Wherever You Are // A Luke Hemmings fanfiction

Part 6

(Luke POV)

“What I don’t understand is how you survived next to her for near enough twenty four hours without either of you yelling at one another.”

I rolled my eyes at Calum’s words, biting the inside of my mouth so I wouldn’t yell at him, something which would definitely attract the attention of Mikki and Ashton, who were stood by the baggage claim carousels, their brows furrowed in concentration as they looked for our suitcases. The two of them had been stood there for the past ten minutes, waiting for our suitcases to come rolling around. I felt my lips curl into a smile as Mikki clapped her hands with joy at the sight of one of her red suitcases, and Michael hit me square in the chest with the palm of his hand.

“Ow!” I whined, rubbing the sore spot with my own hand and frowning at him. “What was that for?” “Being so obvious,” Michael chuckled, shaking his head in disbelief. “Honestly, Luke. I don’t know how you’ve kept it a secret for so long, you’re the most obvious person when it comes to liking a girl. You’re lucky Mikki thinks you hate her.”

“Or he’s an idiot,” Calum said from my other side. “Luke, maybe if you’d just been a bit nicer to her when me and Mikey became friends with her, you’d be friends with her too. Or you’d at least feel comfortable telling her you like her.” “It actually killed me that you didn’t tell her how much you spent on her birthday presents, or that you were the one that told directed me and Calum in what we should buy her when we went shopping together. It was your chance to show her you cared about her in a different way to the three of us, for fuck’s sake.”

As the only girl of the group, we tended to spoil Mikki on special occasions more anyway, because we loved seeing her reaction, but this year we’d gone all out. Since it was Mikki’s eighteenth birthday, we’d all divided it so she got eighteen presents from the four of us, not including the ones we’d already bought her. Our stopover might have only been about an hour and a half, but in that time we’d taken Mikki to a restaurant in the airport and let her open her presents. Ashton had offered to get her five presents immediately, seeing as he had been her best friend for years, and had left the other three of us to sort out the other thirteen between ourselves.

Despite us not being close friends, or even friends at all really, I’d seen Mikki celebrate quite a few birthdays: going to the same schools and constantly ending up in the same class as her meant that I’d been to quite a few birthday parties, but I’d never seen her cry more at her presents than she had earlier on. As Mikki had recorded snippets of us before and after the first flight, wanting to start a YouTube channel filled with vlogs whilst she came on tour with us, I’d held the camera and recorded the entire reaction.

She’d opened Ashton’s presents first, squealing and terrifying half the people in the restaurant when she’d seen the black Christian Louboutins in the first box she opened. I’d felt my stomach curl with jealousy; I’d desperately wanted to buy her her first pair, every girl waited for the moment a guy bought her a pair, but I hadn’t wanted to make it too obvious how I felt about her. Ashton didn’t realise what a lucky bugger he was.

He’d also bought her: a pair of black Ray Bans, so she’d stop stealing his; a photo frame with a picture of the two of them at the first 5 Seconds of Summer gig; two large, hardcover books of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm; and a Links of London friendship bracelet, red because it was his favourite colour, and he’d grinned widely as he rolled down the sleeve of his hoodie and showed her the matching pink one on his wrist.