking over at Matt and shooting him an annoyed glare. “Not that you would know any of that, of course,” he muttered.
Matt blinked, clearly confused. “I…I’m not…”
“Louis,” Harry’s voice almost came out like a plea more than anything else, all but begging him to stop talking even if at the same time his insides were screaming for Louis to keep talking - to talk to the point of explosion, to finally letting out all that he’d been keeping in for the past few years.
But instead, Louis just picked up his menu and cleared his throat, trying his best to act like none of this had ever happened in the first place. “I’m thinking chicken,” he said, looking over at Eleanor. “Kentucky’s famous for their chicken, right?”
“We’re in Tennessee,” Harry mumbled in response, correcting him before Eleanor got the chance to get a word in.
Louis simply looked back down at his menu, nodding so swiftly that it was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. “Right,” he said.
And that was it.
+
That was it, that is, until they got back to the hotel.
The tension was thick and all but unbearable, and before they were even in the hotel, Eleanor was insisting that Matt join her and her friend for an impromptu movie night in her hotel room.
Matt had nodded, looking over at Harry expectantly. “Are you coming?”
“Band meeting,” Harry lied on the spot, offering him a shrug. “Before we leave in the morning…we always spend the night together. It’s a bit of a tradition.”
“They have a lot of traditions,” Eleanor assured him as they headed toward the service elevators that the hotel had permitted to the band for use away from the general population.
Matt merely nodded, going along with everything that was being said to him.
Louis was silent, and Louis had been silent since dinner.
Once the elevator reached their floor, Eleanor guided Matt off toward her room, tossing a look over her shoulder at the other two. “Good night, boys,” she called out, her voice bouncing off the walls before she and Matt were wheeling around a corner and vanishing out of sight.
Louis barely registered a look toward Harry, grabbing his card key and sliding it into the slot of his door, stepping in and allowing Harry to follow. Nobody was in his room, the band having must have all decided to camp out in Liam’s room for the night.
Harry closed the door after them, pausing against it for a moment and trying to collect all of his thoughts, before he was turning around and looking back at Louis. “What the hell was that tonight, Louis?”
Louis scoffed bitterly, shaking his head. “You’ll forgive me for not really knowing how to talk to your boyfriend, Haz. I don’t really know what’s a safe topic to talk about and what’s off-limits since, you know, you didn’t really find it necessary to tell him that you’d been in a relationship before him.”
“Are you honestly still on about this?” Harry groaned. “I really don’t understand what the big deal is, Louis.”
“The big deal is that you didn’t even bother to tell your boyfriend about me,” Louis replied, his voice shaky. “To tell him about us. Like we were nothing!”
“What the fuck was I supposed to say, Lou?!” Harry exclaimed, his voice cracking slightly as he could feel himself getting riled up. “How exactly was I supposed to tell him about that without outing you?”
Louis shook his head, fingers angrily raking into his hair and gripping on slightly to the ends. “What, you can’t trust your own boyfriend to keep his mouth shut?”
“I don’t trust anyone with information about you, Louis! Don’t you get that?!” Harry could feel his cheeks getting hot, his eyes starting to brim up with tears. He took a stagger ing step closer to Louis. “I’m not going to tell him anything about you because that’s not fair to you; because you don’t deserve that.”
Louis was staring down at his feet, keeping silent, and it made Harry even angrier, for whatever reason. “And you just…you just stand there,” he babbled on, his voice beginning to rack with tears. “You just stand there and stew over shit but you don’t say anything. And I don’t know what’s going on in your head anymore when I used to be able to read your thoughts before you were even able to think them, and I hate that.”
“What am I supposed to say?” Louis finally forced out of himself. He reached down to grip onto his shirt, tugging it overhead and tossing it to the side. It landed half on, half off the foot of his bed and Harry had to force himself to keep his eyes focused on Louis’ face rather than any other areas. “Am I supposed to tell you that you broke my heart when you suddenly decided that I wasn’t worth it anymore? That I don’t how to fucking deal with myself because it’s my fault?!”
“Why would you ever think that I don’t think you’re worth it?”
“Because you left!” Louis’ voice shook angrily. Harry hated hearing him angry…and this went beyond angry. This was a combination of anger and loss, desperation, brokenness, and it killed him. “You went off and did that stupid fucking interview and before I even have a chance to blink, you’ve got fucking Matty on your arm and it’s like I’ve been kicked in the gut and left for dead.”
Harry knew where he was coming from, he did, and it hurt. It hurt worse that he was still compelled - even after all of that - to keep fighting, to keep going. “Two years, Louis,” his voice was quieter now, but still low and shaky and scarily serious at the same time. “You had two years to let our relationship not be a secret anymore - and I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I couldn’t not be who I was just because you weren’t ready to be who you are.” His fingers curled into his hair and he shook his head. “And I’m sorry, but if we couldn’t come out publicly, I had to do the next best thing - I at least had to come out…and after that…after I did that…I knew that there couldn’t be a Louis and Harry anymore. It would be too obvious, and they’d be able to draw the line connecting me to you far too easily, and I knew that you weren’t ready for that.”
“So you just walked away,” Louis deadpanned.
“I’m nineteen, Lou,” Harry replied. “I make mistakes. I fuck up. And I know that I fucked up, that I fucked up our relationship, and that I fucked up everything…and I’m so sorry.”
The tears that had been brimming in the corners of his eyes were finally spilling, falling from his eyes and racing down his cheeks, and they felt like tears that he’d been holding in for months. They were tears of anger and regret and loss and a million other things, and the last thing he wanted right now was for Louis to see any of this, for Louis to see him like this, so he pathetically covered his face with his hands, angling his body away.
He felt a pair of arms wrapping around him mere seconds later, and his heart nearly burst out of his chest at the contact, because this was Louis. This was Louis with his arms wrapped around him so tightly that Harry was sure he’d be begging for oxygen if he wasn’t so fucking grateful right now. It felt like coming home. It felt the most right he’d felt in months, and all he could do was wrap his arms around him in response, burrowing his face into the crevice of Louis’ bare neck. “I’m sorry for all of it, Lou.”
Louis’ hands ran up and down Harry’s back consolingly, comfortingly, and Harry’s eyes squeezed shut, crying even harder. He was crying because this was all he wanted at the end of the day, all he’d ever wanted and all he’d ever want. Him and Louis. Louis’ arms around him. That was it.
There were so many things he wanted to say. He wanted to say I love you and I miss you and I made a mistake being with Matt, but he couldn’t get any of it out, all that he could get out was a slurred string of apologies, each one being shushed by Louis.
“I just want to be what you need me to be,” Louis replied back to him, and Harry didn’t know how to respond, but he knew that it felt like an apology - that it was an apology.
They broke away after Harry didn’t know how long, his heart swelling and hammering against his chest. They didn’t pull back very far from each other, granted, just enough that the tip of Harry’s nose nudged along Louis’. When he allowed his eyes to flutter closed and then open once more, they danced along Louis’ own in a butterfly kiss, and he could swear that he heard Louis catch his breath.
