screaming color // n.h. au

part 13

cole trudges through the rest of february in a daze. her coursework, which used to be the most important thing, is now secondary to niall. she can't get him out of her head, and it doesn't help that he's always beside her, laughing, smiling, telling her things about obscure american novelists and sneaking chocolates into her pockets when she's not looking.

she turns to history: to cleopatra and marc antony, napoleon and josephine, queen victoria and prince albert. tragedies, all of them. cole doesn't want to be a tragedy. she doesn't want to be the lost love of a poem like the ones niall reads from his books when she's half-asleep. cole wants a happy ending.

she realizes this on a tuesday evening as she sits on niall's bed with her feet stretched out in front of her and a book she's barely reading in her lap. niall sits at the other end of the bed, actually reading his book and absentmindedly rubbing cole's socked feet, which sit in his lap.

cole needs to have the book on her knees read by tomorrow afternoon's class, but there are a million other things on her mind, a million combinations of the words she could use to tell niall how she feels, strung together in every order possible, even the ones that don't make sense: i you like love me you kiss want you want you i want you. she wonders, as niall glances up from his page and smiles at her before looking back down, if he's really as oblivious as he seems, or if he can see the wheels inside her head turning, turning turning, trying to make sense of it all.

it should make sense: cole likes niall, and she's pretty sure, every time he reaches up to tuck a stray piece of hair behind her ear and then pulls back at the last second, that he likes her too. except. except except except. there are a million excepts, swirling around cole's brain like lawn furniture caught in a tornado. sometimes, when she's with niall, cole feels as if she's been thrust into oz, a foreign land where the normal laws of physics and hearts don't apply.

cole's mid-way through reading the same sentence for the seventh time when her brother calls, the default ringtone on cole's iphone disrupting the silence in the room. cole looks down at the image of her brother's face on the screen, and then up at niall.

"it's my brother," cole says, her thumb hovering over the answer button. she wonders if she should get up, extract her feet from niall's lap and go out into the hallway so she can talk to her brother in private.

but then niall quirks his mouth into something like a smile and nods and looks back down at his book, and cole knows that he'd think nothing of it if she answered her mobile right now. so she does.

"hi, alf." cole speaks softly, her eyes on niall, who's once again engrossed in his book. she's always admired his concentration, his ability to tune out the world and focus on the words on the page. lately, it seems, cole can only focus on him.

"hi, coley," alfie says.

"how are you?" cole asks. her brother doesn't call her that often, and he doesn't have a mobile phone with which to text her as their dad thinks he's too young, so when he does call, it makes cole's stomach flutter. what if something's wrong? maybe their mum's called, maybe alfie's upset with their dad or with school. worries ping around cole's brain as she waits for her brother to answer.

"i'm good," alfie says.

and then he tells cole something she never thought she'd here: he has a crush on a girl at school. he doesn't use that word–it's a girl word, cole thinks, a word for sleepovers and diaries with locks and bedrooms with posters of orlando bloom on the walls. alfie has a crush and cole knows it, but what he says is that rosie, that's her name, is really smart in class and tells funny jokes, and alfie wants to be her friend.

"i think she likes me back," alfie says, voice quiet so that dad doesn't hear from the other room. "but i'm scared i'm imagining it. but what if it's real and i wait too long, and then she doesn't want to be my friend anymore?"

cole doesn't know what to say. her baby brother is expressing all the thoughts that have been tormenting her for the past month, floating around in her brain, bouncing off its walls like a pinball. it sounds like her brother already knows what to do, but cole, on the other hand, is floundering.

"i'm sure it'll all work out, alf," cole says. she wants to tell herself that it'll all work out, that she and niall will just slide into place like the last remaining pieces in a puzzle, the ones you can't manage to fit in until all the others are linked. except (another except, an except in a stack of excepts piled so high that you can't tell them apart even with a magnifying glass) cole doesn't want to wait for all the other pieces to fall into place so that she can see where she's meant to be. who knows how long it'll take everything else to arrange itself?

"yeah, i know, coley," alfie says. "what about that boy who gave you the poetry book?"

"what about that?" cole asks. niall doesn't look up from his reading. his hand rests on her ankle, his fingers pushing up the bottom of her leggings to rub softly at the skin below the top of her sock. she wonders if he even knows he's doing it.

"i dunno." the verbal version of a shrug. "when are you coming home again, coley?"

"april, maybe?" cole says, thinking already of the reading period she has before exams. but maybe she won't go home, if niall stays here. her eyes wander to him again and she imagines them as a pair of magnets, repelling each other until they find the perfect alignment. is that how magnets work? cole's not sure. all she's sure of is that she thinks maybe she could look at niall forever.

"okay," alfie says, letting out a small but forlorn sigh that makes cole want to hug him. "i miss you, coley."

"miss you too, alf," she says. "call me whenever you want, okay?"

"okay," he says. "bye, coley."

"bye, love."

cole hangs up her mobile, setting it down softly on the bed beside her. niall's fingers are beginning to tickle the skin of her ankle, but cole's afraid to move. what if she scares him off?

she can't help it, though. her foot moves of its own free will, jerking out of niall's grip. he looks up at her, smirking. his fingers wrap around her foot, holding it tightly. she wriggles her toes at him.

"stop moving," he says. he sets down his book next to him, upside-down to mark his page. "i'm trying to read."

cole raises a brow, looking from the displaced book back to niall. "are you? it seems like you're getting ready to tickle me."

"i would never!" niall says. but then he grins and his other hand comes up to tickle the bottom of her foot. cole screeches, kicking her feet out, just missing niall's face. "hey," he cries, attempting to secure her other foot. "you're gonna kick me eye out!"

and that's when cole freezes, because an image flashes into her mind of niall's beautiful blue eyes obscured by a bruise the size of her fist, or maybe the size of her heel. there's nothing she wants more, her gut tells her as it somersaults, than for niall's blue eyes to meet hers tomorrow, and the next day, and all the next days after that one.

so cole relaxes her feet in niall's lap and picks up her book again. the air settles around her and she meets niall's eye over the top of her book and smiles, and niall smiles back, and cole thinks that maybe they are puzzle pieces, or they're perpendicular lines just about to cross, hovering in the moment before something big, something monumentally life-changing and earth-shaking, happens.

but most of all, they're cole and niall, and as niall's hands loosen around her ankles and his fingertips begin drawing barely-there patterns on the soles of her feet, she thinks that's okay. coleandniall might be all she needs.