Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 7

Zayn arranged for the cab to pick Harry up at the club exactly half an hour after he left so Harry doesn’t realise he’s heading for Cheyne Row until he sees Charlotte’s house, set back from the road with its Liberty purple front door and sash windows. Of fucking course Zayn lives there. He can’t live in Surrey like everyone else who plays for Chelsea or in a glossy penthouse overlooking the Thames with black silk sheets and a pool on the roof. No. He has to live there, across the street from Charlotte.

The light upstairs is on and Harry imagines her, sitting at her dressing table in a satin gown, brushing her hair a hundred times. He almost laughs as he clambers out of the cab, not because it’s funny, but because shit like that only happens to him. If she looked out of her bedroom window she’d see him and only he would risk something like this under her nose. But he can’t lie, the thought of it, of getting caught makes his heart beat a little harder. After all, it’s not too late. He could ask the driver to wait while he tells Zayn that they have to meet somewhere else, suggest they meet at The Gore instead. So when he presses the buzzer and the gate begins it’s slow swing open to reveal the Range Rover Zayn left the club in, Harry only has himself to blame.

Zayn answers the door looking as immaculate as he did when Harry last saw him, right down to shoes. Harry had hoped that he would have shrugged off his suit jacket, perhaps undone another button to reveal the pendants hanging from the necklace around his neck, but he looks the same. Even his hair is perfect, glossy and watermelon seed black, and Harry wonders if he fixed it while he was waiting. If he brushed his teeth or put on more cologne, and the thought makes Harry fidget again.

Zayn invites him in and Harry tries not to gasp when he accepts but he definitely stares. His house is huge, unnecessarily so, the glass ceiling three stories high so all Harry can see is stars as he tips his head back to look up at it. ‘This house is the Boo Radley of the street. That’s why I bought it,’ Zayn explains, reading Harry’s mind. Harry raises an eyebrow at the reference then swallows a chuckle when he leads him through the living room. It’s so different from Charlotte’s house it can’t be an accident. There are no pretty little sofas with delicate legs or vases of peonies, their pink petals as thin as Bible paper, and Harry realises then that it’s the house she was complaining about last year. A monstrosity, she called it when she saw that it was being built, and Harry knew it was nothing to do with how modern is was – how brutal, with its hard lines and sharp white plaster – and everything to do with the fact that she knew who’d buy it.

But Harry didn’t say anything, just commiserated with her when she was right because that’s London. He loves what a contradiction it is, how the skyscrapers stick up between the crumbling, cake coloured buildings like birthday candles, but as cosmopolitan as it thinks it is, everyone knows their place. This is Old Chelsea. People like Zayn don’t live in Old Chelsea, that’s why it took Harry so long to realise where he was. The Chelsea players live in the townhouses and apartments off Sloane Square, the ones with hot tubs and televisions that appear from the end of the bed. Old Chelsea is for old money. Lords and Ladies, not working class kids done good. No wonder Charlotte had a stroke when she realised a footballer was moving in. But Harry kind of loves Zayn for it, for sticking two fingers up at them all. Charlotte used to be a fucking hairdresser.

But while his house is nothing like hers, it’s still exactly what Harry expected: perfect, but completely soulless. Charlotte’s house is as well, but in a different way. Her house is quiet, so quiet that you realise your shoes squeak. It’s not the sort of house you want to sit down in, but then Zayn’s isn’t, either. The living room feels like an airport hanger that’s been neatly separated into four sections: one for sitting, one for reading, one for eating and one for sitting by a floating chimney breast that’s been painted a miserable shade of grey and has some sort of stainless steel fire place at the bottom.