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Louis is responsible. He is. He’s the first person his friends would call if they were in trouble and the one people come to for advice on how to manage their lives. And yet...when he’s had a few whiskeys, all of that goes out the window.
Tequila makes him silly, vodka surly, rum sick, but whiskey fills him with bravado and makes him think that every passing whim he has is as good as any of his usual well thought out decisions. That’s how he ends up standing over a bowl of instant pudding, trying to whisk together the powder mix with the milk and wishing Harry wasn’t stuck at work. He’d be doing this whisking much more efficiently, and that would give Louis time to figure out the best method for getting the pudding into a balloon. As it is, he’s doing both at once and it’s definitely not giving him room to come up with the best plan, and he does have a bet to win.
“Tommooooooo,” Niall yells from the doorway. His cheeks are ruddy and he’s bare chested, and so Louis flings a bit of pudding at him, laughing when it gets caught in his chest hair. Niall is drunk enough that he just cackles, wiping the pudding up with his finger and having a taste. “Hurry up, yeah? You’ve got a bet to lose.”
“I’ve got a bet to win , Nialler.” Louis looks down at the pudding and figures it’s mixed enough. “Did you find the balloons?”
“Zaynieeeeee, we need balloons!” Niall yells it loud enough that it definitely cuts through the chatter in the living room and the music that drifts up from the basement. Louis is caught up in staring at the pudding-- how is he going to get it into a balloon? --when Niall says, “ehh, stop looking at me like that, weirdo.”
Louis looks back up to find Zayn standing beside Niall, holding a bag of red balloons. Louis can’t quite see his face, but he’s pretty sure that the look Zayn gives Niall is one that says, “you’re an idiot who’s about to lose a $500 bet to Louis.” What else would he be thinking, after all?
“Don’t pick on Zayn just because he’s backing a winner,” Louis says, accidentally flinging pudding on Niall again because he’s forgotten to let go of the whisk before gesturing.
“Look, this is a bad idea from both of you, I don’t care who wins or loses, all I know is that one of the balloons you manage to get pudding into is gonna bust in that pool, and I don’t want to be the one who has to clean it up.” Zayn crosses his arms and manages to look stern and disinterested all at once. Louis sticks his tongue out at him.
“Right, okay, might take a bit of trial and error, but I think I have a way to get pudding into the balloon properly.” Louis holds the bowl up and the pudding sloshes around, not cool enough to come together yet. An hour later, he and Niall are sticky, as is the kitchen floor, and they only have two pudding balloons to show for it, neither of them what Louis imagined when the bet was made earlier in the night.
When Harry appears, Louis swears he’s a vision in his dirty kitchen pants and sweaty white t-shirt. “My angel of the kitchen!” Louis cheers from the floor. He reaches up a sticky hand toward Harry and puckers his lips to send him an air kiss. “Help us get pudding into balloons, baby! You had to do that in culinary school, didn’t you?”
Harry just shakes his head, biting back a smile. “Nooo, not really. What’s this all for then?”
Louis grins and explains what he remembers of the bet. Somehow they’d gotten into the topic of using water balloons as fake boobs. Maybe Niall had found one and shoved it under his shirt? Anyway, that made Louis remember watching a movie where girls put pudding filled balloons in their shirts instead, and somehow that turned into a comparison of the possible buoyancy of water balloons vs. pudding balloons. Louis contended both would float. Niall said he was wrong.
Five whiskey Louis had placed a bet on it.
“A FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR BET?” Harry says. The look on his face tells Louis he might have made an error. He’s not five whiskey Louis anymore, after all, and when he stops to consider, he wonders if maybe Harry is right. And yet...
“I know I’m right!” Louis says, some of his whiskey bravado still valiantly hanging on. He looks down at the sticky balloon he’s holding and tries funneling more pudding into it. Harry sighs, reaching down to take the pudding bowl and the accompanying mess from Louis and-- actually, only Louis, as Niall has made an exit at some point.
“Babe. What if it sinks?“ Harry smiles, just barely holding in a laugh. He shakes his head and plops down onto the floor next to Louis, kissing his pudding covered fingers one by one. “I know you’re good with money, but you don’t have $500 to give away in a bet and the money to have Liam’s pool professionally cleaned.”
“If I win the bet, we’re $500 richer, though. Think of all the pools that could clean.” Louis’ just being silly now. With Niall not encouraging him and the whiskey leaving his body and Harry here, he’s not actually interested in testing his theory anymore. He leans forward and kisses Harry, sweat and chocolate and the slightest hint of his end of shift tequila shot on his tongue. No bet could be as interesting as that.
“Fine,” Louis says. “But I’m leaving one of these pudding balloons hidden somewhere. Liam will flip when he finally finds it.”