You Can Let It Go [ZARRY]

Prologue

San Francisco, seven years ago

Zayn:

“Hey, man.” Joey flashed a small baggie of white powder my way.

Carefully, so none of the other guys milling around on the corner under the streetlamp could see it.

I hesitated. Not because I didn’t want the high—I was desperate for it. Especially that night. But Joey’s dope was usually cut with weird shit. Two nights before, Mel had overdosed after injecting something from Joey’s dealer. We’d had to dump him in
front of the ER and run.

I’d lingered a second outside the hospital,
Mel’s puke on my hands and my heart pounding from the coke and fear. I’d wanted so badly to go inside that warm, yellow light.

Outside, it was cold and black and dirty.
I wondered what it might be like, to be frantic and desperate to save someone’s life, instead of being frantic and desperate just being alive.

“I’m trying to cut down, ” I told Joey, forcing a smile.

Joey didn’t smile back. “Not tonight.”

He was right. My nerves were jangling and my stomach was tied in knots so tight it ached. I could hardly stand straight—every
muscle was tense, hunching me over, hands stuffed into my thrift-store leather jacket, making fists in the pockets.

Joey jerked his head into the shadows outside the streetlamp, toward the street.

“You gotta be loose for your first time. Don’t think about it too much. Just let it happen, collect your cash. Boom. Done.”

I nodded and snorted the little pile of powder from Joey’s palm. Like an animal eating out of its master’s hand.

“What is it?” I asked, only after the sting in my nostrils flared, making my eyes water.

Then the mellow calm flooded my veins and I didn’t care what I’d just inhaled. For a few, brief, shining seconds, nothing mattered.

The night turned from black and menacing to soft and fuzzy. The fear of what I was going to do receded and I didn’t give
a shit about anything except this. This feeling right here. I wanted to live in it forever. And if I did this thing tonight, I’d have more cash to buy more of it.

Joey slapped me on the back. “Feel better? Ready to do this?”

I smiled lazily. “Are you my pimp now?”

“Just looking out for you, ” he said, leading me back out to the corner, under the streetlamp. “And we got rent coming up.”

Rent. I chuckled blearily. We squatted in an abandoned building in the Tenderloin District.

“Rent” was the payoffs we made to the other guys who’d gotten there first. Between them shaking us down and our increasing need to get high, funds were
running low.

On the street corner, a couple of other guys eyed me up and down, not too friendly.

“They’re jealous, ” Joey said and cupped my chin in his hand and gave me a shake. “Look at this face. Gorgeous and a hot piece of ass. You were born for this.”

I was born for this.

The euphoric mellowness soured and my heart that had been thudding dully against my ribs sped up. My high was now cut with
dread and disgust.

What’d I’d actually been born for, I no longer knew. I was a million miles from who I was, so that I hardly recognized myself.

The cone of sallow light fell over me like a spotlight. I put my hand on the lamppost to steady myself. The concrete was pebbled
and rough under my palm. It was real. It was the only thing that was real, as the drugs in my veins warred with the voice in my head that told me this was all wrong.

“Joey. . .”

But he was gone folded into the night with the other guys on that corner. They’d become ghouls lurking on the other side of my cone of light. My fingers clutched at the lamppost until they ached.

But the post was too wide. I couldn’t fit it all into my hand. I couldn’t hold on. Sweat slipped between my shoulder blades and the night pulsed over the city beyond this corner, this light.

A car pulled up. The passenger window went down. I was dimly aware of the half dozen guys around me instantly turn
their attention to the driver. He was nothing but an indistinct shape behind the wheel.

The orange coal of a cigarette glowed
from his hand slung behind the passenger seat. The other guys made catcalls and bent over to shake their asses at him. In
between their noise and over the rushing in my ears, the driver spoke.

“You.”

Me.

The cigarette glow moved in the murky dark to the man’s mouth. It flared as he inhaled, revealing a glimpse of his face. Middle aged. Jowls. Heavy brows over black eyes that were locked on me.

“You pretend like you like it, ” Joey had told me in our shitty corner of the abandoned building. “Pretend like you like them. It’s all an act. You play pretend and get paid for it. Nothing easier.”

The light over me was a spotlight on a stage. The man in the car was my audience, waiting only for me. The other guys cursed
and slunk off into the darkness. I gripped the lamppost tighter.

The rough cement scraped my skin. If I let go and got in that car, I’d never be the same again.

Smoke wafted out of the open window. The city breathed like a monster in the dark. Whatever I’d snorted had been weak. The euphoria that was supposed to make this so easy was already gone.

Don’t let go. Hold on and you’ll be safe. Let go and you’ll never be the same again.

Another voice countered, Same as who?

Zayn Malik, son of yaser and  Trisha Malik, little brother to Doniya and Roger Malik.

He no longer existed. That kid had
already been kicked out of his life and into this one for the crime of sneaking someone into his bedroom. Not just any someone.

Another boy. A man, all of nineteen years old. Didn’t matter if the guy was a good person. Didn’t matter that we only kissed. Didn’t matter that I cared about him and he cared about me. Or that I felt more like myself with him than I had in all of my sixteen years.

There was nothing left of that me except for the need. The endless, desperate craving to remember what it had felt like to
have been wanted once—and the even stronger need to forget what it had felt like to be rejected.

I had to fill that empty shell with pills, X, coke. Anything and everything. It consumed every waking minute until there was no job I could hold, no schedule I could keep. Because that hunger had its own timetable, and it was always.

The man in the car, waiting for me, was the only way to keep feeding it. And what difference did it make if I sold myself?

My parents thought this was who I was. Joey did. Maybe if I did it  enough, I would too. Maybe I would get used to it. I’d already polluted my body. Why not let strangers take a turn?

I was born for this.

Nothing easier.
.
.
.
.
.
I let go.

Note:
I'm back not with the vampire story but I love this one more so here it is. It's going to be an interesting one hope you will enjoy it