Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 2

Okay. Whatever you’re thinking is wrong. He isn’t paid by the hour and he certainly doesn’t hang around hotel bars smiling at lonely businessmen. He works for an agency that you’ve never heard of and you never will. It doesn’t have a website or a number to call when you’re tired and lonely and drinking mini-bar scotch because your hotel room feels so far from home you don’t know if you’ll ever find your way back.

The agency, if you can even call it that, is basically one woman: Charlotte Gordon a Grace Kelly blonde with a sharp tongue and an even sharper smile who works out of her house, a perfectly-balanced Georgian in Chelsea that Harry can suck dick for the rest of his life for and will still never afford. But then that’s how she earned it, she told him the first time he went there, by marrying one of her clients. She said it with a grand wave of her hand as if to say, All of this could be yours, too, Harry. And it is a fairytale, he supposes, if fairytales end with rattling around in a huge house while you wait for your husband to have a heart attack. So Harry smiled and admired the Barbara Hepworth sculpture in the garden because it was kinder than telling her that it wasn’t his fairytale. He was only doing it to pay off his student loans then to pay for his flat and now he’s only doing it until he has enough money to move to New York so he can write that book he’s been scribbling onto napkins for the last three years.

Until then he’s Nathan. Not that you’ll ever meet him. He may smile and hold a door open for you or sit next to you at a bar, smelling faintly of something expensive – something Italian, sunshine and espresso and something else you can’t quite put your finger on that makes you feel like you’re somewhere else – but you’ll never know his name. And even if he tells you – and he won’t – Nathan Styles doesn’t exist. Google him and all you’ll find is a car salesman from Chesterfield.

No. Nathan Styles meets you, if he’s interested, and he isn’t because he already has five clients – two politicians, two CEOs and a premiership footballer – and that’s quite enough, thank you. They’re each allocated one weeknight, a date they tend to keep wherever they are in the world. He’s been on business trips with clients, wandering around Brussels drinking coffee while they’re discussing the Eurozone crisis, and on holiday with them, in a room two floors down from their wives who wake up in the middle of the night and pretend not to notice that they’re alone. He even saw one client on his wedding day, the pink petals from his boutonnière falling at Harry’s feet like confetti as Harry fucked him half an hour before he walked down the aisle.

He’s seen the world, seen it all and he loves it all. Not just the breathless biting sex in hotel rooms that cost more a night than his rent, but being the one thing they can’t live without. He’ll cross the Atlantic just to spend a few hours with someone but it isn’t about seeing them – it’s never about them, not really – it’s about being wanted. About being the guy they’ll risk their careers for, their families for, because they can’t wait a week to see him. He knows all of their secrets. He could ruin them if he wanted, bring the country to its knees, but he never would. He just likes to know that he can when they can’t wait until they get to the hotel and fuck him in the back of the limo, Harry’s cheek pressed to the backseat so all he can smell is leather, or when he’s listening to another desperate voicemail begging to see him. Men like that don’t beg, but he makes them beg.

He’s not doing it right if they don’t beg.