Happy Thoughts

Chapter 8

It was like a game.

It was a terrifying, consuming, back-and-forth exchange that started and stopped without warning, flared at the most inopportune moment and lingered in the air whenever they dared to break the rules that had been set for them. Harry made sure that he never pressed, never went beyond the boundaries they had already set, but it barely mattered; even the most innocent gestures became a tease now, given the right moment.

During the tour, they had found the balance that had been missing throughout the rest of their relationship. By day, they had been free to simply be the best friends that they could ever have hoped for, and by night, they had the freedom to explore every other aspect of the friendship that they had not expected. Now, want was blurring the lines between those two halves of their relationship, bleeding desire into friendship and shifting the balance just enough to change every single one of their interactions, and neither boy had the inclination to do anything to stop it - because the awful truth was that it was fun.

It was fun to test the limits, to flirt with the danger of what they were doing and to know that even though they were technically behaving well within the rules, they were doing the complete opposite of what they should be. They should have been putting some distance between them, to purely become best friends again, but they weren't and they loved it.

Harry loved watching Louis' eyes change colour when he got too close; like when they had been forced to retake their photos, and the make-up artists had had to dab some extra foundation on Louis' cheek to hide the small, black bruise beneath the hollow of his eye. Though it would have been a perfectly innocent gesture at one point in time, the older boy's eyes flickered when Harry took the little pot of make up out of the woman's hands and offered to finish the rest for her while she saw to Niall's hair. Harry's fingertips had barely brushed Louis' skin as he gently smeared the cool, tan-coloured liquid over his cheekbones, lightly covering the bruise, but those blue eyes never left his face for even a moment. Perched on the edge of the counter, half falling into Louis' lap, Harry felt the most wonderful rush as he watched the flames grow in the older boy's gaze - and then Louis had calmly let his hands to fall to rest upon Harry's thighs where they were placed in front of him, and Harry's fingers had slipped and left a streak of foundation down the side of his friend's face.

And that was how things continued between them. The light teasing was far easier for them to handle than the very real tension that frequently began to thicken whenever the two found themselves alone, or in a particularly compromising position. It was much simpler to pretend that they were only playing at desire, rather than feeling that very tangible, stirring hunger whenever the other was even remotely near. If they could retreat into tiny touches - a brush of the hand or a sweep of the other boy's hair behind his ear - they could try to ignore the longing for the more complex touches from their memories. Those touches were the ones that they knew they should not want; the dangerous ones that would inevitably lead to soft gasps, tightening fingers and warm, shadowed nights they could not yet allow themselves to relive.

Surprisingly, Louis able to temporarily keep such thoughts from clouding his judgement with Eleanor, however, since most of the time she and Harry were kept completely separate. He could almost pretend that neither of them existed in the same world, because if that were true, he could not possibly care for Eleanor while still lusting after Harry with a passion that occasionally unnerved him, and he would not be able to want to throw his entire life into his best friend's waiting hands if he were capable of having a girlfriend at the same time. It was a complicated, confusing mixture of denial and conflicting feelings, but for a time, it worked.

For a time, he could pretend that he wasn't searching for some fault in his relationship with that lovely, beautiful girl so that he would have a valid reason to break it apart. For a time, he could let himself believe that there was nothing wrong with wishing that Harry would break the rules just once and give him an excuse to go running back into that boy's strong arms and let them have the relationship that had worked so well for that short, blissful month. Louis no longer cared about the label for whatever it was that they'd been doing, or even the label of 'girlfriend' that he had plastered on Eleanor's forehead to try and make it easier to stay loyal to her, because in truth, he wanted nothing more than to enjoy his friendship with the one person that mattered the most to him.