You Can Let It Go [ZARRY]

Seven

Harry:

Fuck.”

I glanced to the empty passenger seat where Zayn had been sitting.

Zayn.

I hadn’t even done him the courtesy of saying his name. I used him. Got what I wanted out of him and kicked him out of the damn car. My hands itched to swing the car around and go back and....

What? Just what the hell are you thinking?
I was thinking about Zayn.

My damned thoughts were full of him and had been since I first saw him the other night at an NA meeting I swore I wouldn’t go back to. But I went back. I shared for fuck’s sake because....

I’m pathetic and riddled with weakness.

Defective.

I pulled the car over. The road in front of me was black, streetlights streaking it with silvery rain. I could go back. Go to the next meeting. Find Zayn and tell him....

Tell him what? Coach Simon wanted to know. Just what do you think you’d like to tell your street hustlin’ fairy friend?

An ugly laughed burst out of me. Simon had been a skinny, wiry guy. Leathery skin, craggy face bitten by cold and wind.

Zayn was no lightweight; he could have taken Simon out in one punch. I’d seen the way Zayn’s black leather jacket hung on his broad shoulders. Lean muscles and with a
wide mouth that I couldn’t stop staring at while he talked.

We don’t think about things like that, a real memory from Alaska whispered.

You get one of those unwanted, unnatural desires, you just lock it up in the vault. Pay it no mind. You do that long enough, and one day you don’t feel anything. And feeling nothing is better than feeling the things you shouldn’t.

I rested my head against the steering wheel. Damn, I was tired. So tired of being this.....creature.

Not a real man.

Not anything. Stuck permanently between what Dad and Coach Simon wanted me to be and the real me, whatever that was. I
didn’t know anymore.

It was locked in the vault too.

I sucked in a breath through my nose and pushed it all down. Zayn too.

Especially Zayn.

He’d stayed clean for that guy, Ben. I could stay clean for Marcel. Maybe someday it’d
feel like being clean was worth it for me.

Maybe Dad finally trusting me to take over the company would be worth it. Maybe controlling how half the nation got its meds and rolling in billions of dollars would make up for living half an existence.

I started the car and kept driving. When I got to my rooms in Dad’s house, I turned on the shower, cold bullets like the rain drenching me.

Purifying me. Cleansing me of thoughts I shouldn’t be having about Zayn. About a man.

My skin broke out in gooseflesh, my chest constricted. But after a few minutes, the cold settled in.

~~~~~~~

The next morning, Saturday, I went through my usual routine: workout, breakfast, and then I headed to the office after making sure Marcel was happy.

Usually we spent Saturdays together, but I had too much work to catch up on in my new-ish post as Chief Operating Officer.

Marcel sat at the fireplace in the family living room, reading Chaucer with an unlit pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth.

“I have to work today, Marcy,” I said.