Broken (a Niall Horan love story)

Chapter 16

***Navaeh's P.O.V.***

It'd been months since the whole ordeal with Niall cutting himself to try and prove his point to me. Things had been moving slow; school ended and summer flew by until it was time to go back. My eighteenth birthday would be coming up in a few more months, and when Niall found out he was beyond excited. Right now, it was that time of the year when things in London started to slow down due to the returning presence of cold weather. Autumn seemed to be making an early appearance; the weather had started to grow colder even before school started up again.

If you were to count up the months, Niall and I had been friends for almost nine months. It seemed like a lot longer than that. I had been counting the months admittedly because this was so new to me; I had never had a friend that had stuck by me for so long before. To be painfully honest, I was expecting for Niall to leave me as a friend a long time ago. However, he kept sticking with me through all of this time.

I've cut twice since Niall had tried to show me how bad it was, and Niall hadn't found out about the cuts. There were just days that came along and made me feel like complete trash, and then a certain things in my life only made it harder. You would've thought that summer would help, that-considering school was out-there would be less stress and I wouldn't feel too much pressure. However, that wasn't the case; too much time at home was just making things worse.

Niall and I talked very often, extremely often. We'd often meet up at his flat and just hang out. More often than not, we would just talk until there was nothing left to talk about and then we would sit in a comfortable silence. We'd gotten to know a lot about each other, and he knew a lot of the secrets that I had been keeping inside all of these years. I told him about my dad, his death, my step father's arrival into my life, and how my mother was always working. The only things he didn't know were the two secrets that I knew would be too much for anyone to handle.

I was almost done with my drawing of him; I had spent a long time on it because I wanted it to be perfect. Sometimes, I could knock out a picture in a few days or maybe a few weeks, but this one was special and I wanted to give it the attention it deserved. It still baffled me that he had chosen a picture from my wall that wasn't my best work. He even hung it up on his refrigerator like a proud parent of a two year old who'd made a stick figure picture of the family. When I pointed that out to him he only laughed and told me that he put it there so that he would see it every day.

I sat on my bed this particular Saturday in September, and I waited for the familiar three knocks on the door. Niall had said that he was taking me somewhere today, but he wouldn't tell me exactly where. The last time he had surprised me with a hang out, we had ended up on the rooftop of some old building and looking up at the stars in the sky. There was definitely a benefit to having my step father work nights instead of day shifts, because I could stay up late and talk to Niall without getting in trouble. It was especially nice since school started back up, because I would be gone at school, and then I would only have to put up with him for an hour or two before he had to go to work.

When the knocks came, I was rushing down the stars faster than all the times when I had rushed to answer the door for the pizza man. I was practically bouncing up and down with excitement because I couldn't wait to get out of this shit hole of a house. I swung the door open and smiled at the blue eyed boy in front of me who was already offering me a Horan Hug. I gladly accepted, and I heard his greeting, "hello, Crazy Mofo Jr."

I scrunched my nose at the nickname, and pulled away from his comfortable embrace in order to look at him. "I still think that you should be Crazy Mofo Jr.," I told him.

"Are you insinuating that you're crazier than the Niall Horan?" he questioned in mock disbelief.

"Yes, yes I am," I supplied bluntly.