Larry Stylinson - Turning From Praise (AU)

19.-PART 1

Louis stood behind the counter of the local bakery, with his hairnet on, wearing a white coat so that he looked like he’d just walked out of a science lab. The uniform was the main downside to working here; apart from that, he enjoyed the job immensely. When Harry had first suggested that he try for the job working in the little shop, selling buns and cakes and cute little loaves of unprocessed thick-crusted bread to cute old ladies or cooing toddlers who left the shop with sticky hands, Louis hadn’t been so sure. He didn’t think it would do his stomach much good, for starters, although Harry insisted that he loved Louis’ ‘curves’ (“you make me sound like Betty bloody Boop or something,” Louis grumbled) and he could eat as much cake as he liked and still be the sexiest person in the room. For another thing, he couldn’t bake. He’d tried to bake Anne a cake to thank her for letting him stay for so long, and ended up turning the kitchen into the site of a flour-bomb explosion and raw cake mixture inexplicably ended up everywhere, even on the kitchen door-handle and splattered up the window. She’d been very nice about it, and he and Harry had cleaned the kitchen scrupulously, but during tea that night she had gently suggested that perhaps Louis didn’t do any more cooking in the house any more, and he had embarrassedly agreed.

However, Harry had managed to talk him into it, and eventually Louis ended up going for the job interview and managed to land himself a job upon the main counter with ease, selling buns and biscuits with a cheery smile. Harry liked to tease him about his hairnet and would smell him deeply whenever he came home every night, burying his face in his hair with an “Mmm, you smell nice”, savouring the sugary scent of icing and the warm smell of baked bread that wafted from Louis wherever he went and never quite seemed to leave him. But the most important thing was that Louis could work plenty of extra hours to leave Harry without distractions while he studied for his rapidly approaching exams – “babe, I love you, but I can’t focus on maths and science and all that bollocks while I’m staring at you” – and the pay was good, so he was rapidly earning money. They were intending to go and look at some flats a little bit later in the month, when Harry’s mum could go with them to make sure they weren’t being conned and could check for things like damp and wallpaper quality and all the stuff that they would have forgotten to bother about, and when Louis had enough money saved up to safely be able to pay several months’ rent in advance if he’d had to. Harry’s revision seemed to be going well; he was clever, and had a good memory, and was confident that he’d pass most, if not all of his exams without too much bother. Life was simple, and it was nice not to have to hide anything or be ashamed of who he was.

A couple of times, Louis had seen his family around town. He’d seen his mother walking down the road with the twins, who had squealed and tried to run to him, but she’d given him a dark look and hurried them away. Lottie came into the shop one day with her friend to get a gingerbread man, and was surprised but pleased to see him there. Felicite had explained the situation to her in private and she knew about Harry, and she seemed to accept it, although she was rather unkindly amused by the fact that Felicite still harboured her schoolgirl crush on the boy that her brother was dating. Now she would drop by quite regularly to buy things and see him.

Felicite herself had been on several outings with Louis, Harry and their friends, to the cinema or to see a few local bands, and she had come out of her shell quite a lot. She was able to see the funny side of her infatuation with Harry, even managing to tease him a couple times about dangerously inflaming her, and she got on well with Niall and Zayn – Niall because Felicite was at the age where everything is funny and she had a tendency to giggle madly every few minutes, and Niall thought everything was hilarious too, so they would both sit together laughing at nothing very much. Zayn got on well with her because he had several little sisters who were a similar age and he knew how to talk to kids, and also because they both had a tendency to fall silent and sit mooning over things, so they could sit together in mutual silence to their hearts’ content and not feel isolated or left out of anything. Louis loved being able to slot some of the pieces of his new and old lives together, and although he pretended not to care that he hadn’t yet found a place for his mother and father to fit, he secretly harboured a tiny bit of hope that maybe one day there’d be some kind of small resolution between them. He didn’t think Jay would ever fully accept his sexuality or his relationship with Harry, but he did hope that maybe one day she would soften enough to stop scowling whenever she saw him in the street, and that his sisters would stop sadly telling him stories of vicious things she’d said about him at one time or another.