No Strings Attached

Chapter Six

It was a busy day and Louis was running late. 

He had been running late the moment he woke up, when his alarm failed to ring at the proper time and he subsequently woke up to a fussy and hungry Rosie. She had been calling to him from her crib in the room next door, but to no avail. In his morning rush to scramble some eggs and toast some bread, he made a mental note to buy her a bed once she was big enough and once money allowed. This way, he wouldn’t have to worry about inadvertently starving his child due to a faulty alarm clock.

When he showed up at the sitter’s house ten minutes later than he planned, Louis briefly considered his mum’s suggestion to enroll Rosie in some form of childcare. But he knew he couldn’t do it, couldn’t leave her in the care of total strangers. Although he didn’t exactly like the idea of using sitters unless absolutely necessary, he had at least built some sort of rapport with them, had looked at them thoroughly and checked their qualifications. Childcare would certainly be easier and more structured than calling on a sitter whenever his work schedule required, but he wanted as much stability in Rosie’s life as he could offer. Unfortunately, stability didn’t quite include tossing her into a group of other snot-nosed toddlers much earlier than necessary.

So as he cursed his alarm, his sitter, and his customary lateness, he rushed over to the restaurant with thirty seconds to spare. Zayn was somewhere around, but Louis didn’t have the chance to even greet his best mate because the lunchtime rush was worse than usual. Customers usually started streaming a quarter before noon, but today was some freak occurrence wherein the wait time already extended past thirty minutes by 11 o’clock. 

Louis groaned, having to fetch one lunch portion after the other from the kitchen, barely capable of keeping up with the demand. His gaze would occasionally catch Zayn’s and they’d offer each other wordless sympathies before moving onto their next orders, their next source of stress.

And to make matters worse, Louis’ afternoon coffee with Harry lingered in the back of his mind like some sort of parasite, eating away at whatever attention he could spare. Although he didn’t bother sharing this information with Zayn, he felt like he was keeping some sort of secret. He couldn’t quite place his finger on why, but it seemed odd, even to himself, to keep something so seemingly innocent but wildly distracting away from his best mate.

Then again, he had reassured Zayn that he wouldn’t be seeing Harry again, and this wasn’t exactly holding up that end of the agreement.

Still, he knew that he would have to slip out unnoticed by the time his shift came to a close. Otherwise, Zayn would catch him and either drag him off to some pub or interrogate him until he could no longer breathe. And so when the clock turned 4, he was prepared and disappeared quickly through the front door, dashing to his car before anyone could see.

He rifled through the receipts and other scraps of paper scattered across his dashboard, searching for the little sticky note where he scrawled the directions to Harry’s clandestine coffee shop. It certainly wasn’t one he had heard of before, but he trusted the other boy’s judgment. After all, he was probably used to prying eyes, and he wouldn’t have considered it some sort of safe place without experience.

Yet in spite of having directions, Louis inevitably lost his way, driving aimlessly through narrow driveways and lanes before finally pulling over somewhere and asking for help. As was his luck, he was only five minutes away from the coffee shop; he had been driving in circles around it the whole time. 

As he pulled into the parking lot, his heart was beating faster than usual. He hated how nervous he was right now. Harry had said it himself: this wasn’t a date. But the uncertainty of whatever this meeting was had him more worked up than he had any right to be. And by the time he walked – no, barged – through the front door of the quaint little coffee shop, he was fifteen minutes late.