Fifteen Minutes (Zarry AU)

Chapter 3

They have another long kiss on the curb, Harry’s hands cupping her face, before he hails a cab and waves her off. As soon as it turns the corner, he heads back into the pub, looking for someone he recognises as he makes his way towards the back bar.

Chloe finds him first and she’s so mad she’s fidgeting, her arms crossed as she tilts her head to look at him through her untidy fringe. ‘Who was that?’

‘No one,’ he says. He has to shout it over whoever’s on stage so there’s no way it sounds casual and he needs it to because he can’t have another fight with her.

He wishes – wishes – that he listened to Nick when he said that the friends with benefits thing was a myth. ‘One of you always falls in love,’ he told him, but Harry was more concerned about who Nick had fallen in love with than what was going to happen with Chloe. After all, she was so cool – so Camden – with her white blonde hair and gum piercing. Harry had never met a girl like her, a girl who played the drums and read Gloria Steinem and walked around naked, so the first time she got into the shower with him, he didn’t know what to do. He thought shit like that only happened in porn films, but there she was, her soapy hand working his dick and when he came with a stunned grunt, he couldn’t help but wonder what Gloria Steinem would make of it all.

Months of furious fucking followed and Harry thought he had it all, he got to rehearse with Chloe and the rest of the band all day, then go home and have sex with her until they fell asleep in a sweaty heap on her bedroom floor. He thought they were cool – she said they were cool – until the night they did their first gig at the Dublin Castle and he stumbled home with someone else. He was too drunk to notice the filthy looks she was giving him all night, it wasn’t until the next morning when the girl he pulled – he can’t even remember her name – was in the kitchen making toast and Chloe marched up to her and snatched the jar of Nutella out of her hand that he realised she was pissed off.

‘That’s mine!’

‘Chill, Chlo’,’ he told her, putting his hands up. ‘It’s just Nutella.’

‘Fine!’ Chloe spat, her eyes wet. ‘Have it, Harry! Have it all!’

She threw the jar at him and when he ducked out of the way and it hit the wall, he realised Nick was right: You can’t fuck someone every night and not feel something.

Harry doesn’t. It’s been two years and he still doesn’t feel a thing. He’s never said that out loud, though, because he’s pretty sure there’s something wrong with him. After all, Chloe’s almost perfect. She’s sweet and funny and an awesome drummer – Dave Grohl awesome – so he has no idea why. He cares about her, of course. He’d take a bar stool to anyone who talked shit about her, but he doesn’t think about her when she’s not there. You’re not supposed to forget about people when they leave the room.

He’s an asshole, he knows. He should put a stop to it because he’s fucking her up. He hears her crying sometimes, at night, when the rest of the band has passed out and he’s heading upstairs after putting whoever he’s just shagged in a cab. He’ll walk past Chloe’s room and hear her and it’s the worst sound in the world, almost as bad as hearing his mother cry. So he knocks on her door because he’s not sure what makes him more of an asshole, going to her or ignoring her. But he shouldn’t – he knows that now – because it just makes it worse. He thought it was the sex, all the times they’ve fucked on the kitchen table, drunk and laughing when his stray elbow sends the saltshaker flying, that was messing things up, but it’s that. It’s holding her until she stops crying and letting her fall asleep in his arms. Then it starts all over again in the morning when they have slow, sleepy sex, his hands holding onto the pillow under her head as she closes her eyes and tells him that she loves him between pants and he pretends not to hear. So yes, he’s an asshole. He’s an absolute, unrepentant asshole and in three pints time, when he looks at Chloe and thinks that maybe – one day – he could love her, he’ll do it again.