every rose has its thorns. // niall horan

chapter twenty one.

After her meltdown, Rosaleen felt a little embarrassed and was glad that Niall was playing it off like it hadn’t happened. Once they had stepped down from Bray’s Head everything had gone back to normal. Niall had cracked a joke about something stupid and Rosaleen had laughed, not because it was funny but just because she could. They were now standing in the basement of the Heritage Center, staring at the recreation of a castle dungeon and thousand-years-of-Bray exhibit.

“Could you imagine being locked in a dungeon for all of eternity?” Niall asked as he studied the display. “I think I would have preferred a beheading you know? Quick and easy.”

“Not me,” Rosaleen whispered, hearing the slice of an axe in her mind.

“Why? At least with a beheading you won’t feel any pain and you won’t be trapped in a tiny room with barely any food for the rest of your life. You just get it over with.”

“In a dungeon you still have time to live.”

“I wouldn’t call hanging out with the rats living.”

“But you still have your mind. They can’t take that away. And with your imagination you can live forever without leaving the cell.”

Niall made a whirling motion with his finger, “Most people go crazy. You wouldn’t have your mind after all.”

Rosaleen and Niall climbed the stairs, going to check out the model train set up in the upper room. “I’m used to living in my mind,” she said as they watched the train make its way around the track. “I did it for so long that it wouldn’t seem any different.”
“What do you mean?” Niall squatted down next to the train, holding out his hand as if he wanted to reach out and touch it; as if the train could take him anywhere he had ever wanted to go.

“With Tim and stuff. I started to get bored around him a lot in the last year and I reverted to my imagination. All the places I wanted to travel, the foods I wanted to eat, the boys I wanted to kiss.” She made sure not to meet Niall’s eyes when she said this, even though he had stood back up and was staring at her with his head cocked slightly to the side as he took in her words. “I guess that should have been a hint that things weren’t exactly working out, but I was still devastated when he ended it.” Rosaleen punched herself in the thigh, “I was so stupid. I freaked out when he said we were done, even though deep down I had wanted to hear those words for ages. And then when I saw you at the airport I blew you off because I was telling myself that I had just broken up with my one true love and I didn’t need a cute foreign boy messing with me.” She looked up and grinned at him, “Yet here I am a week later; staring at a model train in some random town on the coast of Ireland with the most amazing foreign boy ever.”

Niall scrunched his nose adorably, making the light smattering of freckles on his skin blend together as one. “I’m not foreign. You are.”

Rosaleen couldn’t stop herself; she reached out and poked his nose. “You’re foreign to me.”

He caught her hand with his and wound their fingers together, holding up their clasped hands in the space between their faces. He turned them over, studying the way their fingers fit so perfectly together and smiling at the chipped blue polish on Rosaleen’s fingernails. “Do all foreign girls have tiny hands?” he smirked cutely at her.

“Leave my hands alone,” Rosaleen actually hated the fact that her hands were so small, because she had always felt weird when Tim’s large ones folded over hers. Now though, she was seeing them in a different way. Her and Niall’s hands were like pieces of a puzzle, not overpowering the way Tim’s had been. Niall’s hands were larger than hers, but not in a way that made hers appear nonexistent. She had to admit that their hands complemented each other; his were just large enough to make her feel protected but also small enough to look like they belonged. She suddenly loved her tiny hands. “I’m petite; my hands are proportionate to the rest of me.”