My Summer Love~ A Niall Horan Love Story

Chapter 5~ Stuck In The Nuthouse

"Welcome To The Nuthouse"- Teenage Bottlerocket

"I'm in the nuthouse and they're not gonna let me out of here."

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Niall’s laugh continued to ring through my ears as I came back to the present. My gaze quickly flashed down to see the charm bracelet that still hung loosely around my wrist. Yes, loosely. Like Niall said, I hadn’t grown all that much since he’d seen me last. I was very tiny, though I didn’t mind much. I kind of liked being as small as I was; it made me more agile, I guess. “What’s that?” Niall asked me, his eyes following mine down to my right arm. I pulled my arm up and put it in front of him for him to examine. His jaw dropped as he realized what it was there on my wrist. “It’s the charm bracelet,” he said breathlessly, trailing off on the end.

“That you got me for my eleventh birthday,” I finished for him, the smile forming on my face. His eyes flickered from the bracelet to my face and he had a look of disbelief plastered on his features.

“And it still fits?” Zayn questioned me like he couldn’t believe that I could still wear the thing I had gotten eight years before then.

“I told you she hasn’t grown much since I’d seen her last,” Niall told Zayn what he had said before. His gaze flashed back over to the bracelet on my right arm. He seemed to study the thing intently as his forehead creased just a little bit between his eyebrows and his eyes narrowed. “You’ve never put any new charms on it?” I shook my head no in reply. “Well, then… we’ll have to fix that, now won’t we?” he questioned and I smiled at him while he grinned back at me. He was just too damn cute. How on earth could a boy like him like a girl like me? It didn’t make much sense to me. He was just so perfect and I was just so… not.

 I heard someone clear their throat from across the room and at first I thought it was Harry, but why would Harry do that? It’s not like he cared about me… right? I shook myself as I remembered what we were supposed to be talking about. “Anyway, about you guys’ job,” I said prompting the four boys that sat around me, seeing as Liam still hadn’t come back into the lounge yet. He was still talking on the phone to their manager, which still made no sense to me at all. Why did they need a manager for crying out loud?

“Oh, right,” Niall said reminding himself of the task at hand like I had done. “Well, a few years back, the five of us went onto this show called the X-Factor,” he began to explain to me and the smile broke out on my face.

“I love that show!” I exclaimed excitedly. It was true; I really did love that show. It was really neat.

“Then how do you not know who we are?!” Harry shouted, standing up from his place on the love seat across the way and throwing his hands up in the air. Geez, he was melodramatic.

“I didn’t start watching until this year,” I defended myself, putting my hands up in surrender. Harry sighed and slinked back into his chair. Man, what was his problem? It wasn’t my fault that I didn’t know who they were; or maybe I did know who they were, and I just didn’t remember. That was definitely a possibility with this potential minor concussion I had supposedly had. “Wait, are you telling me that you guys are singers?” I asked them, suddenly coming to the realization of what they were trying to tell me. All four of them nodded their heads and said their yesses, some a little bit louder than others (*cough, cough* Harry). I looked over at Niall in disbelief. “You never said anything about wanting to be a singer,” I said, gazing into his blue orbs.

“I know, but after you left I couldn’t get a hold of you and you’d said multiple times that you wanted to be a musician, so I figured that would be the easiest way to find you,” Niall explained to me with a shrug of his shoulders. “So I began performing and went on the X-Factor when I was sixteen. Harry, Liam, Louis, and Zayn were all there as well and after we all got kicked off, Simon brought the five of us back as a group.”