Their lips were hardly even inches apart, really. It wouldn’t take much at all for them to close off the rest of the distance and kiss. Kiss and not stop kissing. To fall back onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and sheets just like they always did but hadn’t done in so long.
He could tell that similar thoughts were running through Louis’ head, and his eyes were fluttering shut as soon as he realized that Louis was leaning forward and Harry was leaning forward right along with him.
He parted his lips just slightly, barely catching the graze of Louis’ lips against his own when he heard a door from behind them swinging open, and a familiar voice popping up and ripping the two of them away from each other.
“Thought you two lads might be in here,” Niall pointed out a little sheepishly, giving the two of them a small smile when he received their matching, angered glares.
His eyes widened a couple seconds after that. “Oh,” he stammered out. “Oh, I didn’t…I should’ve known that you two were, uh…” he was backing out of the room after that, tucking Louis’ card key back into his pocket and calling out a “they’re already asleep,” to Liam and Zayn as the hotel room door closed behind him.
Harry took a step back, covering his face in his hands for a second before pulling them away and taking a few seconds to simply take in Louis’ appearance. He was flushing, breathing ragged, staring back at him with disheveled hair and a bare chest, and it took all that Harry had within him to not bend him over the nearest furniture on the spot.
“I…I should go…” he said, his voice a little uneasy. And he should go. Because what’d almost happened with Louis was something that could not happen with Matt in the picture - especially when Matt was only down the hall from him. The thought of cheating made Harry ill to his stomach, and he couldn’t be a part of that.
And Louis knew that, he did. He nodded back at him without a fight. “Yeah,” he agreed, his voice a little unsteady. “I need to take a shower, so.”
Harry pushed that mental image (and the other multitudes of miniature mental images that came along with it) as far out of his mind as he could, nodding and taking a few steps backwards to the hotel room door. “R-right, so…I’ll…I’ll see you in the morning.” He wiped at his cheeks with the back of his hand, feeling his skin getting streaked with damp tearstains.
Louis nodded, shuffling from foot to foot. “In the morning,” he echoed, chewing down on his bottom lip and taking another step closer toward the bathroom.
Him and Louis in the shower, Louis pinning him up against the tile wall of their shower back at their apartment…making love with Louis perched on top of the sink and with Harry’s back grating against the door and on the fucking floor of the bathroom and…he forced his thoughts to cut off after that, knowing that if he kept it up, he’d be in need of a shower of his own.
“G-goodnight, Lou,,” Harry spewed out pathetically, clearly and visibly flustered. He grappled for the door handle, twisting it open and stepping back into the hall almost before he had a chance to hear Harry breathing out the returned sentiment back to him.
He closed the door behind himself, leaning back against it and letting out a breath that he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. His heart was hammering in his chest and he shook his head, knowing this was too close, knowing that this couldn’t happen again - no variation of this could happen again. It was wrong, and it wasn’t fair…and he couldn’t do it.
Niall was still standing across the hall from him, staring back at his friend with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.
The blond finally spoke up after a couple beats. “Do you-”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Harry cut him off, shaking his head. “I can’t talk about it.”
Niall’s face relaxed into a playful smile after that, quickly setting Harry at ease. “I was actually going to ask if you wanted to go watch The Avengers with me, but good to know that whatever that conversation topic is that you’re going on about it off limits.”
He’d always admired that about Niall, his ability to turn a conversation around like that just by, well…by being Niall.
Harry rolled his eyes, cracking a grin back at him and shoving at his friend’s shoulder, already guiding the two of them back to the other room. “Piss off,” he said with a laugh, following him into the hotel room.
Zayn and Liam were propped up with pillows, Zayn barely bothering to look up from his phone other than to wave a hand at the two of them, and Liam giving him a small, but sincerely genuine smile. “Avengers assemble,” he called out in the deepest voice he could muster.
Harry could only grin back at him, throwing himself onto the bed and tackling Liam, Niall pouncing on top of them a few seconds later, and Zayn - being unable to resist the temptation for the life of him - was joining in right after; the four of them forming a mountain atop the bed.
“Avengers assemble,” Harry croaked out, echoing Liam, and he was grinning. Wide and genuine.
The only thing missing was Louis.
+
“Would you change anything?” Harry had asked one night, their voices low and quiet in their bunk on the tour bus. It had been the year prior, during the Up All Night tour, somewhere between San Diego and Las Vegas - they couldn’t have cared less, to be honest, much more focused on being tangled around each other like vines to really care about much else.
The American tour had really, somehow, turned to complete and utter shit. Management was too involved in each and every one of their actions now; Eleanor seemed to be being flown out every three weeks at this rate. They’d been pressed about Larry Stylinson during a MuchMusic interview, and Harry had been so stunned, shell-shocked, that he couldn’t even muster up a single word to say - he let Louis man the whole thing, even if his words caused his heart to snap into quarters. That night, they’d buried themselves in their hotel bed, bodies pressed so closely together that Harry couldn’t tell where he ended and Louis began. With each kiss Louis gave to his skin, it was a different sentiment. I love you, you’re beautiful, you’re everything…as if he was trying to force the entire interview as far out of Harry’s head as he could - and it’d worked, it had. But now, he just wanted to go home. He wanted the next month to be over and done with and he wanted to go home. He wanted to go to their home. He wanted to get into the flat and never leave the flat, him and Louis and the boys and nobody else.
Louis looked back over at him, blinking through beautiful eyelashes and raising his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Any of this…” Harry said weakly, waving his hand around the tour bus before looking back at Louis. “If you could get rid of the nosy fans or the crazy long amounts of time being away from home or being able to not have to deal with the Eleanor drama…would you?”
Louis was quiet for a little bit, like he was thinking it over. He looked back at Harry quizzically. “Are you asking me if I could go back in time-”
“If you could go back to when X Factor had first started,” Harry cut him off, better explaining himself, “back to when you’d first auditioned, would you have still auditioned?”
“Yeah,” Louis answered without a moment’s hesitation.
Harry smiled a little. “You’d go through with all the craziness again? Willingly give up your normalcy?”
“Without a doubt,” he said, leaning in and grazing his lips against Harry’s. “If I hadn’t auditioned, I wouldn’t have met you. There would be no this,” he gestured down to their intertwined hands, holding them up to show Harry. “Why would I ever want to change it?”
Harry’s heart caught in his throat, fighting back the blush on his cheeks as he leaned in and pressed a firmer kiss to Louis’ lips. “I love you,” he said softly, breaking away and resting his forehead to Louis’. “But I like to think that we would have met no matter what.”
Louis’ eyebrows rose, seeming intrigued. “Is that so?” he teased. “Do tell, then, Curly.”
Harry only shrugged in response. “I just…I think that a lot of different universes exist - a lot of parallel universes and alternate universes and whatever else - and I just…I can’t imagine any of those worlds existing without us being together in them.”
This time, it was Louis’ turn to blush, chewing down on his lip, which was an action that Harry always found to be utterly adorable. He leaned in, painting lips over flushed cheeks before pulling back away and settling against the bunk.
