Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 17

Charlotte has a lot of first rules. There seems to be a new one every time they speak. Last month it was: they pay for you, they get you, and this week she reminded Harry not to give his number to clients. Then there’s her first rule about always using a condom and her first rule about not picking up randoms. Over the last three years he’s broken every single one of them, but the truth is, even though she insists that each of her rules is the most important, Harry knows that there’s only one first rule and he’d never break it.

‘Don’t get attached,’ she told him the first time they met, Harry sitting opposite her in the drawing room, an array of pastel coloured cakes and delicate sandwiches laid out on the coffee table between them. He was perched on a gold Louis XV chair not unlike the one his sister had in her dolls house when she was little, trying not to fidget as he listened to her well-rehearsed speech about the job and what was expected of him. ‘When you feel it,’ she went on, pausing to adjust her ring so the diamond sat neatly in the middle of her finger, ‘and you will because that’s when you know you’re getting attached, when you can feel it, you have to stop because no good will come of it, Harry.’

He agreed with a nod, but he remembers thinking that it was an odd thing for her to say given everything she had because she let herself get attached to a client. Not that Harry was worried that the same thing would happen to him. He didn’t want what Charlotte had. He was only doing it until he found a job or paid off his student loans, whichever came first. Then he was going to see the world, to climb mountains and fall in love and write a book about all of it, tell the story of how he broke his ankle in the Himalayas and broke his heart in Paris.

So it wasn’t something he worried about, falling for a client. Besides, Harry rarely gets attached to anything. He didn’t even have a favourite toy as a kid, his mother says. Where Gemma trailed her ratty yellow blanket after her everywhere she went, Harry was more fickle. He wore his Spiderman pyjamas to school every day for a week then carried his Optimus Prime around for two, but as soon as he got his bike, he forgot about both of them. Even now he either devours a book in one sitting or puts it down halfway through never to pick it up again. But if he was worried that he might fall for one of his clients, he wasn’t after the first time, when the guy came in his hair before Harry had even taken him in his mouth. Or the second time, when the guy didn’t use enough lube and Harry sobbed in the shower when he got home. Then there was the guy who always called him a fucking whore when he came and the one who got off on spanking him. ‘You’re making my dick harder,’ he told Harry every time he whimpered, slapping him again, so fiercely that Harry would find palm-shaped bruises the next day.

But, as much as Harry has learned to enjoy it, to find that line between agony and ecstasy and make sure that he doesn’t cross it, his clients have never been the sort of men he could become attached to. Yes, his new ones are kinder, they kiss him gently and undress him as though he’s as thin as porcelain and might crack under their fingers, but it’s still not enough to make him feel anything. Even later, when he does that thing with his tongue and they can’t help but pull his hair or bite his shoulder and call him a slut, he might sweat and pant and let them come on his face, but by the time he gets in the cab, it’s forgotten as he chats to the driver about the sudden sunny spell.

Not with Zayn, though. Harry’s hands are still shaking when the cab pulls up outside his flat, still shaking when he fists himself in the shower thinking about the cut of Zayn’s nails and the pinch of his fingers. And yeah, he’s too rough, so rough that Harry is sore for hours afterwards – days sometimes – but it’s a delicious sort of an ache, like touching a bruise with your finger, because every mark, every scratch, is another moment when Harry made him lose control. Mercurial Zayn who always uses a coaster and trains six days a week can’t make it through an hour with him without losing it and Harry hasn’t felt that in such a long time. Not being wanted, or even being needed, but the searing, scarring burn of something neither of them can control, something Zayn can’t gag and Harry can’t ignore when he comes so hard he has tears in his eyes.