Songs We Wrote By The Water's Edge

So while listening to Lewis Watson's brilliant "Songs That We Wrote When We Were Drunk," this short idea wrote itself up in my head. I hope you enjoy it! 

Dedicated to Catherine (RestlessDreamer) for being lovely and for sharing a strong admiration for Niall Horan with me. Honestly, Rinne, you're pretty damn amazing and I'm in awe of just how that came to be. 

NOTE: THIS IS A COMPLETED STORY, HENCE THE LITTLE GREEN CHECK MARK NEXT TO THE STORY. PLEASE D O N O T ASK ME TO UPDATE THIS BECAUSE IT'S ONLY MEANT TO BE A SHORT STORY I WROTE IN A FIT OF NIALL FEELS. I DO THIS A LOT (WRITE A BUNCH OF OPEN-ENDED SHORT STORIES) AND I'M SORRY, BUT I CAN'T HELP IT, OKAY? I HAVE ISSUES. I AM WELL AWARE. 

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SONGS WE WROTE BY THE WATER'S EDGE

Ironically, for an ambitious writer, Josephine has never been very good with words. She speaks a mile a minute, stammers quite frequently in every day speech, and is the full-fledged definition of awkward. She spends most afternoons of the summer sat in the comfort of her rented bedroom above a pastry shop, scribbling less-than-interesting stories on sheets of tattered paper. She doesn’t have many friends, and those she does have, are either too busy or too caught up in their own lives to squeeze even an ounce of time in for her. She learned quite quickly that time spent alone can be just as wonderful as time spent with friends.

One obscenely warm August morning, when Josephine grudgingly slips out of bed, heading straight for the bathroom, her telephone rings. Sweet melodies of Fur Elise pirouette in the scorching air, making her cringe as she reaches for the hot phone hanging on a wall close by. She’s incredibly old-fashioned, and to be honest, she likes it that way. Her mother always complains about the lack of modern technology she keeps in her small home to which Josephine inwardly groans and later laughs about when she aimlessly flips through a stack of magazines her mother leaves behind for her to look into. Josephine may be a writer, but working for her mother’s sordid magazine is a one-way ticket to total hell.

“’Ello?”

A masculine and somewhat familiar voice echoes through the speaker in question, “Josephine?”

“Liam? Oh my God,” she breathes, clutching the phone tighter as if he were to vanish if she did not do so. “How are you?”

He laughs, “Better question is: how are you? We haven’t talked in ages.”

“School, Li,” she huffs, “it’s a prison. I just finished summer classes a couple days ago, so now I’m sat at home. What about you? What are you up to? How are the others? Is the tour nearly finished?”

“Calm, Josie, calm,” he laughs again. Hearing him laugh warms her heart, but not in the romantic sense, she and Liam have never been like that. His laughter is a remembrance of her old life; the one she left behind in Wolverhampton shortly after he did. Their lives had taken different routes, but even though, their friendship was strong. “I’m fine, actually. The boys and I just finished up tour as well and we’re off on holidays now. I can’t even begin to tell you how good it feels. We’ve been looking forward to some time off. This past year’s been crazy.”

“I can imagine,” she smiles, “months and months of jumping from one country to another. How do you lot even do it?”

“We’ve got super powers.”

“Sure you do.”

“We do, we do!” he exclaims cheerfully, his tone falling to a sigh near the end. “Listen, Josie, I want you to come with us.”

“Come with you?” her eyebrows crinkle in utter confusion. “Where?”

“We’ve rented a beach house in Malibu for a few days. The boys and I are all bringing a few friends of ours, and of course, I wanted to ask you. We haven’t seen each other in so long, it’d be nice to spend some time together, ya know? I miss you.”