Count On Me | Niam

Chapter Seventy-Eight

Liam

Two more weeks.

Two more weeks, that's all there was.

Two more weeks and then he'd be home. Two weeks had never seemed longer, not even the two weeks before Niall and Chloe flew out, when he'd woken up every morning wishing time would pass faster.

To be honest, he wasn't even sleeping properly this time. It was the anticipation, that's what he kept telling himself. It was also relief, really. Knowing he'd get to see Niall and there'd be nothing they'd have to talk through, not anymore. Not since everything he'd fucked up had all been sorted; Chloe was doing lessons from home until September, then there'd be a new school, a private one; he and Niall - they were okay, they were - and tour was over halfway over. He'd be home and they'd be perfect. They'd be happy and he could spend three weeks at home without having to think about anything.

It had killed him to let Niall and Chloe go home; it had been impossible not being there for her birthday, the first he'd known about; missing them had been a million times worse after they'd gone. A month apart after two weeks together was worse than the months he'd spent away without them, and it sucked. It sucked and he'd tried to keep busy, he'd let Louis drag him out drinking, he'd done more writing, writing more new material than he'd written for months, even if most of it was slightly melancholic or had an air of...frustration, he'd even started reading the emails he was sent daily about possible strategies for interviews and appearances; things really were that bad.

In all honesty, reading the emails was quite helpful and it stopped his team from catching him out on things he'd never normally bothered with, but at the same time it made him more impatient for the break, made him more desperate to get home and to get away from the world where he was viewed as nothing more than a particularly troublesome chess piece.

It was insane, really. He'd gone from being a twenty-five, nearly twenty-six-year-old adult, with a child, for fuck's sake, to being treated like he was seventeen again, needing to be monitored at every moment, lest he fuck up and destroy whatever media narrative they pushing that week. Well, he had actually done that, but that was beside the point. It was till annoying as hell, but he understood why.

Everything was back to being so tightly scripted that his management had taken control of his and Niall's social media account once more and every interview he gave was scripted word for word. He appeared on Ellen, not One Direction, just him, and everything that was said was planned beforehand. Ellen got the 'exclusive backstory' about him coming out, the 'truth' about his past relationships, cute stories about Niall and seeding the idea that him being a father wasn't completely impossible, but not totally true.

He hadn't worked this hard in promo since...well. He had actually been seventeen and working with Danielle to quell the rumours that he'd had a boyfriend back in secondary school by dating the girl everyone in their secondary school had been convinced was also in the closet. It had worked, though he'd lied relentlessly and hadn't dared to open his mouth without someone from their management nodding their approval.

It was like being back then, only maybe now it wasn't as awful as it had been then. He wasn't holding Sophia's hand anymore, and he could admit that it was Niall, now, not a random girl. He could gush on and on about Niall, boring even Harry senseless, and Harry could fifteen different adjectives to describe Louis' smile. He had once, when the were drunk, and Zayn had left to be sick. Though that might have had something to the entire bottle of Aftershock he'd drank, not Harry. Then again, it could have been Harry.

He did gush on, enough that Paddy put a limit on how much he could talk about Niall as part of normal conversations. Liam didn't quite know how to calculate whether he was taking up more than twenty percent of heir conversations by talking about Niall, so after Paddy imposed the limit, he had to err on the side of caution and not talk about Niall at all. Well, he hardly talked about Niall. He tried, at least.