the record store; vi; 5sos.

"So." He said, after he had taken a small sip of his drink and sat it back down on the table, the liquid lapping from side to side before it settled. "Tell me about you?"

"I'm female." I said, jokingly. "If you didn't already know that."

He rolled his eyes at me, like a parent would at an embarrassing child. "How about I tell you what I know about you, and then you fill in the gaps."

"Sure." I said. "You probably know more about me than I know about myself."

He disregarded my comment before speaking again. "So, you're Hollie. You're a year younger than me, and you've only ever gone to one open mic night. You're pretty and have a thing for the Jonas Brothers." He took a sip of his coffee.

"Well, at least you got my name right!" I said, before taking a sip of my own drink, before looking around the room once more, taking in the surroundings. It was a pretty place, sort of homey, yet commercial, but a good mix of the two. It had changed a lot since I'd last been here, which, when I thought about it, was quite a long time ago.

"I got everything right, Hol." He told me, before speaking again. "You don't mind me calling you that, right?" He suddenly looked embarrassed.

"Hol is good." I said. "But if I get the nickname, you should get one too."

"It's a little hard to shorten mine." He fiddled with the napkin on the table. "But I guess we'll find something."

"Soon, I'll hold you to it." I said, as a took a final sip of the drink out of my cup, and pulling the napkin over my mouth to wipe it.

"Shame." He said. "I was enjoying the drink moustache you'd grown."

"Weirdo." I said, before subsequently checking my face for any remaining drink which decided my face was a better place for it to go than anywhere else.

"Do you prefer Coke or Pepsi?" He asked, clearly not himself taken aback by the strangeness of the question he just asked.

"Pepsi." I dragged the word out. "Why?"

"I just remembered a game I used to play when I was a kid, in the car, to get to know people better. You had to ask each other questions, and whoever couldn't answer one they were given lost. So, I'm starting it now."

"So, no matter how strange the question is, if you can't answer, you loose." I asked.

"Don't girls play this at sleepovers or something?"

"Nope. We eat food and cry over Channing Tatum." I answered honestly. "Or prank call the pizza guy."

"Your go. Ask me the strangest question you can think of. I'll just get you another drink okay." He said as he stood up, and walked his way over to the counter.

By the time he made it back, I had a list of questions in the back of my mind. Most of them were surprisingly normal, but a few weird ones had made their way into the list. He passed me the mug of hot chocolate (I'd chosen something more extravagant than tea, on his request), his hand lingering on the cup as I took it. I placed it down in front of me as he sat down himself, his back arching against the tiny booth he'd chose to sit in.

"Have you ever wondered what it's like to be a girl?" I asked, watching the look of shock come onto his face as I finished the sentence. He started to laugh, the sound making me smile.

"I have, just now." He laughed again. "When was your first kiss?"

"A boy, when I was six. He couldn't stop running, and he sort of ran into my lips." I laughed, actually realising how funny it sounded out loud. "He couldn't look me straight in the face for the rest of the year."

"Okay, that is quite funny." He said, laughing as I had my drink against my lips, making me spill tiny bits of it against my cheek, in the haste to get it away before I would too start choking on it, due to the laughter which I could feel building in my chest. I reached for my paper napkin, before Davie's hand stopped mine. "Let me sort you out."

He put the napkin down before I could say anything else, and hastily rested his hand under my face, swiping away the drink with his thumb. "Thanks." I said, as he took his hand away, replacing it with one of the hands I had laying on the table. I tried to avert my attention elsewhere, but being myself, I could not, and trying to focus on anything other than the hand that was in mine was proving to be almost impossible.

"Are you going to ask me something, then?" The sound of his voice broke the moment, and I began to focus on forming a sentence that was coherent.

"Sure." I said, proud of myself that I had not yet faltered. "Erm, biggest pet peeve?"

He thought for a moment before he spoke. "People who crack their fingers and their neck and stuff." He paused. "Is that strange? It just makes me tense up, I guess."

