The Beautiful Escape [ZARRY]

26

Zayn heard sounds of Harry searching for something just before a strong light shone on his face.

"Will you take that out of my eyes?" he pleaded, screwing his watering eyes uptight. "I can't see a thing." 

He felt a hand tug at the knitted cloche he wore on his head and pull it off. The same hand ran gently through the soft waves that had been crammed beneath. Suddenly the pressure over his middle was gone, as was the hand... Disturbingly he had mixed feelings about his release; there had been something very soothing about those probing fingers- no, that wasn't quite the right word...

Zayn struggled to sit up and managed it with both hands braced behind him for support on the dusty floor.

"I had a torch but I lost it when you leapt on me like that." He squinted into the dusty corners, hoping to relocate it.

Harry regarded him incredulously. "Well, what did you expect, creeping up on me in the middle of the night?"

A fair question if you stopped to look at it from his point of view- something that Zayn hadn't done up to this point. He realised how foolish his impulsive behaviours might seem.

He watched nervously as Harry got to his feet and moved towards the fire, pausing to choose a couple fo dry logs. The fire immediately began to sizzle as the flames licked the wood. Picking up a box of matches from the shoulder-high age-darkened oak mantel, Harry began to light half a dozen candles which were laid out there in various stages of demise. As they took hold, he switched off the torch and slid it into his pocket- it came as no surprise that he'd ben sleeping fully clothed.

"Don't you just love candlelight?" Harry drawled.

"Not especially." His curls were messed up and what had been the suggestion of a shadow over his strong jaw earlier was now a well-developed dark stubble. Neither attractive- well, looking at him made Zayn feel devastated at any rate. 

 "Now," he said in a don't-muck-me-about sort of voice, "you can tell me what you thought you were doing."
What had seemed a perfectly logical step to take at that time suddenly seemed extremely difficult to explain to Zayn's audience.

"If you don't speak I'll just have to assume you couldn't bear to be parted from me any longer..." Harry warned.

The satiric taunt made the colour flare in Zayn's pale cheeks. "In your dreams," he grunted, catching his lower lip between his teeth. 

"Talking of dreams, you owe me one- you rudely interrupted a particularly-"

"I don't want to know anything about your dreams," Zayn assured him, drawing himself up on his knees and dusting the seat of his jeans with a vigorous hand.

"Even if you were involved?"

He seemed to take a malicious delight in winding Zayn up. "Especially if I was involved." Thank goodness he had a thick coat on that covers his lower abdomen area because things were happening down there that couldn't be blamed on the temperature.

Harry laughed then and went to sit down on an upturned packing case. "I'd offer you a seat, only this is the only one." He fingered the rough surface. "It's the only table too, for that matter."

Zayn gathered the drifting threads of his wits- he hadn't come here to talk about furniture. "I only came to look at you," he gritted, wondering why he had ever cared of he expired in his sleep.

"Not touch...?" Harry muttered.

"Will you stop interrupting me?"

"Sorry," he responded meekly.

Meek, him...? That was the best joke Zayn had heard in ages.

"I shouldn't have let you spend the night alone just because you irritated me."

Now that he has his complete attention, Zayn wasn't sure that was what he wanted. He didn't trust that innocent expression in those green eyes either.

His jaw locked tight as he tried to act as if Harry's wolfish grin didn't do anything to him at all. 

"I'm sure you'll manage to come up with something suitably smutty," Zayn predicted acidly, rubbing his sweaty palms against his jeans.

Harry's low chuckle was not only genuinely amused, it was also deeply, devastatingly sexy. 

"The doctor said you needed to be carefully observed. I just thought I'd pop around and see if you were alright."

"You thought you would pop around at," he glanced down at the slim-banded wristwatch on his wrist, "3 a.m.," he read incredulously.

"I didn't know if you could cope, with your ribs and the shoulder..." Zayn gave an exasperated sigh. "If you must know," he added, gathering up the flask and blanket and thrusting them out to him, "I was worried about you."

Harry looked from Zayn's angry, flushed face to the offerings in his hand and back again. "I'm touched."

"There's no need," Zayn said with dignity, "to be sarcastic."

"I'm not."

Zayn tapped a pearly fingertip nervously against a white tooth and eyed him with an exasperated frown. "It's perfectly simple," he began to explain patiently. "I was lying there, listening to the wind, thinking about you-"

"Snap."

It took two seconds' exposure to his wickedly explicit eyes to extinguish the innocent look of enquiry on Zayn's face. " I wasn't doing that sort of thinking," he gasped, horrified.

"What sort of thinking would that be, Zayn...?"

"If you'd got ill in the night nobody would have known. I would have felt responsible."

"You've got a thing for responsibility, haven't you, Zayn?" he mused softly. "Don't you ever get the urge to do something irresponsible?" The humour faded abruptly from his eyes.

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Enjoy the next chapter uulalaaaa ;)