Whispers

“Why are you screaming in my ear?” Niall asked, looking at the phone with severe distaste. He was sitting on his couch in his flat, ignoring the strange looks Liam was giving him as he listened to the overly loud and near hysterical Rae on the phone. “Now can you repeat that in a normal tone of voice, please?”

He heard her take a huge breath on the other side of the line. “What are you doing? Where are you and who are you with? Are you okay? Niall-"

“Rae, please take a deep breath and calm down,” Niall said, arching his brow. He had been sitting around at his flat watching football with Liam when Rae had called him, screaming questions at him like they were on jeopardy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m fine. Drinking a beer, so more than fine.”

She breathed in relief and he rolled his eyes at her. “Okay, sorry. Nothing weird has happened today?”

“If you mean weird as in you calling me and screaming in my fucking ear, no.”

“Well. Um.”

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

Silence for a moment. “We can talk about it later, okay? I don’t… I don’t want to make a big deal out of it right now. Just stay inside and stuff.”

“Okay, Rae. Whatever you say. Hey that rhymed.”

“Yeah,” she said dryly. “You’re a real Edgar Allen Poe.”

With her sarcasm left hanging, the phone call ended. Niall shook his head, laughing at her and setting the phone down. He had no idea why on earth Rae had called him like a complete nutter, but he assumed it had something to do with Harry. He thought nothing of it really, especially when his team made another goal, urging him to jump up and scream loudly, throwing his fists in the air.

When he was done screaming about the goal, he sat back down, sipping his beer. Niall’s flat was modest and small, since he lived alone. Niall worked as a computer specialist in a Macintosh store, and made a fair amount of money. He hadn’t even gone to school for it, but throughout schooling he had always shown just how smart he was with computers.

Niall was often overlooked when it came to judging peoples intelligence. Goofy, funny and often far too boyish for anyone to think much of, Niall was actually a secret genius underneath his habit of going out and getting drunk and sometimes picking fights with guys at pubs.

As a commercial break came on, Niall pulled Liam’s laptop off of the coffee table, opening it and powering it on. Liam kicked his feet up on the table, watching as Niall waited for it to turn on and figure out just what was wrong with it.

“So explain it to me again,” Niall said, clicking over to the settings and opening up many different things that Liam did not understand. Niall’s blue eyes were fixed on the screen and his fingers were tapping wildly and opening up things Liam couldn’t fathom. “You said it was deleting stuff on it’s own?”

“Yeah,” Liam said, leaning and looking over Niall’s shoulder, trying to glean any information from the blonde wiz. “Files were just disappearing.”

“Okay, hold on.” What looked like a bunch of numbers and figures began appearing in a window in the screen, scrolling and practically screaming computer language. Niall seemed to understand it all, typing in a few commands before closing it. “Okay, there you go, mate. It was set to start deleting things when you were nearing capacity. Just had to tweek the figures.”

“How would I have known to do that?”

Niall laughed at him. “You wouldn’t.”

“So why do they do that?”

“Because,” Niall announced, standing and finishing his beer. He walked towards his small kitchen, opening the fridge and grabbing another one just as the game came back on from commercial break. He had fixed the laptop that fast. “They want you to buy another one. It’s all about business, baby.”

Liam frowned. “That’s irritating.”

“Got to make a livin. Speaking of makin’ a livin’, you owe me 200 pounds.”

“Shove off.”

Niall laughed at that. “So how are things with Finn?”

Liam smiled, looking down and suddenly finding the hem of his shirt extremely interesting and worth playing with. Niall ignored the nervous gesture and kept his eyes on the tele. He was really only asking because he felt obligated to do so. “Good, we’ve really only gone out twice,” he admitted shrugging. Niall was still watching the game, only half listening. Liam was a romantic when he wanted to be. Niall thought a girl who liked beer instead of fruity drinks was romantic. And computers, those were good too. “But I really like her.”

Niall nodded. “She’s good for ya, I guess.”

“You guess?”

“I don’t know, I’m not good with that stuff. I suppose you should ask the girls' their opinion.”

“They love her.”

Sitting on the couch, neither one of them spoke more of it. Liam clearly liked Finn and Niall was happy for him. Liam could use a good bird in his life. Niall liked to remain a bachelor, occasionally hooking up with girls and dealing with his best mate’s girlfriends.

It wasn’t that Rae was a bad girlfriend in the slightest. In fact, Niall saw Rae like a sister, in a few ways. She was nicer than most people but had the uncanny ability to make you feel like you weren’t crazy in a funny or sarcastic way. She was also smart.

Rae’s problem is what Niall often called ‘Murphy’s Law’ which was common knowledge among many people who had bad luck. Murphy’s Law stated that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Most people did not have that streak in their lives, like Niall. He lived a quite boring life. Rae had the horrible habit of getting into sticky situations.

Just thinking about Rae and her bad luck, Niall suddenly sat up. At first he had thought absolutely nothing about her phone call and panic. Rae had called him before in a panic looking for Harry for something completely irrelevant to Niall. But she had been asking about Niall himself…

“Why are you frantically dialing your phone?” Liam questioned as Niall shoved his phone up to his ear violently. His eyebrows were pulled together and he screwed up his mouth in frustration as the phone rang. “Niall?”

Niall held out his index finger, silencing Liam rudely as Rae answered on the other line, still sounding flustered. “Niall? Alright?”

“What? Yeah, I’m fine. What were you calling about earlier, Rae? Is everything okay?”

