Here For You

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Liam went home that night with another lingering kiss goodbye. It was a school night, and no matter how adorable Niall’s puppy face was, Maura had to send her son’s boyfriend home for the night.

Niall went to pick up Liam before school the next morning, as he usually did. He waited outside, leaning against the lamp post across the street for Liam to come outside so they could walk to school together. Liam was running late though, something rather out of character for him, so Niall decided to walk over to the door and ask about him. Maybe there had been a power cut and they all overslept or something, you never knew.

Right when he crossed the street, Karen walked outside with a bin bag in her hands, ready to take the trash out to the container in front of their house.

“Oh, hey Niall, aren’t you at school yet?” she asked cheerily, her face a bit flushed and her hair slightly messed up from cleaning around the house.

“Uhm, I was actually waiting for Liam, is he running late or something?” Niall asked, a bit confused at Karen’s question.

“Oh. No. I thought you knew. He left really early this morning, something about a project he had to finish before class or something? I’m not sure, but he’s been gone for at least an hour.” She took a glance at her watch. “And you should get going to Niall, you’ll be late if you don’t run.”

He nodded and put up a hand in a distracted greeting and ran off to school. He only managed to get there right as the bell sounded, so he didn’t get a chance to find Liam before classes started. He couldn’t focus on his classes though, his mind wandered to his boyfriend and his odd behaviour of this morning the entire time, one of his hands clutched around his phone in his pocket whenever he had the chance. It never buzzed though, Liam didn’t text him like he usually did, and Niall started to get worried. Did he do something wrong? Maybe he’d gone too fast yesterday, maybe Liam didn’t like his body and he didn’t want to tell him? It was driving him crazy, and when the bell sounded to announce lunch hour, Niall all but jumped up from his chair and dashed out of the classroom, straight to the cafeteria where he hoped to find Liam.

He didn’t. Liam didn’t show up during lunch hour, making not only Niall worry, but all of their other friends ask about him as well. Apparently neither of them had seen him all morning, and Niall hated how he wasn’t able to answer any of their questions. Zayn told the others to stop asking questions when he noticed how Niall didn’t even touch the sandwich he’d bought for lunch, but Niall hardly heard any of them. He just sat there, waiting, looking around and contemplating how to track Liam down. Finally, after half an hour, he got up, too fidgety to stay seated at a lunch table with people he didn’t want to talk to and food he didn’t want to eat, and started looking for Liam around the school. His chest hurt when he walked towards the bathrooms first. He knew about Liam cutting, and although he also knew he hadn’t cut once since they were together, he was scared Liam would’ve gone back to his old habit after last week. He pushed the door open, but apart from one of his team mates from football who was snogging his latest catch, the room was empty. No one was in the stalls either, and even though it was a sort of relief that Liam wasn’t in there cutting his skin with one of his razors, it didn’t give him any answer about where he was. He spent the rest of lunch hour looking for Liam, but he wasn’t outside at the bleachers, nor in the gym or at the library. He would’ve skipped his afternoon classes, but he had a test in chemistry, a subject he was almost failing already and then an oral exercise in English he couldn’t miss. He’d just have to try and get out of his last class early to try and find Liam before he went home. By this time he didn’t even care if he’d done something wrong and Liam was mad at him, he just needed to be sure that his Liam was doing okay.