Fifteen Minutes (Zarry AU)

Chapter 15

Zayn’s a contradiction, his mother says. A head fuck, Ben prefers. He won’t drink orange juice because he read somewhere that it gives you stomach cancer but smokes twenty a day, and he never calls home but tells Doniya off if she leaves it more than a week between calls. And that’s another contradiction because while Zayn adores his friends and family, he hates people. Hates them. They interrupt him and distract him and sit at his favourite desk in the library. He hates how they smell, hates having to listen to their inane conversations about EastEnders in the queue for the cash point, hates how they have to sit next to him on the tube when there are plenty of other seats.

Zayn hates that most of all because he doesn’t like to be touched. Since he moved to London he’s made his peace with accidental contact – hips nudging in the rush hour crush, knuckles catching in the shuffle for space in a crowded lift – but when people do it on purpose it drives him batshit. He loves London, he loves how big and bright and loud it is compared to Bradford with its rows and rows of terrace houses and flat grey sky, but in London it’s as if wherever he’s standing, he’s in someone’s way. If he stops in the street to look in a shop window, suddenly there’s someone next to him, or if he’s in the supermarket, trying to decide if the name brand baked beans are worth the extra ten pence, someone will reach over him to get something from the shelf over his head.

If Zayn had his way, he’d never see another soul again; he’d just stay in the loft and paint all day. But then, at night, when his sheets feel too cold and his bed feels too big, he aches to feel someone next to him, to feel the nearness of them. He’ll close his eyes and imagine someone beneath him, gasping and hot and alive. Imagine them saying his name like no one ever has, like it’s a secret only they know.

So sometimes, when a hip nudges his on the tube or someone’s knuckles catch on his in a lift, he doesn’t move, he just stays there, enjoying the moment of contact, fleeting as it is. He doesn’t know why, but then that’s what makes Zayn a contradiction. It’s as if the two sides of his brain can never agree: the vulnerable, creative side that paints things other people can’t see and still believes in things like fate and destiny and love at first sight, and the deeply practical side that tells him that stuff is bollocks, that he’ll be back home in five years, teaching art at Tong High.

That he’s better off on his own.

The practical side usually wins, which is why, when his hand strays to Harry’s side of the bed to find that he isn’t there, Zayn knows that he’s gone. But as soon as he thinks it, the other side of his brain kicks in – the side that told Zayn to kiss Harry in the corridor last night, to believe what he was saying – so when he lifts his head off the pillow and looks over at the kitchen, he expects to find Harry dusted with flour, trying to make pancakes. When he isn’t, Zayn turns his head to look at the bathroom door. It’s closed and that extends his hope for another second or two as he waits to hear the shower running, but there’s nothing. Just the sound of his heart in his ears.

He’s gone to get a bacon sandwich, Zayn tells himself as he rolls over and turns off the alarm on his phone, hoping to find a text from Harry saying as much. He does have a message and his breath catches in his throat when he opens it but his shoulders fall as he realises it’s from his mother. Still on for brekkie, sweetheart? 10am at Albertinis? xxx

It’s just gone 9a.m. so if he’s going to get to Kings Cross for 10a.m. he needs to get in the shower now, but he can’t move as he stares at the front door, willing it to open and for Harry to bound in with a half-empty bag of donuts. He doesn’t know how long he stares at it, but his head is aching when he finally looks away and checks his phone. He looks at the screen, at the photo he took of the sky last month when he and Harry were walking home from the Superstore. Harry was drunk and singing Sabotage (which sounded ridiculous in his Cheshire accent) and Zayn tried to take a picture of him but Harry moved so he got the sky instead. He’ll be fucked if that doesn’t sum them up perfectly – never in time with one another – so Zayn calls him. It goes to voicemail and he tells himself that he’s forgotten to charge it again as he leaves a message. ‘Call me back, fuck face,’ he says with a laugh and it sounds so fake. Not sitcom fake, but like the time his grandmother called to say that his cousin died and his mother was so shocked that she laughed then burst into tears.