screaming color // n.h. au

part 15

back in her room, cole shoves her mobile into her sock drawer so she won't think about texting niall. she pulls out a book and tries to focus, but she can't keep her eyes on the page. they keep drifting across the room to her dresser. all the drawers are shut neatly, unlike niall's dresser, where a drawer or two are always ajar, open just enough to make cole want to shut them.

cole slams her book shut and lets it fall to the mattress beside her. she imagines niall right now, sitting in his meeting across campus, knee jittering under the table, barely paying attention to the conversation because he's thinking about what just happened – about how he kissed her.

or maybe he's not thinking about it at all. maybe he's talking about metaphors and line breaks and couplets, and he's not given a second thought to what happened 22 minutes ago, when he kissed cole and ran. cole can't talk about things like metaphors and line breaks and couplets, and maybe niall realized that. maybe he kissed her and ran because he didn't want to stay.

except–cole dwells on excepts, dwells on the way they stick in her belly like this morning's porridge, constant reminders–except niall wouldn't do that to her. niall reads her poetry when she's nearly asleep and grabs extras of her favorite cookies from the dining hall to slip into the pocket of her coat when she's frowning. niall knows that she always shuts the door of her wardrobe before she goes to sleep (he never does) and that she likes winter mint, not spearmint, toothpaste.

niall loves words a lot. cole knows this because of all the earmarked pages in the books scattered across the floor of his room, and because of all the times she's seen him, caught him in the middle of a conversation, scribbling something down in his notebook in his tight, tiny handwriting. sometimes cole thinks it's strange that she and niall don't talk for hours about nothing. she knows the important things, knows about niall's older brother and the dog he had when he was younger and the words to his favorite songs, but they don't talk about things that don't matter.

cole plaits and unplaits her hair again and again as she waits for niall. she knew as soon as she fled the dining hall and caught her breath that she'd be seeing niall tonight, thought it dawns on her only when she remembers the last time–the only time–she was upset with niall, several months ago when he sat beside charlotte watson in class instead of cole but showed up later with a silent apology. because niall always knows when she needs to talk, and he knows when she doesn't. niall knows all kinds of things without her having to verbalize them.

but when it gets past 9 o'clock, cole begins to worry that niall isn't coming. his meeting is long over now. maybe he's back in his room, working on this t.s. eliot paper and not thinking about cole one bit.

cole picks at a loose thread on her duvet and has nearly managed to convince herself that she's misread this entire situation and doesn't understand niall horan one bit when there's a knock at her door. her heart pounds in her chest as she jumps off her bed and goes to open the door.

niall stands on the other side, coat unzipped and hair mussed like he's been running a hand through it, like cole's seen him do when he's working on a big assignment.

"hey," he says. he looks at her like he wants to ask her a million important questions, but he can't remember any of the words.

"hi," cole says, sounding out of breath. she looks at niall, standing sheepishly in her doorway with his hands in his pockets, and realizes that he takes her breath away, knocks it out of her like a punch to the stomach, like a roller coaster drop, like the view of your city's veins from an airplane.

cole steps aside to let niall in, resisting the urge to move closer to him when he brushes against her as he passes by. he shrugs off his coat and drops it on her desk chair before hopping up on her lofted bed, his feet hanging down toward the floor. cole lets the door close and climbs up beside him.

it's quiet for a moment, and cole tries to measure the air between them. she's not mad at niall, and it doesn't seem like he's mad at her. his hand inches closer to hers across the duvet and she thinks that he doesn't regret the kiss, just maybe the moment after, where he left without a word.

words: cole needs to hear them. needs to hear niall say something, anything that he's thinking. she imagines there a million words bouncing around his brain, criss-crossing and zig-zagging and bouncing off of each other, eager to escape through his mouth. but cole knows that niall won't speak until he's selected the right ones and arranged them precisely so.

"tell me a story," cole says when the silence begins to scratch at her. it's been a long time since she made this request, asked niall for a story. it was an ice breaker for them at first, and it quickly became unnecessary when they realized there was no ice to thaw. but now there's something between them that neither of them know how to talk about. so cole resorts back to old tactics.

niall's mouth quirks at her words, like he's about to smile, but then he doesn't. he nods, and cole watches him out of the corner of her eye as he begins. "once upon a time, there was a leprechaun boy who loved books," he says. "and there was a girl with freckles and big green eyes who loved stories. at first, the boy thought they'd never be friends, because her big green eyes could see through everything."

cole blinks her big green eyes and looks away from niall. he's not looking at her, either; his gaze is fixed on the opposite wall, wandering amongst the photographs of her dad and alfie and even one or two of niall himself taped up beside her world map.

"but then what happened?" cole asks, filling the silence of niall's pause. "they became friends, right?"

niall nods. "best friends. the girl's big green eyes could see through everything, and they could see through his dumb jokes, and even though he said he hated poetry, he really didn't. the girl was smart and funny and sweet, and sometimes the boy caught her looking at him when she was supposed to be doing her coursework."

cole blushes at this, and, chancing a glance over at niall, finds his eyes glued to her. he's watching for her reactions. their eyes meet, and cole doesn't look away.

"yeah? and?"

"and the boy thought that maybe they weren't just best mates, like maybe they were something more. but then he did something stupid–" niall cuts himself off and clears his throat. "–something stupid because he wasn't thinking, and he screwed it all up."

"you wanna know what i think?" cole asks, not waiting for niall's answer before she continues. "i think the boy didn't screw anything up, and the girl probably doesn't think it was stupid at all."

"yeah?" niall asks, his voice unsteady. cole wants to do nothing more than climb on his lap and press her lips to his and close this gaping distance between them, but instead she slides her hand across the duvet and intertwines her fingers with his.

"yeah." cole squeezes his hand and sighs, a thousand wiggly wormy worries unwinding inside her stomach. she feels the warmth radiating off of niall's skin climb up her arm and spread across her skin, telling her you are safe, safe, safe.