you'll know it's just for you (1/4). harry/louis.
title: you'll know it's just for you
fandom: one direction
ship: harry/louis
word count: 23,000+ (deeear lord)
summary: He wished he could be as brave as Harry, as bold as Harry - as willing to defy gravity and break all the rules and just let them be together. But he couldn't do it. He couldn't have that following him around. He knew that so many things would change if they went public, if they outed themselves - he wasn't sure if he was quite ready for his world to get turned upside down all over again just yet.
parts: 2, 3, 4
author's note: wow, i did NOT expect this to be this big, but it somehow managed to turn into my baby over the past week. it's kind of a twist on the coming out story, i guess? regardless, i really hope you all like it <3
+
It happened right after the release of their second album, and Louis didn’t really know who he could blame but himself - he certainly couldn’t blame Harry.
It had started with a fight, really. Some stupid argument about Eleanor just like all the other stupid arguments they’d had about Eleanor in the past - only this one resulted in a different outcome. Usually, after the words were slung around and Harry muttered some snarky, bitter comment under his breath, they’d go back to normal. Louis would wrap his arms around him and Harry’s head would rest against Louis’. They’d kiss. They’d go to bed. But not this time.
“I don’t know what you want me to do, it’s not like I really have a say in the matter, Haz,” Louis had argued, shaking his head at his boyfriend behind closed doors.
“But you do have a say in the matter!” Harry’s voice had rattled back at him. Harry wasn’t one for yelling, really, but right now, he was. He stood up from where he’d been sitting at the foot of the bed, reeling around and turning back to face Louis with his hands gripping his curls. “Don’t you get it? You do have a say. You can change all of this - you can be you.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is that simple,” Harry replied. He took a few strides closer to Louis, placing his hands on his shoulders and holding his grip. “Fuck what management says, Lou. All it would take would be one interview, one picture of us…and it’d all be over.”
Louis shook his head, biting down on his lip and staring back at him with wide blue eyes. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “I…I can’t do that, Haz. Not yet.” Harry didn’t say anything after that, simply stared at him as if he was watching all the life slip out of his eyes. He followed the trail of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed hard before opening up his mouth once more. “I’m sorry.”
He wished he could be as brave as Harry, as bold as Harry - as willing to defy gravity and break all the rules and just let them be together. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t have that following him around. He knew that so many things would change if they went public, if they outed himself - he wasn’t sure if he was quite ready for his world to get turned upside down all over again just yet.
And he knew that wasn’t fair to Harry - it wasn’t. Because Harry was this beautiful, happy boy. He smiled and he lived and he laughed, he loved with his whole heart and he didn’t care what anyone thought about him. He was the one who held Louis’ hand from the first second they got into a car together until the last, he snuggled against Louis’ body like a child even though he was so much lankier than Louis. He laughed at stupid shit and his toes always curled when Louis kissed the shell of his ear. He was Harry. He was Louis’ Harry.
But right now, he didn’t look like Louis’ Harry at all. He looked like the ghost of Louis’ Harry. It was as if he was vanishing right in front of Louis’ eyes, slipping away before he had the chance to grab him - like sand falling through the gaps between fingers. Harry’s hands fell away from Louis’ shoulders, and Louis knew that this time, everything was different. Harry had been patient, he’d been willing to wait - but Louis could see that the time for patience was over. Harry gave one last nod, looking down at his shoes before looking back at Louis. “Yeah,” he said, his voice much stiffer than usual. “I’m sorry, too.”
And then he turned on his heel and he was gone.
+
When the magazine article came out, Louis had to do a double-take. But sure enough, there he was. Harry, on the cover of Attitude Magazine, just a few weeks after the argument that had ended it all for them; he had a shit-eating smirk on his lips, giving a two-finger salute to the camera. The headline read: BOTH DIRECTIONS: One Direction’s Harry Styles comes out as bisexual.
He was sure that Harry hadn’t cleared this with anyone before doing it - Harry wouldn’t think about doing something like that, would be so riled up that he’d basically just say “fuck the consequences” and do what he thought needed to be done. That was who Harry was, who he’d always been. And Louis loved him for it.
