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Louis had never been the kind of person that went to bed early, even before he was in a band. Of course, going to bed early was more difficult when you were used to staying awake until at least three o’clock, sometimes not going to bed at all. So when his phone rang at two in the morning, the only out of the ordinary thing was that he was in his old room at his mum’s home in Doncaster, instead of on the back of a tour bus or in his house in London where he normally spent breaks. Hearing Phoebe and Daisy over the phone politely asking to see their bigger brother whenever he could was too much to bear this time however. Louis was certain it had been Johanna’s idea to let the girls talk; her firstborn might have been able to say no to her but to his sisters? Not so easily.
After that conversation, Louis agreed to stay in Doncaster for the weekend. After all, it wasn’t so bad to have the family around and to have someone that cooked and cleaned for you because they loved you, not because they were paid to do it. Also, it was nice to have some girls around that weren’t screaming at the sight of him – well, okay, Phoebe and Daisy screamed a little when they saw him, but then they hugged him and the screaming was replaced with talking.
His sisters had long since calmed down and gone to bed and now Louis was alone in his childhood bedroom, casually surfing the web, not searching anything in particular, when his ringtone, ‘Look After You’ by The Fray, startled him. He wasn’t surprised by the familiar song, the same since 2010 despite changing his phone countless times, a superstitious luck kind of thing, so much as by a call that late during break. He knew it wasn’t Eleanor because they exchanged goodnight texts an hour or so ago.
When he picked up the phone, the name Payno shined on the display over a funny picture of his bandmate and Louis frowned. He answered the call with a sigh, expecting the worst. “You’re drunk, aren’t you?” Louis got up from his desk and leaned gently back onto bed. If this conversation was going to be as long and exhausting as he expected, he figured he might as well get comfortable.
“‘M n-no… ‘M so--- Listen.”. Liam could deny it all he wanted, but his slurred words and extended pauses left no doubt in Louis’ mind that Liam was trashed. Louis waited while Liam figured out what he was saying, fighting against a slow thinking process. Liam started simply enough, “I wanna talk.”
Louis could imagine him, laying somewhere in his home at London, maybe near the toilet. Louis repressed a laugh – he loved to imagine people in miserable conditions –and instead bit his lip. “Go on. I am listening.” said and put the phone between his ear and the pillow. He wanted to be comfortable if the phone call had to be long. He raised his left arm and let it fall upon his forehead while looking at the ceiling without really seeing the white stucco above him.
Liam, on the other side of the phone, made some strange sounds. Some strange moans that revealed his stomachache, probably, given by the alcohol.
“Are you okay?” Louis asked and a brief nodding sound came. “Where are you?” he kept asking.
“At home now. I think --- I think Zaynie brought me here. ‘M not sure.” Liam said, with hiccups interrupting the sentence from time to time. He was trying to control his nausea, his impulses to vomit. He had something important to say so he closed his eyes and tried to breath, slowly. “’M sorry Lou.”
Louis, in his semi-dark room, raised his eyes to the sky. He had been Liam Payne’s bandmate for too long to not expect this call. They had a brief fight in the morning when Liam asked Louis to come home and try to organize some of his notes into a song, but Louis told Liam he was leaving for Doncaster and, as it always was, one thing led to another and some wrong things had been said until both of them hung up without a proper, polite goodbye. In other words, they hung up on each other. Not that Louis hadn’t forgiven him: he was just waiting for the next morning to call him and make some arrangements to see each other, it was his way to end a fight.
Louis didn’t like to call someone and say I’m sorry, he didn’t like to speak about his feelings but he always showed he was truly sorry in an authentic way; Liam, on the other hand, was more sentimental: he always had to apologize and even though he wasn’t always drunk every time he did it, that wasn’t the first time he was. To be honest Louis was expecting the call earlier that afternoon but Liam had been behaving strangely these days. Not too strangely but he did things a little bit differently from the way he did them before and it was easier to make him angry.
Neither of the boys said anything to him because they knew Liam would talk if he felt like it Louis silently agreed to that policy as they all did.
“Y’heard me?” mumbled Liam, stirring Louis from his own thoughts.
“Yes, I heard you.” Louis said, with a puff at the end of the sentence. He took his left hand’s finger through his own hair because he couldn’t stand still. He felt like his mind was overcrowded.
