Archive of Our Own ^beta

Sometimes, in the small rural community of Redwood, the rows of corn swayed gently in one direction. Miles ahead, all one could see was dense green and yellow dancing to the wind, to the rhythm of the soft acoustic melody strummed by nature. Every Saturday morning, I got on my bike and cycled for a minute to Niall’s house next door (but all the houses are very far apart). Niall would always be waiting just outside his doorstep, dressed in his loose basketball shorts and plastic sandals.

Sometimes, I arrived with the wind. Just as I gripped the breaks on my bike to gradually come to a halt, the wind seemed to land right beside me and then disperse into the sky. Sometimes, that gust of wind blew Niall’s shaggy blond hair into his face and Niall would raise his right hand to brush it away, crinkling his nose as some of the strands tickled his cheek. In his left hand would be lunchboxes for us courtesy of his mum – she was a kind woman who always prepared food for us whenever we went out on adventures on Saturday.

“Good morning!” Niall greeted as he jogged through his front yard towards the gate to his house. The ground was dry and sandy beneath his sandal-clad feet. He was the smaller of the two of us and easily climbed onto the back of the bike, balancing on the pedals in the back wheel. Niall never sat down on the backseat unless he was really tired (sometimes on the way back from the river or a long day watching cars by the freeway). He didn’t have a bike of his own – said his dad didn’t think he needed one because I had one and we went everywhere together. So every day after school, he stood on the back pedals of my bike and we rode through the endless fields of corn that made up most of the land in Redwood.

At times we would stay near the school messing around on the football field after classes ended for so long that half way through our trip home, the sun would have set and we would ride through the dark. Redwood was really dark at night because there weren’t many lampposts at all. The only way I could see in the dark when cycling was through the dim light from the distant homes of our neighbors that reflected off the yellow and green of the corn, which gave the ground before me a warm but ghostly color. At night the winds were stronger so the corn swayed more dramatically and sometimes it looked like the ground was dancing, too.

“Morning!” I replied without getting off my bike. I motioned silently for Niall to climb on.

“Mum didn’t let me out of the house last night,” he groaned. Using my shoulders as support, he put his left foot on one of the bike pedals before lifting his right leg over to the other side and stepping off the ground.  “Said I needed to do my homework first – but it was Friday night!”

“Aw man, but we can try the new video game tomorrow night instead, yeah?” I suggested. Niall was supposed to come over last night to try out the new video game my parents bought me for my birthday last week. We designated Friday night for that, but Niall wasn’t able to make it last minute and I ended up doing nothing all night.

“Sounds good,” he said in a cheery tone.

The rest of the ride was silent as we made our way to the river - that and a particular patch of grass by the large freeway were the places we hung out at. Niall and I and decided that it was river weekend.

It hadn’t rained in a while, so when we arrived at the river, the stream we normally played at was nearly completely dry and all that was left was pebbles and rocks clumped together at odd places. Disappointed, Niall and I turned back and decided to go to our spot by the freeway. There was only one freeway that connected the small town of Redwood to the outside world. After following the winding roads that run through the acres of farmland, the path would start to get wider until you could finally see the freeway. The freeway had four lanes – two in each direction – and Niall and I often sat around the length of a football field away from the road to observe the cars as they passed by.

And pass by they did – none of the cars ever stopped, at least not while we were watching. There were cars in every size and color, new, old, clean, dirty, falling apart. I think there were definitely more kinds of cars than there were people in Redwood. At the age of ten, we were still quite a bit away from being legal to drive, but we dreamed relentlessly about owning a car like the ones on the freeway one day and driving away from Redwood, to the city.

A lot of young people in Redwood dreamed of moving to the city one day. To them, the city was a fantastical place wedged somewhere between human imagination and reality. It was a combination of the images they saw on TV and films, and the stories that older folks told them. Once in a while a classmate would return from vacation to visit a distant aunt living in the city and recount their experience with the busy subway and purchasing fast food. I think at some point, I fell in love with the image of the city inside my head – the one filled with childlike fascination and curiosity at a world where anything was possible, where places were actually within walking distance and one could pop downstairs to a convenience store for snacks.

Niall and I had plans to move to the city together when we were old enough – once we graduated high school. We thought we were going to get a car and drive there together. But we were young and foolish; people didn’t normally drive all the way to the city. From Redwood, one travelled to the nearest train station in the adjacent town of Goldsville, which was an hour away by car, and then then boarded the train.

We never drove to the city.