“You are going to get your ass handed to you, mate,” Zayn chided the day the magazine had hit shelves. He rolled his eyes at the curly haired, younger boy, turning to respond to another text message. Their phones had all been blasted all day, Twitter and Tumblr’s servers had all but shut down at the release of the article. They’d taken call after call from management, demanding a mandatory, urgent meeting for later on that night.
Harry merely shrugged back at him. “I was tired of hiding,” he answered honestly, his eyes landing on Louis, who was sitting at the kitchen counter. “You can read all about it in the Attitude article.”
“I think it was ballsy and brassy as fuck,” Niall declared, moving over to his friend and holding up a hand for Harry to high-five. Instead, Harry pulled him into a hug, which Niall gladly took.
Liam was sitting in one of the chairs in the corner of Harry and Louis’ living room. He didn’t say anything at first, just allowed his eyes to settle on Harry. A few moments later, after his “parental stare down” was through, he saw the corner of his lips lift into a small smile. “You changed your entire life in the span of one morning, you realize,” he pointed out.
Harry only nodded, his eyes finding their way back to Louis just as they always did - even when he didn’t want them to. “I know,” he said, before his phone began to blare out with another phone call from their managers (or their publicists, agents, all three) and he stepped into the other room to take the call.
Louis turned his head over his shoulder, following Harry’s frame out of the room before turning back and staring down at the counter, releasing a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding.
“That was big of him,” Liam pointed out, standing up from the chair and moving to the counter.
Louis shook his head, swallowing down the lump in his throat. He didn’t know what to say, what to think. “Yeah,” he finally said. That’s all he said, though. Just “yeah.”
He and Harry hadn’t spoken much since their argument in their room a few weeks back. After that night, Harry had gone back to sleeping in his own room, leaving in the morning before Louis was even awake. At the few shows they’d done for album promotion, they hadn’t interacted the way they used to - they hadn’t danced around each other or touched or any of the sort. Instead, Harry stuck around Niall and Louis stuck with Zayn, the lot of them sharing custody of Liam as if he were the family dog that nobody could bear to part with.
And now Harry had done this. Come out to the entire world. Laid himself bare. Louis hadn’t read the article yet, couldn’t really bring himself to. There was a copy of the magazine on the kitchen counter, Harry’s beautiful face staring back at him.
Liam, as if sensing the thoughts in Louis’ head, reached for the magazine and pushed it over to him. “Starts on page 95,” he told him before backing away from the counter and lifting Zayn by his sleeve, bringing him to a standing position. “Let’s go get some chips, yeah?”
“Chips?” Niall chimed in, face lighting up like a Christmas tree. He clapped Louis on the back for a moment before following the other two out of the flat.
Louis heard the door click shut behind them before looking back at the magazine, flipping through the glossy pages until he reached page 95 and saw the rest of the shots of Harry from the shoot. One was of him leaning against a brick wall, looking over the River Thames. The next page had one of him jumping on a couch with wide eyes and an even wider smile, and it made Louis’ face light up, too - just seeing him like that.
His eyes scanned over the interview, going to the beginning and starting to read. Most of it was Harry explaining his reasoning for coming out, saying that it was something that he’d always known about himself and that he was tired of hiding, that he wanted to be out and comfortable with who he was because he owed it to himself to be honest.
AM: Is there any particular reason that you’ve decided that now is the time to be out about who you are?
HS: (seems confused) What do you mean?
AM: Is there someone special in your life right now who you’re coming out for? So that you can be public with your relationship?
HS: I came out for me. I didn’t come out for anyone else.
AM: And you classify yourself as bisexual?
HS: If I’m being honest, I really classify myself as pansexual. I love people. I love personalities. I love smiles and good vibes. Not genders.
Louis’ stomach twisted into a knot as he read the words, as they asked him about Larry Stylinson later on and Harry dodged it skillfully, Louis’ name hardly being mentioned in the article more than once. He knew that Harry wasn’t going to own up to anything about them, wasn’t going to drag Louis down with him - that was something for Louis to do in his own time, and Harry and Louis both knew that.