“Do the rest of us exist in all of these alternate universes of yours, you sap?” Zayn asked teasingly, poking his head out of his own bunk to look back at where the two of them were nestled together in Louis’ bunk that had turned into Harry and Louis’ bunk very early on.
“Unfortunately,” Harry joked back at him, adding an exhausted eye roll for emphasis. He caught the pillow that Zayn had chucked at him without even having to look first, throwing it right back at him before turning his attention back to Louis.
“So what would that mean?” Louis asked with a slight laugh, eyes flickering over to Zayn momentarily before going back to Harry. “In one of them am I a drama student while you’re working in a bakery?”
“I happen to be a world renowned pastry chef, thank you very much,” Harry corrected him. “I cater one of your movie premieres. It’s love at first sight.”
Louis rolled his eyes, pressing another kiss a little lower, along Harry’s jawline instead of his lips. “And what about a universe where I’m not famous and you’re not world-renowned, and we’re just two normal lads?”
“We bump into each other on the tube,” Harry said, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s a meet cute like the ones in movies, and we barely catch a glimpse of each other before-”
“Sappy, sappy, sappy,” Niall interjected and Liam let out a laugh, looking back at the two of them.
“Sod off, all of you,” Louis spoke up, dragging Harry in a little bit closer. “I want to hear the story of how Curly and I fell in love.”
+
“Sorry, what was the question?” Harry looked over at the radio interviewer curiously. The five of them were sitting around a table in Philadelphia, doing a radio interview before their show that night. Right now, Harry’s mind was scattered in a million different places.
Since the incident in Nashville however many nights ago (six), things with Harry and Louis had wound up being even more uncomfortable than they already had been - and Harry wasn’t quite sure why that was. Or maybe he was sure and he just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
At the heart of it all, he really just thought himself to be a piece of shit. He wasn’t being fair. He wasn’t being fair to Louis and he certainly wasn’t being fair to Matt - he wasn’t being fair to himself, either, if he were honest. If he were being fair to himself, he wouldn’t be with Matt. He’d be with Louis the way that he was always supposed to be happy and they wouldn’t get to hold hands in public, but he wouldn’t care because he had Louis, and at the end of the day that was all he cared about. He knew that. He was just too goddamn stubborn to let himself think about it like that.
“My question,” the DJ - fuck, he hadn’t even caught her name - repeated herself, and Harry forced himself to listen up this time; from beside him, Niall gave him a little pat on the knee and he could feel Louis’ eyes burning into the spot where Niall’s hand rested, “was, if you could go back to the start of it all, would you have done anything differently?”
The question was far too familiar for Harry’s liking, and he knew that his real answer was one that he didn’t dare admit to this stranger in front of him - although he wouldn’t necessarily mind the whole world knowing about him and Louis and all of Harry’s theories about them. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said, stealing Louis’ answer from over a year ago instead. “I wouldn’t give up knowing these four idiots for anything else in the world.”
“Aw, Haz,” Liam cooed teasingly, leaning in and pinching one of his cheeks. Harry batted his hand away, shaking his head and staring down at his lap, giving a weak shrug.
“Now, now, Liam,” the DJ teased playfully. “We don’t want Matt getting jealous.”
But Harry could still feel Louis’ eyes on him, and he knew that Matt getting jealous was the least of his worries.
“Harry, that reminds me,” the announcer spoke up, and Harry swallowed down, sitting up a little rigidly and wondering why all of the questions had to be directed toward him. “How has everything been since you came out? Things with Matt, with your family, with the boys?”
“Well…there was really no Matt until after I’d already come out,” Harry found himself blurting out even though it hadn’t really been necessary. “And, well…my sister Gemma had known, and the boys had already known so…I don’t know. It wasn’t that big of an adjustment on those fronts, really. It was the fans who hadn’t really been in the know.”
“But they’d always suspected, right?” she carried on, using the tip of her pen as a pointer to gesture between him and Louis. Harry could feel all the color draining out of his face. “So many of them wanted the two of you together.” She laughed like it was a joke. It wasn’t a joke. It had never been a joke, and Harry had always hated it when radio announcers and journalists made it out to be one.
“Good ol’ Larry Stylinson,” Louis spoke up before Harry was able to get anything out. He reached over, slapping a hand over Harry’s back. It felt wrong. “Good to see all of those rumors have finally been tossed out with the wash, yeah?” He laughed a little, and Harry knew it was fake, even if the DJ was laughing right along with Louis.
Harry couldn’t believe Louis would even say that. That he would crush that many fans’ hearts in one fail swoop. He looked up, remembering that there was a camera on them, and feeling his eyes settle on the lens for a flash of a second.
He knew that it was a look that would spark countless hours of metanalysis on Tumblr’s all around the world, and Harry was fucking glad for it. He was glad that everyone would be countering Louis’ words with the broken look on Harry’s face. Maybe now they wouldn’t count them out so fast, make their relationship out like it was nothing like Louis just had.
+
Louis had wanted to shovel the words back in his mouth the same second that he’d said them, but he couldn’t, and now they were out there, and it made him sick to his stomach.
He’d said it out of anger, really. Anger and bitterness and jealousy. And that seemed to be what a lot of bloggers were making it out to be as well. But it wasn’t because of what Louis had said so much as it was that paired up with the way that Harry had made direct eye contact with the cameraman’s lens just seconds after Louis had slapped him on the back. The look might as well have read “he’s lying,” and it made Louis’ entire body feel weightless.
Louis’ jealous of Matt, one post read. It’s been incredibly obvious ever since they first started going out - suddenly Larry wasn’t having any interaction AT ALL and it’s because Harry ditched him for someone who was actually comfortable with being out and proud, and it broke Louis’ heart. This is simply Louis’ way of retaliating. Don’t worry, guys, Larry has been and always WILL BE on.
He closed his laptop after that, he never really understood why he checked out blogs in the first place - it always horrified him how people knew his and Harry’s actions that well, better than Louis himself knew them half the time.
From out in the hallway of their hotel room in Philly, he could hear Matt and Harry talking in the hallway, laughing. It made Louis’ stomach churn. He didn’t understand what Harry saw in Matt, really. Yeah, he was athletic and he had a few occasional moments here and there when he was a little funny…but Louis could be funny, too - and Louis was certainly better looking.
But, just like that little paragraph had read…Matt was willing to be out with Harry, and Louis wasn’t. Louis wasn’t ready for any of it. In fact, Louis was fucking terrified of coming out, of all of it. He wasn’t as brave as Harry, as fearless as him, and he knew that.
At the same time, though, he also knew that he did not want Matt with Harry. He didn’t want Matt anywhere remotely close to Harry, because Matt - however fucking charming he may have been - was not Louis, and that therefore made him the enemy. Harry had never liked Eleanor and Eleanor had never even been Louis’ legitimate girlfriend, so Louis figured he was more than entitled to hate Matt. And he did. He really did.
