Play Pretend, Find a Friend? (Larry Stylinson)

1

SOMEDAY, YOU'RE GOING TO SEE THE THINGS THAT I SEE. YOU'RE GOING TO WANT THE AIR THAT I BREATHE. YOU'RE GOING TO WISH YOU NEVER LEFT ME.

i.

It happened, as most stupid, momentous mistakes tended to happen, when Louis was drunk.

Four cups of vodka mixed with Hawaiian punch could not drown out his sorrows. It was his first time attending a party in more than a semester, and he didn't want to be here, but his friends had kidnapped him earlier, forced him into a respectable outfit and dragged him along into the night.

He used to love going out on Friday nights, didn't he? He used to love squeezing into his favorite pair of black skinny jeans and helping Zayn fix his hair and raiding Liam's fridge for jello shots and peach flavored champagne. He used to love dancing to bad music and stepping outside for a smoke and sneaking away early to spend the night in his boyfriend's dorm room, filling the quiet darkness with heady, exploratory sex marked by drunken declarations of love.

He used to love going to parties, but then he found out that Landon was cheating on him, and that he had been cheating on him for months. That was when Louis stopped loving going to parties and stopped loving going out in general and only ever really wanted to cry a little in the shower and curl up naked in his own bed, in his own dark and lonely room, his skin raw from scrubbing it so hard.

He went to his classes and completed his assignments, wrote essays and studied for exams and ate meals in the dining hall and took showers and went to sleep as early as he possibly could and that was it. He stopped going out, stopped hanging out with friends, stopped talking, stopped thinking. Liam and Zayn were worried about him but there wasn't much they could do; their gentle attempts to coax him to be more social had failed, for all intents and purposes, and Louis was still a sad hermit, despite how much he denied it.

Tonight, Zayn and Liam were victorious. They had somehow convinced Louis to go to a party. Louis was mostly persuaded by the promise of alcohol, and the desire to get wasted and let loose for once in his life, and his friends knew that, even though they pretended to be unaware of Louis' ulterior motives. So neither one of them said anything as Louis chugged four cups of vodka mixed with Hawaiian punch, but they did watch over him worriedly, like they were afraid he was going to combust, or break down, or, at any given moment, burst into tears.

Louis wasn't going to burst into tears. Or break down. Or burst into flames. He was going to continue drinking the vodka concoction that tasted like cough medicine, and he was going to flail his limbs to the music, and he was going to let his mind go quiet.

Louis hadn't seen Landon in months. After he found out Landon had slept with at least two girls while he and Louis were dating, Louis confronted him and demanded answers. Landon hadn't had any answers for him, and Louis was so angry and hurt that he just stormed off without saying anything else. That was at the end of fall semester of their junior year, and then Landon went and studied abroad in St. Petersburg for his political science major during the spring semester, and now it was their senior year of college, and they hadn't talked to each other since.

Landon was back on campus now and Louis was avoiding him as best he could at a college that was small enough for them to run into each other on accident multiple times a day. There were only 1,600 students, four hundred in each grade, which meant that everyone was a familiar face and it was virtually impossible to avoid people. Louis and Landon shared a three-hundred level philosophy class. Louis sat in the front row so he didn't have to look at him, and glared at the floor whenever Landon raised his hand to share an idiotically pedantic opinion of his. Whenever Landon tried to stop him after class, saying something like I just want to talk, Louis bolted.