A pause on the other line as Rae murmured something that Niall couldn’t hear. He heard a female voice respond, which he identified as Trystan. That gave him slight relief. “What’s making you ask?”

He frowned. Was this twenty questions? “Because I feel like being the question master,” he said sarcastically, rolling his blue eyes. “Because you sounded worried earlier, and it didn’t register until now that something might be wrong. Is everything alright?”

“Um,” he heard a strange tone in her voice before it cracked. Niall blinked. Niall had never heard Rae’s voice crack before. He had heard her cry of sorts and he had heard her scream, but never had he heard her usually cheery voice split like a glass window pane, damaged and visibly hurt. “Not really.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes with Liam.”

Liam had no idea what was going on, but he was already moving, shutting off the television and tossing the beers. He grabbed his keys as Niall shuffled to his feet, moving towards the door. “Niall, I don’t want-"

“Harry to know,” he finished for her, shaking his head. Outside it had just stopped raining, but the swelling of the clouds and the flash of lightning that looked threatening was all he needed to know that it wasn’t done raining. “I know. He’ll go absolutely mad. We won’t say anything.”

Niall hung up the phone. Liam started the car, biting his lip. “Are we really not going to say anything to Harry?”

Niall raised his brows, looking at Liam. “Do you want to be the messenger? Harry used to be a messenger too. And look where that’s gotten him, Liam.”

The boy nodded. “Point taken.”

*

Rain was pouring down outside again. There was no thunder or lightning around, but the rain was coming down so hard that Rae walked to Harry’s window, glancing out of it to see if the world was about to end. Make the apocalypse would come in the form of rain.

Outside, white sheets of water came down from the heavens, relentless and refusing to give way to anything else. It was beautiful and terrifying to see just how powerful rain could be when it was falling from the sky at a million miles per hour and so hard that it sounded like there was a constant drone in the entire house.

Closing the curtain, Rae rubbed her arms, cold. Harry’s house was always absolutely freezing, which is why she had a habit of stealing his sweatshirts and pulling them over her small frame, letting the smell and size of his shirts swallow her like his heart had.

Opening a top drawer, she took out her favorite sweatshirt of his. He had a really old sweatshirt from his dad’s law school. Harry owned it since he was young, and it became a sort of joke between Harry and Rae that Rae was semi-filling the empty gap in his life where is father should be. So she wore the sweatshirt that represented his father’s school, filling it with good memories and good cuddling instead of letting it sit in a drawer, collecting hatred for a man that hardly came around anymore.

The click of the bathroom door opening caught her attention as Harry came out of his bathroom. He glanced at her just as she pulled the sweatshirt over her bra and underwear clad frame. The soft cotton looked like a strange dress on her, the way it pooled down her arms and legs.

“That always makes you look like quite the midget,” he admit, chuckling deeply. The sound resounded in his chest, rough and happy as he walked over to her. She shrugged, standing on her tiptoes to wrap her arms around his neck, swaying back and forth slightly. “Or I guess I should call it ‘fun size’.”

“There are lots of fun things about my size.”

He arched a brow, resting his forehead against hers. His lips were hovering about her own, and she could feel it when he asked, “Like what?”

“Like not having to bend far if I drop something, or not being crammed in a convertible, or getting to see the way your shoulder blades flex when you collect something off of the top shelf for me because I can’t reach.”

“Shoulder blades?” he asked, pulling his head back. His face looked as it were the most absurd thing that he had ever heard. “My shoulder blades flex? What kind of strange compliment is that.”

She scowled and pulled away from him. “Shoulder blades totally flex… and stuff. Oh fuck it, stop laughing at me. They’re hot.”

“No one has ever told me my shoulder blades are hot.”

“Yeah, well I bet no one has told you you’re hot.”

He chuckled. “Oh, I tell myself I’m hot all the time, especially in the mornings when I have bed-head and I have that lusty, exhausted look.”

She stared at him, deadpan. “Did you take stupid pills this morning or did you read that from a really weird girl’s self-help article.”

He grinned, pointing at her. “Close- heard it on TV that girls like that.”

“They don’t,” she said matter-of-factly, waltzing by him and spinning for a flourish. Except that she tripped slightly, making her cross her arms and huff at him as he burst into laughter at her inability to show off. “They like shoulder blades.”

“Awe, don’t pout.”

Harry followed her out of his room, flicking off the light. The rain outside was still pounding down on the roof, echoing through the house as they walked down the stares, Rae holding her head extra high as if to assure him that she wasn’t a klutz or a weirdo.

It had been two days since Rae’s run in with Sean, and she had yet to tell Harry about it. It had taken a lot of convincing on her part to shut Liam up, but in the end it was agreed upon that keeping it from Harry was the safest thing to do. Harry had a horrible habit of hiding his rage like the Hulk, hurting everyone and anyone around when it was released.

Catching her by the waist and spinning her to face him, he gave her a look. “Come on, I didn’t mean to laugh. It was just out of the ordinary.”

“I thought you liked out of the ordinary.”

“Well, I never actually said that, but I will tell you that I like your type of ‘out of the ordinary.’ Cross my heart and swear to die.”

She blanched. “Don’t swear to die, please.”

“What? I’m not about to drop dead, Rae.”

She still looked uncomfortable. “Anything could happen.”

“Hmm, well I’m glad you’re my anything, and that you happened.”

She cracked a smile then. “Want some wine to go with that fucking cheese, suck up?”

“Mmm, just a kiss.”

And so she kissed him, and it took her to a place where kissing him was like breathing.