Broken (a Niall Horan love story)

Chapter 68

***Navaeh's P.O.V.***

God fucking dammit my head hurt like a bitch. It felt like someone was taking a rail road spike and hammering it into my temple with alarming force. Literally, I almost thought that my brain was about to melt inside of my skull from the pressure. Not even the usually comforting action of rubbing my temples got the pounding to go away. Even though the TV in the hotel room was on a reasonable volume, the noise still caused a sharp pain.

My loud groans filled the whole room while I propped myself up from the bed and looked around the room that was too bright for my taste. Niall was nowhere to be found, but I hear the shower running in the bathroom so I assumed that that's where he was. With another groan, I flopped back onto the bed and covered my eyes with my hands in an attempt to block out some of the intense light. Just as my groan had ended, I could hear the water in the bathroom cut off suddenly and I slid my fingers apart as if I was expecting Niall to be standing in the doorway already.

Soon enough, the door to the bathroom swung open and Niall waked out with a towel wrapped tightly around his waist. His hair stuck to his head and it looked like it was already starting to lose its blonde dye again. Steam poured out from the doorway of the bathroom and I wondered how hot of a shower he had taken. He wasn't even out in the bedroom part of the hotel room for long; he just grabbed some clothes that were on top of the dresser and then went right back into the bathroom to change. When he came back out again, he finally decided to speak.

"Mornin'," he mumbled out as he passed by where I was without much of a glance. A frown pulled my lips taught and I couldn't help but to furrow my brows slightly as his behavior. What was up his butt? Did he have a hangover too?

"Well you seem happy," came my sarcastic tone while I watched him walking through the room and busying himself with different things. He didn't reply like he normally did; he only scoffed and kept doing anything he could find that would prevent him from looking over at me. That wasn't normal Niall behavior at all; I had kind of been expecting him to have put out medicine and water for me since he always seemed to take care of me like that. With a deep frown stretching my lips, I spoke again, "did I do something to make you upset, Niall?"

He sighed heavily as he put down whatever he had been messing with when I had asked the question and then leaned onto the dresser as if he was so frustrated with me that he couldn't even stand it. "No, of course not." I didn't think it was possible for someone to fit so much sarcasm into such a small amount of words. He wasn't finished with his sarcasm, though, "'cause, you know, I just loved it when I turned around at the end of a really important award show and found out that you were piss drunk."

The way that he practically spat out the last two words made me flinch and I instinctively brought my knees up to my chest as I sat up in the bed. It was an attempt to make myself smaller; maybe I could've handled fights with Niall before everything had happened, but now it was a bit scarier of an occurrence. And, really, we had only had one real fight since I had been staying with him. That had happened because we were both really stressed out and I had added another cut with foolish hope that he wouldn't notice. In all honesty, I was kind of anticipating that something like this would happen the second that I had touched the bottle of champagne the night before.

"What the fuck were you thinking, Navaeh?" I could see the way that his fists clenched as he continued to keep his back facing me. In the back of my mind, the fear that he was about to do something drastic was ever present. I mean, I knew that Niall would never hurt me, but that thought would always be in the back of my mind because of the past.

"I'm sorry, I just couldn't stop thinking about-," I didn't even have a chance to finish the words; Niall had finally turned around to look at me and his expression was severe. There was that vein on the side of his neck that was raised ever so slightly due to the anger that he was holding back so that he wouldn't be yelling at me. Knowing Niall, it wouldn't take long for his voice to rise, and I really wasn't looking forward to that since my head hurt.

"James' moans," he finished for me and I looked back at him with a slightly surprised look on my face. "Yeah, I know, you told me that last night. I understand that, but what I don't understand is why you chose to go straight to alcohol to handle that." He sounded exasperated and his voice was rising noticeably by the end of his words. "Do you know how worried I was? You could have seriously hurt yourself!"

"But I didn't!" I shot back defensively after having his loud words bounce around my throbbing head painfully. I wasn't making it any better for my head seeing as I had started to yell as well. God, I was really wishing that I had pain medicine to help with the pounding. Rubbing at my temples didn't seem to help the headache either.

"Oh, and that makes it okay?! Navaeh, you are eighteen," he pointed out with rapid gestures that were really hard to follow. His face was redder than it usually was; instead of the light pink that normally shaded his cheeks there was a darker red that came along with anger. If he got any more frustrated then he would be the color of a fire truck. If I wasn't so busy trying to hide from his accusing words then I would have probably found it funny. "What you did was irresponsible, not to mention illegal!"

"I said I'm sorry, Niall!" I shouted to which he groaned loudly and dragged one of his hands down his face, "what do you want me to do? I can't really go back and changed what I did!"

"I just want you to tell me why you did it in the first place!" was his quick reply to the words. I looked at him as if he had lost his mind.

"You already know why."

Another heavy sigh, "no, I want to know why on earth you decided to drink half a bottle of champagne! I thought we had agreed that you were going to tell me if you got uncomfortable so that we could handle it the right way!" My fingers were practically glued to my temples as I continued with my attempts to get the headache to go away. Every loud word was like a hammer to my skull. It was like I could feel my brain rattling around inside of my head and it hurt a lot.

"It was an important night for you!" I pointed out as if it was obvious. I was aware of how I had told him that I would tell him if I felt like I couldn't take the crowds or anything like that, but I had seen him all throughout the night. He had been so happy; he was giggling excitedly when they got their awards and he just looked like he was having a blast. How was I supposed to just take him away from that? "I wasn't going to be a bitch and make you leave just because I was having a problem!"

"You honestly believe that I would give two shits about how important the awards were if you had told me that you were having problems?!"

"Well, forgive me for assuming that the band and the fans were more important than little ole me-," I was going to go on with my frustrated rant, but he interrupted me right there. The look on his face as he said the words was so incredibly serious and the words themselves were spoken with so much passion,

"When are you going to realize that there is literally nothing more important to me than you?!" The room was absolutely quiet after he had said that. I swear, you could have heard a pin drop. And it wasn't because the words were all that surprising, because he had always kind of implied that whenever he repeated our common phrase of 'I can't lose you'. However, there was something in my mind that seemed to snap when he said the words; some sort of realization dawned over me even though I couldn't figure out what that realization exactly was. It was a feeling that came without a word, but boy was it strong.

Seeing my silence, he let out another angry huff and grabbed his phone and wallet from the edge of the dresser in the hotel room. "I'm going to go get you some fucking pain pills."

And with that, he left me in the room to try and make sense of the feeling that had washed over me.