Zayn P.O.V
Niall had taken Ciara out to the cinema whilst Louis and Bella went out to be seen by the paparazzi and look like they were dating, leaving Harry, Liam and I on our own for the night. So far we had managed to order an Indian and start watching Fast and Furious. But something was bugging me, it was something about Liam. Since yesterday he had seem so… upset, there was definitely something up and I wanted to get it out in the open. I figured that it was about one of the girls so I thought discussing it with just us guys was a good idea.
“Liam mate!” I half yelled half asked. His head didn’t even move, he just made a weird noise and continued to watch the film but I could feel the weird look that Harry gave me from the side.
I turned to Harry and pointed my head towards Liam and mouthed ‘he looks sad’ however, the amount of brain cells Harry had didn’t accommodate to lip reading so he shouted,
“What are saying?!” very loudly which of course got Liam’s attention.
Liam’s head turned towards me and he sighed loudly as he reached over to pick up the TV remote off the coffee table. He pointed it towards the TV and paused the film.
“What’s up?” He asked casually. I raised my eyebrows and gave him a sympathetic smile.
“You tell me, Payne,” I answered.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds, sighed and then put his plate on the coffee table. After that he put his head in his hands and he started to shake it in his hands.
I could hear him whispering the same phrase again and again, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was over the sound of him lifting the heels of his feet and putting them back on the ground repeatedly.
Harry and I exchanged upset glances, as if by instinct, we both stood up and sat on either side of Liam. His head was still in his hands but he knew we were there.
I rubbed by hand up and down his back in a comforting way. All of a sudden he jerked upright and looked at us both.
“Everything. Everything is wrong!” He yelled at the top of his lungs.
“Calm down, it will be alright. Just tell us what’s going on,” Harry soothed.
Tears welled in Liam’s eyes and a scared look came across his face. Suddenly tears started streaming down his face and he looked like lost child.
No amount of words could describe my pain right there, watching one of my best friends start crying. It felt like someone had reached into my stomach and started mixing it around, or like someone had put my heart in the blender.
“You… you know when Danielle and I broke up?” He chocked in-between sobs.
How could we have forgotten? It was Liam’s ‘wild’ stage, as the press called it. But more like the biggest test of friendship we have all ever had. Liam had never been so heart-broken before so he didn’t know how to deal with it, for some reason he thought that clubbing and slacking off would be the best options, he would stop writing songs, not turn up for band practise (when we had it), ignore managements pleas for him to start acting like he did before.
His partying was normal at first, he started to go once or twice a week which was normal for a celebrity but soon it turned into almost every day. It got so bad that he started getting kicked out of clubs for misbehaving. At one point, he got kicked out for bringing 5 girls into the toilet of a club which started a fight between them.
It got so bad that he started bringing home different girls and doing god knows what with them, in the end he started bringing home the same 3 girls again and again on different occasions. I’m not sure he even knew their names! But the worse thing was, they didn’t know that he was seeing other girls too.
The breaking point came after a few months when we started to record our new album, he just didn’t turn up when we wanted to record and obviously we couldn’t record without out him because he was a member of the band. We tried to hide it from management because we didn’t want to Liam in trouble but eventually they found out.
They sat Liam down and had big formal meeting with him, I remember because all had to sit in. It was the head of management at one end, Niall and I on one side and Harry and Louis on the opposite side. Niall and Harry were either side of Paul, there was an empty seat next to Harry and I and then at the other end of the table sat Liam.
I remember the exact words the head of management said because they were so taunting. The poor boy was so vulnerable and he seemed to only be seen as a source of money and press. He said
‘Now Liam, buddy, we understand you have going through a rough patch at the moment which is ok. But people are starting to notice, it’s starting to rub off on your band mates. They’re starting to get bad press too. You don’t want to hurt them right? You don’t want to go through the pain anymore. But if you sign this… it will all be over’
I remember the loud bang as the wad of paper hit the desk. I remember the look Liam gave us when he read what it said. It said he had to leave the band if he didn’t get his act together and starting acting like the ‘serious’ member.
He didn’t sign obviously, but it was not a period of time I would like to repeat. I couldn’t blame him really, he hadn’t ever had his heart properly broken before so he didn’t know how to deal with it and so he turned to what most people turned to. But that was a long time ago and we had moved on since then.
“Yeah I remember, what about it?” I asked as I wrapped my arm around his shoulder.
He rubbed his hand across his face and started to wipe away his tears but failed when he started shaking and ended up putting his head back into his hands.
“You remember that girl, Megan?” He whispered into his hands. Megan… it rang a bell, yes! She was one of the girls Liam used to bring home. She was of the only 2 that we bothered to acknowledge because she was nice, come to think of it she once made pancakes for us all when we she woke up in the morning.
“She called me yesterday, just after the press conference. I was in a bad mood after this stuff with Louis and Bella fake dating. She told me that she was pregnant, that it could have been my baby. I freaked! I told her that I couldn’t have been my baby and I told her not to speak to me again. I’m too young to be a Dad! And what about Bella? God I’ve never felt this way about a girl before, what is she going to think if I’m having a baby with another girl? She won’t want to be with me and then I will take a turn for the worst like when Danielle and I broke up! I can’t do that again! Not to the band!”
