Chapter Text
It all started one summer. The summer before Louis went away on his exchange year during high school, to be exact.
Like every summer before, he went to summer camp in his town. He had made a lot of friends during the previous years and that year had been no different. He’d started getting close with this curly boy, Harry. He seemed nice enough, brazen at times, but so, so honest. His beautiful, deep green eyes often seemed to hold all the answers to Louis’ questions and just enough space to keep all his secrets, too. Needless to say, they became fast friends.
During their time spent at summer camp as tutors, Harry had developed a crush on an older tutor, Bernard. Louis somewhat knew him, he went by Ben; they rode the bus together every morning to go to school but weren’t all that close. They did get closer during the summer, but they always seemed to drift apart during the rest of the year. Louis liked him enough and he even tried to give Harry pointers on how to get on Ben’s good side. Harry, being younger than both Louis and Ben, was still a bit awkward and shy when it came to matters of the heart. It was honestly cute to watch.
As for Louis’ summer love interests, he was obsessed with this girl, Laurence. She was four years older than him, cool, funny and, every once in a while, gave Louis the time of her day. She also always happened to already have a boyfriend. Louis didn’t really care; her boyfriend wasn’t part of the summer camp and Louis just enjoyed having Laurence’s attention on him. She just made him feel that swirl in his belly that got his hands all tingly. It was awesome.
At the same time, Louis had another friend, he could say he was his best friend: Luke. They’d met the two years before there at the camp and never separated since. They spent the holidays with each other’s families, knew each other’s grandmas and had a lot of firsts together: first time sneaking out of their parents’ house, first time lying to go to a party, first time saying they were together at home when they weren’t, first time getting drunk in the streets and then walking all the way home, first time smoking a cigarette, first time getting a ride from strangers to a party… they were teenage best friends and they were making the most of it. That year was also the first time they had sex. With each other.
It happened one night after Louis’ mom had given them a ride back from a foam party, they had been a bit drunk and more handsy than usual. Once in Louis’ bed, one thing led to another and a kiss, followed by a make-out session, turned in Louis going down on Luke. It had been a flurry of flashes the morning after, what with neither of them knowing what to do with a person of the same sex and the alcohol making them both sloppier. They never talked about it. It was fine. It was just experimenting, but Louis had liked it. A lot. He was sure everybody experimented with people of the same sex, you know, just so they knew what they liked once they found the girl they were gonna spend the rest of their lives with. Easy. Nothing wrong with that.
And so, Louis went on with his summer. He met people. He had fun. He hung out with new and old friends. That’s how he found himself, sixteen years old and ready to have the time of his life, at a 24-hour-footie-competition. It was somewhat of a charity event held by the local firefighters to raise money for a new fire truck. Louis and his teammates were scheduled to play once in the morning, twice in the afternoon and then once again in the evening if they won, and again in the early hours of the day in case they won again. The prospect was exciting. They were the youngest team there and everybody’s parents came by in turns to check in on them. That was until evening came.
Louis saw a couple of his classmates and stopped by to say hi. They introduced him to the respective girlfriend and boyfriend, who were competing at the event. When the chit-chat dwindled, he left. During the night, after the firefighters closed the fire station’s gates for safety reasons, Louis found he wasn’t as tired as the majority of his teammates, so he stayed up with the other two who were too excited to sleep. They went back outside and, since one of his teammates already knew her, they started talking to his classmate’s girlfriend he'd been introduced to earlier. They hung out with her teammates and, eventually, ended up talking by themselves just outside the sleeping area.
Audrey was her name, and she was interesting. She was a year and a bit older (eighteen already!), and she seemed so sure of herself, assertive and funny, cheeky if not a bit downright dirty in her flirting. Louis assumed it was harmless since she’d been taken with his classmate for a couple of years. Besides, Louis loved flirting, it was his number one game. Flirt back and forth they did, bringing people in to play footie when the conversation lulled and drinking a little when the adults weren’t watching (not that anyone was watching them to begin with, but alas).
