"I see it all here in colour

It's such a beautiful dream

And nothing's gonna go right

Can't you just stay for a while?

Can't you just stay, stay, stay, stay?"

✰

"I'm sorry."

Arlo groans, the sound muffled as she presses her face into her pillow. Laying on her stomach, the cool morning air breezing in from the window causes goosebumps to rise on the bare skin of her back as the comforter bunches at the bottom of her spine.

"I'm really sorry."

Arlo turns her head to the side, just enough to peek open a single brown eye at the boy lying next to her. A frown is plastered on Luke's pretty face, his blue eyes are bright in the morning light, although they're filled with guilt and Arlo hates it.

"Really, really sorry." Luke continues, pouting out his bottom lip in a vice attempt to get her attention.

Arlo merely pouts her lips right back at him, giving her boy a taste of his own medicine before she shoves her face back into the fabric of the pillowcase. "Stop saying that." The words are so muffled, that Luke almost can't hear them and if he weren't so upset he might've laughed at how silly she was being.

"But I hurt you." Luke nearly whines as he props himself up on his side, supporting his body with his forearm as he leans closer to her, wishing more than anything to have her in his arms again.

"No you didn't" Another muffled reply comes from Arlo.

Luke scoffs, his fingertips beginning to trace down her spine. "Bullshit." He mumbles, sounding as though he was truly upset with himself. "I saw the look on your face when you woke up."

Arlo lifts her face from the pillow, the ghost of a mischievous grin crossing her features for a fleeting moment as she glances up at the boy. "The look on my face was because you kept me all night snoring."

Luke rolls his eyes before ducking his head down until his lips are only inches away from brushing her ear. "I've kept you up at night doing a lot of things but snoring is not one of them, sweetheart."

In a split second, the upper hand is flipped back in Luke's favor and the smallest whine leaves Arlo's lips as she gives up, smooshing her cheek into the pillow. Luke gazes down fondly at her, thankful to finally have an obstructed view of her face in the early morning light.

Although he was being slightly teasing, he was worried about her more than she could ever probably comprehend. Luke knew that in being her first he would cause her pain regardless, but he didn't expect it to make him feel so horrible. Especially, considering he was on cloud fucking nine during it.

In the early hours of the morning when she collapsed in his arms, her head on his chest and her small hands clutching the comforter to her bare chest, he'd attempted to keep her awake. Luke just couldn't help the multitude of questions and concerns falling from his lips.

Arlo, who was practically unconscious from the moment she laid down, mumbled a few times in response to the first questions, but even after she'd succumbed to sleep that didn't stop Luke. In fact, Arlo wasn't even sure if her boy had even gone to sleep himself.

Granted, she fell asleep around two in the morning, and only five hours later at seven in the morning, Luke had to be up to go to the airport. In their short time traveling with Luke, Arlo learned that he preferred to stay up the night before and sleep on the plane, so it was likely he'd done the same the night before.

The girl has a hazy memory of reaching for her phone and setting an alarm before she fell asleep just in case Luke ended up being hesitant to wake her before she left. Although she was pleasantly surprised when she woke up to him pressing his lips to the crook of her neck rather than a blaring alarm.

Consequently, Arlo also woke up to a sharp pain in-between her thighs. The pain wasn't unbearable, but the position she'd fallen asleep in of laying on Luke's chest, his legs tangled between her own, was certainly not helping the soreness.

Luke's heart had dropped straight to his stomach when she woke up fully, the first thing leaving her lips being a pained whine rather than the sound of his name and a sweet good morning. From that moment, he'd spent the next half an hour apologizing and pressing kisses to her bare skin, trying to figure out what he could do in order to take the pain away.

Arlo thought it was sweet at first considering he could've been the opposite and not cared about her at all- eventually though, his guilt was making her feel guilty herself and she couldn't take it any longer.

Luke trails his fingertips down her shoulder blades, the comforter bunched at his waist. His lips follow his eyes that had been scanning over her flushed cheeks, leaning down to leave a few delicate kisses.

A soft smile pulls at Arlo's lips as his own brush her nose, the cool sensation of his lip ring tickling her skin. She rolls onto her side to face him, a thin white sheet held to her chest. "Can you hold me again?" She pouts.

"It hurts you." Luke frowns, a pang of guilt radiating through his chest.

