Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

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“Everyone who keeps a secret, itches to tell it.”
– Gillian Flynn

The picturesque and regal Foster Montgomery Preparatory School is situated in the white mountains of New Hampshire, just outside of Plymouth. About 600 acres of land form its own oasis for the high school, including but not limited to academic buildings, dorms, a covered ice rink, ten tennis courts, and a new state of the art biology center. Two U.S. vice presidents have attended the prestigious boarding school, as well as a Secretary of State, a handful of Attorney Generals, and an Oscar winner. U.N. ambassadors, renowned lawyers, surgeons fighting new strains of diseases in countries all over the world, have all attended Foster Montgomery Preparatory School. Their pictures hang over the libraries and science labs built in their names.

The school is a sight to behold. Beautiful buildings in front of a beautiful Appalachian backdrop, a rich history, behind wrought iron gates with the carefully chosen Latin motto at the very top: strenuis ardua cedunt.

“The heights yield to endeavor.”

The price tag for such a distinguished and revered institution, for tuition, room, and board is $56,250. A year.

That’s what Harry’s parents reminded him of, before the start of his freshmen year three years previously, when they ignored the glint in his eye, as their driver pulled through the front gate. His mother pressed at the new lines forming on her forehead, with a frown, while his father checked emails on his Blackberry, as if to basically say, it’s very expensive dear, please don’t be like Gemma and get into any trouble, and if you do, call us before the school does.

And it’s what Harry thinks to himself now, as he cruises through the gate for his final year at Foster Montgomery and sees the new media arts center over near the Breckinridge building. Both the Paynes and Tomlinsons donated money the previous winter, to fund the installation of the theatre seats and orchestra pit, so their sons wouldn’t go before the disciplinary committee and inevitably be kicked out. It was a necessarily evil for many Foster Montgomery parents over the years, the donating of money for various infractions.

But honestly, the party in the woods last fall had so been worth it.

Harry smiles and shifts gear. He wants to get a good spot near Morton Hall before all the annoying freshmen arrive with their parents and clog up the arrival lines.

Ever since that party and all the donated money, it’s been their class’s running joke anytime one of them does something to earn a demerit or something that could earn them a demerit, should they get caught. “Fifty-six thousand and counting.” The price they pay, for tuition, board, anxiety, and fucked up family dynamics.

It’s like coming home again, as Harry grabs his belongings from the passenger seat of his most prized possession: his dad’s black 1956 Jaguar XK 140 Roadster. He’ll have to cover it soon, with the top canvas he absolutely loathes, since it means he won’t have the summer wind in his hair for much longer. But the top on his car means he’s back at school, with his friends, in the place he knows. And that makes it worth it. It’s all worth it, when he’s home again. My thoughts create my world. Harry breathes it in, each deep breath soaking in the feeling of contentment, like he’s practicing his yoga poses. It’s home, it’s going to be a good year, with or without Gemma to guide him. He languidly moves around classmates old and new with a smile on his face, towards his upper classmen dorm.

Per Gemma’s instructions, Harry made sure to request a specific room this year.

It’s no surprise when he arrives before Louis, so Harry tosses his bags to the wooden bed on the left. He then texts Gemma, his sister, mentor, the one who practically raised him, and swiftly gets to work. She had trained Harry well over the last few years, as her “apprentice” and “Styles-in-training,” but this is his first fall semester on his own. It’s weird to be without her, to not have his big sister to look after him, in case he fucks up. He knocks on the bedposts, to find which of the four contain the hollow spaces. Then he gets down on his hands and knees to open up the four drawers under his mattress, to reach up underneath them, to feel around for which of them have moveable compartments. Hiding places.

Those past Foster Montgomery Prep kids knew their shit, that’s for sure.

Right as Harry feels the wood panel above the last drawer on the right give way, where he’ll hide most of his stash and scales, he hears a key in the lock. He quickly grabs for the bag within his bag on the floor, and shoves it inside.

“Look who’s finally arrived,” Harry says with a smile, turning on his knees.

But it’s not Louis who walks through the door with a few handfuls of belongings. It’s not one of Harry’s best friends, with a gym bag stuffed with a soccer ball and cleats, his glasses pushed up on his head, a cigarette behind his ear because he doesn’t care if Wallace sees. Wallace never says shit to any of them, because of Harry's deal with Gemma.

Instead it’s Jack Darcy.

“Hey,” he says politely to Harry, kicking at the door behind him with his foot. Jack, thin, awkward in his movements, a mess of light feathered hair, sniffling from allergies. He heads towards the other bed, gently setting his stuff down. Harry notes the tennis racket among the pile, the way he’s already toeing off his Keds.

“Hey,” Harry says with a frown.

“How was your summer? Good? I was in Colorado for most of June with my dad and then had to be back east, home with my mom, for SAT prep. Been at it for weeks. I’m taking it again in October. Are you? Taking it again? What was your score?”

Harry gets to his feet, swiping at the dust on his jeaned knees.

“Wait,” he cuts him off, pointing to Jack, who is a reasonably nice person, albeit very boring and a total square.

Jack turns to him and waits.

“I thought I was rooming with Louis Tomlinson again this year.”

“My email said this was my room assignment,” Jack says robotically.

“That must be wrong.”

“It’s not.”

“I think it is.”

“No,” Jack says easily. “And anyways, Mr. Groenenberg said to come here, when I saw him outside.”

