Screaming Color

the first time niall horan saw cole jacobs, all five-foot-three inches of her complete with freckles, she was looking at him like he better not dare talk to her, so he did anyway. niall believes in the power of words. believes that saying things out loud makes them real, believes that saying sorry can fix what’s broken, believes that the truest, most heartfelt words can change somebody’s mind.

but when it comes to cole jacobs, he finds he doesn’t need them. he doesn’t have them, anyway. he never has the words to tell cole that he could spend all day counting the freckles scattered across her cheeks, and the ones on her back, too. never has the words to do justice to the dreams he has about her, the dreams where they’re traveling across the world in a sailboat or sitting in a little cafe in paris or lying beside each other on cole’s dorm bed – the location doesn’t matter. what does matter is cole’s smile and the grip she’s got on his heart. he doesn’t want her to let go anytime soon.

the summer trip to italy is his idea, and cole’s hesitant at first, biting at her lip and turning the pages of her book without really reading them. niall can practically read her thoughts: three weeks, all on their own, in a foreign country. that’s three weeks she could be at home with her family, or working, or fretting about the future. but niall knows she’ll come around soon.

“i’ve decided it’s a perfect idea,” she says when she finally does. niall’s already taken his last exam, but cole still has two more to go. though he’ll never tell her, he’s far too enamored with the way she’s taken to holding up her hair with a highlighter.

niall smiles widely and pulls the highlighter free, letting her hair down. “good thing i bought the tickets weeks ago.”

she wrinkles her nose in that i’m annoyed at you way that he loves, but she lets him pull her against him anyway. when he kisses her, he means for it to say all the things he can’t put into words: i love you more than anything and italy’s not nearly as beautiful as you and we’ve got all the time in the world.

but they don’t, and before they know it, it’s graduation day. after the ceremony, niall holds his tasseled cap in his hand and watches his mum talk to cole with wild hand gestures and a giant smile on her face. his mum seems to be more interested in cole than she is in him, but that’s the way things should be, niall thinks.

he thinks of the first time he saw cole jacobs, walking past him into poetry class so many months ago. he looked at her then and thought she was going to break his heart someday. but now he looks at her and he knows better. his heart broke that day and cole’s been putting it back together, bit by bit, ever since.

in italy, they eat gelato every day, sometimes more than once, and visit dozens of famous churches and all the cafes hemingway ate at, and go to so many museums that niall loses track. by evening, his feet hurt from all of the walking, but his heart feels huge.

after italy, they head back to london and then take a train to a little house in a small town, and niall meets alfie and cole’s dad, a tall, narrow man who speaks very little but, niall thinks, knows a lot. alfie tries to teach niall to play chess, but niall doesn’t take to it. cole sits beside him, her head on his shoulder, and tells him which pieces to move.

at the end of the summer, they start what niall thinks might be one of the toughest years of his life. he’d hushed cole whenever she’d expressed worry about the distance between them–it’s only minutes, he said–but now he understands. he spends cold nights alone, huddled underneath his blankets wishing it was the weekend already, and finds that studying alone is more difficult than he once thought. one evening, he crosses the city unplanned to surprise cole, only to find her huddled in bed, eyes red and cheeks wet.

it’s only when he’s in bed with her, arms wrapped around her like he’ll never let her go, that she speaks. “i get homesick for you,” she says.

“i get homesick for you, too,” niall says. these are the perfect words to describe the hollowness that overtakes his chest whenever cole’s not around. it’s more than i miss you. stronger.

but they are strong too, and the leaves on the trees change and niall sees cole whenever he can, and thinks about her when he can’t. in june, he sits beside cole’s dad and brother at her graduation ceremony, thumb wrestling with alfie until they call cole’s name. they all stand up for her, her boys, a group that niall’s proud to be a part of.

the next week, they move into a new flat, one all their own. it has the tiniest kitchen and cardboard-thin walls, but they wallpaper them with the faces of their friends and a map of all the places they’ll travel someday, and it feels like theirs. cole begins a master’s in history and they study together again, working themselves ragged. on the worst nights, when niall’s read so much his vision goes blurry, he lays his head in cole’s lap and listens to her read about the roman empire or the ottomans, and on nights when she’s so tired she can’t see, they trade and he reads to her, yeats and pound and auden.

niall used to hate poetry, but now he loves it, fills shelf after shelf with it. he reads every poem he comes across, searching for a way to describe the way he feels about cole jacobs. but maybe it’s impossible. maybe it’s impossible to describe the way cole lights up the world in a million different colors for him, and only for him. that’s it, isn’t it? that’s love. nobody can describe niall’s love except him, if he could only find the words.

when cole finishes her masters, she gets a job at the british museum. niall feels alive when he listens to cole tell stories about her job, about the things she’s learned, the people she’s met. he loves his job too, but not as much as cole loves hers, and certainly not as much as he loves cole. sometimes they fight, but only sometimes, and never badly, and they rarely grow tired of each other. niall can tell when cole looks at him that she’s stopped fearing that they might.

meanwhile, niall keeps searching for the words. he’s going to need them someday, he knows, when he finally asks cole to marry him like he’s been thinking about doing since they got pickles. the puppy is his idea, though for the next decade he’ll say it was hers. they name the dog pickles because they can’t think of anything better, and they let her sleep in bed with them. it doesn’t take long for niall to start to measure time according to pickles. two years after they get pickles, niall finally finds the words.

he doesn’t plan them or borrow them from somebody who’s dead. instead he takes cole’s hand when they’re out shopping and makes her stop next to the fruit and veg so that he can tell her. she reminded him why words are beautiful and these, though stuttered, though disorganized, are his, for her. he loves every freckle on her skin and the way her ears stick out a little bit and her laugh that fills a room, and he wants forever starting now.

“okay,” cole says, smiling the biggest smile he’s ever seen her smile. “yeah.”

“yeah?”

“yeah.”

and he kisses her in the produce section, no stranger than the time he kissed her on a street corner outside their flat because he couldn’t wait until they got inside, or all the times he woke her up just to kiss her goodbye in the morning. no stranger, but just as indescribable, for niall knows that though he found the words for this moment, he’ll be searching his whole life for ones big enough to capture all that he feels for cole jacobs.