The Rusty Old Minivan

Chapter 6

The first thing that met them as they stepped into the trailer was a widely snaggleteeth-smiling Niall standing in the kitchen with a toddler on either arm. He was in his dressiest outfit; a white button-down that had a permanent yellow stain on the chest pocket, which he was conveniently covering with Ernest, and a pair of black jeans that he'd rolled halfway up his calves to hide the fact that they'd been inches too short since he was eleven. He actually looked decent.

"'Ello!" he exclaimed, "Harold, I presume?"

Louis rolled his eyes from behind Harry. "This is Niall," he sighed, "and the two munchkins attached to him are Doris and Ernest."

"Hiiii," Harry said to Niall, a little bit shy and a whole lot charming. "And hello, you two," he added, shaking the hands of both toddler's. Their little one's hardly wrapped all the way around one of his fingers. "And its actually just Harry," Harry said, straightening up to look at Niall again, "not short for anything. Well, I guess it's short for Harry Styles, but, I mean..."

"Hellooooooo," Daisy interrupted, swooping up to Harry's left, fast followed by Phoebe. They were in their nicest dresses; the matching blue ones that they'd snatched from the Lost and Found box at their school. They looked adorable, hair pulled back in French braids and little glittery pins holding their bangs in place. "You must be Harold."

"Oh, we've heard so much about you, Harold," Phoebe added, shaking his hand over-eagerly.

Harry chuckled a little, throwing Louis a teasing over-the-shoulder smile. "S'that so?"

"Yes. Louis won't shut up about you," Phoebe replied.

Daisy slapped her hands to her cheeks, exclaiming in a high-pitched voice, "oh Harry, oh Harry, please just come and fuck..."

"Oi!" Louis jumped in between the two, gripping their shoulders, tightly. "That's enough of that. Haven't you two got some homework you need to do?"

"They finished the lot of it already," Niall replied, "by the way, I think Fred's needs his bottle, but I've sort of got my hands full."

Louis offered Harry an apologetic smile and went to pick his son out of his crib. As he got up again, inching his way over to the kitchen, he noticed Harry watching him from the other end of the room where Daisy and Phoebe were fighting for his attention. His eyes went from Louis', then down to Freddie who was clawing at his collarbones and whimpering softly at his chest, then up to Louis' again, smiling in a way that made Louis have to look away. Much too dangerous.

"You weren't lying when you said he was fit," Niall said, a bit too loudly, sliding up to Louis' side after dumping the toddlers off in the big bed, "he's all dimples on dick, inny?"

Louis barked a screechy laugh. "What the hell does that even mean?"

"Dunno," Niall's eyes rolled over toward Harry, who was still trapped with the girls, then back on Louis again. "Those jeans could not have been tighter though, could they? Old John Thomas looks about two coughs from burstin' out full-frontal, eh?"

Louis shoved him. "Oh my god, you absolute pervert, shut up." But no. No, those jeans could not have been tighter.

They managed to make things relatively comfortable for Harry over the next hour – well, maybe not his jeans, but he and old John Thomas seemed to be coping. Louis fed Freddie while Daisy and Phoebe gave Harry a 'tour' of the trailer. Then they described their diabolical plan for revenge on a snooty cow in their class to him in horrifying detail and he only looked sort of disturbed at the amount of morbid creativity two ten-year-old could possess.

It wasn't until he pulled out his laptop and let them take it up to their bed, that Harry was let out of their hold.

"You didn't have to do that," Louis told him as he came to sit down in the big bed, "they're stealing all your internet access."