screaming color // n.h. au

part 5

things have been strange since halloween, though cole's vowed to pretend that everything is fine. things are fine when they're studying in her room or his room and niall absentmindedly plays with a piece of her hair, and things are fine when they're eating dinner with a group of people and he doesn't look at anyone besides her.

april doesn't think so. april doesn't think so so strongly that she will not stop talking about it. over the course of the three weeks following halloween, cole begins to wonder whether she should've chosen someone else to be her best friend–although if she's completely honest, april chose her. sat down next to her in their very first day of biology lecture freshmen year and asked to borrow a pen.

"purple, if you have it," april said. "i really like purple."

cole happened to have purple, and from then on she had a best friend, a five-foot-eleven-inches tall best friend with long red hair and a million freckles and the kind of voice that commands a room.

"niall likes you," april says. it's raining outside and they're holed up in april's room, where the walls are covered in photos torn of obscure british indie musicians who have indecipherable tattoos marking up their torsos.

"yeah, we're friends," cole says, playing dumb. this isn't the first time april has brought this up, so cole is getting really good at playing dumb. it involves a lot of avoiding eye contact.

"that's not what i mean, and you know it," april says.

cole does know, unfortunately. so she tiptoes around niall, pretending that she's not tiptoeing, and she waits for something to happen. for him to lean in when they're watching a movie together in his room, or for him to send her a text that's worded just a little bit differently from his usual ones, because the subtext is, "i want to kiss you."

but none of that happens. niall's behaving exactly as he's always behaved. that is, until one windy wednesday evening. they've just walked back to the dorm from the dining hall, their heads down and hoods up, a useless defense against the harsh wind. niall unlocks the door to his room and follows her in. cole rubs at her cold nose and shrugs off her jacket.

"you know you're my best friend, right?"

he says it so suddenly that she freezes, one arm still inside her coat. did she hear him right? she turns, pulling her coat off the rest of the way, and looks at him. he's watching her, a look she can't decipher on his face.

"zayn's your best friend," she manages to say. her heart is racing. her fingers were frozen from the cold air outside but now they're pulsing as the blood rushes back into them.

because there's a difference between being just friends and being best friends, especially when the best friend in question is a boy. cole's been fed a lot of nora ephron relationship "wisdom" in her lifetime, and "you can't be just friends with a guy" is one of her least favorites. she's never quite bought into it, but now she's not so sure.

"well, sure," niall says, shrugging. "but you can have more than one best friend, right?"

it's a rhetorical question. cole can tell because as soon as niall finishes saying it, he jumps onto the bed and toes off his shoes. they land on the floor with a thump, and then another. an auditory punctuation mark. conversation finished.

but cole answers him anyway.

"of course," she says.

of course. she and niall are just friends. just best friends.