This Thing Upon Me [Order The eBook] [Harry Styles]

Chapter 22***

(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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***THIS CHAPTER HAS BEEN EDITED AND IS NO LONGER CENSORED***

February 2016

That evening after therapy, I recounted the details I confessed to Naomi (for the third time that day) and no longer felt a sense of dread immediately after. The shame was fading. Those feelings of mortification that had trailed me out of the office and discouraged me from looking Jeff in the eye had also begun to abate; particularly after Z's latest text.

I got so high seeing his name appear across my screen, that if I stepped out of a window I wouldn't touch the ground for days. I opened it, only to see that he had texted the address as promised. Nothing more. It was someplace outside of Bel Air, close to where he stayed (or so I assumed). I wanted to respond and draw him deeper into conversation, yet didn't want to be overly forward. I felt it might have presented an imposition if he wasn't ready to talk yet. So I decided to wait and unwrap him tomorrow, in the flesh.

"Got it, thanks," I typed. "See u tomorrow?" He replied so quickly I nearly dropped my phone. He must've been scrolling when I sent the message.

Z: "Can't wait. Seriously, Haz." The seriously opened a door of hope I wasn't quite prepared to gaze through yet. Knowing that I was a presumptuous, arrogant son-of-a-bitch didn't help either. A lot of times I let my imagination run away with me—which it wanted to do now by presuming he was desiring me. This often led to disappointment and embarrassment over how wrong I was most times.

As it stood, his intentions remained a mystery. For him, this was likely just a rekindling of friendship. Catching up with an old mate. A comrade. Bro shit. Nothing more, nothing less; positively nothing romantic or incriminating. For me, it was different. To be fair, I didn't think of it as romantic either. Even I wasn't that naïve...or pathetic. Still, it felt like something far more profound than friendship. Something like family, or business partners with a storied history of conquests and acquisitions abroad. Some of them illegal. Some of them gained through blood and bodies and dirt. Wicked sh-t. State secret sh-t. He resided deep in my confidence and I in his, on a level that even my dearest friends wouldn't be afforded the privilege of experiencing. That part of me was preserved for his eyes only.

Would I be OK with "friendship" with Z? It was the million dollar question. He was an ordeal. He didn't fit into categories, least of all something as tame as friendship. It had never worked before, no matter how hard we tried to keep things platonic or civil outside of the bedroom. Most days, we were either at each other's throats and not speaking because we felt jealous, neglected, or misunderstood—like when I had waved around an inflatable Israeli flag and he took offense to it during the Palestinian issue. Or on the other side of the coin, we were knee-deep in each other, making love every night (all night) for days on end. There was no in-between, and I couldn't imagine there being one now.

The second I got home from meeting with Naomi, I keyed up Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" (our get high album, as he would call it) and took all my clothes off down to my briefs. I was sticky and hot. Inexplicably so. Now I stood in front of my bedroom windows, watching a night-swept Hollywood Hills sink into an overhanging mist.

The gloomy, opening percussion of "Speak to Me" spoke to me, in a language only my soul could discern. One that appalled my mind and shied away from all manner of true cognition. It scored the murky landscape before me like a sequence out of a macabre art-film—reinforcing the plummet in my core as I debated texting him again.