Screaming Color

cole arrives back at uni in the new year with a galaxy of anxiety swirling in her stomach. things are normal and the same with niall: they do their coursework sitting side by side on his bed, and niall reads poetry out loud when it gets late and cole pushes her book aside, her eyes beginning to droop. the cold weather and the lack of sunlight make her sleepier than usual. at least that’s what she tells herself as explanation for her new habit of falling asleep in niall’s bed while they’re studying.

and things are also different with niall, in small ways that sneak up on cole and bite her on the nose like sharp, cold wind when she’s half awake in the morning. niall touches her more, an arm around her shoulder, a hand on her back, and, though she thinks she might’ve imagined it, a kiss to her forehead when she leaves his room one night, half-asleep and slightly delirious from so much reading.

their new routine is different because they no longer share a class, but cole sees niall more than she used to. they eat all their meals together, study at the same table in the library, and spend their free hours watching films in niall’s room, burrowed deep in the pile of pillows on his bed. cole’s exhausted most of the time from her course load and the weather and, though she’s hard pressed to admit it, the late nights she spends looking foggy-eyed at niall, too afraid to blink in case he disappears. he’s bound, she thinks, to grow tired of her, of her too-loud laugh and the freckles on the bridge of her nose that keep her from a flawless complexion and her tendency to say “um” four times in a sentence that only contains ten words.

cole fears, though she wouldn’t tell you if you asked, the day that niall moves on from her and she must, as a result, force herself to move on from him. it will be an agonizing process, like pulling herself up out of the strongest quicksand with only her arms.

on february 1st, it snows, wet and white and enough to prompt the university to cancel morning classes. cole and niall bundle themselves up in layers of scarves and sweaters and trudge through the cold to the dining hall. the employees have put up the valentine’s day decorations seemingly overnight, and it’s zayn who brings them up.

“i pity the bastard who’s alone on valentine’s day,” zayn says. he sits beside april, their chairs so close together they might as well be sharing one. cole’s not sure when that happened, zayn and april, but it did, and now cole can’t escape it. they’re always together, zayn and april, and the worst of it is that they’re sickeningly happy, always laughing at a joke only the two of them understand and looking at each other with heart-shaped eyes.

april tells cole whenever she asks, and often when she doesn’t, that it’s nothing serious. “i’m just having a bit of fun,” april says frequently enough that cole begins to pretend to believe her.

at zayn’s words, april looks pointedly at cole, who sits beside niall on the other side of the table. cole leans back in her chair, ignores the flip of her stomach, and pretends she didn’t see. she as the courtesy to believe april’s lies about zayn, so april, cole feels, should believe hers about niall.

“whatever you say, mate,” niall says with a lighthearted shrug. “not much for valentine’s day meself.”

“nah, that’s no fun,” zayn says, raising an eyebrow. “you should pull a girl just for february, niall. let loose a little bit.”

cole shifts uncomfortably in her seat and niall puts a hand on her thigh, his palm warm and comforting through her jeans. sometimes it feels like she and niall are keeping a secret from everyone – though they are keeping it from themselves, too.

“i’m quite happy the way things are, thanks,” niall says in a tone that cole knows well enough to mean back off. zayn shrugs and turns back to april, and cole relaxes a little bit in her seat. niall’s hand climbs off of her thigh and onto the edge of the seat of her chair.

cole wraps her hands around her paper coffee cup and clutches it like it’s warming her frozen hands, though the liquid inside has gone cold ages ago. her eyes drift over to niall, who smiles at her and lets his fingers brush her thigh.

“got any plans for next saturday?” niall asks her softly, leaning over, his breath tickling her neck. he speaks so that zayn won’t hear, so that he won’t leer across the table at them like they’re something to look at. something to analyse and pick apart and gleefully exclaim, “i told you so!” about.

“no,” cole says. “no plans.” her stomach wobbles and she wonders if maybe she should’ve lied, made up a date with a boy called john from her revolutions of 1848 class. maybe that would’ve answered the are we/aren’t we question painted across the inside of her lids. it’s all she sees every time she closes her eyes: niall’s face, niall’s smile, and the wibbly wobbly feeling in her stomach manifested in the image of a teetering spinning top, stuck forever in the millisecond before it falls.