It still nagged at him that Harry had lied to him about being a virgin, that he’d told Matt that he was saving himself. Why would he say that? Was it because he was worried about doing it with someone else? Because he wanted Matt to feel special? Because he was so convinced that he would think about Louis snapping his hips into him the entire time he was with Matt that he figured maybe he’d just pretend he’d never been with Louis in the first place? The last one made him feel a little triumphant, but he highly doubted that was actually the case.
There was a rap at his door. Louis pushed his laptop off to the side of the bed, standing up and moving toward the door, opening it up and seeing Liam on the other end.
Liam opened his mouth to say something - probably to ask him if he was okay after the interview today (especially since Louis had practically avoided Harry at all costs during the concert tonight) - but Louis spoke up before Liam was able to. “Do you think he loves him?”
Liam let out a sigh, nodding toward Louis to step back into the room so that Liam could come inside. “I think you need to talk to him,” he replied, turning around to face him. “Not get into some screaming match with him or bitch at him about his boyfriend, but really talk to him and get all of your crap out in the open because the way you acted tonight? You’re starting to make everything obvious, Lou.”
“Maybe I want to,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe I should just go out myself and then everything can go back to normal.”
Liam seemed surprised, raising his eyebrows. “Are you actually going to do that?”
Louis’ face fell and he stayed quiet.
Shaking his head, Liam reached forward to pull Louis into a hug. “I know that it sucks seeing him with someone else, but you can’t let it affect the entire group, mate. And it is. That’s exactly what it’s doing. And fans are blasting everyone on Twitter about it, asking why you’re so mad at Harry.” He raked his fingers through his hair, which was growing out some since their last tour, and kept his eyes trained on Louis. “And Harry doesn’t know what to do with himself, I’m pretty sure at this point he’s just counting down the days until Matt goes back to England so he doesn’t have to worry about you sneaking into their room and smothering the poor guy with a pillow.”
“He didn’t give me a key,” Louis deadpanned, “couldn’t get in if I tried.”
The look that Liam shot him in return somehow managed to be a mixture of both un-amused and painfully amused. “He’s a good guy.”
“He’s not me.”
“Christ, you’re not going to start singing one of our songs right now, are you? This isn’t Glee, mate, you can’t just burst into song at any given moment. Well, I mean, you can, but-”
“I fucked up,” Louis cut him off, rolling his eyes. “When Harry came out in that Attitude article…I should have just done the same thing. I should have gotten all of this over with and dealt with the consequences and just gone from there. And now I’ve ruined everything, and he’s with him, and…” he shook his head, titling his head back. “It doesn’t matter at this point, really. I’m just beginning to sound like some pathetic teenage girl.”
Liam placed a hand on Louis’ shoulder, rattling it a little. “If two people are meant to be together, they will be eventually, you know. Give yourself time to sort out your head.”
“Are you a fortune cookie now?” Louis asked, looking back at his friend with raised eyebrows.
Liam only grinned dopily back at him. “I have always been a fortune cookie, Lou, you know that.”
+
(part four)
(see header post for summary and details)
+
“Don’t judge him without really knowing him first, Louis,” Eleanor warned him, elbowing him slightly as they headed down to the lobby of the hotel to meet Harry and Matt. “Don’t you remember back when Harry and I first met, and he jokingly made that tweet about wanting to shave-”
“-that wasn’t a joke,” Louis cut in.
“-but look at us now,” Eleanor tossed back, lifting her shoulders in a shrug.
Louis snorted, looking back at her and raising his eyebrows at her, amused. “That was a really bad example to use, you know,” he told her. “Harry still can’t stand-”
She grimaced, holding a hand to cut him off from saying anything else and nodding. “Right,” she said.
“I can’t believe he didn’t tell him that he’d had a boyfriend before him,” Louis muttered, his tone laced with bitterness.
Eleanor sighed, reaching lace her fingers very loosely through the gaps in Louis’, squeezing lightly. “Just don’t let any of this get to your head tonight, okay?” she asked. “You know there are going to cameras there, and the last thing that the paparazzi needs is for you to look like a jealous ex-boyfriend.”
“Or maybe that’s exactly what they need,” Louis replied, even though he knew that he wouldn’t do that. Even if he should, even if he knew he should. That’s all it would take, really. A few shots of him and Harry for the entire to façade to shatter once and for all.
Eleanor gave him a small smile, rolling her eyes as a camera snapped a picture of them entering the lobby. Up ahead, Harry and Matt were leaning against a wall, their eyes falling onto the couple and Harry’s face lighting up a little at the sight of Louis up ahead of him - or maybe that was all just Louis’ imagination. It wouldn’t surprise him, really.
“You’re blushing already,” Eleanor teased, bumping her hip against Louis’ and letting out a small laugh. That didn’t surprise him, either.
“Hey you two,” Matt was the first to greet them. His hand wrapped around Harry’s, and Louis wanted to knock him right back into the wall he’d just pushed off of. That was his hand to hold. Not Matt’s.
He hated that he was nearly to the point where he couldn’t even remember the last time he’d held Harry’s hand. It made him sick to his stomach.
“Hello,” Eleanor replied, Louis keeping quiet. She reached forward to pull Matt in for a quick hug. “Welcome to the One Direction Significant Others’ Society, the meetings are every other Wednesday.”
“Christ,” Harry and Louis muttered in unison, both staring back at each other as soon as it happened.
If any of it was suspicious or off-putting to Matt in the slightest, he didn’t let it show. Eleanor, however, allowed her eyes to scan from Harry and Louis and back again before taking a step backwards and clearing her throat. “Anywho,” she hummed, “the reservations are for seven, so we should probably get going, yeah?”
Louis nodded stiffly, taking her hand back in his - loosely, always loosely - and heading toward the door. Harry and Matt were behind them, and as the electric doors pushed open, a flurry of camera flashes were aimed toward them, documenting their “first of many” double dates.
From the corner of Louis’ eye, he could see a girl holding up a sign written in Sharpies and glitter glue. WHAT ABOUT LARRY? it read, and Louis couldn’t help but agree.
What about Larry?
+
Harry had caught sight of the sign, just barely before he’d been ushered into the black SUV that was going to be taking them to whatever restaurant it was they were going. It felt like a slap in the face, really, but it wasn’t something that he wasn’t used to by now.
Ever since he and Matt had first become a thing, the fans had really turned into a constant outpour of outbursts. He grimaced every time he saw a tweet directed at Louis, telling him that he’d missed his chance. He got tweet after tweet from people telling him that Matt wasn’t as cute as Louis, that this wasn’t fair. There was a wide scattering of them that called Harry an asshole for betraying Louis like this (and Louis had replied to one of them, even, feigning curiosity and making a joke about how Harry was always an asshole with a winking emoticon after it). And he didn’t know how to reply to any of them other than to, really, agree with them. So he didn’t say anything at all and let them all roll in with a knot in his stomach.
There was metanalysis, even, written about “the rise and fall of the Larry Empire.” People would chart their body language, the way they interacted at the concert. They could almost pinpoint exactly when the breakup (or whatever it was) had happened - it blew his mind, that people were that aware of their actions, that people knew them that well.
