Count On Me | Niam

Chapter Forty

Niall

Niall was having a bad morning.

Well...

It wasn't really a bad morning, just a long one. A very long one.

He'd worked overnight, puling a double shift and spending all sixteen hours restocking the storeroom and fixing up instruments, not even surprised when he went to take a break somewhere around four am and found the coffee maker in the back room to be broken.

It was always fucking broken.

He'd pushed through, though, working until his boss arrived to open up the shop at eight am and had then sent him home, and then he'd caught the bus back to his end of Brixton, intending to go home and nap for an hour until Jessica dropped Chloe off after her swimming lesson. That plan had gone out of the window, though, when he remembered the mountain of house work that had been piling up, jobs he'd been neglecting to do all week, the time he'd usually spend doing said jobs having been taken up by Liam.

Not that he was complaining.

Not about Liam. God, no.

But spending all but one evening a week with Liam meant that he was so far behind on all the everyday jobs that Chloe wold have no clean clothes for school next week and his laundry bin was beginning to overflow.

So...no long overdue nap for Niall.

But what did he expect?

Working overnight on a Friday never really worked out for Niall, though. When he'd first dared to work the night shift, leaving Chloe with Jessica overnight for the first time, Chloe had taken it upon herself to fall down two flights of stairs. Niall had nearly had a heart attack when he'd answered heard Jessica's voicemail during a brief break, only to be told that his daughter, his barely just turned three-year-old daughter had tumbled down two flights of stairs. Chloe had been fine, of course she had. She'd come out of it with no more than a scraped knee and bruised elbow.

But it still set the tone for most of the night shifts Niall would work. Even the time where nothing horrible happened, afterwards he'd be left to deal with something or other. Like the time he'd gone to pick Chloe up from Jessica's the morning after, they hadn't been there, he'd gotten no phone calls to explain and had been this close away from freaking out when a neighbour told him they'd 'popped out to buy some cereal'.

This particular morning, though, it wasn't an impromptu shopping trip or minor hear attack that meant he was in for a long, long morning and an even longer day, but a mountain of laundry and a weeks worth of ironing and then, the proverbial cherry on top of the ice cream sundae of shitty chores, there was dusting and hoovering to be done. And no time to sleep. And that was before he even considered the thing...the meeting he'd agreed to with Liam and his bandmates.

He didn't have it in him to worry about it anymore, though. He'd spent Wednesday night worrying about finally meeting them and had come to the conclusion somewhere around three am last night whilst he was working that worrying about it was pointless. Chloe, Chloe had almost been bouncing around out of anticipation, had been ever since Niall had explained to her who Liam wanted them to meet, ever since Niall had explained to her what exactly Liam did for a living and that it was very important that she maybe didn't tell everyone at school. She'd nodded at that, only really  asking if it was the same One Direction that got played at the school disco.

She didn't necessarily like One Direction's music, Niall had never really made her properly listen to it and school discos only ever played the oldest songs—songs older than she was—but Niall's eyes had sparkled when he'd told her about One Direction and Liam and he'd seemed proud so she'd decided that maybe she wanted to meet them.