I was older than Niall by two weeks and had always been taller than him. Growing up, I treated him much like the younger brother I never had – that I had always wanted, because having two older sisters was really not the same. I was the one with the bike, and he always depended on me to take him places; otherwise he would be stuck at home. We always went wherever he wanted to go, because he was the innocent baby brother doted and loved by everyone he met, and he always got his way. If you took one look at Niall, you would know why. He had the roundest blue eyes and a naturally pale complexion that had his cheeks constantly flushed pink for no reason. He looked like he hadn’t aged a day since he was ten, and now at thirteen, it was particularly jarring when he reached into his opened backpack and took out two cans of beer.

“Where did you get those?” I asked, my voice sounding a little higher than usual. We were sat at our usual spot by the freeway when Niall suddenly opened his backpack and reached inside, rummaging for something. I had thought that maybe he was just going to take out a water bottle.

“The fridge. They’re my dad’s,” he replied with a shrug. He pulled the tab of one of the cans; the resulting sound from the action surprised me as it sounded like a can of soda being opened – but I knew for fact that it was not. Heineken, I read from the smooth shiny green aluminum surface of the can.

Niall glanced over at me as he sipped on his beer casually – it clearly wasn’t his first time – and noticed that I hadn’t made a move to touch the second can of beer that had obviously been brought for me. Picking up the can with his spare hand, he pushed the beverage toward me, his head tilting softly to the side as if in question. It’s yours, don’t you want it?

I shook my head.

“I only have one kidney, remember? Drinking could kill me.”

Then, he lowered the spare can of beer until it dropped lightly onto the grass.

“It could do that? Beer, I mean. Why does missing a kidney affect it?”

I signed. “You didn’t listen in biology, did you? We use our kidneys to digest alcohol, sort of.”

Niall shrugged and returned his gaze to the freeway straight ahead.

“Wouldn’t have guessed,” he said quietly. “Sucks though, that you can’t drink.”

“Not really,” I replied quickly. “We’re underage. And I don’t think I would choose to drink even if I didn’t have kidney problems.”

And you can’t drink and drive, I added, but never actually said out loud. Or else you’ll crash and burn.

Niall let out a quiet chuckle and took another sip out of his can – the sound was pure, almost like a small child giggling at something funny in a cartoon, and he was small for his age.

“Come on, Liam,” he began as he gave me a friendly pat on the back. “What are rules if they aren’t broken?”

He sounded wise beyond his age, then, and there was a strange glint in his eyes – mischievous yet knowing. There was a small half smile on his lips; I didn’t know before then that it was possible to look like an angel and a devil at once. But with that smile that bordered on a condescending smirk and his baby face that otherwise reeked of nothing but pseudo innocence, the small boy beside me with his father’s beer in his hand was the true representation of what would happen if the sky ever fell and heaven merged with hell.

I suddenly came to the realization in that moment that something had changed – or perhaps all that I had come to know had never been real and this was the truth. The fact was that Niall and I were wholly different and even though I had always followed him around and pretended to like the things he did, there came a day where I had to draw a line and I knew it was nearing.

I shook my head and picked up the spare can of beer, sitting it upright on the grass beside Niall before standing up and brushing the dirt off my shorts.

“I just remembered I gotta go,” I muttered before making my way towards my bike parked a few strides away. I wasn’t in the mood to wait for Niall or ask if he was ready to go yet. He had no way of going home besides walking because we had come to the freeway together. It wasn’t too far of a walk back to his house – maybe around half an hour, but it would still be inconvenient.

“Wait!” Niall got up quickly. “Aw, what’s gotten to you?” he yelled after me as I got on my bike and began pedaling away. He could walk home by himself for all I cared.

I didn’t know why I was suddenly so mad. That day was the day I first felt like I was beginning to lose the younger brother I thought I had in Niall, but later I realized how ridiculous that was because Niall didn’t need an older brother in me. He already had a paternal older brother.

My mum sometimes still asked me how Niall had been and whether or not he was coming over for dinner.

Liam, you really ought to go out more, like Niall. He seems to go out a lot.

If only she knew half the stuff he got up to these days, she would stop pestering me about him. We didn’t really talk anymore. We’d grown apart in the last two years and I didn’t feel like I knew him anymore. I stopped coming to and from school with Niall on my bike. His dad bought a new truck a while ago and started driving Niall to school every day. Sometimes Niall even drove the truck himself, and the girls at school go absolutely crazy for him. Something about a guy driving a truck was hot, they said, but I sure didn’t see them say the same thing about the guy who drove the truck of supplies into Redwood every day.

