Here In The Afterglow

Chapter 2.9

No more notes come. Not from Harry, and not from anyone else.

Blessedly, it seems a one off thing. Nobody is acting strangely around him, nobody says anything, does anything that sets off Louis' alarm bells.

Harry's absence in his day is heartbreaking, hurts him in the worst of ways. He barely sees him in the hall, and if he does, on the slim chance he catches a lucky glimpse, he only allows himself a few precious moments to look before he pulls his eyes away and concentrates on what he's doing.

He feels a chasm of dullness when he opens his locker to find it empty of little strips of paper. There's nothing there to greet him, no wit or love or poorly drawn hears, just the remnants of black scribbles on the bottom from the previous owner and his books stacked up messily.

Louis lives for the night. He lives for when Harry spends his time on him slow, when they make up for the time they've lost by stretching everything out in a hazy, luscious warmth, in sensual presses of tongues and desperate presses of fingertips. He lives for Harry guiding his fingers along the frets of his guitar delicately, of him singing quietly under his breath while Louis plays their favorite songs messily, the strings muted and wrong more often than not.

He lives for Harry reading to him in the almost dark, his glasses reflecting the silver moon and his hands glowing in a soft bubble of yellow torchlight, when his voice washes over him like a broken wave, gentle in its curve and fizzling out against smooth pebbles, caressing and harmless. He lives for the way they dance together, the way that Harry will put on Ella & Louis and they sway through the blue light like willow trees by a lagoon, trumpets and tinkling piano floating around them.

He lives for the way they both understand their desperate need for simplicity, their need to just lie together for hours and do nothing at all, to just be. Nothing can be something. Harry's voice resonates in Louis' mind endlessly, as it always does, as they lie on their backs and hold hands. It's those moments that Louis finds himself yearning for the most, when there's complete calm around them both and they can rest.

Stan has stopped coming to collect him every day, but Louis goes to the table anyway. He knows that he has to, now that he isn't sitting with Harry and Zayn, who he finds himself oddly missing too. When he slides in beside Stan, the tiny, satisfied curve of his lips doesn't go unnoticed. It feels like Louis has lost something, like Stan has this strange power that he doesn't know how to describe. Louis detests it, loathes it.

But, he does notice that there's a general shift in their whole dynamic, not just between himself and Stan, but between the rest of the team in general. The undercurrent of hostility and indifference that he'd grown so used to now seems absent, which he's grateful for. In its place, though, is this off emptiness that feels too weighty to be much of a good thing. Louis tries not to think too much about it, and keeps his head down.