Count On Me | Niam

Chapter Twenty

Niall

Niall didn't know what to do. He'd spent the day mis-organising instruments at the shop, unable to think clearly. He'd spent the whole day unable to think clearly. Chloe had ended up reminding him of their stop, the seven-year-old having to remind him to get off the bus a testament to how distracted he was.

Ever since his phone call with Liam, he'd been distracted.

Part of him was thinking about how grateful Liam had been to simply be given a chance, another part of him couldn't stop thinking that Liam really shouldn't be grateful for just being given a chance and another part of him was berating the part of him that wanted nothing more than for Liam to meet Chloe, the disapproving voice that wouldn't shut up, bringing up seven years worth of anger and hurt as a reason as to why the part of him that wanted nothing more than to let Liam walk straight back into his life was an idiot.

Only one very small part of his brain was occupied by anything other than Liam and that part was constantly switching between the problems that were keeping Niall awake at night, whether it was the problem of how he'd actually find the money to take Chloe home to Mullingar for the rapidly approaching Christmas holidays, the worry that Chloe wasn't really well enough to go back to school and go back to her swim class, or if Chloe would even want to meet Liam once Niall properly managed to tell her about him.

He'd spent the day mis-sorting instruments into the wrong categories—he of all people should know that the bass guitars don't belong with the acoustic guitars—and when Jessica had dropped Chloe off after school, the two of them had almost left for her swimming lesson without her bag of swimming stuff. Whilst waiting for Chloe's lesson to finish, Niall had half hoped that he would run into Liam for a third time, despite knowing for a fact that Liam's schedule no longer allowed him the time to go to a public gym and instead made him use the one in his apartment building out of convenience.

Liam had made that clear through the string of texts and random phone calls they'd shared in the week and a bit since they'd met up in person.

The texts and calls were a new thing they'd started doing. Liam had called a couple of times, sounding vague, with someone in the background interrupting and distracting him, but he'd call and ask after Chloe and ask how Niall was and they'd end up chatting about inconsequential things, neither one of them mentioning anything that might jeopardise the tentative peace between the two of them.

The odd phone calls had somehow turned into frequent texts, Liam texting Niall with a random snatch of gossip about people he didn't know but assumed Liam worked with or an update on the craziness regarding all things One Direction with Niall eventually texting back, filling him in on whatever his latest Chloe question was but neither of them would mention the more important things they actually needed to talk about or would have to talk about if whatever they were doing was going to work.

The texts weren't helping with his confusion, though. He had no idea what to do, about Liam meeting Chloe, about the confusing way Liam would sound whenever he mentioned why he was so interested in Niall, about anything in general. He was even considering getting Greg to message Liam and sort things out over myspace, but that idea probably wouldn't work. Greg wasn't Liam's biggest fan, he'd been cautious about his sixteen-year-old brother's first boyfriend years ago and time hadn't helped change his opinion about Liam and, apparently, he was actually considering deleting his myspace like everybody else had done years ago.

He didn't know what to do. Well...He did. Fate, if there was such a thing, had decided that after the second time he ran into Liam. Niall knew what he had to do, what was only fair for him to do and what was probably best for Chloe in the long term, he just didn't quite know how to do it.