Towards the early hours of the morning – Louis’ team hadn’t won the last match, so they didn’t have to play until 9AM and neither did Audrey’s since they were all drunk – they went to lay down in the sleeping area, which turned out to be the common room of the fire station scattered with God-knows how many sleeping bags, yoga or air mattresses and more sleeping people on every surface available. Louis and Audrey found a spot behind the armchair Louis’ teammates had designated as their base and sat down. Audrey encouraged Louis to lay his head on her lap and started caressing his hair and massage his scalp. Everything felt very intimate, and Louis was torn between enjoying it and feeling guilty for accepting the girl’s attentions when she clearly already had a boyfriend. After a while Audrey said she was tired and lay down right in front of Louis, barely an inch of space between their faces.
His brain was short circuiting – he knew it was wrong; everything was on the verge of too much. Louis had been feeling the spark of attraction, but it was forbidden, he knew that. It had to stay PG. At the same time, Louis had always had this need to be accepted, to feel wanted, and it was becoming more and more difficult to resist the pull and not give in, feel that glorious sparkling way he so liked. While this whole debate was going on in his head, Audrey seemed very sure where she wanted to take things. After breathing each other’s air for what felt like an hour, Audrey nudged Louis’ nose with hers, pausing for a second before going in and kissing him.
Louis’ head turned empty. The choice had been made, and he was done for. He didn’t even have to choose in the end, someone else had done it for him and now he just had to play along. It was simple enough.
They ended up making out for the better part of an hour on the floor, dawn ever closer. At some point Louis tried to raise the issue of people knowing, since Audrey was cheating but she shushed him, assuring him nobody would ever know, her people were trust-worthy.
Once they got up and out of the building, they kept interacting as if nothing had happened. They watched the last matches being played and hung out with those from their group who had woken up. Everything was fine, until Louis made eye contact with that one guy in his team who knew Audrey. His eyes sparkled in a “I-know-what-you-did-way”, and he smirked. Fuck. Louis was fucked, no one was supposed to know about this. Louis gestured for him to come outside, and he followed him.
“Hey”, Louis said.
“Listen”, his teammate started without preamble, “I know Audrey can be… intense, but, as her friend, and yours”, he took a big breath in, “I have to ward you off”.
Neither of them said anything.
“Why?”
“You know why.”
“I honestly don’t”, Louis was playing dumb, fishing for information. They both knew that.
“Look, she likes to have fun and that’s her prerogative”, Louis nodded, and the boy continued, “But she has a boyfriend, and I don’t care for him, I really don’t. Neither do I like him, but she’s not as good as you’re seeing her right now, Louis.”
“…Okay?”, he ventured. If Louis were honest with himself, in hindsight, he could have seen where his teammate was trying to get to with this speech; in the moment, though, he was only thoroughly confused.
“Don’t get involved, she’s bad news, man. I mean it.”
With that and a shrug, his teammate’s shpiel ended and he retreated in the building. If Louis had had his head on his shoulders, such a warning would have left him reeling, but he was a sixteen-year-old about to leave home for a year, nothing could hold him down, he felt invincible. He didn’t pay any mind to his teammate’s words.
In the end, Audrey and he took a walk in the nearby park. Light was coming and soon everything would have been clearly visible once again, people would have been wandering to and fro around the station and the make-shift field. It felt like they had no more time. They found a bench and sat down, talking and holding hands.
Audrey’s hands soon started straying away from his arms, calculatedly exploring Louis’ body. He’d been touched before, he’d even touched people before, but it had never felt quite this intimate, quite this intense, quite this alluding. He wasn’t sure he liked where this was going but his voice was nowhere to be found. The girl seemed on a mission, and he didn’t feel like he was in charge of his own body anymore. She ended up feeling him up through his trackie shorts, palming him till his dick had gotten a bit stiff, then she slid her hand inside and touched him directly. It wasn’t nice, but it also wasn’t unpleasant. It felt like a sort of nothing to him, but the contact with his skin still made him gasp and squirm. He didn’t come nor did he return the favor. After a while he just checked his phone.
“My mom’s here to pick me up”, he said and left.