Time B0mb

Chapter 5

"I didn't know I was lonely till I saw your face."

-The Bleachers

Harry's eyes were a striking, honeydew green framed by smudged eyeliner as black as his pupils, which had grown to about three times their original size since landing on Louis. Both of his hands were clasped over his gaping mouth, a collection of rings sparkling from his slender fingers. He looked at Louis with an expression somewhere between excitement and complete terror. Altogether, it was a pretty accurate reenactment of how Louis had been panicking earlier in the evening.

"You're-!" Harry stammered. "You're you!" His shock sounded unnatural through the timbre of his deep voice. Before Louis couldn't even consider collecting himself enough to respond, Harry turned to Niall, who was absentmindedly guzzling beer straight from a pitcher from his seat at the booth. "You didn't tell me he was going to be here!"

"Course I did." Niall responded.

"No, no you did not. I would definitely have remembered that."

"Oh. Whoops." Niall shrugged, turning his attention back to his beer.

Harry slowly turned back to Louis, his eyes somehow impossibly wider and a whisper of a dimples beginning to poke through on both cheeks.

"I'm Harry." He said on an exhale, extending his hand.

"Oh, I'm very, very aware of who you are." Louis responded, trying to convey just how star-struck he was.

He shook his hand, and it was in that moment that Louis finally took in the person that was standing before him. At this proximity, Harry was all jawline and hazelnut curls, a flourish of full-blown, boyish dimples with the tease of inked skin poking out from under his shirt, full pink lips, remarkably skinny jeans, and this aura of charm that tangibly radiated from his glistening skin. His billowy, loose-fitting black shirt was unbuttoned to a precariously low degree, revealing a butterfly splayed across his taut muscles.

But it was Harry's eyes that Louis couldn't look away from. There was something so enrapturing, so gripping in his gaze that Louis found himself locked there, staring back at this smiling man.

"Um, hi! Sorry! Could we get a picture with you?" There was a woman by Harry's side, phone in hand, a hopeful look in her eyes.

Harry and Louis broke their stare, suddenly realizing that they had been standing there wordlessly, hands clasped together under the guise of a handshake for what might have been several minutes. Harry blinked as if surfacing from a daydream and turned to the fan.

"Yes, but only if the picture is artistic in a post-modern sense." He said as the fan whisked him away.

Louis collapsed into his seat, panting as if he had just run a marathon. He'd done it. He'd just survived meeting Harry Styles. Or had he? Was he dead? Is this what purgatory looks like? At least there seemed to be alcohol in purgatory.

Up until that point, he hadn't been aware that there was wait-staff at the club. But since their booth had been graced by Harry's A-list credentials, the group had been receiving regular attention from a waitress. The alcohol consumption had increased ten-fold.

Harry would engage himself whole-heartedly with everyone at the table, demanding snippets of their life stories and reveling in whatever he coaxed them into revealing. According to Harry, Zayn's preference for jelly donuts was "esoterically beautiful," the fact that Liam had minored in sport's medicine at Uni made him a "well-rounded citizen of the world," and the fact that Niall had made his own BLT for lunch was "an achievement worthy of acclaim and renown."

Between these conversations Harry would flit around the club. That was really the only word to describe it: Harry would flit. He would disappear at his own volition, seemingly following whatever direction his thoughts would send him in. Occasionally he would bring one of them along, dragging Niall or Zayn away to "observe an anomaly" or meet someone "utterly life-changing." He even whisked Liam away on a little field trip at one point, which Liam had returned from by himself about ten minutes later.