Harry feels his right eye twitch a bit, an old tick he’s had since he was in junior high. He knows for a fact that he’s rooming with Louis this year, his last year, his senior year, because it was part of their plan. The party room. The fun room. It was Harry’s final and only year on his own, without Gemma, to run things. Louis was going to be his backup, the one to help run the numbers. It would be the best senior year this school has ever seen, their class a bunch of hell raisers. Harry and his friends tearing it up, like they have the last three years, their little group of boys chasing after girls, fucking off their study sessions and grades, side by side.

But first things first, Harry needs Louis as his roommate.

“I’ll talk to Wallace,” Harry says finally, heading towards the door. “I’ll get it sorted.”

“Good luck,” Jack says over his shoulder, before the door closes.

Harry hopes Jack doesn’t begin unpacking anytime soon, because it’d be a waste to have to pack it all up again to go find his real room.

He makes his way through Morton, one of the smaller dorms that houses some of the junior and senior students. The school’s enrollment sits at about 290, with the senior class at only 72 students. Even then, nine of them only come for the school day and then go home to their families every night and weekend. The rest board all week. It shouldn’t be too hard to find Wallace, even as more of his classmates start arriving.

He feels his phone in his pocket, already blowing up with texts from his regulars. First day back means first day jitters.

Wallace, ever the traffic controller, paces in front of the main Morton steps with a clipboard in his hand. In his very best Foster Montgomery royal blue polo and khakis, he calls out to a few other Resident Advisors as they pass and waves to a group of sophomores rolling luggage into Harry’s old dorm across the grass. Everyone at F.M. knows everyone, the place is so small, so even in the midst of his discomfort, Harry smiles and waves, too.

At the last second, before Wallace can turn around and say something first, Harry sneaks up on him.

“How’s my favorite guy,” Harry whispers.

Wallace Groenenberg almost falls over he jumps so high, gripping his chest like a little old lady in a silent film. He wheels around and stares at Harry with wide eyes, heaving.

“I hate when you do that,” Wallace shrieks.

Harry smirks.

“Hi,” Wallace says, trying to measure his voice. He straightens his glasses and grips his clipboard between thin fingers. Harry takes in how the summer did absolutely nothing for his mid-thirties complexion, still as pale and pasty as ever, his thin, orange hair stuck to his sweaty forehead like it was painted on.

“Hello, Wallace,” Harry says, still smirking.

“Mr. Groenenberg,” Wallace tries to correct Harry, like he always does whenever they haven’t seen each other in a while. Wallace tries to keep up the façade that their relationship is as it should be, as teacher/student, especially in front of other people.

Harry rolls his eyes.

“Why is Jack Darcy in my room?”

“He’s your roommate,” Wallace says, looking off towards the school’s entrance, as more cars make their way in through the gate.

“No.”

“Everything I have here says Darcy-Styles.”

“Where the hell is Louis, then?” Harry says, starting to get annoyed.

Wallace looks down at his clipboard.

“Second floor,” he says indifferently. “Rooming with Zayn Malik this year.”

Harry has started to lose his patience. And Harry doesn’t have much patience to begin with, even on a good day. He gets that from his mother.

“Since when does Zayn live on campus?”

“Since now, I guess.”

Harry folds his arms across his chest, his white t-shirt starting to stick to his back in the September heat. Wallace continues to help students into the dorm, directing them to their rooms. A few of the junior girls Harry sells to give him kisses on the cheek and pinch his ass, which say much more than their words ever could. Cody Ornish, the captain of one of the spring sports (Harry can’t remember which), actually slips him a few bills straight away, as they shake hands right there in front of Wallace, for later.

And because Wallace is absolutely terrified of the Styles siblings, and most of the students in general, he pretends not to notice.

But Harry isn’t quite done with him yet.

“Why aren’t we rooming together?” he asks quietly, reaching for the door to head back into the dorm. He can see from Wallace’s clipboard that both Louis and Zayn have arrived.

Wallace looks down at the list.

“Says Tomlinson requested Malik,” he says.

Harry frowns.

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” Wallace says quietly, looking up at Harry. “Please don’t… make my job more difficult. If Tomlinson’s father makes a request, it just… it happens, and you can’t change it.”

“I’m aware of that,” Harry says. “And just so long as you continue with your deal with Gemma, I would never make your job more difficult.”

Wallace’s entire face reddens, his cheeks flaring, like they do whenever someone mentions his under-the-table deal outright. How Gemma Styles, as a lowly freshmen a few years back, blackmailed him into it because she’s a fucking genius. And since Harry absolutely loves to embarrass people, he savors the moment and smiles. Their relationship will always favor Harry’s upper hand, and they both know it.

“Catch you later, Wally,” Harry says with a wink, disappearing through the door like he hasn’t a care in the world.

Harry has a good poker face.

He runs a hand through his hair and quickly makes his way down the hallway, towards the stairs that lead towards the second floor. It doesn’t take him long to pass only a various open doors, filled with his classmates and a few stray parents, to find two of his good friends tucked together in their new room.

Louis Tomlinson, a sight for sore eyes, in all of his tanned, bronzed glory, lounges on one of the beds while Zayn perches on a desk chair in the opposite corner. Their room is already a mess of shit, clothes and shoes, their unpacking due to wait until probably mid-March.

Louis laughs at something Zayn says, who looks just as gorgeous as always: chiseled jaw, facial hair Harry’s always envied. His hair is longer, shinier. But he’s thinner. Face a bit more pinched.

To announce himself, Harry clears his throat. Both boys startle a bit and look up at him. At the very next moment, he feels about seventeen pairs of hands come at him from behind, pinching the life out of his sides and love handles.