His thoughts were all cut off abruptly by the feeling of Matt’s hand slipping into his once more, giving him a light squeeze. “This should be fun, yeah?” he asked.
Harry nodded back at him, gave him a soft “yeah,” in response. But the only thoughts going through his head at the moment were about how wrong this was.
His first big public date since coming out shouldn’t have been with anyone other than Louis. And yes, Louis was here. But he wasn’t here the way he should have been. He wasn’t here with Harry.
+
The dinner turned out to be not nearly as torturous as it could have been - which wasn’t to say that it was exactly pleasant, but it wasn’t miserable, and so far, no screaming matches had occurred.
“How much of the Up All Night tour did you follow, Eleanor?” Matt asked, looking over at Eleanor as a refill on the bread basket was sat down in the center of the table. The four of them were sectioned off in a private backroom at a local restaurant, away from the crowds and the cameras - save for a few shots for the newspaper and magazines.
Eleanor paused before answering, taking a sip from her drink. “I was here for quite a bit of it,” she said with a small shrug. She leaned in against Louis for a moment before swaying right back away from him as she caught the look that Harry hadn’t even realized he’d been sending her. “I liked spending time with Louis in the States.”
Harry scoffed, low and hardly noticeable under his breath. He reached forward to grab a roll out of the basket, his hand falling on top of another’s with similar intentions, the sparks shooting up his arm on instant. He looked forward, feeling Louis’ eyes on him before he actually saw him, and he could feel a slight flush to his cheeks as he pulled his hand away. “It’s all yours,” he said.
“No, you can have it,” Louis assured him.
But Harry shook his head and Louis wasn’t budging, so the bread just sat between them, untouched until Matt declared that if nobody else was going to eat it, he would.
“These two once got into a breadsticks sword fight at an Olive Garden,” Eleanor said with a laugh, nodding between Louis and Harry and looking back over at Matt.
Harry’s heart sunk a little in his stomach - why would she bring that up? Why would she even think she had the right to bring that up? When he looked at Louis, he saw that Louis was staring down at the table cloth.
“Oh yeah?” Matt asked, missing the looks on Harry and Louis’ faces entirely. “Who won?”
“I did,” they both replied before staring up at each other and shaking their heads, almost like a mirror reflection. “No, you didn’t.”
From out of the corner of his eye, he could see Eleanor smirking to herself, smiling slyly down at the table and scanning her eyes across the menu.
“You lot probably have a lot of tour stories,” Matt carried on with a shrug. “You two especially, I’m sure.”
Harry almost choked on his soda and Louis cleared his throat. Harry looked back at Matt, raising his eyebrows. “W-why do we get an especially?” he asked.
Matt shrugged. “Just that you two seem the closest…or you used to, at least. Maybe you had a spat or something, but you two seemed a bit attached at the hips.”
Eleanor was giggling freely at this point, dodging the glares that Louis was sending in her direction and covering her mouth with her cloth napkin.
“They’re kind of you-had-to-be-there stories, I guess,” Harry finally spoke up, giving a shrug as he looked between Eleanor and Louis before bringing his eyes back to Matt. “Why dwell on the past when you can focus on the future, right?”
“How would it be dwelling?”
Harry’s gaze was ripped away from Matt, brought back to Louis, and he blinked back at him with wide eyes. “What?”
Louis only shook his head back at him. “I don’t see how it’s really dwelling on the past,” he repeated himself. “We had some fucking good memories last year, Haz.”
Their 2011 memories had been better, though, and they both knew that. In 2011, things had been simpler. In 2011, they didn’t have management crawling up their asses at all times and telling them that they needed to tone down their friendship before it became far too obvious that it was much more than friendship.
Harry shrugged. “I was just saying-”
“That you’re looking more forward to the tour this year with Matty boy over here than last year’s tour? Last year when we got to headline for the first time? When we-”
“Lou, I didn’t say that.”
“Well you might as well have,” Louis spat back at him. “You know we had some good times last year, times that you don’t look back and dwell on - things that you actually like to remember…” he paused, looking over at Matt and shooting him an annoyed glare. “Not that you would know any of that, of course,” he muttered.
Matt blinked, clearly confused. “I…I’m not…”
“Louis,” Harry’s voice almost came out like a plea more than anything else, all but begging him to stop talking even if at the same time his insides were screaming for Louis to keep talking - to talk to the point of explosion, to finally letting out all that he’d been keeping in for the past few years.
But instead, Louis just picked up his menu and cleared his throat, trying his best to act like none of this had ever happened in the first place. “I’m thinking chicken,” he said, looking over at Eleanor. “Kentucky’s famous for their chicken, right?”
“We’re in Tennessee,” Harry mumbled in response, correcting him before Eleanor got the chance to get a word in.
Louis simply looked back down at his menu, nodding so swiftly that it was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. “Right,” he said.
And that was it.
+
That was it, that is, until they got back to the hotel.
The tension was thick and all but unbearable, and before they were even in the hotel, Eleanor was insisting that Matt join her and her friend for an impromptu movie night in her hotel room.
Matt had nodded, looking over at Harry expectantly. “Are you coming?”
“Band meeting,” Harry lied on the spot, offering him a shrug. “Before we leave in the morning…we always spend the night together. It’s a bit of a tradition.”
“They have a lot of traditions,” Eleanor assured him as they headed toward the service elevators that the hotel had permitted to the band for use away from the general population.
Matt merely nodded, going along with everything that was being said to him.
Louis was silent, and Louis had been silent since dinner.
Once the elevator reached their floor, Eleanor guided Matt off toward her room, tossing a look over her shoulder at the other two. “Good night, boys,” she called out, her voice bouncing off the walls before she and Matt were wheeling around a corner and vanishing out of sight.
Louis barely registered a look toward Harry, grabbing his card key and sliding it into the slot of his door, stepping in and allowing Harry to follow. Nobody was in his room, the band having must have all decided to camp out in Liam’s room for the night.
Harry closed the door after them, pausing against it for a moment and trying to collect all of his thoughts, before he was turning around and looking back at Louis. “What the hell was that tonight, Louis?”
Louis scoffed bitterly, shaking his head. “You’ll forgive me for not really knowing how to talk to your boyfriend, Haz. I don’t really know what’s a safe topic to talk about and what’s off-limits since, you know, you didn’t really find it necessary to tell him that you’d been in a relationship before him.”
“Are you honestly still on about this?” Harry groaned. “I really don’t understand what the big deal is, Louis.”
“The big deal is that you didn’t even bother to tell your boyfriend about me,” Louis replied, his voice shaky. “To tell him about us. Like we were nothing!”
“What the fuck was I supposed to say, Lou?!” Harry exclaimed, his voice cracking slightly as he could feel himself getting riled up. “How exactly was I supposed to tell him about that without outing you?”
Louis shook his head, fingers angrily raking into his hair and gripping on slightly to the ends. “What, you can’t trust your own boyfriend to keep his mouth shut?”
