You Were Mine

The sweet relief of being in one place for more than a couple days was the only thing keeping me going. We, the boys and I that is, had finally returned to London after months, and months on the road, days that seemed impossibly long and an end that never seemed to come. Finally, it was here, the three month void of nothing but everything – everything we wanted, at least. A break from the stardom. Every bone in my body begged me to go home and sleep, but something dragged me out that night. Fate, maybe. Yeah, probably fate.

We were at our favorite pub just outside the city when I spotted her. Thick, pin-straight blonde hair down just past her chest, stovepipe jeans that hugged her hips in the most heart-stopping way, wearing a simple band t-shirt for a group I didn’t recognize. She was unusual in her beauty, unlike any girl in the entire bar.

Suddenly, she was approaching me and every inch of me was on fire, her gaze scorching my skin with the sheer intensity of her eyes. Her cheekbones were high and hollow as a drum, the smirk on her lips resonating in them like a secret. Something about her was so fierce, so confident, so magnetizing. I wanted to go to her right away and tell her how beautiful she was, but the slant of her eyebrows petrified me. And at any rate, she was close enough now that I could see each individual eyelash flaring from those stony blue eyes.

“My name is Adalyn,” she murmured in my ear, her voice as silky as her milk-white skin. "I saw you looking at me and thought I might introduce myself."

“Niall,” I replied, a little louder than necessary for fear of my introduction being lost in the roar of the pub. “What’s the Wu-Tang Clan?”

Her eyebrows flickered up in apparent amusement, realizing that I was referring to the shirt enveloping her lithe frame. “They’re certainly not something to fuck with,” she said with a light laugh. I immediately fell into embarrassment, realizing that what I hoped to be a conversation starter instead made me look like an idiot. She had this bad-girl vibe about her, something I found so alluring but didn’t know I could really compete with.

“Have you met my friend Zayn?” I asked meekly, nodding to my friend sitting down the bar from us, talking to Liam and Louis. “I think he might be more your type.”

“That’s a pretty lofty assumption, Niall,” she hummed, the smirk returning. “You have really don’t know anything about me.”

I paused, the sight of the straw from her drink between her lips enough to make me weak in the knees. “I may not, but I’d like to.”

“Buy me a drink and take me outside, then,” she hummed playfully, and I followed her command. “It’s too loud in here to talk.” I ordered two gin and tonics from the bartender and handed one to her before following her outside. Harry was just coming back to me from requesting a song and looked at me with confusion before his expression melted to approval, sealed with a wink.

“Are you from around here?” she asked me, though she had to have known from my accent. She leaned against the brick façade of the pub and stuck a cigarette in between her lips, lighting it with her free hand.

“Mullingar, actually,” I clarified, taking a long swig from my drink. “But I spend a lot of time in London and on the road. I’m in a band.”

“Of course you are. What are you called?” She exhaled a stream of smoke, shivering a little bit in the nipping wind of the early June night. I offered her my coat and she accepted, slipping her thin arms into the sleeves.

“One Direction. You’ve probably heard of us, right?” I replied, trying my best not to sound cocky but also wanting to let her down easy in case she absolutely hated our sound. She didn’t come off as much of a so-called “Directioner.”

“Actually I haven’t,” she admitted, and I choked a little on my drink in surprise. “Should I have?”

“Turn on the radio and you probably will hear us on one channel or another,” I sighed, knocking back the rest of my drink. “Just promise me that if you don’t like it, you won’t think of me any differently.”

The smirk returned again. “Promise.”

We talked for a while, exchanging stories and learning more about each other. I discovered that she had grown up in Loughton, a city girl from the start, and was on track to go to the University of Glasgow that fall. All the while that she talked, I couldn’t help but stare at her lips and the way they moved, like they were telling the most compelling story ever told. I thought of what it would be like to have my lips on them, to have her in my arms with her hands in my hair.

“You can kiss me if you want,” she said mid-sentence, her eyes filled with playful sparks like the night sky.

She was so beautiful and so funny, with her laugh like porcelain and hands so delicate I simply wanted to hold them. My heart rate skyrocketed she closed the gap between us, my hand going to her hip and grasping it loosely.

“What?” I replied, taken aback. “Oh… right.”

“Well, then come here superstar,” she said with a wink, dropping her cigarette to the ground. And then we were together, her lips gliding across mine like they had known that this was their destination since she first introduced herself. And from that moment on, I knew that summer would be the summer of Adalyn.