Seven | Niall Horan

12 | Sette

I hadn't slept. No more than thirty minutes the whole night.

I had left Nine Lives straight after I heard Carter on the phone last night. I was planning on going straight to see Harry, I had to tell him what I heard. But when I got home, Jenny told me that mum was already sitting in the lounge waiting for me.

I promised.

We made snacks and watched romcoms until 11pm, when I put mum to bed, but I don't think I paid attention to the movies at all. All I could think about was what I had heard. Mum asked me how my day had been and I answered convincingly, telling her about Brooke's tattoo and assuring her that I wouldn't be getting another one for a while.

I had always been a paranoid person. Ever since my dad was killed, I had always looked over my shoulder. I tried to tell myself as I laid awake, staring at the ceiling, that I was just being paranoid about this as well. That there was no way that someone who I had known for five years could be lying to me. That our friendship was all a lie.

It was running through my mind all  night and every time I had started to dose off, I'd have a weird dream that would jolt me awake again. I got up a few times to make myself some tea in an attempt to calm me down. All it did was make me need to pee.

By 4AM, I gave up on sleep and headed into my little office space next to my bedroom. I opened my laptop, not really knowing what I was going to do. I looked up Carter Dayley first and nothing came up. I wasn't very surprised. I then looked up Nine Lives and the website and social media accounts for the tattoo parlour came up. I clicked on the link and was met with an all black website with a neon red heading.

...Carter has been an artist since he was a kid, studying art design in high school and college in the US. After he got his first tattoo at 18, he fell in love with tattoos and quickly decided that he wanted to open up his own tattoo parlour one day...

I already knew all of this.

...Nine Lives was opened in 2015 by Carter and Riley Smith. Riley stayed with the Nine Lives family for 3 years before leaving to move to Paris...

I didn't know that. I had been going to Nine Lives for 5 years and I had never heard about Riley Smith once. Carter had never mentioned that name before and from what I was told, he opened the shop by himself. I had actually never even been on the website before, only finding the shop just by simply walking past it. After getting my first few there, I only followed them on Instagram and never looked into them further.

I knew all the other workers though, so I was surprised to never have heard about Riley. There was Brett, another tattoo artists from the States (Boston specifically), Saxon, the resident piercing specialist from Scotland, and Casey on the front desk, who also dabbled in tattooing when she felt like it.

It was 5:30AM when I finally started to feel drowsy, but with the new information swirling around in my mind, I couldn't fall asleep. Instead, I got up and had a scolding hot shower in an attempt to soothe myself. I just found it so odd that Carter told me he set up the shop by himself all those years ago but the info on the website said he had a partner. That mixed with the phone conversation I overheard him having yesterday didn't sit right with me. Just thinking about what it could all mean made me feel a bit queasy. The anxiety threatening to surface before the sun had even risen.