It is a rainy Saturday afternoon when Louis is startled by the doorbell that rips him out of his cleaning session. He has just started dusting his bookshelves, mimicking Baby Spice's part of Wannabe while shaking his hips to the song coming out of his speakers. He stops his dance party and presses the pause button on his phone, before walking towards his front door with furrowed eyebrows. As far as he is concerned, he's expecting nobody.

Completely forgetting to look through the peephole first, Louis opens the door and is surprised as the small frame of his girlfriend comes in sight, next to a rather huge suitcase.

"Hey," she says with a shy smile, taking a step forward to hug him quickly, while Louis is a little overwhelmed, not knowing where to put his arms and the duster in his hands.

His awkwardness and her hurry result in their heads crashing together in a hurtful way, making her ramble apologies and Louis telling her it's nothing, although he can see little stars swirling behind his eyelids. They always seem to lose their feeling for each other a little when they're so long apart, he thinks.

He steps aside and motions for her to come in, grabbing the handle of her luggage to pull it inside. After setting it down in the bedroom, he pads over to the living room, but keeps standing awkwardly in the doorframe. Jane is sitting on the sofa, brushing a hand through her long ponytail.

"Umm...," he begins, "I didn't, you know, forget anything, right?"

"What? Oh, no... I thought it would be a nice surprise to come home earlier," she replies, and Louis doesn't miss the hint of reproach in her voice, probably because he isn't showing the right amount of enthusiasm.

"I could have picked you up, you know...," he says, trying to not start off an argument within the first ten minutes.

"Yeah but as I said, I wanted to surprise you and asking you to pick me up would have ruined everything. I took a taxi."

Louis slowly nods his head. She probably only meant well and here he is, being thrown off by the fact that his girlfriend came home unexpectedly. He should be happy to see her after so many weeks, but actually he would have preferred to know about her plans to show up. It's not directly that she's disturbing anything but still... It is bringing a little more chaos in his routine than he finds bearable.

"I don't even get a welcome kiss?" Jane teases, ripping him out of his thoughts. He focuses his eyes on her to see if she is angry, but she actually smiles. She has probably noticed that Louis is a little taken aback by her appearance and is now trying to brighten the mood.

"Oh, umm... Sorry," Louis replies with a slight smirk, pushing himself away from the doorframe and strolling over to the sofa. He stops in front of her and bends down to quickly peck her lips, but she immediately wraps her hands around his neck to hold him in place and deepen the kiss.

He hums and tries to pull away after what feels like an appropriate amount of time for a welcome kiss, but she holds onto his shoulders and guides him to sit down next to her. He crouches on the sofa, awkwardly placing his hands on her waist when she straddles his lap. He has never been that uncomfortable with her, he doesn't understand what's wrong with him. She finally breaks the kiss, looking him in the eyes and brushing her thumb over his cheek.

"I missed you," she coos, tipping her chin forward to kiss him again, but Louis tilts his head to the side, so she only catches his cheek.

Louis would love to tell her that he missed her too and he certainly did, but he must also admit that didn't mind their sparse contact over the past few weeks as much as usually. His mind has been somewhere else. He has been busy brooding over a certain wedding and everything else that came with it and then scolding himself again for allowing his thoughts to drift back to this.

"How was your exam?" he asks instead of giving her a proper reply, mostly to change the subject. He can see disappointment flash over her eyes, but she swallows it down.

"Which one?"

"Oh, I mean generally. Like, all of them... in general," he rambles, trying to avoid the embarrassment of admitting that he didn't really pay attention when Jane told him about her exam schedule.

She scrutinises him for a moment before she goes with it, "Well, the first one – history of English literature – was quite easy... The only thing I wasn't sure about was...," she begins, Louis' brain shutting off already. He really tries to show interest in what his girlfriend is doing and what she's passionate about, but when it comes to medieval poetry and Romanticism, he just can't keep up anymore.

All he can do now is humming every once in a while, and nodding constantly, somehow trying to follow her words. Sometimes he throws in questions that are vague enough for him to seem interested but don't expose his cluelessness. Occasionally he tries to start telling a story of something that happened to him recently but usually she manages to draw the conversation back on herself in the end.

Louis nearly never questions it when it turns out to be more of a monologue than an actual chat between them. It is true that her life is much more exciting than his, logically she has much more to tell than he does. It's not that he wouldn't have anything to say, he actually has. And if it is only which thoughts crossed his mind when he was standing on the balcony this morning, drinking his tea and watching the sunrise, before dark clouds spread across the sky. He can't expect her to show interest in that, though. Nobody would care about something like that.

Louis has no reason to open up about his stupid morning pondering either, when there are more urgent, more important issues to discuss – things he definitely should tell her, whether she cares or not, just because she deserves to know about them. For example, that his trip to the north did not only contain the planned film shoot but also crashing a wedding and stumbling over someone he used to know many years ago – especially who exactly this someone is to him, although he would rather die than talk about this ever again.

As a responsible, good boyfriend it would only be fair to tell her about this. He has always liked to believe that he is the most open and the most honest with her, just as she is with him. He would love to explain the fact that he has never told her about this part of his past with it being unimportant, so irrelevant, that he simply forgot about it. The truth is, he has spent the last ten years trying to lock these things deep down somewhere at the back of his mind, swearing to himself that he would never ever waste thought on it again.

Considering the course of the last weeks, he has failed terribly at doing so. Meeting Harry stirred everything up again. It forced him to admit all this is not as meaningless as he wants it to be – not meaningless enough to justify withholding it. But he can't help himself. It could be called cowardice, laziness, carelessness. Something is holding him back from letting her know. Probably the fact that the isn't even sure himself what this - what Harry - means to him.

Before figuring this out, before finally knowing for sure that the answer is Nothing at all, he would prefer keeping it to himself. He doesn't want to lose her because of a temporarily confused state of mind. He knows that one of her talents is overreacting, interpreting way too much into trivial things. Once she didn't talk to him for days because he forgot the bouquet for her mother when she visited them and afterwards dared to ask if it's really such a big deal.

He isn't even sure what he fears her to be most angry about. Finding out what originally happened between Harry and him? Never telling her? Meeting him again? Again, hesitating to tell her? The thing is, he doesn't want to find out. He would love to be able to say that she will show understanding, but that's something he can't be sure of. Anyways, he needs to focus on her again, on their relationship. Maybe it's good that she is here now. It will help to forget, to ignore, to suppress.

"Lou? Are you listening?" she suddenly says, waving a hand in front of his face. He snaps out of his thoughts, realising that he has been drifted off for the past couple of minutes. He has no idea what she has been talking about.

"Sorry, I was miles away," he mumbles apologetically, nervously brushing his fringe out of his forehead. He can see her pursing her lips, her shoulders slumping in resignation.

"I should have assumed that you don't care about uni shit," she says, but Louis can't tell if there's more understanding or reproach in her statement.

"Hey, what if we go out tonight?" he quickly suggests, mostly to change the subjects but also to show he cares about her. "There's a new club somewhere down the street and we haven't been out like this for ages."

Fortunately, she goes with it and agrees, her jaw still a little clenched in anger but she seems to decide for letting it go. Louis can only hope that the rest of the day and the time she's staying will be better. He will be doing his best to make this happen.