Arlo rolls her eyes playfully, taking the liberty of scooting closer to him, laying on his chest regardless of the fact that he was correct in assuming it hurt. Especially, when she slings one of her legs over his hip, allowing them to be impossibly closer.

"I saw the way you just scrunched up your nose." Luke pouts, a small sigh leaving his lips as he tugs her closer regardless. Secretly he was glad she'd taken the step to come closer and slot herself against his body, for he was fighting the urge to do it for her all morning.

"Had to sneeze." Arlo's lips turn up and he can feel the movement against the skin of his chest, his smile mirroring her own.

"Mhm." Luke hums, his mind unwilling to let go of the fact that she was hurting and it was because of him. Even more infuriatingly, he couldn't fix it. "I wish it hadn't happened last night."

Luke says the words not even thinking about how they would sound to her. Really, he was so caught up in his own guilt that he didn't process that the words had even left his lips. Although, as Arlo's face falls and devastation takes over her features he's snapped back to reality.

"You regret it?" Arlo's voice cracks and a pit forms in her stomach as she waits for his response in anticipation.

"Fuck, I didn't mean it like that, Lo." Luke fights the urge to sit up immediately- she was on his chest and the harsh movement might hurt her so he tightens his arms around her instead, one large hand cupping her jaw as he forces her to look at him. "Never. I'd never regret anything with you. Especially not this." He rambles.

He can feel the way her heart is pounding, only making him feel worse. "What did you mean then?" Arlo asks hesitantly.

"I just feel like a fucking douchebag leaving for London only hours after what we did." Luke explains frantically. "That's all I meant, baby, I promise. You know I'm fuckin' obsessed with you. You could break my heart and I wouldn't regret the time I spent watching you do it." A relieved breath leaves him as her face softens. "I just don't want to leave. I want to lay in bed for half of the day and spend the rest of it taking care of you like you deserve."

Luke leans forward to press his lips to her own, wanting to kiss the slight frown on her face away. He mentally curses himself for the panic that he caused to cross her face as he pulls back to examine her features with concern-filled eyes. "You believe me?"

"Mhm." Arlo hums, slightly dazed from the emotion in which he used to kiss her. "Just scared me for a second."

Instead of risking letting his words fail him again, Luke merely pulls her closer. She rests her head back on his chest where she'd been laying comfortably before, her own chest rising and falling slowly as she fights off her exhaustion.

Luke's eyes find the bare expanse of her back once again as he memorizes every inch of her, every freckle and small scar from childhood scrapes. "You have a cluster of freckles on your back that make a heart." He points out, his fingertips tracing over them.

"Only you would notice something like that." Arlo says fondly, a small shiver coursing through her body at his feather-light touch. "That's one of my favorite things about you." She confesses.

"What do you mean?" Luke furrows his brows.

Luke is so used to silently observing her, memorizing every inch of her skin and pretty mind that he didn't even realize when he did it. The difference was he didn't usually speak it aloud. Most of those thoughts are sprawled in his tattered notebook.

Arlo shrugs, her own fingertips running along the dips and curves of his chest. "You just think about things in such a unique way. Especially, the ones you care about. It's really beautiful." She smiles as Luke's heartbeat physically speeds up, the thumping being able to be heard from her position on his chest.

"You're so good at disguising meaningful moments in your lyrics." Arlo continues, her fingertips finding Luke's free hand that lays on his chest. She intertwines them and Luke brings their connected hands briefly to his lips, placing a kiss on the back of her hand. "That line in Castaway about 'closing the chapter', you were referring to how we met in a bookstore but nobody would ever know it."

Luke's cheeks flush and he shakes his head in denial. "It's no big deal, Lo. It's just me being selfish really." Luke says lowly, his morning rasp favoring him as a shiver goes down her spine when he speaks. "I'm so fuckin' jealous when it comes to you that I can't stand anybody else knowing the little things about us, not even in songs made to play for millions of people."

I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Arlo merely rolls her eyes at the way he deflects. "It doesn't matter why you do it, Luke. It's still beautiful." She says honestly. "I feel so lucky to be able to know your mind."

"Oh, yeah?" Luke smirks, pulling her closer. God, he didn't think he could ever be close enough to her. "Good thing it's all yours then. Every piece of me."

How'd you make me fall in love with you the very moment we met, Lo? Do you know how rare that is?