"It's not that strange." I said, making him flush slightly red before recovering, with laughter. "I just haven't known anyone to get annoyed by something that, you know, you can't stop happening. Normally, it's just something you can stop."

"So, you can stop someone chewing gum loudly, by?" He asked.

"Well, the sound of someone chewing gum isn't annoying to me." I said.

"I see." He said. "You're someone who doesn't get annoyed by much."

"I guess." I said, detaching my hand from his to take another sip of my drink. The liquid was now cold, as I would have thought, but it did not taste terrible, and the taste of cold chocolate was not unbearable, just a mild inconvenience. Davie's hand still rested on the table, but had moved back from the position it was in before, and because host to a packet of sugar, which he was twisting around in his palm.

"Do you want to get out of here?" Davie asked. "There's something I want to show you."

I nodded, and watched him stand, copying his movements as he grabbed his jacket and his phone, before coming round to the other side of the table to wait for me to exit the table myself. He thanked the server who had given him the drinks on the way out with a nod, and grabbed my hand as the bell wrung, signalling the closing of the door.

The night was a little darker as we crossed the road to get to the car, but the street was still buzzing with people, as it was here at night. We seemed to be more active in hours when it was more peaceful. The air was a little colder, and I shivered at the breeze, leading me to quickly release my hand from his as I reached for the zip on my jacket.

"I thought you were going to reject me there." Davie joked, as I replaced my hand into his.

"That guy over there looks pretty good." I joked. He looked at me, and I stuck my tongue out at him, like the immature child I was.

He turned to face me, and mocked a shocked expression on his face. "I think you're just sticking around for the free hot chocolate."

"And maybe the purchaser of the hot chocolate too." I replied, the cold no longer affecting me, and instead, a warm feeling running through my veins.

➳   ➳   ➳

"This is it, then." He said as he uncovered my eyes. In front of me lie probably the best sight of my life, minus various male celebrities that had appeared shirtless in a rare few films.

"Woah." I said, not trying to hide my shock. As a child, I'd loved rare vinyls, collecting the ones that ranged from being signed by everyone who had preformed at music festivals that took place in the 90's to ones that had only been produced a tiny amount of times. What I was looking at, was something I'd never seen in such a magnitude: it was a collection I could only dream of owning.

"There's quite a few here, at the back of the shop. When I first started working here, they saw my interest in the things, so they gave me a key to come back and marvel over them at any time of day, instead of doing it while I was working." He joked. "Mind you, I guess they don't mind. These records have seen more attention in the past couple of years than they did for the rest of their lives."

I took a step forward, marvelling in the sight of everything around me. As cheesy as it sounded, I wanted to remember this moment forever. It was a hobby I thought only a few people shared, and I felt privileged to know someone who was the same as me, in that way.

"Do you like it?" He asked, half sure. Instead of acting with words, which, knowing me I would mess up doing, I turned around and wrapped him into a hug. It took a couple of seconds for him to respond, hugging me back, and after a few more seconds, he spoke again. "I'll take that as a yes."

"You should." I whispered into his shoulder. "I honestly cannot thank you enough."

After he released me, I went around, looking around the rest of the store. I'd never really had enough time to look when I'd been here with Laura. I felt as ease as I walked around, holding up records and CD's I liked the look of, and Davie would tell me about the band and the type of sound they had, sitting on a stool he had found in the stock cupboard.

"This is kind of like one of those scenes in a movie." I said, when I had finished looking at the various music the little shop had to offer. "Where everything is complete and happy."

"It's missing one thing though." Davie said, walking closer to me.

"And that might be?" I asked.

His response was simple, his lips planted onto mine.

- - -

[favourite band #6] 5sos. i thought i'd drop them here after referring to them in chapter one. happy listening to the song on the side: try hard. which was filmed in blackpool pleasure beach, a place where i have been too many times to count on both hands.