Chapter 05

                                    

                                          
Trigger Warning: This chapter contains sensitive themes that may not be suitable for all audiences (Homophobia, Bullying, Hate speech, Graphic violence, Substance abuse)
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Louis's POV
For the next two weeks I barely saw Harry. Sure, he was in the Humanities lecture every week but that was it. After I accidently called him a... well, after that last incident.
He no longer tried to get on my nerves. He was doing his best to blend in with the crowd and avoid running in to me. The anger inside me too slowly started to fade away, more affectionate emotions dominating over them. I spent a good 40 out of the 50 minutes of the Humanities lecture staring at the back of Harry's head, or the back of his neck on days he tied up his hair in a bun. Instead of forgetting him, I was beginning to think about him more and more now. 
If I thought the past two years of being away from him was hard, well, those were nothing compared to what I was feeling now. Seeing him right in front of me, pretending to not know me, as if I never existed in his world, was not something I'd ever get used to. Imagine having the one thing you really want walk right in front of you and you not being able to even glance in their direction, let alone have them. 
All I wanted to do was grab him by those beautiful curls, kiss him breathless until his lips turn bright pink and tell him, "Damn, you have no idea how much I've missed you". 
I wanted to hug him just one last time.
I don't know when our last hug was. All I know is that, if I had known it'd be our last hug, I would've held him a little bit longer, a little bit tighter. I would have breathed in all his scent, his sweet Harry scent, so that I wouldn't have to think so hard to remember what he used to smell like. What wouldn't I give to hug him one last time; to tell him "It was always you".
All these thoughts and feelings I had buried deep down in my heart with alcohol and nicotine, resurfaced when Harry waltzed back into my life. No amount of alcohol was able to get these thoughts out of my head. Cigarette after cigarette, I found that nothing was enough to unsnarl my feelings.
The only tiny distraction I had to distance myself from my own feelings was witnessing Zayn's and Liam's mutual attraction growing right in front of us. 
Liam made it to the team, being the first pick of Coach obviously, and he made it a habit to visit our flat every day with me after practice. It started off as a means of avoiding his bullies. But his real intensions soon became a little too obvious when he wanted me to stop by the little coffee shop next to campus everyday to buy a pack of matcha white chocolate cookies to bring over. Only one single person on this planet earth ate those. Well, one single person we knew of. That one single person who had a pot of coffee waiting every day when we came back from practice in a flat shared by three tea-drinkers. By then it wasn't much of a shocker for me and Niall to know who it was that had to have a cup of coffee right after a shower, or right after dinner, or literally every fucking minute. How Zayn knew this about Liam, I have no fucking idea.
A typical day in our flat used to be Niall in front of Telly playing video games with a beer next to him, Zayn on the window seat drawing on his iPad and me on the opposite end of the window seat smoking and scrolling through my phone. Now a typical day also involved a very attentive Liam sitting on the floor next to Zayn on the window seat, obsessing over whatever Zayn was drawing. Though more than the art, he was obsessing over the artist.
They'd be engrossed in their own conversation, giggling and whispering, as if I, who was literally right in front of them, were invisible. Sometimes, instead of Liam sitting on the floor, both of them would squeeze themselves to the small space of the window seat. I even walked in one afternoon to the flat to find both of them comfortably dozing-off in the confined space of the window seat, wrapped in each other's arms. It was too cute that I couldn't stop myself from taking a picture. Which is what both of them have on their lock screen now. I couldn't get used to the bittersweet feeling I got every time I saw this picture.