Somewhere In Between // Niall Horan

Chapter 22: Alone

❝ He often went out alone, and when he came back you were never absolutely certain whether he had had an adventure or not. He might have forgotten it so completely that he said nothing about it… ❞

~~~

April 28, 2013

Paris

    The stress was getting to Niall.  Like, really getting to him.

    The band was well into their Take Me Home tour.  Everyday was the same: wake up, rehearse, do an interview or two, perform, collapse into bed, repeat.  And sometimes, if Niall was lucky, there’d be the occasional moment when he’d be slammed with lingering memories of sarcastic wit and a Harvard sweatshirt like a quarterback being tackled by a linebacker.

    He couldn’t help it, he really couldn’t.  It was especially hard to push it out of his mind now that he and his bandmates found themselves in Paris (see also: the City of Light, the most romantic place on earth, etc.).  Niall thought of Whit whenever he saw a couple holding hands, or a couple arguing, or a couple on a romantic excursion.  His left wrist would tingle and he’d run his fingers over his skin lightly, remembering when there were six black figures that claimed him to another person.

    He wouldn’t lie and say he never tried to find Whitney in the two months since he’d been back from Neverland.  There’d be late nights when he couldn’t sleep that he’d pull out his laptop and be in two minds whether he should try looking her up or not.  One time, after weeks of his fingers hovering over the keyboard but never actually pressing any keys, he caved and typed her name in the Google search bar.

    W-H-I-T-N-E-Y  D-A-V-I-E-S

    He found a wedding photographer, a professor at UC Berkeley, and several LinkedIn profiles, but none of them matched who he was looking for.  Niall did, however, find something particularly interesting.  It wasn’t Whitney, but it was someone she’d mentioned to him in Neverland.  

    Greg Davies.  A Harvard-bred businessman tangled in a company fraud that sent him and several others to serve short prison sentences.  Whitney’s dad.

    It hit too close to Niall; he wasn’t actually expecting to find anything.  When he read the article about Greg’s arrest, he hurriedly shut his laptop and tried to ignore the girl haunting his dreams.  He didn’t search her name on the internet again.

    Niall was trying his damn hardest to stop pitying himself and move on for Whitney’s sake.  If she saw you being this pathetic, he asked himself, what would she say?  “Get your head out of your ass, Niall.  You’re too far from reality again.  Go find that middle ground.  Remember?”  Oh, he remembered.  He had to find that somewhere in between fame and normality.  But it was proving difficult to find when he felt boxed in.

    It scared him because he felt like this before.  Niall remembered what it felt like to be under so much pressure and stress that it was physically draining.  It scared him because last time he felt like this, he went into a coma.