“Finally,” Niall huffs out a laugh, moving Harry out of his way to throw himself and his backpack onto Zayn’s empty bed.

“We’ve been here hours,” Liam agrees, sitting next to Louis. He’s wearing a princess birthday crown, surely a gift from Niall. They always just miss his summer birthday, and have to celebrate in other ways their first weekend back.

Niall and Liam have shared a room since freshmen year, when they were randomly placed together. It was a match made in bro heaven, and the rest was history. They both probably showed up at seven in the morning, just because they could.

“Someone going to tell me what’s going on, then?” Harry says first thing, hands on his hips, looking around at his friends.

It’s not like Louis to switch something like this on Harry, of all people. Harry usually needs to prepare himself for shit. It’s pretty well known among them that Harry doesn’t like to change his day-to-day routine much. Once he’s set in his way about something, he doesn’t deviate from the path. It’s why over the summer, his weekly Skype date with Liam happened every Thursday morning at exactly eleven, after they both had a run. It’s why Niall made sure to text Harry every time there was a chance of heavy storms up on the Cape, that he was “fine,” just in case Harry saw the news alert on his phone and freaked out over Niall possibly being out on his dad’s boat.

It’s why Louis fucking Tomlinson was supposed to be his roommate, again, because Harry likes having Louis fucking Tomlinson as a roommate. Because Louis understands that Harry likes having certain things in his life just so, and also, because Harry is a drug dealer, and Louis never minded that little detail.

Gemma always said, when dealing drugs, it’s important to have a supportive roommate.

For some reason, before Louis can answer, Harry’s eyes are drawn over to Zayn. Of all the boys, Zayn is the one Harry is least close to. As one of the very few F.M. students who never boarded at boarding school, because his family home was so close by, the camaraderie that comes with close living quarters got lost a bit in translation. The late night studying, the after-hours partying right down the hall from the R.A.s, the drinking and pill popping to stay awake, it wasn’t as ingrained in his relationship with Zayn.

Zayn’s cool, though. The five of them spent almost every day together during school hours, they've taken vacations and weekends together, and yes, he was always up for a good laugh. Harry really would consider him a great friend. But it’s just not… the same.

Zayn meets Harry’s eyes briefly and then looks away.

Louis, never one to miss an opportunity to smack Liam in the dick, gets him good. And then he stands up to get close to Harry, to fuck up his hair.

“Are you mad?” he asks quietly, as the boys get the sense to talk loudly amongst themselves.

“Yes,” Harry admits.

“Look, it’s like this…” Louis says, hands on his hips, brow furrowed. “Zayn… He’s never lived on campus before, yeah? And this year… This year he has to stay here. And I think it’d be best if he stayed with me.”

Harry folds his arms over his chest.

“I don’t understand. He lives like, five minutes away.”

He can feel himself pouting like a fucking child, which is ridiculous. It’s his first Gemma-less year, his first year by himself. He needed Louis. It’s his chance to be something, to be better, as the only Styles on campus people can rely on for their shit: to get through their classes, to get out of their heads, to party when they need the release. They need him. And he needs to buck up. Why does Zayn Malik, son of Malik Enterprises with his own guest house the size of a mansion five minutes up the road, have to ruin Harry's first day?

“Zayn needs to stay here this year, with me,” Louis says with a firmer voice, staring at Harry. “And I need you to get that.”

Louis rarely gets firm and he rarely gives this much of a shit about anything. Harry blinks at him, at a slight loss.

So it only takes about three more seconds for Harry to give up and roll his eyes. He won’t be a dick.

“Fine,” he says, stepping back and opening himself up to the room of boys. “Zayn, just so you know, Louis is an asshole who will steal all of your boxers. And he snores.”

“You snore,” Louis practically yells, hitting Harry in the nuts.

Harry smirks and grabs for Louis, to put him in a headlock. Zayn laughs from his chair, hands wringing slightly, like he gets when he’s a bit nervous. But the tension he held in his shoulder blades has started to ease. And even if Harry doesn’t quite like that between the five of them, he’s the odd-man-out within the dorm, he’ll just have to deal with it. As Wallace said, there’s nothing to be done. Louis asked about as nicely as he could, in his own Louis-like way, for Harry to please let it be.

So Harry sends Zayn a wink, to say they’re good, as Louis squirms away from him and calls him a twat.

“Now boys,” Niall interrupts them, reaching into the bag he brought. “Since it took young Harold here about a decade to arrive, I hope it’s not warm…”

He pulls out a handle of vodka. It’s still frosty on the sides, clearly pulled from the deep freezer he keeps in his closet at home. Liam the little worker bee that he is, knows what comes next. He leaps up to grab the red solo cups from within the bag and begins throwing them at all of their faces.

Louis rolls his eyes like he’s annoyed, but they all know he loves it, as he gestures for them all to gather round, to stand in a circle in the middle of the room. So they do. They know their Niall, and they know what’s coming.

“Zayn, this has been our tradition since sophomore year,” Niall continues, pouring shots into the cups they all hold out, giving a solemn, sincere look, “first day in our rooms.”

“Uh, yeah,” Zayn says with a knowing smirk. “You all show up to class two days later, still hung over and tell me all about it. Remember?”

Zayn, when his dad dropped him off on his way into the conglomerate of whatever it is the hell their company does, actually brought them breakfast the year before on their first day of classes, prepared by his sisters’ nannies, which Niall full well knows.

But Niall gives Zayn a look anyways, that says Jesus, just let me give my speech, that’s part of the fun of it, okay?