Growing apart from Niall made me realize just how close we had been – hanging out almost every day and depending on each other. But as much as that was the case, it became obvious to me that I depended on Niall much more than he depended on me. We talked more and more infrequently until we didn’t talk at all, but while it seemed like Niall just skipped away from our years of friendship unscathed, like we were never friends to begin with, I was left alone with only my school work and my mum’s constant nagging.

Without Niall, I – well, sure, I had friends, but I didn’t have friends, get what I mean? He and I were together every day. I never thought there was a need for another friend like Niall because Niall was irreplaceable – but I guess I wasn’t. Quite easily, Niall began hanging out with a different crowd, and if he had been popular before despite spending most of his time with me, he was definitely the center of the entire universe now. Everyone knew who Niall was in Redwood, to varying degrees, and held varied judgments of him. He was a social butterfly – sure – I think most people could conclude that the moment they met him, but I think what most people were split on was whether or not those rumors about him were true.

Adults would tell you that there was no way the rumors were true. Niall? The baby angel they all watched grow into a handsome young man who, at the age of fifteen, still retained certain childlike facial features that charmed both young and old alike while his peers were breaking out in pimples and going through awkward growth spurts? Absolutely no way. Yet, what would they know? And this was where the story usually got confusing because while most adults in Redwood seemed to think highly of Niall, the teenagers, the ones who should know better, had almost identical opinions of him.

That was the thing about Niall – and it was both a blessing and a curse, but mostly a blessing for now. He might not be the same boy I knew as a child anymore, but one thing that hadn’t changed, and would probably never change, was the way he could effortlessly exude an overwhelming charm that could persuade anyone he was innocent. The fact was that most people in school, and in fact, in the entire town in Redwood – knew in some way or another the kinds of things Niall got up to in his spare time. Everyone knew he was bedding a different girl almost every week – or maybe more than once a week – and maybe he’d almost run out of girls in the town he could sleep with legally. Hell, he’d probably been sleeping with older girls for a while now and most people probably knew who the girls were, but nobody was saying anything. Everyone knew Niall often hung out with some of his older brother’s friends and they bought him drinks and probably gave him cigarettes and other drugs. Everyone knew Niall was at the party thrown by one of his brother’s friends last weekend and everyone there was older than eighteen, and there were rumors that he was in bed with five girls at one point, as well as grinding up to some guy at some other point. He was drunk – the rumors said – so he didn’t realize he was dancing with guys.

I’d take some of the rumors with a grain of salt because sometimes they went really far, but the point was, when everyone heard about these things, they’d immediately judge Niall and finally come to the conclusion that he was a terrible kid that needed to be disciplined urgently. Yet, on Monday, Niall would arrive at school on his father’s truck, clean, fresh, and handsome, with an innocent and blinding smile on his face, and all the negative things anyone ever thought about Niall were immediately out the window. You wouldn’t be able to bring yourself to believe it – that the beautiful boy before you, only fifteen years old, with his baby face and cheeks flushed a natural pale pink, could so much as utter a single curse word. Never mind having sex, smoking, drinking, and doing drugs – all the kinds of things teenagers got up to. That was the thing with Niall – he could be the center of as many teenage scandals as possible – but as long as nobody actually saw him do it and he came to school the week after looking like the perfect angel everyone thought he was, then people gladly overlooked the rumors.

I knew I regretted making the decision to come to the party the moment I heard the pounding music from a distance I shouldn’t be able to hear pounding music from. This knowledge was reinforced when I stepped foot into the house where the party was occurring, because immediately the swarm of bodies jumping to the beat and smells pervading my senses overwhelmed me and I wanted to turn and bolt right out the direction I came from. I was about to do exactly that when a hand gripped my wrist, and I was forced to abandon my impromptu escape plan to respond politely to whoever that was holding me back.

It turned out it was the guy who got me here in the first place.

“Jack,” I greeted with a wry smile. I kind of hoped it didn’t look too obvious I wasn’t happy to be there, but one proper look at Jack told me that he was probably not in his right mind to notice anyway.

“Hey, Liam! You actually came, good to see ya! Come in!” Jack said – a little louder than usual, but maybe I was just hearing things, because how would I know the difference?