“I don’t trust anyone with information about you, Louis! Don’t you get that?!” Harry could feel his cheeks getting hot, his eyes starting to brim up with tears. He took a stagger ing step closer to Louis. “I’m not going to tell him anything about you because that’s not fair to you; because you don’t deserve that.”
Louis was staring down at his feet, keeping silent, and it made Harry even angrier, for whatever reason. “And you just…you just stand there,” he babbled on, his voice beginning to rack with tears. “You just stand there and stew over shit but you don’t say anything. And I don’t know what’s going on in your head anymore when I used to be able to read your thoughts before you were even able to think them, and I hate that.”
“What am I supposed to say?” Louis finally forced out of himself. He reached down to grip onto his shirt, tugging it overhead and tossing it to the side. It landed half on, half off the foot of his bed and Harry had to force himself to keep his eyes focused on Louis’ face rather than any other areas. “Am I supposed to tell you that you broke my heart when you suddenly decided that I wasn’t worth it anymore? That I don’t how to fucking deal with myself because it’s my fault?!”
“Why would you ever think that I don’t think you’re worth it?”
“Because you left!” Louis’ voice shook angrily. Harry hated hearing him angry…and this went beyond angry. This was a combination of anger and loss, desperation, brokenness, and it killed him. “You went off and did that stupid fucking interview and before I even have a chance to blink, you’ve got fucking Matty on your arm and it’s like I’ve been kicked in the gut and left for dead.”
Harry knew where he was coming from, he did, and it hurt. It hurt worse that he was still compelled - even after all of that - to keep fighting, to keep going. “Two years, Louis,” his voice was quieter now, but still low and shaky and scarily serious at the same time. “You had two years to let our relationship not be a secret anymore - and I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I couldn’t not be who I was just because you weren’t ready to be who you are.” His fingers curled into his hair and he shook his head. “And I’m sorry, but if we couldn’t come out publicly, I had to do the next best thing - I at least had to come out…and after that…after I did that…I knew that there couldn’t be a Louis and Harry anymore. It would be too obvious, and they’d be able to draw the line connecting me to you far too easily, and I knew that you weren’t ready for that.”
“So you just walked away,” Louis deadpanned.
“I’m nineteen, Lou,” Harry replied. “I make mistakes. I fuck up. And I know that I fucked up, that I fucked up our relationship, and that I fucked up everything…and I’m so sorry.”
The tears that had been brimming in the corners of his eyes were finally spilling, falling from his eyes and racing down his cheeks, and they felt like tears that he’d been holding in for months. They were tears of anger and regret and loss and a million other things, and the last thing he wanted right now was for Louis to see any of this, for Louis to see him like this, so he pathetically covered his face with his hands, angling his body away.
He felt a pair of arms wrapping around him mere seconds later, and his heart nearly burst out of his chest at the contact, because this was Louis. This was Louis with his arms wrapped around him so tightly that Harry was sure he’d be begging for oxygen if he wasn’t so fucking grateful right now. It felt like coming home. It felt the most right he’d felt in months, and all he could do was wrap his arms around him in response, burrowing his face into the crevice of Louis’ bare neck. “I’m sorry for all of it, Lou.”
Louis’ hands ran up and down Harry’s back consolingly, comfortingly, and Harry’s eyes squeezed shut, crying even harder. He was crying because this was all he wanted at the end of the day, all he’d ever wanted and all he’d ever want. Him and Louis. Louis’ arms around him. That was it.
There were so many things he wanted to say. He wanted to say I love you and I miss you and I made a mistake being with Matt, but he couldn’t get any of it out, all that he could get out was a slurred string of apologies, each one being shushed by Louis.
“I just want to be what you need me to be,” Louis replied back to him, and Harry didn’t know how to respond, but he knew that it felt like an apology - that it was an apology.
They broke away after Harry didn’t know how long, his heart swelling and hammering against his chest. They didn’t pull back very far from each other, granted, just enough that the tip of Harry’s nose nudged along Louis’. When he allowed his eyes to flutter closed and then open once more, they danced along Louis’ own in a butterfly kiss, and he could swear that he heard Louis catch his breath.
Their lips were hardly even inches apart, really. It wouldn’t take much at all for them to close off the rest of the distance and kiss. Kiss and not stop kissing. To fall back onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and sheets just like they always did but hadn’t done in so long.
He could tell that similar thoughts were running through Louis’ head, and his eyes were fluttering shut as soon as he realized that Louis was leaning forward and Harry was leaning forward right along with him.
He parted his lips just slightly, barely catching the graze of Louis’ lips against his own when he heard a door from behind them swinging open, and a familiar voice popping up and ripping the two of them away from each other.
“Thought you two lads might be in here,” Niall pointed out a little sheepishly, giving the two of them a small smile when he received their matching, angered glares.
His eyes widened a couple seconds after that. “Oh,” he stammered out. “Oh, I didn’t…I should’ve known that you two were, uh…” he was backing out of the room after that, tucking Louis’ card key back into his pocket and calling out a “they’re already asleep,” to Liam and Zayn as the hotel room door closed behind him.
Harry took a step back, covering his face in his hands for a second before pulling them away and taking a few seconds to simply take in Louis’ appearance. He was flushing, breathing ragged, staring back at him with disheveled hair and a bare chest, and it took all that Harry had within him to not bend him over the nearest furniture on the spot.
“I…I should go…” he said, his voice a little uneasy. And he should go. Because what’d almost happened with Louis was something that could not happen with Matt in the picture - especially when Matt was only down the hall from him. The thought of cheating made Harry ill to his stomach, and he couldn’t be a part of that.
And Louis knew that, he did. He nodded back at him without a fight. “Yeah,” he agreed, his voice a little unsteady. “I need to take a shower, so.”
Harry pushed that mental image (and the other multitudes of miniature mental images that came along with it) as far out of his mind as he could, nodding and taking a few steps backwards to the hotel room door. “R-right, so…I’ll…I’ll see you in the morning.” He wiped at his cheeks with the back of his hand, feeling his skin getting streaked with damp tearstains.
Louis nodded, shuffling from foot to foot. “In the morning,” he echoed, chewing down on his bottom lip and taking another step closer toward the bathroom.
Him and Louis in the shower, Louis pinning him up against the tile wall of their shower back at their apartment…making love with Louis perched on top of the sink and with Harry’s back grating against the door and on the fucking floor of the bathroom and…he forced his thoughts to cut off after that, knowing that if he kept it up, he’d be in need of a shower of his own.
“G-goodnight, Lou,,” Harry spewed out pathetically, clearly and visibly flustered. He grappled for the door handle, twisting it open and stepping back into the hall almost before he had a chance to hear Harry breathing out the returned sentiment back to him.
He closed the door behind himself, leaning back against it and letting out a breath that he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. His heart was hammering in his chest and he shook his head, knowing this was too close, knowing that this couldn’t happen again - no variation of this could happen again. It was wrong, and it wasn’t fair…and he couldn’t do it.
Niall was still standing across the hall from him, staring back at his friend with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.
