Smoke & Mirrors • Zarry

22. The brightest star

Two weeks. It had only been two weeks since Harry set off to film his debut movie Dunkirk but for Zayn it felt more like two years.

As he sat in his living room lit and shooting zombie aliens he desperately tried not to think about how empty the walls felt, how deafening the silence was from the lack of Harry's laughter, which usually filled the room.

And when he rolled up a joint of weed, that Sherbert strain they smoked together for the first time, he almost passed it to his left on the couch, to the place where Harry would have been sitting, and every time he looked over and saw the space empty it was just another painful reminder that Harry wasn't there.

He tried to remember what life was like before he and Harry dived into whatever it was that they were, when he just went out and hooked up with random acquaintances from The Box or The Eagle, when he couldn't get close enough to anyone but could still sleep at night, when he lived inside of that cage he put himself in and he was content there, or at least accustomed to it, and nothing felt hard and his heart didn't ache with this numbing feeling of emptiness.

And part of him wanted that back, if only so that he didn't have to feel so much, so that he could get through the day without being made aware of the little things that reminded him of Harry.

He thought about him whenever he drove down the slick, city streets of London and a song came on the radio. It didn't even matter what song it was because surely Harry would know it and would be loudly and unapologetically singing along and Zayn would pretend as though he hated when he did that, but he never once did.

And when he woke up and wandered into the kitchen he thought of Harry and the times he spent in Zayn's kitchen, whipping them up something to eat because he found cooking to be therapeutic and treated every entree like he was in some five star restaurant, even if it was just a grilled cheese sandwich. And when Zayn ventured off to The Eagle his eyes scanned the crowd, observing the guys bopping around on the dance floor and he thought about how dull the energy seemed because Harry wasn't the one there dancing in the spotlight.

It was driving him mad just contemplating exactly how much of Harry had rubbed off on Zayn that summer and what made things even worse was knowing that he had to get used to it because Harry was going to leave soon enough. And amongst the sadness of this thought Zayn also found himself growing a little bit angry, angry that he had even allowed himself to open up to Harry at all, to let his walls come crashing down, to take a gamble on something that was never once defined by either of them, to fall for Harry in the first place and part of Zayn wished that he hadn't just so it wouldn't hurt so bad when the time came to inevitably part.

He had no idea how Harry felt about all of this either, other than him pretending like it wasn't happening and when he did acknowledge it, just asking Zayn not to forget him, hoping that Zayn would miss him. Harry had been so focused on his upcoming role in this film lately, and his modeling campaign, and the other projects in the United States that were already in the works, so it was starting to seem like moving to Los Angeles and zeroing in on his career was quite important to Harry. It was clearly his top priority.

Harry had never asked Zayn for anything more than just a little bit of his heart from the very start. He never offered to stay in London and he never asked Zayn to go with him to LA. He never asked to be in a relationship or uttered those three words, and as time wore on, Zayn started to second guess the nature of Harry's feelings and what they really amounted to in the long run.

Zayn was laying in bed around midnight after returning home early from The Box, selling out nearly all of his supply, and was listening to music to help him drift off to sleep when Harry called.

"Hey you," Zayn said.

"How are you?"

"I'm alright, just tired. Sold a lot of shit tonight. How was filming?"