I was dragged into the other side of the living room, past the makeshift dance floor in the middle, to where the bar was. Various bottles of alcohol and some cups were scattered around the area. While I was distracted counting the number of bottles on the bar, Jack must have slipped off somewhere because when I looked around me he was nowhere to be found. Shrugging, I went and sat by the bar, pouring myself a cup of decoy alcohol so I didn’t look too out of place. I wasn’t going to drink it, but people were going to ask if I just sat in front of the bottles and did nothing.

I wondered how long I had to stay at the party until it was appropriate for me to leave. I wondered if it mattered.

Jack was an acquaintance of mine from my advanced mathematics class who had helped me out various times when I had problems with the homework. He was a smart guy; rich and loved to party, and was the host of tonight. He had invited me earlier in the week, and I regret agreeing now, but at the time I thought I owed him something for the other times he had helped me, so I said yes. Never the kind of guy to back out of my word, I ended up where I was now, sitting on a bar stool in a large house staring blankly at the crowd on the dance floor.

That was when I spotted him – Niall, right in the middle of all the activity, but I expected nothing less from him. I’d actually never seen him in action at a party like this since I didn’t go to parties, but it was just as I thought. Girls and boys alike, all trying to get close to him, talk to him, dance with him. Everybody loved him, as usual. And he was charming as ever, trying to listen to everyone, dance with everyone, smile at everyone… it was hard to fault him, but I knew he loved the attention. Sometimes, I wondered how he did it – all Niall had to do was be, and everyone wanted to talk to him, wanted him to like them, wanted to be like him, wanted to be him. Sometimes, I wondered why I couldn’t do the same. I wondered why I couldn’t just walk out onto the dance floor and talk to everyone, dance with everyone, and then have everyone automatically love me.

 I also wondered if things would be different if I had stood up and walked onto the dance floor in the first place. The thought made a sickening feeling bubble up in my stomach and I stared down at the cup in my hand for a fraction of a second – untouched, half empty. I couldn’t fathom why, but I felt an overwhelming sense of self-loathing, the kind you’d try to drink away, and it all suddenly seemed very fitting. Without any further thought, I gripped the cup in my hand and raised it to my lips. I drank everything in the cup in three large gulps. The taste was bitter and it stung a little, but the after taste was oddly pleasant, and I wondered if I could do it again.

When I woke up I was in my room lying on my bed. There was a disgusting taste in my mouth and I almost gagged when I swallowed. The light green ceiling towered over me much more ominously than usual, and when I tried to lift my head to glance at the clock on the nightstand, I thought the ceiling was going to crash on me. I let out a slow groan, head pounding as I tried to figure out why everything was hurting and what I did last night to end up in bed not wearing my pajamas.

Closing my eyes to again in attempt to run through what happened the night before, I took a deep breathe to relax myself – only to break out in a series of violent coughs.

Cigarette smoke. How had I not noticed this before? It was painful, but I finally turned my head enough to notice that there was someone sitting beside me on the bed, near the opened window of my room. In between his fingers was a cigarette – smoke drifting from the tip like wisps of clouds in the sky on a windy day. It was a boy, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. I could see the light accents on his stomach – skinny, pale. I had a bad feeling about this.

I couldn’t see his face from my angle but I heard him turn away from the window to face me. I could weakly smell stale cologne – obvious now due to his movement – and I didn’t even need to make the effort to look up. I guess at that point I already subconsciously knew who it was beside me, but I just didn’t want to acknowledge it, didn’t want it to be true.

Then he spoke, and it all came crashing down on me. I panicked and shot up from the bed. Just as I gained enough composure, steadying myself with a hand on the wall, sitting upright, I froze. My head was still pounding and I wasn’t sure if my vision was blurred or just going all weird on me. Beside me was Niall, his blond hair a little tousled but still falling around his face perfectly. His pale skin looked like it was glowing against the backdrop of the window with the soft morning sunlight filtering in. He looked a bit tired, his blue eyes were half-lidded – but I wasn’t sure if I was seeing right. He took a drag from the cigarette between his fingers, letting the stick hover between his lips briefly before releasing the smoke gradually. The sight was hypnotic, poisonous –he looked so natural doing it, and I found my eyes following the trail of smoke as it went out the window and dispersed into the atmosphere. A small smile played on his lips as he watched me – it was soft, kind even, but I didn’t understand it so I didn’t think about it.

I could take a guess as to what happened. The usual. It was always like this. Niall would do something completely out of line but then he would come back and look like an angel, convincing people simply by existing, that he was innocent. I bet it was the same now, at sixteen; and even with the cancer stick between his lips, he still looked as childlike and pure as ever. It was a highly disconcerting image, and yet oddly fitting – as was most things with Niall ever since that day he brought the cans of beer to the freeway.

