Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 3

Harry’s weakness for alpha males is well documented. He enjoys being dominated, enjoys the pull of big hands and the weight of someone on top of him, but he enjoys not giving in more, overthrowing them with a flick of his tongue and bringing them to their knees with a finger. That’s why they keep coming back. It isn’t for the sex – they could fuck any one – it’s about more than that. Not just his discretion or the opportunity to do things to him that make their hands shake as they follow him across the line they drew in the sand a few minutes before, but it’s also about giving into him. About letting go and knowing that he’ll be there to break their fall.

So the footballer he’s seeing – let’s call him Karl – is his wild card. That’s what Charlotte refers to him as, anyway, and Harry supposes he is. His other clients are older and married with children not much younger than he is. They take him to dinner at Claridge’s and watch his lips as he eats his steak and listens to them complain about the house they’re building in Umbria. But Karl is younger than him and just wants to fuck in his big white bed in his big white house that was in OK! magazine last month.

Charlotte can’t stand him. She thinks he’s vulgar, with his shaved head and Bermondsey accent. ‘He should be a plumber,’ she always says with a slight sneer when Harry mentions him, fiddling with her wedding ring, but that’s what Harry likes about him. Yes, he’s cocky, but he’s spun something out of nothing. Karl did it. He got out. He didn’t listen to the people who told him to go to university, the ones who shook their heads and told him that for every David Beckham there are three hundred other kids who end up stacking shelves in a supermarket. And guess what? He scored more last season than David Beckham did his entire career so maybe he is cocky, but he has every right to be.

He’d be stacking shelves in a supermarket if he wasn’t.

Harry can’t help but admire that. Okay, Karl’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, as his mother would say, but he has a certain charm. A swagger. And he has a body that Harry wants to lick, his skin tight and tattooed and always too warm. Plus, he’s twenty-one so, without being crude, he has a lot of stamina. He’s never late or tired or distracted by his phone. He just wants to be fucked and Harry obliges, fucking him into the bed until Karl’s face is red and he’s panting that he can’t take it. But he does – he always does – and while he doesn’t make Harry’s hand shake, it’s worth it just for that, to see the look on his face when Harry takes him to the edge and dangles him off.

When he got married last month, Harry wasn’t surprised, but after their final fuck – the pink petals from his boutonnière falling at Harry’s feet – Harry indulged him in one last kiss because he’s a lot of things, but he isn’t cruel. He knew it wasn’t over, that he’d call, and when he does, two days into his honeymoon, Harry’s heart sings at the complement, but he doesn’t answer. Charlotte will turn his bollocks into earrings when she finds out, but Harry doesn’t care because there are still some lines he won’t cross, it seems, and he’s glad because he thought he couldn’t see them any more.