You Can Let It Go [ZARRY]

Sixteen

Harry:

In the plain guest bedroom, I lay flat on my back on the bed in the dark and stared at the pristine white ceiling. I imagined it was keeping the world out, keeping it from
crushing me under the weight of what Styles Pharma had done. For now. Tomorrow, I’d have to get up and do
something.

But how in the hell could I ever hope to fix all that had been broken?

The wine muted my thoughts, blunted the edges and let them wander without stabbing me with guilt.

Zayn Malik.

I could tell him everything. He would tell me what to do. He’d know what was right. WWZD?(what would Zayn do) I should put that on a bumper sticker.

I chuckled to myself, my eyes drifting closed. In my mind’s eye, I saw Zayn leaning against a wall, arms crossed, wearing that quiet smile of his that was so damn distracting.

Zayn was a good man. Too good for me to drag into this ugliness. Too fucking beautiful, inside and out....

We don’t describe men with pretty words, Coach Simon reminded me. Real men are ugly, rough brutes who take what they want—including women—because that is the way nature designed us. Men are hard. Women are soft. Yin and yang. That’s how it’s supposed to be.... You live like that, or nothing at all.

Your choice.

I sank deeper into the bed and behind my closed lids, the white ceiling above me became the pale sky of Alaska in September. White and flat and endless. I didn’t want to go back, but it’s what happened when I had inappropriate
thoughts about men. My ‘training’ came to get me and drag me back into the cold....

There were seven of us. I guessed them all to be about my age—late teens or even a little younger—lined up on the deserted
road in the middle of nowhere. If you could call it a road.

A vague track of rocks and packed dirt overgrown with scrubby plants ran between a dozen rotting log cabins that had been new at the turn of the century. We exchanged glances, our breaths pluming in
front of us. Winter was still months away and it was already so damn cold.

The guy who’d come to our house in Seattle—the guy Dad had introduced me to as Coach Simon—was conferring with his
counselors. Three big guys who reminded me of orderlies in movies about scary mental hospitals or bouncers at biker bars.

Nothing about them screamed “counselor” someone you’d want to talk your problems over with.

Compared to them, Coach Simon was downright scrawny, but he scared me the most. He looked like a snake, with blue eyes in a huge skull and a high forehead. In our living room, he’d made Chisana sound like a summer camp.

The boys I’d be bunking up with formed “a team” whose goal was to defeat our “opponent” and repair what was broken in us. He was going to coach us through it, and we wouldn’t be allowed to leave until victory was achieved.

Three weeks later, I was standing on this road in a deserted mining town, freezing my ass off with six other guys. Except for a
whistling wind, Chisana was eerily silent. Hushed. I thought that if I screamed, the sound wouldn’t travel farther than a few feet before being swallowed up in the cold, dry air.

I sort of wanted to scream.

Coach finished conferring, and his henchmen left. They’d driven a U-Haul behind Coach’s camper on the thirty-six-hour drive up and were now going to move stuff  out of it and into one of the main buildings that still had a roof. Coach told us the U- Haul was filled with supplies for our trip: food, bottled water, and electrical equipment.