Louis decides that the only way to end this is to actually fucking end it. “Come with me,” he says, and puts the cups of tea down onto the coffee table. He stands up and walks into the hall and down to the bathroom, switching on the light. He holds his hand out like he’s on a fucking stage. “Exhibit A: my shower curtain.”
Harry, following him down the hall and stopping in the doorway to the bathroom, makes an awkward sort of squeaking noise. You would, probably, if faced with a custom-made shower curtain that’s made up primarily of your own face.
Louis stomps away, past Niall’s room and Liam’s room, and pushes open his bedroom door. “Exhibit B: my bed.” It’s in a mess, as usual, and could probably do with having the window open and a bit of fresh air in to make it smell less like he’s a revolting example of a terrible adult, but the duvet is in good enough shape that Harry can probably make out his own face on it, and on the pillows too.
Harry doesn’t say anything this time.
“It’s possible,” Louis goes on, folding his arms and ignoring the great gigantic weight of his own humiliation, “that I might possibly maybe have a huge crush on you, and my friends buy me this stuff—” he’d bought himself the shower curtain and the mugs, but Harry doesn’t need to know that, “—and it’s funny because they get to make fun of me and I get to have a stupid crush on a famous person, and it’s all one hundred per cent okay because I am never going to meet you, and you are never going to show up in my flat wanting sugar and then show up again in the middle of the night—”
“Nine am,” Harry says faintly.
“—with biscuits, and I think it would be better for all concerned if we just pretended that we’d never met, and you can go back to being a perfectly functional famous adult, and I can go back and find a hole in the ground and curl up and die in it, then we can all go back to the day before yesterday and forget any of this ever happened.”
“Are those my cookbooks?” Harry asks, pointing to the only shelf in Louis’s room that has books on it.
“And that framed collage. Did you make that?”
“I have little sisters,” Louis says defensively. “I was babysitting. We all made one.”
“Right,” Harry says. The collage is A3, covered in glitter and pictures of Harry printed off from the internet, and interspersed with stupid pink hearts. It hadn’t taken Louis much persuading to join in with his sisters and their personal art projects. “Did they have theirs framed, too?”
Louis folds his arms. “No,” he says. “Just me.”
-Harry Styles Cooks by sunsetmog | @magicalrocketships
