Complacent [Duplicity Niall]

Madi

The bathroom tiles were cold against my knees. My forehead rested against the porcelain of the toilet, my arms wrapped around it like it was the only thing keeping me upright.

I had already thrown up everything inside of me, but my body hadn’t caught on yet. My stomach was still twisting, heaving, like it wanted to purge something deeper, something that had nothing to do with the pills.

The room felt like it was spinning. My skin was too hot, my clothes stuck to me like a second layer of flesh, but at the same time, I was shivering. My teeth chattered as I pressed my cheek to my forearm, trying to catch my breath.

The door was still open.

I knew he was there.

Standing in the doorway.

Silent.

Watching.

Niall.

He hadn’t said anything yet.

Not when Louis shoved the Narcan up my nose.

Not when I gasped back to life, my chest heaving, my brain kicking back into motion like a rusty engine that didn’t want to start.

Not when Louis left, his face tight, his warning unspoken but heavy.

And not now, as I curled over the toilet, shaking and empty, everything still too much and not enough all at once.

I wanted to say something.

Something snarky. Something to cut through the unbearable weight of his silence.

But I didn’t have the energy to lie.

Didn’t have the energy to act like I wasn’t exhausted in a way that sleep could never fix.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and slowly, painfully, pushed myself up from the floor. My body felt foreign, like my limbs weren’t connected right, like my brain and bones were on different frequencies. I gripped the edge of the sink, my fingers white-knuckled, and dared to look up.

I shouldn’t have.

I should have kept my eyes on the faucet, on the water stains in the porcelain, on the chipped tile beneath my bare feet.

But I looked.

And there he was.

Niall.

Standing just outside the doorway, his hands loose at his sides, his expression unreadable.

He was still beat to shit from the night before. Bruises darkened the skin around his eyes, cuts littered his cheekbones, his jaw, his lips. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst of it was the look in his eyes.

I had seen Niall angry.

I had seen him wrecked, high, half-dead, reckless, furious.

But I had never seen him like this.

Like he was hollowed out.

Like he was staring at something he couldn’t make sense of, something that didn’t fit into the world he thought he knew.

And for some reason, that was the thing that made my stomach drop.

That was the thing that made my throat close up.

I turned back to the sink, twisting the faucet on, cupping cold water in my hands and splashing it over my face.

I needed to fix this.