Harry has to bite his lip to keep himself from laughing. They all know how much Niall enjoys a tradition, a speech, a here-here. He loves a campfire story, a toast before a big event. Niall will be at all of their future weddings, holding a microphone, telling their brides and receptions at large about their early days in these very halls. The one to christen their first boats with broken champagne bottles and shout L'Chaim! when they have their first babies.

It’s best to just let him roll with it, once he’s started.

“Now that we have Zayn with us all the time, now that we’re all here, together for one final ride… this is going to be the best fucking senior year this place has ever seen,” Niall says, looking into each of their faces.

“Amen,” Harry says, hitting his plastic cup against Zayn’s.

Zayn smiles at them.

Niall makes it so all of their cups knock together.

“So here’s to us. Our senior year. Before graduation and the Ivys we all head off to, before we’re old and boring, we have one more year. This year, to be young and alive, in the same place. May it be full of booze, Harry’s good stash, and enough pussy to go around.”

“And for the love of god,” Liam says with a groan, “no getting caught.”

“Amen!” Louis says louder, crossing himself.

“Fifty-six and counting,” Zayn says with a smirk.

“Fifty-six,” they agree as a group, laughing together.

“Slàinte, boys,” Niall finishes, nodding for them to drink. They all tip back their cups, hissing at various intervals at the disgusting bite only vodka can bring. “Salud.”

Harry nearly vomits his shot right back into his cup. He hates the taste of pure vodka. But he does it for Niall, and for their tradition. As the handle of liquor starts going around again though, he sort of wishes he could pass on it.

Zayn catches his eye a few minutes later, as they settle around the room to do a proper First Day “Day Drink.” Zayn has started to unpack his belongings, from the massive pile near his bed. It’s not the standard few bags, or even the box or two some kids tend to ship to themselves if they come to Foster Montgomery from states or countries away. It’s like Zayn’s a freshman, new to the whole experience. He brought his entire life with him.

Harry smiles at him, to assure Zayn that he’s really not pissed to be Louis-less for the year.

Zayn smiles back.

One of the other boys punches Niall in the dick, his yell piercing the room, and the moment is lost.

---

Harry grew up on 61st Street, off Park Avenue in the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He went to some of the finest schools money can buy. To this day his mother still rubs elbows with Kennedys. His father donates money to the Met every year, so Harry and Gemma always make sure to beg him for invites to the best galas and after parties. It’s where they learned from their cousins, and other family friends, how to not only procure the best drugs, but how to distribute them correctly. Gemma and Harry both learned that without access to their trust funds until they each turned twenty-one, it’s really the best option for uninterrupted spending money. Upper East Side kids, as well as F.M. students, get what they need from each other. They also know how to take care of their own.

Harry’s world, and the world of his friends, is very much a tight-knit community built on the backs of children who grew up too quickly.

Gemma and Harry learned from a very early age how to navigate their way around the city, before they got a driver: underground on the subway, up and down the river’s edge, across the park, and through lavish buildings. Harry is good with direction, good with getting in and out of his bedroom window undetected lest his mother or the maid hear him drunkenly stumbling up the fire escape again, and he’s especially good at opening condoms with his teeth.

Escape routes, side entrances, locked doors.

So it’s quite the surprise to Harry that he can’t seem to grasp the concept of getting into his goddamn room that night without a key or Louis to assist him.

Harry slaps at the old brass handle of his new door, with the number 5 carved into the wood, and wonders if he’ll make it inside. He sways on the spot, his hair limp and sticking to his face and neck, as a boy from another room yells at him for making noise in the hall, at whatever the fuck time it is. It’s probably Dominic or Brady Powers or Yancy Urena.

“Fuck off,” Harry mumbles to no one.

If he still had Louis as a roommate, this wouldn’t be an issue. They would’ve had their annual first shot, and all the following drinks, in their room. The other boys would’ve been the ones to go off to their dorms, stumbling to their beds, texting girls to suck their dicks. Harry would be face first in his pillow right now, instead of knocking on the door of a stranger, of Jack fucking Darcy, who is so lame and boring and straight laced. He’s from fucking Denver, for Christ’s sake. Who lives in Denver?

“Jack,” Harry moans, his face up against the wood of the door, giving up. “Let me in.”

Jack does not let Harry in.

A few more knocks and it’s still no use. Harry still can’t seem to get himself into his room. If he keeps it up, someone will call Wallace on him and he can’t be so brazen about his special treatment, what with his too-long hair and his carelessness when it comes to the dress code. He can’t be that obvious with his Wallace tie, especially on the first night.

So Harry exhales and peels his face off of the door, to stumble his way back down the hall, up the stairs, towards the room he came from earlier. He probably reeks of vodka and weed. He may even have some bud in his hair, from when he tripped and fell over onto Zayn’s bed and landed on the pipe. Amy, Ruth, and Maureen had all come up to the floor to see some of the senior boys, drifting in and out of each room, and Mo had picked some from Harry’s shirt with red fingernails.

It’s with another face full of door that Harry huffs another exasperated breath and kicks out a foot.

“Lou,” he mumbles into it, the hall lights luckily dimmed. “Zayn. Lemme in.”

A few seconds later, the door begins to move. Harry almost falls forward, but he catches himself on the frame just in time.

It’s Zayn, in nothing but a pair of black boxer briefs, staring at him with one eye.

“Why aren’t you in your room?” he says quietly, drunk, exhausted.

“Jack’s a dick.”

“True.”

“Let me in.”

“You get the floor.”