I would have been tricked – too, if I hadn’t known better. I was almost sickly glad when I felt anger flare within me, knowing that I would now have enough guts to do as I wished. With eyes hard as stone, I squared my jaw and pointed towards the door. Niall had opened his mouth like he wanted to say something then, reaching his hand out from beneath the sheets to touch my shoulder, but I flinched away, and he stopped.

“Leave,” I said firmly. There was no need to repeat it – the instruction was clear. My stare was void of emotion, cold, and there was only decaying disdain – that simmered for years and had been waiting to surface.

Niall looked shocked for a second, his gaze flickering to my finger pointing towards the door, then back and me, and there was an unreadable look in his eyes, wider than usual.

“W-why?” he squeaked out.

Pathetic, I thought, considering what I knew he’d done.

“Just leave,” I repeated. “I know what you did, and I don’t want to see you here again. Just leave.”

I thought I was letting him down gently – gentler than someone who’d obviously been violated in his sleep. There was no question that it occurred since Niall had removed his shirt, and given his track record it seemed completely obvious.

Niall had stood from the bed then, grabbing his wallet from the nightstand and his shirt at the end of the bed. He walked quickly to the door before pausing by the doorframe. I waited patiently for him to leave, but he turned around and gave me a look that I later found impossible to erase from my memory.

His eyes were a glistening cerulean then – brimming with moisture, and I didn’t know why, but it made me feel uncomfortable, like a child who’d done something wrong being chided by a parent. I felt small. I felt guilty. Niall was looking down at me, disappointment evident in his eyes, filled with tears that didn’t fall. Tears were complicated, but I think unshed tears were harder still to understand. Within every unshed drop was strength that seemingly came out of nowhere, and on top of trying to understand the emotion behind the tears, there was also the power behind withholding them.

Niall walked out that day without uttering another word. Yet, memories of that morning were etched permanently into my heart: the small smile on his face after he released the cigarette smoke between his lips, and the sadness and disappointment in his eyes as he was forced to leave.

I felt a terrible twist in my chest when I heard the sound of my door click shut. It was that feeling you had when you knew you’d done something terrible. Yet I tried to convince myself that I was right – that my version of the story I made up as I woke up was the real version and was what actually happened.

When I glanced over at my nightstand again to look at the time, sitting beside the clock was a glass of water and a packet of painkillers. Not too far away from the cup was a small white slip of paper. It was near the spot where Niall’s wallet had been.

I didn’t know what to feel then – when I reached out to pick up the paper and flipped it around…

… only to be kicked in the stomach by the photo of Niall and me on my bike by the entrance of his house. It was a photo taken by his mother before one of my trips to the freeway on Saturday. We were ten years old then.

I felt like a criminal when I picked up the glass of water and took some of the painkillers.

In the heart of the rainy season, on a cool day in spring, I sat by his window with an opened book in my hand as I stared out into the fields that once again today seemed to stretch on forever. I had woken up in the morning anticipating that today would be a quiet day I could spend doing whatever I wanted indoors – having known that the weather would prevent me from going outside. What I hadn’t anticipated was the knock on the door at exactly five in the evening. I thought maybe it was a postman or some delivery guy who had his orders mixed up – but I almost fell backwards from shock when I realized who was standing in the porch.

“Niall,” I had said in a surprised tone, eyes wide and unsure of what facial expression was appropriate. What kind of face did you make to a person you had constantly misunderstood and failed to listen to all these years – yet who still went out of their way to help you in times of need? What kind of face did you make to a person you have mistreated but yet who still cared for you despite everything – who still kept a photo of the two of you in his wallet after all this time?

“Hi Liam, sorry if this is a bit sudden,” he said sheepishly, his voice soft and his blue eyes glistening with an unidentified emotion. He had run over from his house, it seemed – without an umbrella – and he was drenched in rain water.

I hadn’t spoken to Niall since that incident after the party – avoided him out of guilt, maybe. I didn’t think I could redeem myself after accusing him of stooping so low and learning that I’d been wrong… I hadn’t felt good about myself since and speaking to him would just have made the feeling worse.

“I know you’re still angry at me and that you’ve been avoiding me more than usual but – please listen to me just this once.”

There was a pleading look in his eyes – something desperate, a sense of urgency – and I felt my heart drop. I wasn’t sure why. I didn’t know what he wanted to talk to me about, but this couldn’t be good.

