Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 45

THREE YEARS LATER

 

 

 

I will remember the kisses, our lips raw with love,

and how you gave me everything you had

and how I offered you what was left of me.

~ Charles Bukowski

Harry wonders if he’ll ever get used to this, to seeing the words that were once scribbled into his Moleskine committed to paper. He almost doesn’t recognise them, the neat black letters somehow not his any more, like passing a friend he hasn’t spoken to for years in the street. But they are his, even if they don’t look like them. It’s only when he reads them aloud that they become his own again. When he hears himself saying each sentence and remembers why he had to write it down. That’s something only he will know. And while his editor will shuffle them about and the reviewers will look under them for things that aren’t there, only he knows what each one means.

So he doesn’t need to read from the book, but that’s something he still isn’t used to, either, to reading to a roomful of people. Maybe it’s a crutch, the perfect paragraphs steadying him when his heart gallops and the words wobble. Or maybe it’s something to look at so his gaze doesn’t wander, looking for a flash of black hair, because there never is. Harry was sure that he’d hear from Zayn when the book came out, that he’d see the review in the Guardian or see it at an airport as he was killing time before a flight. But then Harry was sure that he’d hear from him when he got injured, then after the divorce, then when he moved back to Bradford to start working with the kids from his old neighbourhood. He never uses his real name, but every time he talks about the book, he’s talking to Zayn, talking to anyone that will listen in the hope that it will somehow get to him, a message – a novel – in a bottle. But it hasn’t and it’s a terrible thing, to write a book because you can’t move on, while the person you wrote it about does.

So it’s an exquisite torture, talking about it every day, but as each one passes and the memory of Zayn gets a little blurrier, the book reminds him that it did happen because sometimes he’s not so sure. The funny thing is, he wanted to forget. At first he forgot just enough to get him out of bed in the morning – the smell of him, the soft hair on the nape of his neck, the tiny mole on the bridge of his nose that looks like a dot of ink. Then, when that wasn’t enough, it was the little things, his shirt that was the colour of Parma Violets and the pendants on his necklace that Harry would press between his finger and thumb when they kissed. Finally it was the big things, the things only Harry knew, like the way he said his name. But now, when he lies in the middle of his bed, staring into the dark, Harry wants it all back. He wants to remember everything, because to forget, to feel anything other than the unreachable pain in his chest that can’t be written away or kissed away or fucked away, would be a betrayal. He wants to wrap each memory in tissue paper and put it in a drawer so on those nights, when he’s mad with it, when his heart won’t settle as he pictures Zayn, sleeping soundly, he can take them out and look at them. Turn over each one in his hand until he’s assured that it happened. That for those few months, he was loved. That’s why he wrote the book. Not just because he had to, because those things are all he has left, but because he wants his happy ending.

Even if he has to write it himself.