screaming color // n.h. au

part 6

there's a guitar leaning against the wall at the foot of niall's bed. niall has never mentioned it and cole has never asked, but she's sure that niall plays it often. the strap is worn and one of the strings is broken, and an arctic monkeys song lyric is scribbled across the side in niall's messy handwriting.

she wonders about it a little bit, she'll admit, and nearly asks him about it once as she curls up at the foot of his bed with a novel she's reading for a class. but she likes that she doesn't know everything about niall, like that he can always surprise her. she can't help but wonder, though, what he sounds like when he sings.

the first time she hears him playing, it's by accident. she comes back from the gym on a thursday night to find the soft sounds of an acoustic guitar filling the hallway. she knows that it's niall before he even starts singing.

it's a beatles song, "blackbird," and it's one she's heard a thousand times before, but she stops in her tracks to listen to it anyway. she sits down on the dirty carpet outside nialls door, leans her head against the wall, and closes her eyes. niall's voice is so much sweeter than she'd ever imagined (and oh, she'd imagined) and she thinks maybe she could listen to it forever.

"cole?"

cole opens her eyes to see niall's skinny legs, bare below basketball shorts, in front of her. she lets her eyes trail up them to his face, where his eyes are looking at her from underneath a raised brow. she hadn't even realized he'd stopped playing.

"sorry," she says. niall holds out a hand to help her to her feet.

"were you listening to me play?" he asks. he's smiling now, and it makes her feel like blushing, though she's not sure why. she hasn't done anything wrong.

"so what if i was?" she asks. suddenly she can feel dry sweat all over her skin and niall won't stop grinning at her like he knows something she doesn't know.

"why didn't you come in?" niall asks.

"i didn't want to bother you?" cole says, says it like a question and it makes niall laugh, his deep belly laugh that always makes cole's stomach flutter.

"ya never bother me, cole," niall says.

"right," cole says, which is exactly the kind of non-answer she will grow accustomed to giving to niall over the next months and months as they dance around each other in the dining hall and the dorm hallway and poetry class, wondering wondering wondering if this is the way that things are meant to be.

niall will write no less than three songs about cole during these months. it will be many, many more months before cole hears them.

they will always make her cry.