But Louis knew that some part of Harry, even if it was a small part of Harry, had done this for Louis. He’d taken the first step, the big step, so that Louis didn’t have to do it first. And the simple realization of that, that Harry had done that - had done it for him - made his heart swell and his chest ache at the same time.
From behind him, he could Harry stepping back into the kitchen. He turned around and saw him paused at the entryway to the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe and staring back at the boy he loved far too much for his own good.
Louis looked down at the spread once more before allowing his eyes to shift back up to Harry. “You in trouble?” he asked.
Harry shrugged, sniffing a little. “It’s not like there’s really much damage control they can do at this point,” he said. “I ran it by with a few of the publicists and thankfully they thought it was at least somewhat marketable…so they let me do it. There’s not much they can really do now. What’s done is done.”
Louis nodded, swallowing thickly and giving Harry the best smile he could muster, even though it was a weak and timid one at that. “So, you’re out,” he stated obviously.
Harry nodded, blinking slowly as if it was all still registering within him that this had really happened. “I’m out,” he echoed.
+
Management was thankfully not too angry at Harry for what he’d done, for what he’d said. It was the night before their first show since the Attitude article had been released, and all the boys were a little nervous by the entire idea of it - they didn’t know what to expect from tonight, from the fans, from any of it. “Just remember to keep your head high, Harry,” they’d told him, and Harry had nodded along obediently. “What you did was big - career changing, even, and you need to know that a lot of weight is on your shoulders now, on your as well as your bandmates.”
“I know,” he said, his voice a little quiet. “And I know I should have at least given you all some sort of warning, but-”
Liam held up his hand to silence him, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder and rattling it a little. “You didn’t owe us an explanation, Harry. This was for you. Not us.” The band had been interviewed about the Attitude interview the same day it had come out, all of the boys telling the reporters that they fully supported Harry and that it was something that they’d always known about him.
“When we look at each other and when we hang out with each other, we don’t see things like sexual orientations or celebrity statuses…none of that,” Liam had said. “We just see each other. Harry’s our Harry just as he’s always been, and we all quite love him an obnoxious amount.”
Louis had been ghost-faced through nearly the entire interview, finally managing to get a few words out about how he was proud of him, that Harry was his best mate and that would never change.
Right now, Louis was looking everywhere but at the rest of them, few more words being said, some warnings heeded toward the boys.
Simon, who was staring at them through a Skype screen, allowed his eyes to shift between Harry and Louis. “Are we to expect any more abrupt magazine articles?” he asked.
Even though Harry already knew the answer to the question, his eyes shifted over toward Louis regardless, waiting for him to speak up.
But Louis only shook his head and picked at a thread on his jeans. “No,” he said, and it sounded definite. Harry tried to not look too upset - after all, what else had he expected? - averting his gaze back down to the floor and ignoring the fact that he could almost hear his own heart breaking.
+
A few minutes before they were set to go on stage at the O2 in London, Harry’s heart began to pound so fast he worried it was going to actually slam all the way out of his chest. All the repercussions from his actions were finally coming back to bite him in the ass, and he was scared about what the fans’ reactions to him would be.
The outpour on Twitter had been (almost) all positive, Larry Stylinson Is On having become a trending topic almost in the same breath that Attitude had hit store shelves. Mostly everyone who had tweeted him had been supportive and respectful, but there were the occasional assholes as there always had been. He tried to stay positive, he was always trying to stay positive - he focused on the good rather than the bad, but that didn’t change the fact that the bad was still there. He’d made a few Tweets himself, thanking the fans for their support and telling them that he was happy to be in his own skin, but this would be his first real public appearance since the article had come out, and he was fucking terrified.
Zayn clapped a hand over Harry’s shoulder. “You’ll be good, mate,” he told him, giving him a little shake as the audience roared from beyond the stage.