The blond finally spoke up after a couple beats. “Do you-”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Harry cut him off, shaking his head. “I can’t talk about it.”
Niall’s face relaxed into a playful smile after that, quickly setting Harry at ease. “I was actually going to ask if you wanted to go watch The Avengers with me, but good to know that whatever that conversation topic is that you’re going on about it off limits.”
He’d always admired that about Niall, his ability to turn a conversation around like that just by, well…by being Niall.
Harry rolled his eyes, cracking a grin back at him and shoving at his friend’s shoulder, already guiding the two of them back to the other room. “Piss off,” he said with a laugh, following him into the hotel room.
Zayn and Liam were propped up with pillows, Zayn barely bothering to look up from his phone other than to wave a hand at the two of them, and Liam giving him a small, but sincerely genuine smile. “Avengers assemble,” he called out in the deepest voice he could muster.
Harry could only grin back at him, throwing himself onto the bed and tackling Liam, Niall pouncing on top of them a few seconds later, and Zayn - being unable to resist the temptation for the life of him - was joining in right after; the four of them forming a mountain atop the bed.
“Avengers assemble,” Harry croaked out, echoing Liam, and he was grinning. Wide and genuine.
The only thing missing was Louis.
+
“Would you change anything?” Harry had asked one night, their voices low and quiet in their bunk on the tour bus. It had been the year prior, during the Up All Night tour, somewhere between San Diego and Las Vegas - they couldn’t have cared less, to be honest, much more focused on being tangled around each other like vines to really care about much else.
The American tour had really, somehow, turned to complete and utter shit. Management was too involved in each and every one of their actions now; Eleanor seemed to be being flown out every three weeks at this rate. They’d been pressed about Larry Stylinson during a MuchMusic interview, and Harry had been so stunned, shell-shocked, that he couldn’t even muster up a single word to say - he let Louis man the whole thing, even if his words caused his heart to snap into quarters. That night, they’d buried themselves in their hotel bed, bodies pressed so closely together that Harry couldn’t tell where he ended and Louis began. With each kiss Louis gave to his skin, it was a different sentiment. I love you, you’re beautiful, you’re everything…as if he was trying to force the entire interview as far out of Harry’s head as he could - and it’d worked, it had. But now, he just wanted to go home. He wanted the next month to be over and done with and he wanted to go home. He wanted to go to their home. He wanted to get into the flat and never leave the flat, him and Louis and the boys and nobody else.
Louis looked back over at him, blinking through beautiful eyelashes and raising his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Any of this…” Harry said weakly, waving his hand around the tour bus before looking back at Louis. “If you could get rid of the nosy fans or the crazy long amounts of time being away from home or being able to not have to deal with the Eleanor drama…would you?”
Louis was quiet for a little bit, like he was thinking it over. He looked back at Harry quizzically. “Are you asking me if I could go back in time-”
“If you could go back to when X Factor had first started,” Harry cut him off, better explaining himself, “back to when you’d first auditioned, would you have still auditioned?”
“Yeah,” Louis answered without a moment’s hesitation.
Harry smiled a little. “You’d go through with all the craziness again? Willingly give up your normalcy?”
“Without a doubt,” he said, leaning in and grazing his lips against Harry’s. “If I hadn’t auditioned, I wouldn’t have met you. There would be no this,” he gestured down to their intertwined hands, holding them up to show Harry. “Why would I ever want to change it?”
Harry’s heart caught in his throat, fighting back the blush on his cheeks as he leaned in and pressed a firmer kiss to Louis’ lips. “I love you,” he said softly, breaking away and resting his forehead to Louis’. “But I like to think that we would have met no matter what.”
Louis’ eyebrows rose, seeming intrigued. “Is that so?” he teased. “Do tell, then, Curly.”
Harry only shrugged in response. “I just…I think that a lot of different universes exist - a lot of parallel universes and alternate universes and whatever else - and I just…I can’t imagine any of those worlds existing without us being together in them.”
This time, it was Louis’ turn to blush, chewing down on his lip, which was an action that Harry always found to be utterly adorable. He leaned in, painting lips over flushed cheeks before pulling back away and settling against the bunk.
“Do the rest of us exist in all of these alternate universes of yours, you sap?” Zayn asked teasingly, poking his head out of his own bunk to look back at where the two of them were nestled together in Louis’ bunk that had turned into Harry and Louis’ bunk very early on.
“Unfortunately,” Harry joked back at him, adding an exhausted eye roll for emphasis. He caught the pillow that Zayn had chucked at him without even having to look first, throwing it right back at him before turning his attention back to Louis.
“So what would that mean?” Louis asked with a slight laugh, eyes flickering over to Zayn momentarily before going back to Harry. “In one of them am I a drama student while you’re working in a bakery?”
“I happen to be a world renowned pastry chef, thank you very much,” Harry corrected him. “I cater one of your movie premieres. It’s love at first sight.”
Louis rolled his eyes, pressing another kiss a little lower, along Harry’s jawline instead of his lips. “And what about a universe where I’m not famous and you’re not world-renowned, and we’re just two normal lads?”
“We bump into each other on the tube,” Harry said, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s a meet cute like the ones in movies, and we barely catch a glimpse of each other before-”
“Sappy, sappy, sappy,” Niall interjected and Liam let out a laugh, looking back at the two of them.
“Sod off, all of you,” Louis spoke up, dragging Harry in a little bit closer. “I want to hear the story of how Curly and I fell in love.”
+
“Sorry, what was the question?” Harry looked over at the radio interviewer curiously. The five of them were sitting around a table in Philadelphia, doing a radio interview before their show that night. Right now, Harry’s mind was scattered in a million different places.
Since the incident in Nashville however many nights ago (six), things with Harry and Louis had wound up being even more uncomfortable than they already had been - and Harry wasn’t quite sure why that was. Or maybe he was sure and he just didn’t want to acknowledge it.
At the heart of it all, he really just thought himself to be a piece of shit. He wasn’t being fair. He wasn’t being fair to Louis and he certainly wasn’t being fair to Matt - he wasn’t being fair to himself, either, if he were honest. If he were being fair to himself, he wouldn’t be with Matt. He’d be with Louis the way that he was always supposed to be happy and they wouldn’t get to hold hands in public, but he wouldn’t care because he had Louis, and at the end of the day that was all he cared about. He knew that. He was just too goddamn stubborn to let himself think about it like that.
“My question,” the DJ - fuck, he hadn’t even caught her name - repeated herself, and Harry forced himself to listen up this time; from beside him, Niall gave him a little pat on the knee and he could feel Louis’ eyes burning into the spot where Niall’s hand rested, “was, if you could go back to the start of it all, would you have done anything differently?”
The question was far too familiar for Harry’s liking, and he knew that his real answer was one that he didn’t dare admit to this stranger in front of him - although he wouldn’t necessarily mind the whole world knowing about him and Louis and all of Harry’s theories about them. “I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said, stealing Louis’ answer from over a year ago instead. “I wouldn’t give up knowing these four idiots for anything else in the world.”