He goes back to tracing over the heart-shaped cluster of freckles on her back. "I never knew how you felt about me hiding things about us in the band's lyrics." Luke confesses. "I wasn't sure if you'd pick up on it, but I should have known from the way you annotate your books that you wouldn't let a goddamn detail slip."

"I love it." Arlo says simply, causing Luke's heart to beat even faster.

Deciding that it had been far too long since he'd heard his girl laugh, Luke decides to distract them both from their slight pain- hers being physical and his from the struggle of biting his tongue when all he wanted to do was tell her that he loves her.

"I'm going to write a lyric about the heart-shaped freckles on your back next." Luke smirks, pinching the bare skin of her hip teasingly and eliciting a giggle from her pretty lips. "Nobody will know, not even the boys."

Arlo sits up, ignoring the throbbing sensation in-between her thighs as she now hovers over him with her plans flat against his chest, her mouth agape. "They're singing the lyrics, Luke. How are you going to hide it from them?"

"Easy." Luke says, a satisfied grin tugging at his lips as he realizes that the sheet Arlo had tugged up to her chest all morning had fallen down as she readjusted herself, her bare chest marked by his lips on full display. "I'll write a song about something to do with hearts- Valentine's Day or some shit and they won't question it."

"Call it Valentine too, just so it's not as obvious, you know?" Arlo quips playfully, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

"I think I can manage to fit it on this album." Luke says, his voice trailing off as his eyes continuously flick downwards, confusing her.

That is, until Arlo realizes that the sheet around her body had shifted down, exposing her. With a blush tinting her cheeks, she rolls her eyes at the boyish look on Luke's face before hastily tugging the sheet back up to her chest.

Luke's jaw drops, his hands finding her hips. "Rude. I wasn't done looking." He smirks, seeing the shyness in her brown eyes clear as day. "Baby, you do realize that a few hours ago I was nine inches deep-"

"Luke!" Arlo gasps, quickly covering his lips with her palm.

Just as she expected, Luke isn't deterred in the slightest, his lips turning up against her palm as he pulls her impossibly close. "What?" His words are muffled as he draws out the word.

Arlo purses her lips in faux disappointment as both of them get lost in each other, forgetting about their ticking time together. "You're insane." She says, her teeth catching her bottom lip as she suppresses a grin.

"Absolutely." Luke's voice is quieter now, all of the teasing nature leaving his tone as he really takes in the sight in front of him. The morning sun backlighting her figure making her glow like a fucking angel, the slight flush of her cheeks, the spark of genuine happiness in her brown eyes, the feeling of her bare skin against his own.

"Because I'd make a deal with the devil just to stop time at this moment."

✰

Luke feels undeniably empty as he walks through the airport. He'd never flown without Arlo and although she couldn't come to the airport for her own safety, Luke regretted leaving her behind more than anything.

He takes his time to stop and talk to every fan, mentally reminding himself that the fans who vandalized the shop didn't reflect all of their fans. To his surprise, meeting people who love his music, who said they loved him, made him feel slightly better.

As he poses for pictures with the fans, Luke is suddenly thankful that Arlo didn't let him leave Calum's house in his pajama pants like he begged her to. He may have been forced out of her arms earlier, but taking the time to throw on a leather jacket and a black beanie was probably for the best.

"You guys ever been to London?" Ashton asks the group as they walk away from the crowd of fans, their faces flushed from the affection they'd received.

"Nope." Michael pops his lip and Luke shakes his head no as well.

"Yeah, when I was like a baby." Calum says, his eyes angled towards the ceiling as he tries to recall the memory. "Do you think we'll like it?"

"I'm just excited for the afterparty of the award show." Michael says simply, scrolling through his phone and interacting with the fans that already had begun to post their pictures from the airport. "We don't even have to pick out our own outfits, how sick is that?"

"Kinda terrifying." Ashton admits. "I've never been to a party where I didn't wear skinny jeans and a t-shirt."

The rest of the boys continue to ramble on as Luke trails behind, in his own head as he usually was. It was still early in the morning so he already wasn't feeling talkative, but the boys also knew how difficult it was for him to leave Arlo. Hell, they'd miss her company too.

Arlo kept them all sane, that was undeniable.

It's also undeniable that as Luke steps on the plane and Arlo, into the doorway of her broken home, neither of them has any idea how much their lives are about to change.