The opening bars of the first single off their new album began to pound through the arena, and the boys all made their way on stage, the crowd going wild by the sight of them. Harry had tried to scan the crowd earlier for signs, seeing what they said, but he could hardly catch a glimpse of anything.
But now he could see them, just barely beyond the bright lights, but he could see them. WE LOVE YOU, HAZZA! and GIVE LOUIS A KISS! (which set his stomach into a firm knot and caused him to stop reading the signs and start focusing on the music instead as a means of distraction).
He got up to sing one of his solos during the third song in the set, and he could feel Louis’ eyes burning into the back of his head, causing his cheeks to flush a furious shade of pink. Even after all this time, after all they’d been through, Louis still got under his skin and managed to spark his way all the way into his heartstrings.
He didn’t dare turn around or settle his eyes on Louis. After all, he knew that Eleanor was in the crowd tonight and now that Harry had come out with his sexual orientation, he knew that it wouldn’t take long for anyone to play connect-the-dots and draw the line between Louis and Harry. He had to be careful, more careful than he’d ever been before (although, granted, Harry had never been all that careful to begin with).
During their final song of the show, Louis sided up next to Harry for a few brief moments, just long enough for Harry to know that he was there. He looked at him out of the corner of his eyes, just barely catching the thumbs up at Louis’ side, resting by his hip, before he bounced over to Liam instead.
Harry sang out his lyrics, lyrics about doing all that you can to make someone yours, and in the back of his head, all he could think was, I love you too, Lou.
+
“See, that wasn’t too terrible, eh, Harry?” Niall declared jovially, dropping an arm around Harry’s shoulder as the show ended and they all began to filter back out toward one of the vans at the back of the arena.
Harry could only nod in agreement, too amped up on worrying about the fans who were undoubtedly waiting for them beyond the doors to really be able to say much of anything else.
They could hear the screaming as soon as the double doors pushed open, all the arms waving out toward them, eager for autographs and pictures. Harry’s issue of Attitude was thrust toward him more times than he could count, and he was more than eager to pose for any pictures that the fans wanted. They loved him, they accepted him and stood by him no matter what, and he loved that about them - he’d always loved that about them.
He caught Louis’ eye a few times through the crowd, finally sending him a small smile after the third look, and he began to feel a little uplifted, hopeful. Maybe, just maybe, they could go back to the way things had been between them - or maybe they could at least talk to each other and go from there. Harry knew he didn’t want to take three steps backwards after having taken five steps forward, but he missed Louis more than he had ever imagined missing a person, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
Louis smiled back, genuine and lazy, and he took a step toward him - only to have it intercepted a moment later by a flash of long brown hair in a light blue dress, weaving her bony fingers through Louis’ and pulling him in the opposite direction. Of course. Eleanor.
They weren’t even together, really, Eleanor still being sent to most events and shows for publicity’s sake and nothing more, but it still rattled Harry to the core. Louis was not Eleanor’s, he didn’t belong to her. He was Harry’s, he’d always been Harry’s, and he belonged to him¸ not her.
He signed a few more autographs, his attitude noticeably more upset than it had been moments earlier, before making his way back toward the van. One last hand reached out, latching around Harry’s wrist, and he circled around to settle his eyes onto the boy staring back at him.
He was taller than him and a little broader, blond hair and a bright smile, eyes twinkling behind thick-rimmed glasses. “I know you have to go,” he apologized quickly, “but I just wanted to say that I think you’re a great inspiration to a lot of people, and I’m really proud of you.”
His words stalled Harry momentarily, surprising him a little, and his lips lifted into a smile, nodding back at him gratefully. “Thanks,” he said, holding his hand out to the boy’s for him to shake.
“I’m Matt,” he introduced himself.
“Harry,” he echoed, and Matt only cracked a knowing smile back at him.
“Yeah,” he said with a slight chuckle. “I know.”
Harry blushed, nodding sheepishly and taking a step back. “It was good to meet you,” he said. “I’ll see you around, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Matt agreed, nodding back at him as if he were absolutely certain of his answer. “Yeah, you will.”