I nodded to urge him to continue. I knew in the back of my mind that maybe I should invite him in now so we could sit down and have a long, proper chat about whatever it was that he wanted to talk about, but it didn’t seem like he expected me to. And within me I didn’t want to feel like I was inviting him in out of self-pity and the need to feel good about myself – being in his presence reminded me too much of the ways I had done him wrong. Maybe these were all just excuses. Maybe I was a coward.

And then I guess this was where everything stopped.

“I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Breathe. I forgot how.

“… Why?” was all I managed to croak out in my state of shock.

“I messed up again, Liam,” he said in a whisper as he stepped closer to me and gently held my hands in his. “I know you don’t like me but I can’t help being who I am… all these years I’ve been nothing but myself and I don’t always do the right thing but things always turn out okay.”

He paused a bit and peered into my eyes as if to gauge my reaction. I remained primarily confused but also mostly blank. I was still a bit shaken from his announcement. Why was he leaving – tomorrow, no less?

“But this time I really messed up,” Niall continued. He tore his blue eyes from mine then, opting to look down at our intertwined hands as he gave mine a squeeze and chewed on his bottom lip, hesitating. “Do you remember Kelly?”

“Kelly? Yeah, she’d always been in love with you ever since we were kids… what about her?”

“Well… listen though, I’ve always been very careful but somehow… a while ago we left a party together and we were really drunk, then we hooked up and I was really damn sure I wore a condom but… she called me this morning and said she was pregnant.”

I felt my heart constrict at the news – I wasn’t sure why, maybe it was because I could sense that there was something wrong with the story, or the fact that Niall was going to leave because of this, or maybe I was annoyed that he had gotten a girl pregnant. I couldn’t be sure but it made me uncomfortable.

“How does she know it’s yours?” I asked, keeping my tone even.

“She already got the test results… I waited until I was certain to tell anyone and I really hoped it was a mistake but it’s not.” Niall looked down then, releasing my hands from his and letting his arms fall slack on his sides. “Please don’t hate me because of this, I know you think I sleep around a lot and maybe I do but I’ve always been careful and I’ve never hurt anybody.”

I was silent then, and he physically deflated. Maybe he was hoping for a positive response from me, something to encourage him, tell him it was okay and that I didn’t hate him. But I stayed silent because I didn’t know what to say and I didn’t know what I was going to do once he left.

“Well, that’s all I’ve got to say. I’m leaving tomorrow, to the city because Kelly’s relatives live there and they could help look after Kelly while she’s pregnant and also once the baby is born. We’re also supposed to register for marriage tomorrow.”

“You’re getting married?” I blurted out. Getting someone pregnant and having a baby to take care of was all too much already, but to move away from home and get married too… Niall only just turned eighteen not long ago.

“Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “It’s only right.”

“But you’re going to graduate soon – you’re just going to drop out?”

He looked at me then. There was a hint sadness in his eyes that I couldn’t place, but it tore at the pieces of my heart long after the moment passed.

“I have no choice, Liam,” he said in whisper. “Look, I gotta go, but maybe I’ll see you soon, okay? In the city?”

He pulled me in for a hug, and this was the closest we’d been in a long, long time. He was still dripping a little from the rain and his hair was flat. Despite the dampness, he smelled of a mix of cigarette smoke, stale cologne, and his apple shampoo that he’d been using since he was a kid. His blond hair was wet against my cheek and his chin fit snugly on my shoulder. It felt right somehow, to be close to Niall like this. I tightened my arms around his smaller body and wrapped my fingers around his slim waist.

“I just want you to know that, even though you would never speak to me all these years, I had never stopped considering you a friend. Thank you.”

There was a slight tremor in his voice toward the end of his sentence, but he pulled away then and turned to leave.

The sun was nearing the horizon then and the sky was a little more orange than usual. The light cast a shadow on Niall’s retreating figure that made everything register with me all the more clearly as he stuck his hands in his pockets and the rain obscured his silhouette. The sight was heartbreaking and I didn’t’ t know why but in that moment I knew that there was so much left unsaid and we could have been so much more but the circumstances had never allowed it. We had never allowed it.

That was when I found my feet carrying me out into the rain and chasing after Niall’s fading silhouette in the rain, not caring that I was getting drenched too and that it was getting hard to see because the rain was getting in my eyes.

“Niall!” I called out. My voice sounded foreign to me and my hand even more foreign as it reached out and grabbed on to Niall’s arm. He froze and I spun him around to face me. I couldn’t tell if it was the rain or not, but there was something about the way the water droplets rolled down his cheeks. It made him look like he was crying. But maybe it was only the rain.

