Your Creation • Zarry

7. What if

After rehearsals I made my way back to Ben Winston's house, who was our video producer, and also where I happened to be living at the time. I had started doing some renovations on the first house that I bought in London, and I just figured that I would stay with Ben until it was sorted, but that turned into a much longer span of time than I had anticipated. I think most people I knew thought it was kind of strange that I preferred to sleep on a mattress in someone's attic over a flat I could have bought in the mean time, but I enjoyed the family atmosphere rather than an empty, quiet space where it felt lonely with no one around. I had this tendency to want to be around people all the time and I used to sleep on Ed Sheeran's couch, even. To be honest, I was the type of person who would much rather sleep on someone's couch than in an empty bed in a big place. Plus, I liked that nobody knew I was living with Ben except for work people, my family and close friends. It felt more private and privacy was a cherished treasure.

I threw my stuff on the floor and picked up my guitar, strumming a few chords. I had purchased a guitar over Christmas break, intending to learn it better with some help from my guitar teacher, who just so happened to be Niall. He was the only one in the band, other than our band, who could actually play guitar and I was keen on learning. I had some lyrics floating around in my brain, especially lately, so I started messing around with some melodies to see what I could come up with.

Bending down to pick up my journal, I opened to the first page where I had written"The sweetest dream," but I noticed there was now another phrase written below it in all too familiar handwriting, and it read:

Let me know if you would like another.

I froze, staring at the words which I knew belong to Zayn's penmanship. I knew that he definitely wrote this, but when? My mind started racing. He must have written it during our rehearsals earlier that day when I wasn't around because it wasn't there before. I didn't even know what to think. He really went bloody snooping in my journal!? He had to have been fucking with me somehow.

But what if?

What if I wasn't over analyzing this entire thing with Zayn? What if that night at Zayn's house actually happened? What if I hadn't been just dreaming? What if it was real? And all I could do was stare down at his words and read them over again until I felt myself going crazy.

No fucking way.

I found myself traveling back in time in my mind and replaying a bunch of old memories that we had. First of all, Zayn and I had always joked around about "being gay" for each other ever since the early days, but it wasn't like that. To be fair, we all kind of did that, especially me and Louis, but it was mostly like having a bromance. It was a thing that guys did. We were younger and didn't think too deeply about our behavior at all. It wasn't like anyone had actually shown signs that they were into each other and these 'ships' that fans invented were sort of funny to us, but everything was mostly innocent. Mostly. I guess thinking about it now I realized that it wasn't innocent for me because my Zayn fantasies spoke for themselves.

I just sat there on the edge of my bed, staring into space, wondering if somehow things between Zayn and I had been adding up to something else all this time and I had been oblivious. Were there clues coming from him that I missed? Had he been giving me signs and I just wasn't reading them all this time? It didn't make any sense.

I thought back to all the times we idiotically tattooed each other with random stuff we thought of. I purchased a tattoo gun for him last year and we would spend hours in hotel rooms just tattooing each other and most of them were pretty badly done. We had no idea what we were even doing with a tattoo gun and the level of trust we had for each other permanently injecting ink into our skins was kind of wild, now that I was thinking about it. But we were good mates. We joked around about stupid shit and tattooed songs and things that we liked and that's when I first learned that Zayn had this pain kink which I found kind of attractive but I never talked about it. We never talked about stuff like that.

I thought about how Zayn got this black heart tattooed on him, which was inspired by the same ones that our hairstylist, Lou, and her fiancé Tom had with each other, and he had tried persuading me to get the matching one all year long until I finally did. He wanted us to have friendship tattoos, he said, because we both have big hearts. But it was just like best mates.

Then I started thinking about all of our inside jokes, many of which ended up inspiring some of these bad tattoos, and the late nights we spent listening to "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd and pondering the weird mysteries of life. We talked about whether or not we thought aliens existed and dived into those weird conspiracy theories, debating on whether or not the Illuminati was real. We talked about the fucked up parts of history that they never teach you about in school and argued about whether Abbey Road or Revolver was the best Beatles album.

I thought about our many attempts at trying to successfully pull off the last dance from Dirty Dancing and failing miserably every time and how I tried getting everyone to do this scene with me where Baby runs up and Patrick Swayze just holds her above his head, which is inarguably one of the best scenes in cinematic history, and Zayn was the only one who would ever try it with me.

And when it came to sharing a bed on tour, which sometimes had to happen, Zayn and I always chose each other because we could stay up late bullshitting and watching films but then I remembered that sometimes when we woke up in the morning we'd be accidentally snuggling and I'd move away from him.

But even after thinking about all of these memories, none of it had ever been sexual in nature. The only time that we had ever come close was when we were hooking up with girls and it was one time when we were a bit tipsy, but he never made any advances towards me. I sat there on my bed feeling very confused. Where were the signs? Was I that blind? The more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that the only possible explanation had to be that Zayn and I were more alike than I thought, and that maybe it wasn't just me who was secretly curious about things.

I read and re-read the words on the page of my journal until it finally dawned on me. What happened on my birthday wasn't a dream. It actually fucking happened. I felt my heart beating out of my chest as I tried to figure out what to do next, but my fingers were fast and I grabbed my phone, opening up my text conversations with Zayn.

Come over.