Harry smiled, moving back over to the van and sliding in, eyes still settled onto the boy in the crowd before the door closed behind him and he was dragged back into his band’s reality.
“Who was that?” Louis asked, eyes shifting out the window to settle on Matt.
Harry settled back against his seat, shrugging his shoulders. “His name is Matt,” he answered simply. “Thinks I’m an inspiration.”
“Aw,” Zayn cooed teasingly. “Harry’s got a boyfriend.”
Niall chimed in, the two of them singing some silly schoolyard song as the van pulled away from the curb and back through the London streets.
Eleanor was seated next to Louis, typing something into her phone, and Louis’ eyes shifted back over to Harry. But he didn’t say a word, he just stared.
So Harry stared right back.
+
“I don’t like him,” Louis declared, slamming the tabloid down on Liam’s counter.
“I just polished that, be easy on it, yeah?” Liam tossed back at him in a slightly peeved voice.
Louis rolled his eyes, taking a step back and staring down at the cover of the magazine with blown eyes. “As if the entire goddamn world needed to know that Harry and that twat were at the fucking market together,” he snapped bitterly.
“Aw, the green-eyed monster on your shoulder isn’t one of the cuter ones, mate,” Niall observed, leaning up a little as if inspecting the imaginary monster.
Louis glared back at him, but his eyes went back to the magazine almost instantly.
HARRY STYLES AND NEW BEAU’S SATURDAY EXPEDITION.
“Fucking Matt,” Louis muttered.
“Easy there,” Liam warned him, blinking over at Louis worriedly.
Louis chewed down on his bottom lip. “I practically hide from our flat now, did you know that?” he pointed out, looking back over at Liam expectantly. “Because I never know when he is going to be over there. And who is he anyway? Just some fan that Harry’s using to get back at me?”
“Did you ever think that maybe it has nothing to do with you?” Liam replied, raising his eyebrows. “That maybe Harry’s doing this for Harry?”
Of course Louis had thought that. And Louis could see that Harry was happy, that Harry seemed really happy…but he didn’t care. Harry would never be as happy as he was when he was with Louis, Louis was sure of it.
Sugarscape had been all over it the second that Matt and Harry had gone official, almost a month after they’d first met. Their ship name was Marry, and they’d already made joke after joke about Louis scowling somewhere in a corner over being replaced. Louis rolled his eyes at it, laughed it off, but not very convincingly - mostly because it was true, that was exactly what he was doing.
It’d been a few months now, the band getting ready to go off on their US leg of the tour, and Louis just hoped like hell that Matt wouldn’t be invited to tag along, that management wouldn’t fly him out the same way that they flew out Eleanor.
Then again, the circumstances were entirely different for the two cases, so maybe Louis would luck out and he wouldn’t have to see Matt at all.
As if thinking the name Matt too many times caused him to summon just as it did when you said Bloody Mary into a mirror, the door to the flat opened and Matt and Harry came in, arms looped around one another.
Louis quickly flipped the magazine over so that they couldn’t see what he’d been looking at, an advert for cigarettes staring back at him instead.
“So, guess what?” Harry declared brightly to the room, looking over at Matt and flashing him a wide grin. Louis’ insides twisted.
Without giving the guys much of a chance to comment, Harry’s mouth opened and he continued to speak. “Matt has family in the States, he’s going to go there to visit them so that he can make a few of the shows on the tour.”
“Of course he is,” Louis muttered without realizing it, all the eyes in the room settling on him. His head lifted slightly and he straightened his stance, clearing his throat. “That’s great,” he covered up pathetically, eyes settling onto Matt’s. He wished that he was a superhero, that his glare could set Matt on fire and incinerate him to ash. “Perhaps you can fly in with Eleanor.”
He didn’t say anything after that, simply grabbed the tabloid from the counter and chucked it into the trash, ignoring Liam’s cries about how he should have recycled it instead, turning on his heel and walking out the door.
