You drive me round the bend - l.s

Chapter 6

Louis hadn't seen Harry in over a week, which... good riddance. Harry's voice was too deep and his hands obscenely big and he couldn't even button up his shirts properly and who even wanted to see Harry's stupid, severely unimpressive bare chest, honestly. Maybe Louis would buy him a turtleneck, do the entire world a favour.

He should have known his lucky streak would have to come to an end eventually. He'd just never expected cupcakes would be involved.

"Um," was all his brain managed to come up with when he slipped into Karen's office, a cupcake with pink frosting halfway up to her mouth.

Harry's dimple flattened out the second he spotted Louis.

The feeling was mutual.

Though unaware of it, Harry had ruined Louis' sex life. And Louis knew it had to have been temporary, but that didn't mean his own hand was getting any more fun. This was clearly Harry's fault and nobody else's.

"Sorry, am I interrupting?" Louis asked, pointedly avoiding looking at Harry, even though his eyes were straining with the effort. "I can come back later."

"No, it's fine," Karen said, taking a bite out of the cupcake with a disturbingly orgasmic expression. "Harry brought these. Come have some."

What had Louis ever done to deserve this? Anyone who knew him was also aware Louis had a sweet tooth. Sometimes he'd sneak out of his bed at 3am to ravage the freezer for chocolate chip ice-cream with mint or pillage the cookie jar their cook usually hid from him in increasingly inventive places. Sometimes he'd have to climb up on the counter to get it, but... nobody needed to know that.

"He baked them, too. Didn't you, Harry?"

Harry cleared his throat, shrugging and blushing light pink. His innocent act wasn't fooling Louis one bit.

Fuck, those cupcakes looked good.

"I'm not really hungry," Louis said, right as his stomach decided to betray him and growl so loudly his hand flew to cover it up on instinct.

Harry snorted in a rather unattractive way and Karen just lifted her eyebrow. "Watching your figure, love?"

"Kind of," he lied, even though he'd gone through a period of time when he'd controlled his weight almost obsessively, had been told 'you've got hips like a girl' or 'getting a bit of a tummy there, aren't you, Tommo?'. The boys at the boarding school had loved to pinch his hips. That was, until Louis had tracked down one of their bitter ex-girlfriends and plastered the very unimpressive nudes all over the dorms, deciding that Belgian chocolate was more important than what some immature wankers thought. "I'm not really a cupcake kind of guy."

Harry frowned as though Louis had just personally offended him, which... well, yes. He kind of had. That vague sense of nagging guilt was harder to shake than it should have been.

"Suit yourself," Karen said, either completely oblivious to the rapidly increasing tension in the room, or choosing to ignore it. "More for me."

"I brought you the... stuff," Louis remembered himself, lifted the stack of papers in his hand. He'd never really wanted to spend his best years stuck in an office, sitting behind a desk, but as his mother had once told him, we can't always get what we want. "Sorry it took me a bit longer."

"It's fine. I won't need it until tomorrow anyway. Thank you."

He was turning around on his heel when he heard Harry say, "I'm going to get some tea. Do you want me to bring you some?"

"Could you bring me a cup of coffee?" Karen asked.

"Of course."

Louis barely resisted the urge to roll his eyes as he walked out of Karen's office.