You Sunshine, You Temptress (l.s)

Please don't leave

Before chapter starts: This book was #1 in Stylinson out of like 17k stories for 2 days straight. That blows my fucking mind so much, I can't. I might've freaked out...ok, I definitely freaked out. Wouldn't have been possible without you, so thank you:)

Louis

I watch from the bay window as snow falls upon the heads of my little sisters, clinging to their brown flyaways before melting into their hair. They skip throughout the yard, pelting each other with compact and poorly constructed snowballs. Loud shrills rip from their tiny bodies, sounding muffled from the distance between them and I. 

They skip throughout the yard, their boots making tiny footprints in the fallen snow, not a care in the world and not a single thing on their mind other than the meal they'll be digging into within the next 15 minutes. 

I smile as I watch them enjoy the bitter cold of mid-December and ignore the definite numbing of their fingers. Zayn and I did that every day of winter as kids. He used to live down the road from me in our old neighborhood filled with tiny flats with well-kept gardens filled with vibrant flowers. One year, for Zayn's birthday, I bought him a two pack set of those little walkie-talkie radios. We used them day and night, always pissing off our mums because we'd steal batteries from the television remotes whenever ours would die. 

We promised each other we'd wake up bright and early at 8am, eat breakfast as quickly as we could manage and meet at the lamp-post at the midway point between our houses by 8:20. And so that's what we did, every weekend for 2 months without fail. We'd race each other just a few meters into the leafy green woods behind my house, both desperate to be the first one into the treehouse because whoever got there first would get first dibs on their little pretend weapon for the day. The weapons in question were really just sticks we found on the floor of the woods, but we pretended nonetheless. 

But one morning when I lay frozen in my racecar bed, refusing to let my tiny feet press into the carpeted floor out of fear of my father coming into my room the way he did a few hours prior, I didn't meet Zayn at the lamp-post. I could hear Zayn's tiny voice coming through the cheap radio from the table in the corner, but I physically could not make my frozen body move from the bed.

"Lou-Lou? Are you coming? It's cold out here," he had said into the radio, the sound of his voice accompanied by chattering teeth. I glanced over to the cheap yellow walkie-talkie, making no effort to move toward it because my brain couldn't signal the rest of my body to get the fuck up. It was incapable of it.

Within minutes, the front door slammed and faint running footsteps inched closer to my room. My body tensed so harshly it made every single bone, big or small, feel like it was set aflame. "No," I pleaded, fresh tears wetting the dried ones on my pillowcase as I braced myself for what I assumed to be my father coming in to teach me another lesson.

My bedroom door, which was decorated with miscellaneous stickers, flew open so abruptly the paint is probably still chipped from where the knob hit it. I squeezed my eyes shut, my eye sockets feeling as though they could shatter as I awaited my fate, but it never came. 

"You're crying," Zayn said, panting heavily and moving the hood of his coat from his head. 

"Shut up, no I'm not," I objected, wiping my eyes furiously with the heel of my hand and tightening the blanket around my younger shoulders. He pulled a glove from his tanned hand and touched the fabric of my pillowcase right next to my eyes. "But your eyes are wet... and so is the pillowcase," he said confusedly, glancing over to the walkie-talkie resting on my table as I sniffled and fought back the fresh tears threatening to spill over at the drop of a hat.

"Did your mummy say you can't play today?" He asked. I shook my head. "No...no I think I just want to be inside today so if you don't mind," I trailed off, looking over to the vacant doorway and silently praying to the god I still believed in that Zayn would take the hint.