+
He was stewing later on, sitting in the corner of the couch and scrolling through the pictures on his phone that he would never dream of deleting. It was risky enough to have them there in the first place, but he couldn’t bring himself to delete them. The pictures and the videos, the Louis and Harry that nobody outside of the five of them ever really got to see…it was all he had left, really.
His finger hovered over the play button on one of the videos before pressing down on the triangle and watching the video flicker to life. Niall had been filming, moaning in some horrible narrator’s voice about how the five boy band members were going to inevitably starve to death due to Louis’ incompetency at being able to cook a meal. Harry had come up behind him, wrapping his arms around Louis’ waist and resting his chin atop Louis’s shoulder, asking him if he needed any help.
“I can cook,” Louis heard his voice argue, his body swiveling around until he was chest-to-chest with Harry, “thank you very much.”
“You burn Pop-Tarts,” Harry teased in response. Louis had swatted his chest, and moments after that, the two of them had been doing an odd mixture of hugging, kissing, dancing, and wrestling around the kitchen, their bodies a mess of limbs.
“Are we going to get to eat or not?” Niall’s voice groaned from beyond the camera just before the video turned off.
The room was silent again just as the front door opened and Harry stepped inside sans Matt (much to Louis’ relief). His eyes briefly scanned over Louis, eyebrows raising slightly in curiosity. “What are you up to?”
Louis could have just about scoffed. Small talk after so much time barely even acknowledging each other, it was laughable. “Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “Responding to some texts.”
Harry nodded, rocking back and forth on his heels for a few moments as he hovered in the entryway to their flat without moving. Louis’ eyes moved back from his phone to Harry, staying fixed on him and trying to ignore the fact that his heart was twisting into knots.
“…should I have run it by you?” Harry finally blurted out, twiddling his fingers around one another until they gnarled like vines. “Matt tagging along for a few shows?”
Louis instantly stiffened, sitting up slightly, rigidly, and not responding for a little while. “Why would you have to run it by me?” he finally asked, his voice colder than usual. Louis was rarely cold. His blue eyes stayed settled on Harry, almost as if he were staring straight through him. “It’s not like I’m your boyfriend, Haz.”
Harry chewed down on his lip, shaking his head. “Don’t be like that, Lou.”
“Don’t be like what?” Louis practically snapped back at him, his phone falling from his hand and dropping to the couch as he stood up. “Sorry that I’m not particularly ecstatic that you replaced me so quic-”
“Replaced you?” Harry cut him off, shaking his head in disbelief. He took a step closer to Louis, arms crossing over one another defensively. “You think I replaced you with Matt?”
“What the hell else would you call it?” Louis fired back. “One second you’re upset about not going public with me and the next you’re going all over London with…him. How am I supposed to take that, Haz? How am I supposed to feel about that?”
Harry rubbed his lips together, swallowing hard. “That’s really rich coming from you, you know,” he said. “You can go out with Eleanor for over a year and I’m supposed to just stand by and be okay with it, but the second the tables turn and I’m the one going out with someone else, it’s suddenly not okay.”
“I’m not actually with El, Harry!” Louis exclaimed, his voice cracking a little as it only ever did when he got too worked up about something. “And you know that. It’s not the same thing. There aren’t any actual feelings involved. But you and Matt? That’s different, and you know that’s different.”
“I couldn’t just wait around for you, Lou,” Harry pointed out, fingers raking into dark curls. “And I know that that’s shitty of me, okay, I get that. But I was so tired of just being there and watching and waiting for you to make the next move. I was trying to do so much-”
“And I wasn’t?” Louis snapped. “You act like any of this is easy on me, Haz, but it’s not. I’ve been the one who’s been dodging all the dating rumors about us, who’s been letting my reputation turn to shit. Management has more access to my own Twitter than I do just so I don’t slip up about us, so that you don’t have to deal with it. You have no idea how many times I’ve just wanted to say fuck it all and tell everyone how fucking in love with you I am, but I can’t do that because it’s not fair to anyone, Harry. And you know that.” Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Louis was taking strides closer to him, speaking before Harry had the chance. “So don’t act like I didn’t give a shit about our relationship, you know better than that.” He grabbed his coat from the hook by the door, throwing it on and shaking his head.
