Love and Fame (Harry Styles)

Chapter 7

"It's the most distressful thing to remove contacts with long nails," I said as I tried to rub away the lenses without scratching my eyeballs in the process. "You have no idea."

The boys chuckled as I swore and blinked and eventually managed to remove my contact lenses without seriously injuring myself.

We were all squashed into the tiny bathroom of the tour bus to get ready for bed. There wasn't really room for everyone, so Liam and Zayn were standing on the wrong side of the open door.

Toothpaste and toothbrushes were passed around as I tossed away my contacts and gathered my hair in a messy bun.

"This is nice, do you always brush your teeth together before you go to bed?" I said as Niall squeezed a generous amount of toothpaste onto my toothbrush.

"Not really," Louis admitted.

"I think we should start doing it on a regular basis," I announced and the boys chuckled again. "What? Isn't this nice?"

"Very nice," Liam said dryly. "Except for the fact that I'm standing on the wrong side of the threshold and feel a bit excluded."

"You're not excluded. If we had closed the door, then you would have been excluded."

"Are we really going to bed already?" Zayn said as the boys finished laughing because of my comment.

"We could watch some TV before we tuck in," Harry said and I smiled because it was a cute thing to say.

After a few minutes of quiet tooth brushing-time, I started regretting telling the boys to make the shared bathroom time a regular thing. The room was absolutely way too small to give any wiggle room for six people and I was several times poked by someone's elbow. And things got particularly brutal whenever someone had to push their way through the crowd to spit. 

Liam stepped on my toes twice as he made his way to the sink, and though he seemed genuinely sorry, I wondered if it had something to do with my snappy remark earlier about him not really being excluded. The idea of him deliberately stepping on my toes amused me, because I knew that Liam was as tame and kind as a kitten. It was interesting to know that I could break through his polite exterior with just a few words. I could have some fun with that in the future.

As everyone finished up in the bathroom, we returned to the rear end of the bus to watch some TV before bed. 

Harry started flipping through the channels and stopped when he found one sending old episodes of Friends. Everyone nodded approvingly because Friends was a classic that everyone loved.

After a few humorous episodes with six of my favorite TV characters of all time, I was too tired to keep my eyes open anymore.

I announced that I was going to bed and left the rear end of the bus to change into my soft pajamas. I was so tired that I was actually considering just stripping in front of my bunk bed, formerly known as the junk bunk, but I was very aware that the boys were looking at me, so I decided to lock myself in the bathroom instead.

When I had changed and returned to the bunk beds, the boys queued up to kiss and hug me good night. And by now I felt like I knew them well enough for that, so it felt nice to have them embrace me.

The boys had been kind enough to remove their things from the junk bunk and I had gotten fresh sheets. It was overwhelmingly comfortable to crawl under the covers and shut the drapes in front of the bunk.

I got comfortable and closed my eyes, but just as I was about to drift away, my eyes fluttered open as a lyric idea started humming in my head.

My brain always worked full speed at night and it was indescribably annoying. Whenever I tried to sleep, lyric ideas popped into my head and I didn't get peace of mind before I had written them down in my notebook. Why couldn't my brain function like that in a decent hour of the day?