plaid shirt days & nights (when you made me your own) // niall horan au

part ii

By the time Zoe makes her way through the people on her socializing list and gets to Liam, Harry, and Louis, somehow about half of their group have ended up at their old high school, where the boys break into the gym—Zoe finds it a bit scary how easy it was for them to do that—and they all sit on the floor passing around bottles of beer and wine with someone blasting music from their wireless speakers. The girls are well past tipsy and are currently leading a dance competition between those who are buzzed enough to want to participate as she plops down on the stage beside the boys and greets them with a slurred salutation.

"Hey, Zoe!" Harry greets as he throws an arm over her shoulders and pulls her into his chest. "It's nice to see that at least someone here looks exactly the same." The boys chuckle along with Harry's joke in agreement, and Zoe distantly wonders if they don't care about what happened five years ago or they're too buzzed to remember that she's the girl who broke their best friend's heart.

"How are you guys?" is what she asks when Liam and Louis both move in for a cuddle. The buzz running through her veins and the warmth of the three boys saddled up to her side leaves her feeling much more than content. And as she watches Jesy, Perrie, Jade, and Leigh drag Niall into their little circle of tipsy dancers and sees his face light up with a laugh, it's like she's been transported five years back. It's like nothing has changed.

"We'll take it that you two have spoken then?" is what Liam says, completely ignoring her question, and when Zoe looks up, he's looking at her rather fondly while next to him, Louis' eyes twinkle in amusement.

She shrugs. "I guess? It's more like I cried and he stopped outwardly hating me." She watches as Niall tries to mimic the move Leigh-Ann and Jesy are currently performing, a smile pushing the corners of her lips upwards when he can't stop laughing at himself to take it seriously. She sighs. "We haven't really talked about it, y'know?" she continues, leaning into Harry as he rubs soothing circles on her shoulder. He was always the one to comfort her when she was down, with Liam providing the advice, and Louis offering some comical relief. She realizes that while they were always more of Niall's friends, she probably loves them a little more.

Louis scoffs. "Well we all know Niall. Never really one to talk about his feelings, is he?" That coaxes a laugh from all of them.

Harry hums. "I think it's one of those things where he knows he hurt you as much as you hurt him. So it's like," he shrugs, "you're even now." Zoe looks up at him questioningly, and she doesn't have to glance at Liam or Louis to know that they're confused too. Harry smiles at her and says, "Well you found the ring, didn't you?" and the question has the hair at the back of her neck rising.

"How did you know?" she breathes out, and Harry simply shakes his head at her and goes back to watching the dance circle tumble around the floor.

"Why else would you cry," he says dryly, and behind her, Liam and Louis hum and nod like it all makes complete sense.

Zoe doesn't really know how to respond. She guesses that Harry's words do have some truth to them, but the difference between the two situations is that Niall was there to pick her back up from the cement and wipe the trails of mascara from her face. She wasn't there for him when he was hurting.

She still owes him.

The music transitions into a slower piece, everyone coming down with the falling tempo, and as soon as she recognizes the opening beats of the song, she looks up to find that Niall's eyes are already locked on her. Beside her, she can feel Harry chuckling, his arm dropping from her shoulders as she watches Jade give Niall a gentle push in her direction.

The unmistakable voice of Amy Winehouse starts crooning the lyrics to 'Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,' and like everything else that has happened today, the song transports her back to a memory of her and Niall at the diner, belting out the words to the song at the top of their lungs on one particular karaoke night. It was mostly meant as a joke, but Zoe knows that they both meant the words they were singing to each other then, and every other time after that.