Count On Me | Niam

Chapter Eighty-Nine

Liam

His friends were...whatever they were, there wasn't even a word for it.

He'd almost missed them, over the break, but then they went and pulled shit like this and he was back to planning murder. Really. He was going to straight up murder them, starting with Louis, and then he'd leave their bodies to be discovered in the hold of the tour bus or something. At least then he wouldn't have been metaphorically pantsed in front of a whole arena full of people.

Luckily, he guessed, they'd grown out of actually pantsing each other on stage, and they'd simply decided to make a big deal out of- Well, out of everything. They'd stopped a show, the first show, back in America, and they hadn't let it continue until they'd embarrassed him and made a whole arena full of people scream/cheer/celebrate — he really wasn't sure which — over the news of the baby. Whilst it wasn't brand new news to anyone, it was still weird for people to know and he was going to kill them for being so extra.

Especially when they'd started changing lyrics, making highly inappropriate lyrics changes, some of which didn't actually make sense, and made Liam the focus of them.

His resolution was only reinforced when he walked into his hotel room to find them there with alcohol and plans for forcing him out to celebrate properly, which was the last thing he wanted to, especially when Louis threw a box of condoms at him before taking them back and cackling. "Actually, Li, I guess you won't need these for a while. Not that you apparently know what they're for, anyway."

"Fuck you. Do you lot have to be so extra?" He didn't feel even remotely bad for his churlishness or for snapping, and any guilt he might have eventually felt vanished as they forced him out with them anyway, and on some level he knew he should be grateful, should enjoy a night out with them like they hadn't done for fucking ages, but his head wasn't there yet.

In his head, he was still home, still in London, still kissing Niall goodbye before he was forced out the door by Paddy and into a car, into the cold air of the early morning to head to the airport. He was still tucking Chloe into bed for the last time, promising he'd call her as soon as possible. He was still there, his last night at home, revelling over the decision they'd made the day before, promising that there would be rings and celebrations and champagne, as soon as he was home and Niall could drink again.

His head wasn't there yet and it hurt, not being there, so his lack of enthusiasm should have been understandable, but he was still forced to be there, a drink in hand, listening to them make stupid jokes, when he really wanted to be able to call them and fall asleep listening to Chloe complain about her day and whatever the latest thing she and Toby had fallen out over was.

Instead, he was sat at a table in the VIP section of some club he knew Harry had picked out, it was far more Harry's thing than Zayn's, listening to them good-naturedly take the piss out of him — they probably thought it was good-naturedly, anyway — and watching Louis and Harry pretend that they weren't going to end up shagging in the toilets in twenty minutes time. He'd never understand why they: a) ended up sneaking off to the toilets of some dingy club, b) pretended that it wasn't going to happen, or c) went out with other people, only to abandon them an hour in anyway.

A small voice told him that had he ever had the guts or been with the right person on such a night out, he probably would have ended up copying the sloppy, drunken behaviour of his bandmates, but he ignored that voice and told it to shut up before he ended imagining him and Niall actually on a night out that could have ended similarly. He stopped that train of thought before it could germinate into anything else, but truthfully, he was having a hard time even imagining it. Niall was far too much of a proper adult to probably even go for such a suggestion — Liam's shot in the dark involving that tie notwithstanding — and they'd only ever done a proper night out once, and that had ended with him having to keep Niall from getting to the point where he was puking in the gutter.