“let’s just watch a film or something, yeah?” niall asks, pulling back and grinning at her. “‘gone girl’ has just come out.”

cole wrinkles her nose. “we already know how it ends.”

“doesn’t mean it won’t be fun while it lasts.”

cole’s not sure what niall means by that, so she can’t object, and on valentine’s saturday she finds herself dressed in her pajamas and sat on niall’s bed, a mug of hot chocolate in her hands and ‘gone girl’ playing on niall’s laptop set between them. at some point cole puts her empty mug aside and drifts closer to niall, and at some point he wraps his arm around her and she leans into him and further into the question of are we/aren’t we that’s been plaguing her for months.

“the book was better,” niall grumbles when the credits roll. he tightens his arm around cole and asks, “want to watch another one?” and cole knows she’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

not that she wants too, because niall is warm and smells good and though her legs are intertwined with his, neither of them have fallen asleep. cole can’t say the same for herself, though: she can feel her eyelids growing heavy, and she knows that she’ll be asleep before they finish another movie. but falling asleep with her head against niall’s chest doesn’t sound like a very bad thing at all.

niall chooses an action film with matt damon, one of the bourne movies, which cole normally loves because they remind her of alfie, but tonight she can’t keep her eyes open. niall doesn’t seem to care; she hears him laugh lightly before pulling her more securely against him.

that’s the last thing she remembers before falling asleep. the first thing she senses when she wakes up is something brushing against her skin of her waist, just underneath the bottom of her t-shirt. it tickles a little bit, but not in an unpleasant way. she settles her head back into the pillow and hums, eager to go back to sleep, and then she realizes where she is.

her back is to niall, her head underneath his chin, and his hand on her waist holds her against him. cole can tell from his breathing that he’s awake, and she doesn’t want to think about what it means that he’s chosen to stay like this. this is different from the other time she slept in his bed for a whole night, because this time there are feelings, big ones with lots of spidery legs and a mosquito-like way of buzzing about just when she’d thought she’d gotten rid of them.

“mornin’,” niall says softly. his hand stills on her waist, but doesn’t pull away.

so cole does. she’s on the side of the bed facing the room, so she’s able to untangle her legs from niall’s and pull herself into a seated position. she dangles her legs off the edge of the bed and stretches her arms over her head.

“what time is it?” she can hear niall moving around behind her, though she doesn’t turn around to look. she doesn’t want to see the spindly emotional bugs that might be showing themselves on his face.

“just past 10,” niall says. he crawls over to cole and sits beside her, bumping her shoulder with his. so she looks up at him, looks at him because she can’t resist looking at him, at his bright blue eyes and hair made of sunshine, and niall grins wide and looks back at her like she’s the one who’s made of sunlight.

he leans down a little bit and cole wonders if this is it. she’d given it a thought a few days ago, a thought as to whether or not niall would kiss her on valentine’s day, and then she’d decided that that was too cliche for them. in the part of her mind that cole likes to ignore, she thinks that maybe the cole-and-niall story, the one they’ll tell their friends ages from now, is an epic. it’s the kind of story worthy of love songs and auden poems, and it doesn’t begin with trite valentine’s day kisses.

so cole jumps off of the bed onto shaky feet and looks away from niall’s emotional bugs and searches the floor for her now surely dead mobile. her stomach rolls, and she knows it’s not because she’s hungry.

“i’m gonna shower before breakfast,” cole says, glancing over her shoulder at niall, who’s staring at her. she looks away before she can dissect his expression. her head feels foggy and her limbs tight and a few minutes ago niall looked at her like she hung the sun, and she knows she needs some time away from him to get her head on straight. “i’ll meet you there.”

she barely hears niall’s “sure” as she ducks out into the hallway. it’s late morning already and the world is awake: there’s someone in the hallway, one of their neighbors, a second-year named josh or jack or maybe james, cole can’t remember. he stands between her and her room, unlocking his door at a snail’s pace. he looks up at the sound of niall’s door shutting and spots cole. a grin spreads across his face.

“glad you two finally figured it out,” he says.

cole doesn’t say anything as she slips past him and into the safety of her room, where, try as she might, she can’t forget the feeling of niall’s fingertips brushing gently against her skin.

but maybe, though she wouldn’t tell you if you asked, she doesn’t actually try very hard at all.