“Fantastic. I love the floor. We’re in love,” Harry says with a smile, wiggling his hips. He pushes past Zayn into the mess of a room and almost trips over a pair of jeans. “I could kiss the floor.”

Harry falls over, his kneecaps cracking into the wood a little too hard for a sober person, but just the right amount for a drunk teenager, and lands on his back. And because Zayn Malik is a saint, even in his own drunk stupor, he stands over Harry and holds out his hands, palms up.

Harry throws his arms out to his sides, swimming in a pool of his friends’ clothing, and laughs. Because like all of Harry’s best friends, Zayn remembered.

Harry Styles can sleep anywhere, at any time, in any sort of condition: dressed, undressed, in a bed, on the floor, in the eye of a hurricane, outside on the grass near the headmaster’s quarters even. He doesn’t need a mattress or a fancy pillow. He doesn’t need a blanket, or a tent, or a friend, a warm body next to him. He certainly doesn’t need the feeling of “home” or the comfort of having his mother down the hall, like some kids do. Harry can practically fall asleep at will, if he tries hard enough.

Just so long as he has his boots off.

He kicks his legs up so his feet land into Zayn’s waiting palms.

"We're so glad you're here, you know," Harry sighs, eyes getting heavy as Zayn undoes the straps of Harry's massive Saint Laurent boots.

“Might as well be flippers,” Zayn huffs a laugh as response, finally tugging both boots off. Harry wore his good socks, thank god.

“You know what they say about big feet,” Harry smiles. The moonlight filters in through the wooden blinds just so, and Harry can tell that Zayn is smiling too.

“Shut the fuck up, Harry,” Louis groans from under his pillow across the room.

Just for that, when Zayn heads back to his bed to settle back into it, Harry takes one of his massive Saint Laurent boots and throws it at the wall above Louis’s head. As planned, it scares the ever-living shit out of him.

Harry falls asleep laughing to himself, using a pile of Zayn’s wrinkled t-shirts as a pillow.

---

Once he’s gained entry back into his room, life runs a tad more smoothly for Harry. F.M. students tend to keep their doors open on the weekends, to filter in and out as they please when they don’t have classes, sports, or clubs to attend. So Harry schlepped his way back down to his room the next morning before senior orientation and walked right in, to see Jack hanging the last of his clothes up in his closet.

“Really?” Harry said woefully, scratching at his dirty hair. “There’s no way you didn’t hear me knocking.”

“You were drunk.”

“And?”

“If I saw you drunk, then that would mean I was an accessory. And if you had gotten into some trouble last night and Mr. Groenenberg had asked me, ‘Did you see Harry Styles wasted out of his mind? Were you aware that he was impaired?’ And then I would’ve had to say, ‘Yes, I did.’ And I really didn’t want to have to say that.”

Harry stared at his roommate, at Jack fucking Darcy, the lamest fucking person on the planet. Because he honestly couldn’t believe his ears.

“And for that matter,” Jack nodded towards Harry’s bed, to the bottom drawer on the right and its hidden compartment, “I have no idea what you have in there. I never want to hear about it, see it, be a witness to it, or in any way be apart of it. If I’m in the room, it doesn’t exist.”

Harry blinked.

“If I don’t see it, I don’t have to lie about it.”

Harry’s eye did that twitch again, but it wasn’t entirely unfair.

And that’s how Jack and Harry came to their current agreement, about Harry’s extracurricular activities. If Harry needed to sell outright from their room, he had to do it when Jack wasn’t around. And if Jack was around, Harry had to give him proper verbal notice to get lost for a bit. They weren’t to talk about it in mixed company, through text, or near Wallace. Even though many students knew that Wallace knew what Harry did, Jack found it to be distasteful.

Harry also figured he’d have the backup of his friends’ rooms anytime he needed them, seeing as how Louis and Zayn owed him big time, and he provided Niall and Liam with enough free weed over the years to get the kick back.

“Isn’t that right, boys?” Harry said, eyeing the four of them, his arms crossed over his chest as they all stood around before their first class of senior year that Monday morning.

Their crisp, navy blue F.M. blazers matched perfectly, as they stood on the steps of John Henry. Their laptop bags over their shoulders, their khakis pressed, their eyes only slightly hooded from their still-lingering weekend hangovers aside, it was almost time to face the day. But Harry didn’t want them to forget the deal he made with Jack and how it would affect all of them now.

Liam passed over his father’s flask to Zayn, with a distinct roll to his eyes and a nervous shake to his hand, as they all murmured their agreements. They knew Harry could be overly dramatic when he wanted to be.

Classes at Foster Montgomery are on the small side. (“The small side?” Kash Vahdat scoffed their freshmen year when he looked around and saw only eleven students in their Spanish class. “Small would be twenty of us. This is downright miniscule, compared to my old school.”) The school pamphlet says smaller class size “leads to more one-on-one attention from the faculty” and that Foster Montgomery “prides itself on the individualized attention each student receives to achieve their goals.” It sounds great on paper, and in theory Harry loves having one of the four boys in almost every class. But it makes it hard to fuck around all day, when there are fewer people to hide behind when one wants to take a nap, or text under the table during a boring lecture.

Not that many F.M. students would take the time to fuck around in class, even if they could.

The reason the Styles Family Business has boomed so well over the last few years is because the students around Gemma and Harry rely on their products first and foremost to get through AP classes. The entire first week back, Harry barely makes his way across campus without various people tugging on his hand, texting him to meet up, or eyeing him in the dining hall. Their eyes say I need you, please Harry, I have a test on Friday already, I have SAT prep, three papers, early admission is coming up, and you’re my only hope, Harry.