“And.. d’ya frog-forgive me? Oh sh---“ the sound of Liam throwing up so near to his ear wasn’t something Louis wanted to hear but it seemed like he had no choice. He sighed again, waiting for his friend to come back. The sound of the flush, a minute or two later, confirmed Louis’ theory about the place in which Liam was.
“’M sorry” said Liam with a hoarse voice. “Didn’t want you to hear that.” he coughed a couple of times and since Louis heard some rushing water, he was maybe washing his face and his mouth. “Oh fuck, I drank too much.”
“That’s new!” said Louis sarcastically looking at his bare foot swinging from right to left and from left to right with no apparent reason.
“Don’t be mean.” said Liam sighing in relief. “Tell me you can forgive me.”
From the sound of his voice it looked like he was getting out of his binge and still he hadn’t hung up. Maybe he really wanted to call him, not only because he was drunk. Maybe Louis was the very reason Liam got drunk in the first place and this thought made Louis groan, but that was the wrong thing to do because Liam took it the wrong way.
“Yeah, as I tho....”
Louis interrupted him. “It wasn’t… oh my god, it wasn’t for you Li. Not as an answer, anyway.” he sniffed and stopped his foot. Louis looked again at the ceiling as if he expected to find there the words he could not find in his head. “I forgive you Li. This morning, we were just too nervous, okay? It happens.” maybe he could have added I’m sorry too but it felt like the words were stuck, frozen into his throat. No, he could not say it. He wasn’t able to say it.
Liam seemed more relaxed when he talked again. “It’s not only about this morning.”
The silence fell between them. During the time when Liam wasn’t acting like himself anymore, they had had a lot of fights: they never were exactly compatible but they had found a balance that, during the last days, had shaken many times. They had never argued so much, not even during the beginning when they knew they had to work their relationship out but to Louis it was fine because every time they made up. Every single time.
Liam broke the silence, again. “Are you still there?”
“Yep.” said Louis not knowing what else he was supposed to say. He wasn’t good in those kind of things, not really. Outside the room he heard someone walking, maybe Lottie going to the bathroom or to the kitchen. It wasn’t really important but this reminded him to lower his voice: this was definitely a conversation he wanted no one to hear.
“That’s it, Lou. I am sorry, I’ve been angry and always ready to argue about the smallest thing but…” he suddenly became silent. There was something he wasn’t saying that was driving Louis mad because he hated unfinished things.
“What were you going to say, Payno?” he asked and suddenly bit his nail only to stop a few seconds later. He was still fighting against his nasty habit but when he was nervous it was natural for him to fall into the trap again.
“Oh God. I…. I have a problem.” said the voice from the phone that now appeared to be tired and gave the impression of something too dry. “I have a really fucking huge problem.” Liam said again. The noises that came from his side of the line made Louis think he was walking, even because the acoustic changed quickly and some noises were recognized by Louis as the ones switches did, so… Liam was like, changing room?
“You know you can tell me, right?” Louis was trying to sound caring but even if he was - and he was – there was the curious part of him that was ruling his mind and it didn’t need pointless speeches about how they could trust one another; they were supposed to know it already.
Thanks to his curious and pragmatic attitude, he always seemed to act a little bitchy when he really cared about Liam and his other bandmates. Especially Liam since they started writing together, thing that created a little stronger intimacy between the two of them, stronger than the one they had with the other lads. Okay maybe he was still a little bitchy in the end but not as much as he appeared to be.
“Do you remember Rome?” Liam said and it seemed like he finally stopped somewhere. Maybe on his bed. The only noise Louis heard was the lighter being lit on so the only thing he could guess was that Liam was smoking. Good thing to do if he wanted to recover his head from being drunk; wrong thing to do because his stomach would not forgive him for that, but he already knew it probably.
Rome. Rome had been a big deal, especially for the two of them. Obviously Louis remembered what happened there: they went to a party in some disco in the city and he was drunk even before they arrived but they didn’t drink much in the disco so, when they came back to the hotel Louis – with a special thanks to Zayn’s joint provisions – was already beginning to regain some power over himself and his actions. He just wasn’t sleepy and Liam wasn’t too even if Zayn and Harry were already fallen asleep in the car and Niall could not stop yawning. So Liam had asked him some company before going to sleep and he had accepted it gladly. Liam had put Bailando by Enrique Iglesias (oh goodness, he was obsessed by that song back in those months!) and they both danced a while, still being both a little bit high.