“Aw, Haz,” Liam cooed teasingly, leaning in and pinching one of his cheeks. Harry batted his hand away, shaking his head and staring down at his lap, giving a weak shrug.
“Now, now, Liam,” the DJ teased playfully. “We don’t want Matt getting jealous.”
But Harry could still feel Louis’ eyes on him, and he knew that Matt getting jealous was the least of his worries.
“Harry, that reminds me,” the announcer spoke up, and Harry swallowed down, sitting up a little rigidly and wondering why all of the questions had to be directed toward him. “How has everything been since you came out? Things with Matt, with your family, with the boys?”
“Well…there was really no Matt until after I’d already come out,” Harry found himself blurting out even though it hadn’t really been necessary. “And, well…my sister Gemma had known, and the boys had already known so…I don’t know. It wasn’t that big of an adjustment on those fronts, really. It was the fans who hadn’t really been in the know.”
“But they’d always suspected, right?” she carried on, using the tip of her pen as a pointer to gesture between him and Louis. Harry could feel all the color draining out of his face. “So many of them wanted the two of you together.” She laughed like it was a joke. It wasn’t a joke. It had never been a joke, and Harry had always hated it when radio announcers and journalists made it out to be one.
“Good ol’ Larry Stylinson,” Louis spoke up before Harry was able to get anything out. He reached over, slapping a hand over Harry’s back. It felt wrong. “Good to see all of those rumors have finally been tossed out with the wash, yeah?” He laughed a little, and Harry knew it was fake, even if the DJ was laughing right along with Louis.
Harry couldn’t believe Louis would even say that. That he would crush that many fans’ hearts in one fail swoop. He looked up, remembering that there was a camera on them, and feeling his eyes settle on the lens for a flash of a second.
He knew that it was a look that would spark countless hours of metanalysis on Tumblr’s all around the world, and Harry was fucking glad for it. He was glad that everyone would be countering Louis’ words with the broken look on Harry’s face. Maybe now they wouldn’t count them out so fast, make their relationship out like it was nothing like Louis just had.
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Louis had wanted to shovel the words back in his mouth the same second that he’d said them, but he couldn’t, and now they were out there, and it made him sick to his stomach.
He’d said it out of anger, really. Anger and bitterness and jealousy. And that seemed to be what a lot of bloggers were making it out to be as well. But it wasn’t because of what Louis had said so much as it was that paired up with the way that Harry had made direct eye contact with the cameraman’s lens just seconds after Louis had slapped him on the back. The look might as well have read “he’s lying,” and it made Louis’ entire body feel weightless.
Louis’ jealous of Matt, one post read. It’s been incredibly obvious ever since they first started going out - suddenly Larry wasn’t having any interaction AT ALL and it’s because Harry ditched him for someone who was actually comfortable with being out and proud, and it broke Louis’ heart. This is simply Louis’ way of retaliating. Don’t worry, guys, Larry has been and always WILL BE on.
He closed his laptop after that, he never really understood why he checked out blogs in the first place - it always horrified him how people knew his and Harry’s actions that well, better than Louis himself knew them half the time.
From out in the hallway of their hotel room in Philly, he could hear Matt and Harry talking in the hallway, laughing. It made Louis’ stomach churn. He didn’t understand what Harry saw in Matt, really. Yeah, he was athletic and he had a few occasional moments here and there when he was a little funny…but Louis could be funny, too - and Louis was certainly better looking.
But, just like that little paragraph had read…Matt was willing to be out with Harry, and Louis wasn’t. Louis wasn’t ready for any of it. In fact, Louis was fucking terrified of coming out, of all of it. He wasn’t as brave as Harry, as fearless as him, and he knew that.
At the same time, though, he also knew that he did not want Matt with Harry. He didn’t want Matt anywhere remotely close to Harry, because Matt - however fucking charming he may have been - was not Louis, and that therefore made him the enemy. Harry had never liked Eleanor and Eleanor had never even been Louis’ legitimate girlfriend, so Louis figured he was more than entitled to hate Matt. And he did. He really did.
It still nagged at him that Harry had lied to him about being a virgin, that he’d told Matt that he was saving himself. Why would he say that? Was it because he was worried about doing it with someone else? Because he wanted Matt to feel special? Because he was so convinced that he would think about Louis snapping his hips into him the entire time he was with Matt that he figured maybe he’d just pretend he’d never been with Louis in the first place? The last one made him feel a little triumphant, but he highly doubted that was actually the case.
There was a rap at his door. Louis pushed his laptop off to the side of the bed, standing up and moving toward the door, opening it up and seeing Liam on the other end.
Liam opened his mouth to say something - probably to ask him if he was okay after the interview today (especially since Louis had practically avoided Harry at all costs during the concert tonight) - but Louis spoke up before Liam was able to. “Do you think he loves him?”
Liam let out a sigh, nodding toward Louis to step back into the room so that Liam could come inside. “I think you need to talk to him,” he replied, turning around to face him. “Not get into some screaming match with him or bitch at him about his boyfriend, but really talk to him and get all of your crap out in the open because the way you acted tonight? You’re starting to make everything obvious, Lou.”
“Maybe I want to,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe I should just go out myself and then everything can go back to normal.”
Liam seemed surprised, raising his eyebrows. “Are you actually going to do that?”
Louis’ face fell and he stayed quiet.
Shaking his head, Liam reached forward to pull Louis into a hug. “I know that it sucks seeing him with someone else, but you can’t let it affect the entire group, mate. And it is. That’s exactly what it’s doing. And fans are blasting everyone on Twitter about it, asking why you’re so mad at Harry.” He raked his fingers through his hair, which was growing out some since their last tour, and kept his eyes trained on Louis. “And Harry doesn’t know what to do with himself, I’m pretty sure at this point he’s just counting down the days until Matt goes back to England so he doesn’t have to worry about you sneaking into their room and smothering the poor guy with a pillow.”
“He didn’t give me a key,” Louis deadpanned, “couldn’t get in if I tried.”
The look that Liam shot him in return somehow managed to be a mixture of both un-amused and painfully amused. “He’s a good guy.”
“He’s not me.”
“Christ, you’re not going to start singing one of our songs right now, are you? This isn’t Glee, mate, you can’t just burst into song at any given moment. Well, I mean, you can, but-”
“I fucked up,” Louis cut him off, rolling his eyes. “When Harry came out in that Attitude article…I should have just done the same thing. I should have gotten all of this over with and dealt with the consequences and just gone from there. And now I’ve ruined everything, and he’s with him, and…” he shook his head, titling his head back. “It doesn’t matter at this point, really. I’m just beginning to sound like some pathetic teenage girl.”
Liam placed a hand on Louis’ shoulder, rattling it a little. “If two people are meant to be together, they will be eventually, you know. Give yourself time to sort out your head.”
“Are you a fortune cookie now?” Louis asked, looking back at his friend with raised eyebrows.
Liam only grinned dopily back at him. “I have always been a fortune cookie, Lou, you know that.”
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(part four)