So as Harry lives his life, hanging out with his friends, enjoying his home away from home, with his tie undone and a blazer over his shoulder, he does what Gemma taught him, and sells. He kicks back under his favorite oak tree on the edge of the track, while Louis and Liam work out, and eats weed Gummie Bears with Niall and Zayn after school.

His junior and senior regulars come see him most afternoons, some of his favorite fucking people in the world, some he’s known in the city since he was eleven, some he met just a few years ago. Girls kiss his neck when they feel especially grateful, Mo flirts with him just as much as ever, and Louis only smacks his dick half as often since they don’t share a room anymore. Jack is neat and tidy so his dorm is a pleasant place to be. Zayn doesn’t leave every day like he used to, so their little group feels even closer than before. Harry makes sure to tell him every chance he gets, how glad he is to have him there, “especially as a fellow entrepreneur.” Zayn always calls him an idiot as a response.

As it turned out, Zayn surprised them by pulling out a black case a few days into the school year, well after midnight when they all should’ve been looking over chemistry notes and instead got high out of their minds to make sure they looked over their chemistry notes. Liam kept snapping at them to pay attention, the coke always making him slightly more on edge than the rest of them. But it was hard to concentrate, because apparently Zayn had gone with his oldest cousin into the city in June (“And you didn’t call me?” Harry screeched) to buy a tattoo gun. He’d been practicing for years with Assaf’s, but wanted to have one of his own.

“You never told me! Even… Not even when… Wait, we can market you!” Louis yelled confused and then joyously, eyes coked out and crazed. “Holy shit, you can tattoo for cash. We’ll set up shop right here in our room. Make it legit.”

Harry had to keep himself from laughing as he locked eyes with Zayn. Louis sure did love being the numbers guy, yet again, as he paced the floor and discussed Zayn’s new rate per hour. Overhead, the cost of ink, supply and demand on F.M.’s campus, beating the curve before anyone else moved in on the market. Zayn winked at Harry and let Louis go off on his tangent, as Liam shoved at him to be honest if his notes were clear enough. Niall rambled on about how he didn’t need a tattoo, thank you very much, that he’d stick to Harry’s “services” and snorted the rail of blow from Louis’s Chem II book.

It’s only been a few weeks since school started up again, and they were already in a bit over their heads with classes. They all had their calendars marked for important dates about midterms, college application deadlines, and the weekends their parents were scheduled to visit. Harry had his boys, maybe the prospect of Maureen Voorhees on the horizon if he decides that could work, and a text from Gemma that said he was doing a good job, in sales and doing his own numbers.

All in all, it’s a great first few weeks.

---

The knock to Harry’s door is a timid one, like the hand on the other side of it is unsure of where exactly it is, like it’s nervous to get in trouble for being outside of the dining hall over lunchtime. Louis shoves at Niall to get in place, to sit over by Liam on Jack’s bed so that Harry and Zayn can sit together on his own. They have a plan, and it means Harry and Zayn need to look especially “Godfather”-esque, side by side.

Louis straightens his tie quickly and then brushes the hair out of his eyes.

“Come in,” he says breezily, kicking back to rest his ass on the heater underneath the window overlooking the sloping lawn that leads towards the tree line.

Slowly, the door opens and in steps two freshmen. A girl who looks a lot like Liam’s oldest sister smooths down her plaid skirt, while the boy with her, some short, skater type clearly from the west coast, coughs into his fist. He reaches with his other hand to grip her hand, a couple already, bless their hearts.

“I swear they’re getting smaller,” Niall says quietly, as Liam sniggers to his right.

Zayn crosses his arms on Harry’s left, which prompts Harry to do the same. Beyond their school uniforms, they want to match. Harry hurries to catch up and schools his face, to try and do that smolder thing Zayn does so well. He feels like it looks like he has food poisoning or something awful, and almost laughs when Zayn elbows him in the ribs to get a grip.

“Hello freshmen,” Louis says with a vicious smile.

“Hey,” the boy says, moving the snapback on his head nervously, looking at Louis because he spoke to him but then at the other boys in the room. He gestures to himself and the girl, “Dean. Steph.”

“What can we do for you?” Louis intones to bring the focus back.

“Uh…” Dean starts.

Niall and Liam start to whisper to each other, probably about nothing, just to create the illusion of talking shit. Harry almost starts to laugh again, so Zayn elbows him harder and gets him straight in the kidney. Harry can’t help but hiss at it.

“Boys?” Louis finally gives up, since the freshmen won’t say anything. He leans back against the heater and throws his hands up.

So Zayn sighs.

“What are you here for?” Zayn says like they’re idiots, flicking a finger between himself and Harry. “Which one of us?”

“Pain or pleasure?” Harry says with a smirk.

The girl’s face reddens.

“I don’t do anything tribal,” Zayn deadpans, his voice hard like he’s bored by the whole exchange. “Nothing in any ‘exotic’ language or script for you lame white people. No offense. If you want art, I want to draw it. No infinity symbols. No shitty song lyrics.”

The boys all laugh at Zayn’s rules. They can’t help it.

“No,” the boy scoffs, annoyed at the exchange thus far, embarrassed to be laughed at. The girl grips his hand tighter.

And honestly, Harry probably should’ve pegged him from the start: this kid from California so used to buying shitty weed from some shitty neighborhood dealer must’ve asked around his new school for the “dopest dealer around” and was led straight to Harry Styles.

“Me,” Harry nods, understanding. “Alright, what do you need?”

“What do you have?” the kid challenges him, turning towards Harry.