Somehow between their distorted Spanish singing, they had kissed. Not just once. They actually had fell on the bed kissing and biting each other’s lips for five or six minutes and then, as if nothing had happened, Louis had gone to his room to sleep only to remember the kiss the morning after. They had never spoke of that and Louis convinced himself that to be a dream. And maybe it was a dream. Maybe Liam was talking about something else, maybe Louis wasn’t involved at all, right? Why he had to act as he was always the star (truly he was but he didn’t want to be in that moment)?
“What about Rome?” he asked, nonchalantly, praying that Liam wasn’t going to say what Louis feared he was going to say.
“We kissed, Lou.”
And he said it. Loudly. He understood the sentence perfectly, the line didn’t waver, not even for a minute. He tapped his fingers on the bed, trying to chase away his angst. “It wasn’t a big deal. Don’t worry. I guess it.. shouldn’t things like that happen when you’re in a boy band?” his face was forming the most curious expression ever and Louis was sure no human being had ever made with his face what his own face was doing right now. “You know, long time with no girls available, intimacy growing strong between boys… that’s why they write fanfiction about it, isn’t it?”. He asked himself if he was playing it well, at least a little bit but he knew he wasn’t. And why on Earth should Liam stay silent?
“Point is that I cannot stop thinking about it. I think I want to kiss you again.” Liam said the last sentence in a lower voice, like he was embarrassed about it.
Louis was able to understand him because, even if he only heard the sentence through a phone, he was covering his face with the free hand and he was pretty sure his cheeks were red. He felt like his skin was burning. Good thing nobody could see him right in that moment.
“Am I gay, Lou?” Liam asked.
It was funny because Louis asked the same question to Eleanor soon after they came back from Rome. He too could not stop thinking about he and Liam kissing but without saying it to his girlfriend, he just opened himself a little bit. He wasn’t completely sure of being heterosexual, even before they kissed. “Dunno. Maybe you like both things.” he answered politely, copying Eleanor’s answer. “Anyway, why do you care? You are with Sophia, are you not?” he needed Liam to say yes, Because if they started talking about a potential love interest between them, Louis was sure the world would be crumbling down on him.
“Yes I am, But I wanted to call you to say I love you. I just called to say I love you.”
Louis wanted to answer ironically quoting Stevie Wonder’s song, but he couldn’t. Not that time. He could not even answer seriously. The situation was just too much. He opted for both things. “Do you mean it from the bottom of the heart?” said in a sassy tone and raised an eyebrow.
“One: you’re not funny and two: I don’t know, I was as drunk as a skunk until five minutes ago so I really don’t know. I obviously love you, Tommo but I don’t even know how I love you anymore.” he stopped for a while and, on a complete unrelated note, Louis wondered if was still dressed or half-naked or just naked.
“I think we should not discuss it on the phone, you know?” he said, sighing. “We should see each other and talk about it. I might miss you somehow, putting aside this whole thing for a moment.”
Liam laughed and Louis liked the way he laughed. “Alright then, let’s go to sleep. At what time will you come back tomorrow?” Liam asked.
Louis put him on speaker just to see the train time table. He wasn’t thinking of leaving tomorrow before Liam told him, but that wasn’t important. His mum had to deal with it. “There is a train leaving Doncaster at half past one. I’ll be at King’s Cross at ten to three.” he was strangely excited to see him even though he had no idea on what will come after that speech.
“I can make it. I’ll be there in the parking behind the station. I would like to wait for you inside but I don’t want English directioners to organize a sudden meet up. Not this time.” Liam felt always guilty when he thought about avoiding fan but he could not always be available for thousands of autographs and photos. He had to discuss something really personal with his Tommo this time. He caressed his belly happily but agitated. Sometimes he really acted like a big, golden retriever puppy.
“No worries. I will meet you there. Now put something on your chest, go under the blankets and sleep for a while!” Louis said. Giving orders helped him coping with his feeling, it helped him to put them in order.
“How do you know I am bare chested?” Liam frowned but he did not wait an answer. Some of his habits were predictable, he guessed. “Yes mom, anything you say. See you tomorrow, Tommo.” Liam liked to put Tommo and tomorrow in the same sentence if he could.
“See you. Goodnight.” said Louis getting up and going to his laptop to turn it off. “I love you too.” he said, and then he hung up before Liam could say anything else.