Where We Belong

Chapter 11

Chapter warning: Dubious Consent.

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He wakes in his own bed the following morning, free space around him, no man clinging to his body like a desperate naked sloth. But he knows he's not alone in bed. After telly and tea, he and Harry went to bed together last night. They shared a brief few chaste little kisses on the lips, then flicked off the lights and went to sleep. It felt all right. No expectations, no awkward silence, just the two of them, going to bed in the same place.

Louis rolls over and, for a moment, he feels like he's back to months ago, any random Saturday morning, and he can't help but smile.

Harry's propped up against some pillows, no shirt on, hair tangled around his shoulders, one side tucked sweetly behind his ear. He's got his laptop open, eyes trained on the screen, teeth chewing at his chapped lip as he concentrates.

Louis opens his mouth to ask whatcha doooin', but then stops himself in fear of sounding suspicious, and instead just murmurs; "morning."

"Oh," Harry blinks, closes the tab and coughs, before he finally looks at Louis, "morning."

And, now he is suspicious. "What the fuck? Why'd you just close the tab like that?"

"Just an e-mail from my editor," Harry says, in the mumbling way that he does when he's lying but caught too off guard to put any actual effort into it.

He goes to close the laptop, but Louis sticks a hand in-between and re-opens it.

"Show me, then."

"Wha'?"

"Open the tab, I just want to see if you're lying."

Harry shoots him an incredulous look, but it's just over-dramatic enough that Louis knows he's onto something.

"Open it," he repeats, "open the tab."

"Louis—"

"What's the fucking problem, if you weren't lying, you'd just open the bloody tab—"

Louis goes to do it himself, but Harry grabs his hand off the touch-pad then. "Wait. Okay, I lied. Sorry."

Yeah. Course he did. "Nothing new in that, is there? So, what's it this time? You've impregnated someone four years ago?"

Harry gives an exasperated sigh, and drops his head to pinch the bridge of his nose.

While he's busy doing so, Louis jumps to the touch-pad and opens the tab.

It is an e-mail. It just isn't from his editor.

Gathered the best ones I could find. A few might be a bit blurry since I took a picture of a picture in my photo-albums, but most are all right. - Marie

"It's just a folder of pictures of Charlie," Harry says.

Louis' heart slowly glides back down from where it shot up his throat. "Well," he says, leaning back into his own pillows, "why'd you lie?"

Harry shrugs a shoulder. "We were doing so well since last night, didn't wanna spoil it by bringing Charlie up."

Right. Cause Harry can't talk about his own kid around the man he spends his life with.

Louis thought he'd been good at hiding how he felt about her. He thought he'd been doing, well, relatively okay, apart from minor mishaps (running out and taking the train home without warning five minutes into his first meeting with her, for one). He thought he'd, at the very least, been able to not make Harry feel obligated to hide stuff just to keep the peace.