Harry almost scoffs right in his face. He should charge him double, just for being difficult.

“Depends on what you’re looking for here at our beautiful Foster Montgomery Preparatory School,” Harry says with a smile, to give the speech he’s heard Gemma give a thousand times. “The usual for during the week: Adderall and Vyvanse for studying, staying awake, staying alert all night. Coke for quick energy. Weed for the come down, to zone out, to sleep. Oxy if you feel yourself getting sick. For the weekend, if you’re into the classics: MDMA for the rollers. Mushrooms, obviously. And 2-CB for that… psychedelic experience.”

Dean and Steph, probably looking for a quick gram of the Northeast’s best cannabis, stare at Harry like he has three heads. It does sound a bit overwhelming, when put that way, especially to a freshman. Zayn elbows Harry again, so Harry elbows him back even harder to leave him alone.

“Gram of Lemon Haze?” Harry sighs.

Dean nods and holds out some cash to make the exchange as quickly as possible. It’s mean, but as the door slams behind them, the boys burst out laughing. The five of them, in their preppy fucking blazers and khakis, are about the least intimidating boys on the planet. And yet they still pulled it off.

“Jesus Christ, you’d think you were Tony Montana the way you were talking,” Liam says, rolling around on the floor clutching his stomach, practically in tears.

“It’s not like I have… I don’t know, black tar heroin or something,” Harry laughs, wiping his eyes. “I barely sell any good shit at this school.”

“And fuckin’ fancy tattoo artist over here,” Niall says to Zayn, who giggles next to Harry as their knees knock together. “Sure have a lot of rules for someone who’s never tattooed anything other than a grapefruit.”

“Fuck off, I’ve tattooed plenty of people.”

“Who?”

“Cousins. People. My sister!”

Zayn shoves at his friends, to show them the pictures on his phone, shit he’s done on various bits of skin from his family members: a feather on Jawaad, Doniya’s bird, a few other pieces for a few other cousins. Zayn’s face does a weird thing as he touches each picture, like he’s trying to squash a memory, or keep something tucked away. Harry notices it and almost asks him about it, quietly, from where he’s sitting next to Zayn on his bed. He even reaches a hand out, to pat at his knee a bit, when Louis reaches over and grabs for Zayn’s phone. He announces they have a break from classes and that no one’s allowed to touch their phones for the next half hour, so the moment is lost.

The boys spend the rest of their lunch hour smoking some Lemon Haze of their own, careful to blow the smoke out the window. If Wallace smells it from down the hall, he pretends not to notice.

---

Elizabeth Stacy’s birthday falls on the last Friday of September, to usher in the alumni homecoming weekend. It’s just about perfect, seeing as how the seniors will probably spend the month of October slammed with tests as well as college admission essays. So when her boyfriend Storm goes around to each room two days before, popping his head in to give the details about where the party will be held, it’s with a special glint in his eye.

Let’s do it right, my friends. Fifty-six thousand and counting.

While at his desk, Harry throws his books towards his bag and shuts his laptop, giving up studying for the night. So much for a senior year without giving a shit about grades. At the last second, he shifts the pens on his desk to be in the right order. Then he begins to text the boys about the party and how they’ll need to gather some alcoholic rations for the night, when he hears Jack exhale from his own desk across the room. He of course thinks parties are stupid, and will probably spend his night with the other lame seniors who think movie nights in the den are the only way to blow of steam.

Harry ignores him.

The night of the party, the fun seniors sneak out the same as always. After lights out, give it about an hour for all the RAs to settle in for the night, and head towards the woods in their quietest shoes. It’s past the football field and tennis courts, along the track, towards the stables. There’s a small shed the stable hands use that has a bunch of extra firewood that they can take, if they’re careful. Once they’re far enough away from the school, if done correctly, the varsity hockey team can make a pretty sick fire in a little clearing between some trees near the lake.

This particular tradition has been passed down for years now, so by the time Harry and his friends arrive, the seniors all have exactly what they need to make their night good. Someone brought good speakers, thank God, so the music playing already has Maureen and her friends dancing a bit. Harry smiles at her as he starts handing out joints and tablets, to the people who prepaid. She smiles back.

Harry thinks the voice in his head should be saying something like, maybe tonight is finally the fucking night, but it doesn’t.

He quickly looks away.

Liam has the cups and ice in his backpack, while Niall has the bag full of booze, so Harry makes sure to kiss both of their cheeks first thing as a thank you. Then he kisses Zayn’s cheek because he’s so pretty, and then Louis’s because Louis doesn’t like to be left out of anything, even something as dumb as Harry kissing everyone around him. Then Harry kisses the cheeks of Kash, Dominic, and Amy, in that order, as he makes his way around the fire without spilling his drink once.

It’s a great party, which is what Louis says over and over again, in his idiotic stupor. That’s how you know Louis is having a good time. He holds his arms out, says something like look at us, under the fucking stars, middle of nowhere, free as birds, and says how much of a good time he’s having. Niall hits him in the dick once or eight times for good measure. And Zayn makes sure to get as many pictures on his phone as possible, for blackmail later on.

A bit later, Harry can’t see very straight. Someone turns up the song playing and it’s something Harry recognizes, but not something he can remember. That happens whenever he rolls: his brain halves itself into at-odd thoughts. Like when he looks over to Mo and sees the swell of her cleavage as she bends down to whisper something to Jessica, her long black hair sweeping over her shoulders. She winks at him as she does it, sending a small message. Harry sees tits and skin and that mole near her clavicle. And all he thinks about is covering her up with six sweaters. Exactly six sweaters, one after the other, in successive thickness. The thinnest sweater first, building up the thickest sweater, until she’s all covered and warm. So he can’t see any more skin. No more skin, just fabric and wool and roughness. No skin at all.