“Have a good time with your boyfriend,” he muttered, pushing himself out the door and allowing the aftershock to quake the apartment with a resounding slam.
Harry leaned against the back of the couch, unsure if he was even really aware of what had just happened between the two of them. Everything was fucked up, their entire relationship was fucked up, and he was starting to feel like it was his fault. Maybe it was nobody’s fault. Maybe it was simply an inevitability. They couldn’t stay on cloud nine forever, after all, right? They had to fall at some point.
He turned around, catching sight of Louis’ phone on the couch and reaching down to grab it as if it were a reflex. He pressed the top button, allowing the screen to illuminate in front of him as he saw what was staring back at him. It was a picture of him and Louis from the past summer when they’d been on tour in the US. It was after one of their shows in California, backstage on the couch, and it was horribly zoomed in and off center. Harry was grinning widely at the camera and Louis’ lips were pressed to Harry’s cheek, smiling against the skin.
He swallowed the lump threatening to form in his throat and scrolled to the next picture. Them again. He scrolled to the next one. And again. Again. Again.
The door to the flat opened after he didn’t know how long, after however many pictures he’d scrolled through, and he could see Liam hovering curiously in the doorway. “Heard Louis tear out of here…” he stated awkwardly, looking at his friend with concern in his eyes. “What happened?”
Harry dropped the phone to the couch, throwing his head back against the cushions and staring up at the ceiling exasperatedly.
“I have no fucking clue.”
+
“You are a five-year-old, Louis Tomlinson.” Harry barely managed to get his words out before he let out another shriek of laughter - he was always somewhat embarrassed by his laugh, especially when it caught him off guard like it had just now.
“Like you’re any better,” Louis teased back at him, fingers digging into Harry’s sides once more and sending the younger and taller of the two arching off the bed before falling back against the sheets. Louis grinned, hands sliding down until they were resting at Harry’s naked hips and tugging him down, sending their bodies sliding down the messy bed consisting of rumpled sheets and a strewn comforter.
Louis landed at the foot of the bed, falling back until he was on the floor and pushing himself up onto his knees, staring back up at Harry with a twinkle in his eyes and a smirk on his lips. Harry’s breath was already caught in his throat as Louis’ leaned in, mouth closing around him as Harry fell back against the sheets and let out a strangled, “fuck, Lou.”
“Fuck¸ Lou.”
Louis’ eyes blinked open, head pushing up from where it was rested against the wall of the tour bus. He looked over, seeing Zayn staring back at him expectantly. “We’re at the arena,” Zayn told him. “Get up.”
Louis could only smirk, staring back at his friend in amusement. “You’re the one telling me to-”
“I understand the irony, mate,” Zayn told him with an eye roll, “get up.”
Louis let out a laugh, practically falling out of his bunk before standing and stretching. He snagged his glasses from where they must have fallen during his sleep (Harry had always been the one to make sure they were put away whenever Louis fell asleep with them on so that he didn’t break them), sliding them back on as he followed Zayn down the steps of the bus.
“Is he-”
“Matt’s meeting up in Nashville,” Zayn cut him off with a shrug of the shoulders. “Same time as Eleanor.”
“Convenient.”
“It’s all about the timing,” he said drily, giving Louis a sympathetic smile as they headed into the back of the stadium. “You’re in the clear for two shows, few days,” he carried on with a shrug, looking over at Louis and raising his eyebrows. “Think that’s enough time?”
Louis looked back at him, confused and curious. “Enough time for what?”
The look on Zayn’s face told Louis that he should already be well aware of whatever it was that Zayn was getting at. “You know,” he stated, “to pull off your master plan to get Harry back or…” he drifted off after a second, “oh, you’re not…doing anything…?”
Louis rolled his eyes and cleared his throat, the two of them heading backstage for sound check. From out of the corner of his eye, he could see Harry and Niall wrestling on the couch, and he turned back to look at Zayn. “No,” he finally said after a couple beats, “I’m not doing anything.”
+
(part two)