You Were Mine

We knew from the start that it couldn’t last. At the end of the summer, the new record would be out and touring would all but consume me, and she would be headed to Glasgow for university. But logic was the last thing on our minds, and we became instantly inseparable.

Adalyn was an enigma, a puzzle I just couldn’t solve, a mystery without a plausible resolution. But I dedicated myself and all my days to her. Trying to make her laugh, trying to make her understand how amazing she was, trying to make her understand how alive she made me feel with her cryptic magnetism.

For all of her personality, there were equal parts indifference, or maybe independence – I’m not sure if I can tell the difference. She was this insane contrast of intensity and simplicity. Somehow, I wanted to unravel her, to understand what she kept hidden behind those stone grey eyes. But what I didn’t realize was that all the while, she was unraveling me.

“Confidence, Horan,” she asserted one afternoon after I made a bad joke in hopes of impressing her. “You don’t have to try so hard. I like you the way that you are.”

This concept struck me as absolutely mental. She felt like the sun and I was a simple molecule in her presence, her complexity dwarfing me entirely. She couldn’t possibly just like me for what I was. I needed to be bigger, more noticeable, even more outrageous for her to possibly see me. Or at least, that’s what I thought before she showed me otherwise with her lips, the velvet pink buds insisting that she really did like me for me.

It’s not that I wasn’t confident, because normally I was. The wear of critics, and even of hypercritical fans, wore me down from what I was before One Direction. I tried my best to play it off, to cover it up with a boisterous personality that girls fell in love with but didn’t understand. Adalyn taught me that I was more than just adequate, that the real me was worthwhile.



“Play me something that’s just you,” she begged one afternoon as we lay in my room, my acoustic guitar laid out across my lap. “None of this stuff I hear on the radio, with all these other people’s hands in it. Play me something that you love.”

I felt on the spot for a minute. “Anything?”

She smiled softly before nestling her warm face into the crook of my neck. “Anything that’s you, Niall.”

I sat and thought for a while before deciding. I felt her lips just behind my ear and I knew at once. My fingers came to life on the neck of the guitar, pressing down the chords that made the song sound just right. An old Frank Sinatra bossa nova tune, The Girl From Ipanema. One of my favorites.

“Yes, I would give my heart gladly, but each day when she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead, not at me,” I sang to her, feeling her hands inch up underneath my shirt to massage the skin just above my hip bones. I sang to her and I sang to her, and I spilled my soul to her with my words in the best way I knew how. And I felt her breath on my skin, eyelashes brushing lightly against my neck, and decided that maybe I didn’t need to figure her out, maybe I would never know.

“Well?” I asked her, setting the guitar down on the side of my bed. She sat up and looked me dead in the eyes, a ghost of a smile glimmering on her lips.

“You’re pretty good, I guess,” she teased, crawling on top of me and giving me a kiss so soft and sweet, I could have never been kissed again and I would be okay with simply the memory of that kiss on my lips. We fell into each other that afternoon, giving each other all we had, and there were absolutely no regrets about it.



The boys fell in love with her the moment they met her, not in the way that I was afraid of at first, but because they knew that she was so good for me. She could outwit Harry, back-sass Louis, and give Zayn a run for his money making ridiculous faces while others were talking. Even Liam approved of her maturity in the appropriate situations, though he worried about her dependence on cigarettes and how really thin she was, like a wisp.

“She’s really great, mate,” Harry cheered when she got up from our booth at the pub one night to call for another pitcher of beer. “I knew the minute I saw you with her that night in June, I did.”

“Oh, piss off,” I said through a laugh. “Don’t act like you had some hand in this, I got her all by myself.”

“Yeah, and if you ever don’t want her anymore, you can tell her to give me a ring,” Zayn chimed in with a cheeky grin, and I proceeded to kick him in his scrawny shins across from me.

“Have you told her you love her yet?” Liam asked out of nowhere.

“What?” I questioned back.

“Oh, you heard me,” Liam quipped, earning an eyebrow raise from Louis, who was the one in the lot of us that probably knew the most on the subject. I rolled my eyes. Leave it to Liam to get so serious so quickly. Adalyn and I had only been together for not more than a heartbeat, only a few weeks under our belts.

“Heard you say what?” Adalyn interrupted. She really couldn’t have had better or worse timing, and I prayed to become one with the booth and fade into invisibility.

“That you’re a real gem, for being from Loughton,” Harry spat with a grin. I sighed, thanking him silently for the terribly graceful save. Adalyn wouldn't turn down an opportunity to be sassy.

“Oh Harry, I forget where you’re from again,” she mused falsely, a devilish expression already rising on her face. “A pig farm in Winterley, is it?”

“Holmes Chapel,” he growled while she poured him a new pint with the sweetest smile, a twinkle in the corner of her pale blue eyes.

“You could have fooled me,” she quipped, proceeding to fill up the rest of our pints, a rousing round of ‘oohs’ arising from all of us, followed by laughter. He raised his glass in defeat, beaming at her like mad. When she reached Zayn, he made the ugliest face at her, contorting his eyebrows and mouth in a positively unnatural way. And somehow she topped him – bugging out her beautiful eyes and sticking out her bubblegum pink tongue to touch her nose. I sat in the corner, feeling like the proudest boyfriend there could be. Words could not express how pleased I was that they were getting along.

But Liam’s words were ringing in my head, the concept of telling Adalyn that I love her all I could think about. I thought about it for the rest of the night, through drinks and dancing at the pub, through the taxi ride back to her place, up the stairs to her apartment and even in bed at the most ungodly hour of the morning.

“What’s on your mind, Ni?” she murmured, the haze sleep apparent in her voice as she readjusted herself on my chest.

The words were heavy on my tongue, ready to escape into the lightly moon lit room, the pale glow falling in through the slats in the window shades. It couldn’t possibly be so hard to just say it, to just tell her how I felt, especially if I meant it as much as I did in that moment. But I couldn’t make my vocal cords form the sound to say them, the three little words that could potentially change everything. I couldn’t.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Go to sleep.”

I wrapped my arms around her, kissed the top of her head and decided it would be best for another time. Definitely another time.