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

Chapter 40***

(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.)

**********

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

September 2011

The last moments of our time at the bungalow were spent in the yard with the other boys, fooling around with a leaf blower until it ran out of petrol. Z kept his distance snickering to himself, and I was glad to be able to breathe before heading home. For days to come, I wouldn't understand why his touch still made me weak, or why I still felt giddy whenever he walked into a room, even after I'd been annoyed by him.

Feelings I had presumed to be short-lived would set up camp in my brain and preoccupy it, day in and day out. Fortunately (or unfortunately) the oxytocin was there to stay, and administered me a feeling of unadulterated bliss each time I recounted the bungalow. Sweet bursts of dopamine, rocketing throughout my body and leaving me on edge, especially in his vicinity.

Once we headed back to London to our separate flats, I wondered how things would progress between us. Would our nights together fade and be lost to the ever-enlarging vacuum of distant memory? Or would we relive them right away without shame? (In my place or his.) Would we continue to be what we were when no one was watching? Would he forget me?

What had we established exactly? That we liked kissing? That we liked touching each other's bodies? Was that enough to bind us? Even in all my inexperience with relationships, I doubted it. I think convention required something more solidified before we could consider ourselves a "couple." Something like communication or devotion—neither of which we had mastered yet.

On the bus trip back to London, I felt him drifting; slipping away from me ever-so-subtly so that I didn't notice it at first. He kept his headphones on most of the time, and apart from that, he joked about with the other boys and began to pretend I didn't exist. When I made follow-up remarks to his, he barely spared me a glance. When I laughed at his jokes, he didn't snicker over at me like he used to, instead he rushed on to another topic as though he was afraid to be caught fraternizing with me individually.

Eventually I took all I needed from his silence and kept my distance as well, unwilling to make a fool of myself by laughing at his every word and earning such a glacial reception. In the meantime, I stuck to Louis and the other boys in hopes it would distract me from all that had happened and all that was happening now, and shortly realized that Lou was the only one who really had my back at the end of the day. Zayn had gotten what he wanted and was now treating me like I was disposable. It hurt in ways I still failed to define, and made me question my masculinity and self-worth to no end.

By the time two weeks had passed, there was no hope to revive what we'd allowed to die between us, and my self-esteem plummeted like never before (even worse than when I'd gotten a chubby a few years ago and my family made remarks about it when we gathered on the holidays.) Now, I plagued myself with questions of what went wrong and why he was no longer interested. Did he no longer find me attractive? Was I too boyish after all? Was I ugly in the light of day—since he was only used to dealing with me under the cover of night?

Was it my voice, my smell, my hair? Did he want me to wear heels, lipstick, perfume? What had changed? He was completely ignoring me now; absurdly so. Flagrantly so. He wasn't even pretending to be a cordial bandmate anymore. Something had changed within him, and as a result, he was shunning me harder by the day, embarrassed by what had happened and longing that I didn't exist to remind him.