“Jesus Christ!” I said as I yanked his arm towards me. His body fell into mine with a soft ‘oomph’ and he didn’t hesitate to bury his head into my shoulder like he always did when he hugged someone.

“I’m sorry, Liam, so sorry. I know this is such a short notice and I wish we could have talked about what was wrong between us sooner but we didn’t and I’m sor—”

“Don’t apologize!” I interrupted abruptly before cradling the back of his head with my hand and placing another hand on his waist to pull him closer. Even through the rain, I could smell the apple fragrance of Niall’s shampoo on his hair. “It was my fault, all these years, for judging you and never giving you a chance. So don’t apologize. I already feel like shit enough as it is.”

Niall fell quiet then. And we simply held each other in the rain. I began to wonder how things would have been different and Niall and I hadn’t grown apart all these years and if we had talked things over to sort out our differences.

But it was too late now.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said, burying my face into the side of Niall’s head and whispering the apology into his ear. I could feel him nod into my shoulder as he clutched onto the back of my shirt – soaked now.

It was still quite early in spring and the air was cool as the rain pitter pattered onto the muddy wheat fields of the rural community of Redwood. Niall was trembling a little in my arms from being out in the rain for quite some time. His normally shaggily styled blond hair was wet and flat against his head, a few strands covering his forehead and reaching his eyes. He had pulled away from me now, his blue eyes peering up at me as though in question. Are we all right?

Then, he held my hand in his as he dragged me along the dirty road. His feet were covered in mud now – still dressed in his plastic sandals, something he probably put on quickly before running over to my house to tell me the news.

We ended up back at my house, but he gestured for me to grab my bike which was parked by the entrance. When he hopped on – standing, as he always had – and placed his hands on my shoulders to steady himself, he didn’t even need to tell me where he wanted to go.

Not long after we were right by the freeway. I hadn’t been here in a while, let alone with Niall, but it hadn’t changed one bit. I heard they were planning on building some kind of shopping strip here in the future for cars to drive through, but the plans were only just being laid out so nothing was starting yet.

After Niall jumped off the bike, he grabbed on to my hand and neither of us had let go since. The rain was a little lighter now and the sun was still peeking through the clouds right by the horizon. Water wasn’t getting into my eyes as much anymore and I could see clearer the way the light hit the side of Niall’s face. He looked peaceful, staring off into the freeway like that. There weren’t any cars, but that didn’t matter.

I let go of Niall’s hand and instead wrapped an arm around his shoulder to pull him close beside me. From the corner of my eye I saw that he had turned to look at me, and when I returned the gaze, he smiled – his entire face lit up. It was getting dark, but he was bright.

What would we have been if we hadn’t grown apart all these years?

The thought kept passing by in my head as I strolled through my mind.

We didn’t make any promises to keep in contact or meet up after he moved. He was going to be busy with a new family and life that he had to adjust to.

We shared one last hug at his doorstep before parting ways. Our touch lingered a little longer than usual and perhaps our faces had been closer than necessary when I wished him good luck in everything. But when everything was said and done, he tore his eyes from mine and found something of interest on his feet while I turned away. I saw him inhale suddenly and open his mouth as if to say something, but there was no sound. I felt like I had something that I wanted to tell him too, but I couldn’t place the thought and simply smiled and waved.

I didn’t hear from Niall after that for a long time.

It didn’t take a genius to piece two and two together and realize that Niall had been tricked into the marriage. Kelly had been in love with Niall all these years, but Niall had rejected her time and time again because he wasn’t looking for a relationship. Niall had made sure that he had worn a condom but clearly it wasn’t rocket science for Kelly to break it. It had been a little bit of a risk, whether or not she would actually get pregnant from one hook-up, but she had nothing to lose in the plan (given that it would still have been sex with the man she thought she was in love with).

The rumors were all around town for a couple of months after Niall left with Kelly. Of course, a lot of people were angry that a nice young lad’s life had been ruined from a trick like this but Kelly had still been pregnant and there was still a child involved. And others were in shock that Niall had slept with Kelly in the first place given that they thought he was an angel who made no mistakes.

Even in a time like this people still stuck up for Niall – but it was no surprise really.

I never saw Niall again since that day – we lost contact and I had been too busy with finishing high school and going to university to try and figure out how to reach him. He was gone.

