Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 46

‘Hello, I’m Harry Styles,’ he says with a small wave, trying not to look too closely at the crowd huddled in front of him. ‘Thanks for coming. I’m going to read to you from my book, Paper Hearts, but my French is appalling so I’ll stick to English, if you don’t mind.’

There’s a polite chuckle and when Harry stops to lick his lips, his heart is beating so fast that he feels almost superhuman, like he can hear a hundred different things at once. The chatter floating up through the open window from the street below, the wooden stairs groaning grumpily as people go up and down the staircase with handfuls of books, the boats chugging along the Seine as the guide points out Notre Dame and tells the story of how it was rededicated to the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution. He’s even sure he can hear the pink geraniums in the window box swaying idly in the breeze, but he can’t, of course. All he can hear is his heart in his ears and the shuffle of shoes as more people squeeze into the tiny back room.

He’s sure it’s just curiosity, the tourists lingering to see what’s going on as they take photos of the sign over the door. Harry took a photo of it as well – BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE – the first time he came here, the summer before he went to Cambridge when his heart felt brand new, like a new pair of shoes he was yet to wear in. He checked where his book would sit on the cluttered shelves (between Darin Strauss and William Styron) and sure enough, there it is. It’s moments like that, when his heart sheds its skin so it feels brand new again, that Harry feels like he can do anything. He doesn’t know when he forgot that. When he stopped checking bookshelves to see where his would sit, but maybe Zayn didn’t break him after all. Maybe he showed him a way to make the broken bits of him fit back together. Perhaps that’s love, fighting the urge to fix someone because they have to fix themselves.

‘I wonder if this is growing up,’ Harry reads aloud, the words swaying slightly as he stops to lick his lips again. ‘Waiting until I’m home to press my cheek to the bathroom floor and cry. For the first time in a long time, I don’t shove or shout. Don’t try to leave a mark. But I hope I do. I hope that there are nights when he can’t sleep and he doesn’t know why. That there are songs that he finds himself listening to on repeat at 4 a.m. when everyone else is asleep and he’s smoking a cigarette he makes last until he feels the burn of the filter. That’s where I am. Not in any photographs. Not in a shoebox of things he can’t bear to throw out. Things other couples have – cinema tickets and seashells. I am a name it hurts to hear. A bruise that will never heal. And I know this is growing up: being kind enough not to remind him.’

The applause is warm, his agent beaming as someone issues directions on where to buy a book if they want it signed. It’s all a little overwhelming. This is something he isn’t used to, either. Every book he signs is different – sometimes he signs it Harry, sometimes Harry Styles, sometimes just HS – because he never thought to practise it. He wonders if he ever will. If in five years he’ll be so blasé about it that he won’t even think, just write a squiggle before reaching for the next book. And he isn’t used to the photographs, either, people wanting to pose with him as though he’s a pop star. Today it’s a couple who can’t be much older than he was the first time he came to Paris that summer before he went to Cambridge.

‘We couldn’t get tickets to see you at the Edinburgh Festival,’ the taller guy explains. ‘So we decided to come here. Make a weekend of it.’

They exchange a glance and Harry has to look away because it feels like he’s intruding.

‘I made my mum read this,’ he goes on, clutching the book to his chest. ‘She cried and said that as long as he,’ he nods at his boyfriend, who rolls his eyes theatrically, ‘loves me as much as Damien loves Rav, she’s happy.’

‘Thanks.’ Harry smiles clumsily, so stunned he doesn’t know how to respond.

But then the guy smiles knowingly at him. ‘I hope you find your Rav.’

He means well, but Harry still feels it like a punch, smiling kindly as he signs the book. His hand shakes as he gives it back and it shakes for the rest of the signing, his signature messier than usual as he fights the tears needling the back of his eyes. But he holds it together, smiling for photographs and not spelling anyone’s name wrong until the crowd thins and his hand begins to ache.

As usual, it’s a blur, Harry barely looking up, so he sees his hand first. Sees the deep creases in his knuckles and his smooth, almond shaped nails, and he’s scared to look up in case it isn’t him. But he does and it is and Harry almost laughs.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asks, staring at him as though he’s devouring him, gobbling him up in case this is all he gets. These few minutes. He looks the same, but different, all at once. He’s thinner, his cheekbones sharper, but he somehow looks softer, too. All big eyes and eyelashes.

‘It wasn’t enough,’ Zayn tells him with an elegant shrug and Harry’s heart does that thing, the thing it does every time he looks at him.

He almost drops the book when he takes it from him. He must have seen the dedication – This isn’t about you – at least a hundred times, but at last, under it he can write, Maybe it is. Because it’s just like Harry to say in eighty thousand words, what he could have said in three.