Fading

Chapter Twenty-Seven

When Louis wakes up the room is dark, and he is completely alone. He has that familiar cotton-and-shit taste in his mouth, and the pounding in his head clarifies that he's hungover. He stares up at the ceiling for a while, listening for sounds in the flat, but there are none. He tries to remember the last time he woke up alone in the middle of the night, and he can't. Instead he remembers coming home from the bar. He remembers slurred words, painful confessions, and the look of horror and pity on Harry's handsome face. Suddenly it doesn't seem so confusing that he's waking up alone.

Panic slowly starts to claw at the back of his throat, but he pushes it down, because he doesn't want to freak out if Harry's just gone for a wee. The bed next to him is cold, there is no lingering body heat. He takes a deep breath, and when he pushes himself up onto his elbow his head spins. He grabs his phone first, and sees that it's half two in the morning.

He realizes they let him sleep straight through, even though it was barely evening when Harry picked him and Niall up from the pub. He wonders what Harry told Liam and Zayn, to explain why he wasn't going to eat dinner. The room is only lit by the moon, coming through his sheer curtains, and casting shadows. Even so, he can clearly note the absence of Harry's jeans, which were laying crumpled on the floor next to the bed when Louis fell asleep.

Louis tries to tell himself maybe Harry just woke up in the evening for dinner, and put them on to go eat with the boys. He must have also grabbed a new shirt from his drawer in Louis' dresser, because Louis is still wearing his shirt. Except when Louis sits up more, and cranes his neck to look over at the hamper in the closet, the jeans aren't hanging over the edge, like they would be any other time Harry took them off to come to bed.

He sits up fully and his head hurts more, but not as much as his chest hurts when he realizes Harry's iPhone isn't plugged in and waiting on the desk, like it would be any other night he slept over. Harry never takes his phone to the loo with him, because he dropped it in the toilet once somehow. That, coupled with the fact that Louis has already been awake longer than the average wee, rules out Harry having slipped to the bathroom.

Louis checks his phone again, but there is no text explaining that Harry had to go back to the dorm, for whatever reason. Louis lets himself fall back against the mattress, and he listens with all his might. He can hear Liam softly snoring in his room down the hall, he can even hear the music Zayn always leaves playing on the lowest volume while he sleeps. He doesn't hear Harry in the kitchen making a cuppa, or in the shower, or watching TV in the living room, though it wouldn't make sense for him to be doing any of those things at two thirty a.m. anyway. The walls of the flat are paper thin, but Louis doesn't hear Harry, and that means he's gone.

Cold washes over him, and suddenly he's fighting back tears. Harry is gone. Harry has left him. He knew this was going to happen, but he never let himself think about what he would do when it actually did. He had thought he'd feel numb at first, he'd figured it would take a while to hit him. He at least assumed he'd have time to wrap his head around it first. He doesn't though, it hits him instantaneously; a crushing weight pinning him to the mattress and making it hard to breathe.

Harry is gone. Louis has fucked it up. There is no other reason Harry wouldn't be in bed with him right now. He would never leave without letting Louis know where he was going. He knows Harry isn't the type of person to just leave and stop talking to him, but that doesn't change the fact that he's gone now. Louis knows that Harry will be infinitely kind about the breakup, because that's just how Harry is. He'll do it gently and maybe slowly, and he'll do his best not to hurt Louis.

Louis knows that if he calls Harry in the morning, and asks where he went, Harry will make up some excuse, and then ask to meet up. When they meet up Harry will give him the talk. The 'it's not you, it's me,' the 'I still want to be friends,' the 'you'll be okay, it just wasn't working out,' talk. Except it isn't Harry, it's Louis who is fucked up, and they won't be friends, and Louis won't be okay.