Later I realized that we might have had something – that I might have had some feelings for him that, to me, came out of nowhere – and that we could have had something if he had stayed. But once again, it was too little, too late. 

It was near midnight and I had only just finished preparing the documents for the presentation tomorrow morning at the office. A few high profile partners of the company were going to be there and the presentation had to be perfect. I had unfortunately been assigned to complete the final preparations – the most stressful – by my boss.

I decided to pop down to the convenience store just downstairs to grab a snack and maybe something for breakfast tomorrow. I scanned the aisles wondering which microwavable package I should purchase. Normally I liked a good bowl of chili but I wasn’t really feeling that today and maybe some chicken noodle soup would be better.

Just then, the cashier of the store emerged from the storage room and I almost tripped on air.

No fucking way.

Standing behind the counter was none other than him. And he worked at the convenience store right beneath my apartment.

He didn’t look too different, blond hair a little shorter maybe, and the circles beneath his eyes a little darker than before. He still retained a youthful air around him despite maturing in the years. He still looked like he was only about nineteen - boyish features and all.

Niall

He hadn’t noticed me yet, so I kept my head down and tried to figure out what to do, what to say. What did you say to a person you hadn’t seen in years – who you might have realized you had some feelings for that you never got to confess? What did you say to a person you still thought about sometimes – after all these years?

Reaching for my wallet, I opened it and looked inside – only to realize I had a good idea.

It was snowing a bit outside, the white snowflakes falling slowly and gently into my hair and onto my coat. I crossed my arms tighter as I walked away from the convenience store and into the night. Hopefully Niall would have…

“Liam!”

When I spun around, I was met with the sight of Niall a few feet away from me, panting not from exertion of running a few steps from the convenience store but probably from shock.

He held up a slip of paper then – the photo of us, when we were around ten, outside of house.

“Niall,” I responded. I suddenly felt a bit light. The way the snow fell so slowly made everything feel more dreamlike than usual and I was pretty sure I was breathing in slow motion. Niall had run out of the convenience store in just the sweatshirt he had been wearing, so he starting to shiver a bit, but I closed the distance between us then and wrapped him up in a tight hug. I guess I was even happier to see him than I thought.

He still smelled like fresh apples – the smell of his shampoo. But that stale smell of cigarette smoke was gone and his natural smell, the same one he had when we were ten and sat side by side by the freeway, finally emerged and I forgot how much I loved it.

“How have you been?” he asked me, raising a hand and gently placing it on the back of my head as he nestled his face comfortably between my neck and my shoulder.

“Good, but better now,” I replied. “When do you get off work?”

“In two hours, but don’t you have work tomorrow?”

“Yes, but I live just above this convenience store actually. You should pop by after and we could catch up.”

I could feel his lips curve into a wide smile against my neck.

“Sounds like a plan.”

I felt giddy, excited – I don’t think I’d been this excited since… I don’t even remember.

When we pulled away we stood there in the snow for a while simply smiling stupidly at each other. The snow had a way of falling and landing in Niall’s a-little-shorter-now-but-still-shaggy blond hair that somehow worked for him. I don’t think I’d ever seen someone pull off the snow look quite like him.

His face was getting a little red from the cold and I remembered that he wasn’t wearing enough out in this weather and he was still shivering a bit.

“You should get back inside,” I said.

“Niall!” a voice interrupted. He spun around quickly and yelled out an apology.

“Sorry Liam, I’ll catch you later, yeah?”

“I’ll pick you up when your shift ends, how’s that?”

He smiled a blinding smile at me then, a soft blush dusting his cheeks – and I’m not sure if it was from the cold or if he was happy.

“Yeah!” he replied, giving me a swift nod. Then he made his way back into the store quickly, apologizing along the way to his boss who was glaring at him disapprovingly.

The snow continued to fall as Niall went back inside. And I wondered what happened to Kelly and the child, although I had heard that the two had gotten a divorce and the child was looked after by Kelly’s family. I wondered what Niall had been up to all these years and why he was working at the convenience store downstairs from my apartment. I wondered if this was his night job – then I wondered what he did during the day.

I wondered what he would say if I asked him to meet up with me Friday night for drinks at the bar, even though I wasn’t going to drink – but hey, just for the atmosphere, and to properly catch up. I wondered, too, how he would respond if I asked him out for dinner after we caught up with each other’s lives.

But for now the snow felt cold against my cheek as it landed gently and melted. The city was covered in a thin layer of white in the heart of January.

There was a bounce to my step as I made my way back to my apartment.