Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 37

There’s always a moment, right before Harry wakes up, in that blurry halfway point between the end of a dream and opening his eyes, when everything is slow and sticky and heart meltingly quiet. Harry loves that moment. He could live out the rest of his life in that moment, climb mountains and jump into rivers and fall in and out of love in the time it takes for his brain to flick back on. Because in that moment when he’s not quite awake and not quite asleep – not quite Nathan and not quite Harry – he’s nothing.

No one.

Not yet, anyway. Later, when he’s shaving carefully and layering on cologne he will be. Until then it just feels like floating, like when he was four and he went to Cyprus. He wouldn’t go near the sea, running back to where his mother and Gemma were sitting on the beach whenever he got close enough to feel the tide nipping at his toes. It’s one of his earliest memories, his mother scooping him up and carrying him towards the water, his hand fisted in her necklace as he looked out at the endless stretch of sea. Gemma skipped after them, leaving footprints in the wet sand as she told him to stop being such a baby and Harry remembers trying, remembers lifting his chin defiantly, but as soon as he felt the splash of the first wave against the soles of his feet, he yelped.

‘Don’t be scared, little one.’ His mother smiled, poking his orange inflatable armbands that she’d gone cross-eyed blowing up. ‘There’s so much salt in the water that you’ll float.’ Harry didn’t believe her, kicking his legs furiously when the water began to swallow them up. He only calmed down when his mother promised not to let go, her hands under his armpits as she held him until his legs settled. But of course she did (a trick she employed again when she taught him how to ride a bike) and when the horror of it passed, Harry realised that she was right, he was floating. He’d never felt anything like it, shivering with delight as he lay there, his arms out and his legs open, the surface of the sea holding him up towards the sun as though he were on a silver platter.

That’s what that moment feels like – the one before he wakes up – like he’s floating. Like he isn’t there, just a breath. A sigh. A curl of smoke that gets thicker and thicker until he’s aware of the pillow under his cheek and the ache in his stomach. Most of the time he doesn’t even know where he is. He spends so much time in strange beds, swaddled in strange sheets, that he could be anywhere. Sometimes he’s sure he’s at home or even back at Cambridge, his eyes sore from working on an essay he hopes will make Peter think of him as more than the kid with the unruly hair who always has ink on his hands. It’s usually a disappointment to find that he’s in his flat, his arm curled around a pillow that can’t possibly smell of home, but does. It’s been four years and he’s sure it still smells of the washing power his mother used to use – the one with the baby on the box – and Gemma’s shampoo, which he wasn’t supposed to steal. Some far off place he’ll write about one day, his heart hurting as he describes his bedroom and compares the colour of the slate roof when it rained to salmon skin. But this morning his bed smells of something else, of Zayn – cologne and chewing gum and the secret cigarettes he tries to disguise with them – and Harry isn’t disappointed at all.

The lamp is still on and the top of it is projecting a circle of white light onto the ceiling that makes Harry think of Cyprus again, of floating on the surface of the sea, blinking into the sun. He should probably turn it off, but he can’t bear to move, not when Zayn’s spooning him like that, his leg hooked over Harry’s hip and his arm around his waist, holding him so close that his breath is tickling the hair on the back of Harry’s neck. It feels so good that Harry’s too scared to move in case he wakes him up, so he settles for looking at his hand, flat on Harry’s stomach, at the deep creases in his knuckles and his smooth, almond shaped nails. Harry wants to turn it over, to trace the lines across his palm and compare their love lines, but then Zayn mutters something and pulls him closer and it’s so possessive that Harry can’t move for a moment.