Harry rubs at his eyes and turns away from the girls and focuses on the fire and the people sitting around it with him for a few hours.

Elizabeth Stacy sits on Storm’s lap all night, which is sort of adorable and sort of nauseating. They’ve been together since they were in seventh grade, when they attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols in Boston. They’re the Ken and Barbie of the senior class, an “Aryan Wet Dream” Zayn said once, with their matching blond hair, blue eyes, and inevitable Harvard Business degrees. They love each other, which is nice, Harry supposes. Storm always makes sure Elizabeth has a drink. He holds her hand if she needs to get up to find a place to pee in the woods, so no one can see. And maybe that’s love, when you’re seventeen: holding someone’s hand so they don’t fall when they need to pee in the woods.

“What are you thinking about?” Liam says with a huff, as he plops down on the ground next to Harry.

Harry tears his eyes away from Storm and Elizabeth, tucked together near the beer. He realizes he’s been sitting in the exact same place, in the same position, for a very long time and hasn’t seen his friends in awhile.

“Peeing in the woods.”

“You gotta pee?” Liam slurs.

That sounds a bit better, doesn’t it.

“Yeah,” Harry says, as he wrinkles his nose with a smile. So he wobbles up onto his feet to crack his back, his nice boots getting all dirty and makes his way away from the group. Some of them have already gone back to school, which is good, since that’s how they got caught last year. Too many of them went back to the dorms at once, made too much noise, much to the dismay of the Payne and Tomlinson bank accounts.

So when Harry gets far enough away from the fire and voices between the pine trees, he unzips his jeans. Maybe he does have to pee. He almost trips over a branch, but he catches himself just in time and rips his palms open on the bark of a tree. He hisses at the pain.

“Harry?”

It’s Zayn, who comes into view just ahead of him, stumbling slightly. His hair’s so much longer now, not as formal or coiffed as he used to wear it. Harry heard Mr. Malik chastise Zayn for it once, how it fell in his face if he didn’t “do it right,” which was sort of stupid, because even though most of the F.M. students were trying to fuck each other, they weren’t exactly trying to impress anyone. They all knew they had money. There wasn’t anything to prove.

They knew the cost of their tuition. And they all wore the same goddamn uniform.

But Zayn wears his hair wilder now that he’s on his own, with the rest of the boarding school vagabonds without parental supervision. More plaid in his wardrobe too, not so buttoned up. Tighter jeans. More cigarettes behind his ears. He smiles more and, even when he’s shy and a tad awkward, it’s like he throws himself at the world with more ease, which Harry is glad to have noticed. Zayn and Harry both have an affinity for high end and expensive designers, but at least now Zayn can enjoy it without having to present himself like a prized pony.

He talks about getting his nose pierced, about adding more tattoos to his arms, how he has some hidden in places his parents would never see. He drunkenly pressed a finger to Harry’s hip a few days before, with a slight smirk, like that’s where he’d put one on Harry. It’s how you know a tattoo is good, Haz. If your mother can never look at it up close.

Zayn gets closer, the sounds of the party dimmed and far away, with a look of concern on his face. Harry’s unsure as to why, until he remembers.

“Hi,” Harry says with a frown, looking down at his bloody palms.

“You hurt yourself?”

“I fell.”

“Why’d you fall?”

Harry just shrugs and remembers his zipper is undone. He reaches for it and tries to do it up, but he can’t stand up straight. Zayn notices and holds him steady, his hands on Harry’s elbows, as he finally gets it.

They stand for a few seconds, too far from the party for it to be safe. Sophomore year, two of their own got lost out in these woods and weren’t found for hours the next day. Luckily it was the end of April, otherwise they would’ve frozen to death. Zayn starts to turn Harry towards the way they both came, when instead their ears perk up to the shuffling sounds further into the woods.

“S’that?” Harry whispers.

“I don’t know,” Zayn hisses in return, clearly nervous.

“Let’s go see,” Harry says, too nosy for his own good. He shakes Zayn off and heads deeper in to the forest.

“Harry,” Zayn hisses louder.

Harry’s not sure what he expected to find. Maybe a deer. Or maybe in his fucked out mind, he didn’t consider any possibility. Maybe he was still thinking about people peeing in the woods, and figured it’d be a group of girls awkwardly squatting over the dirt, trying not to get piss on their thongs.

He didn’t expect to find Anthony Yates leaning back against a tree with his jeans around his thighs and a girl on her knees between his legs.

Zayn, not expecting Harry to stop dead in his tracks, walks right into his back. Before he can yelp or ask what’s going on, Harry slaps a hand behind himself, to grab any part of Zayn he can find. It ends up being Zayn’s hip, so he squeezes as hard as he possibly can. Zayn inhales sharply right into Harry’s ear, peering over his shoulder, as he too takes in the scene before them. They move quietly together, like one melded body, to the left so they can hide behind a cluster of small trees. They can still see through the branches, though.

Anthony hasn’t noticed them. He didn’t hear the movement from the path. He’s too busy looking down at the girl, her long brown hair cascading down her back, bobbing up and down on his dick. He has a hand on the back of her neck, licking his lips and inhaling sharply through his nose. Harry can’t tell which girl it is, can’t tell by the hair or her clothes which of his classmates is on her fucking knees, blowing Anthony Yates in the woods, right there in front of him!

Zayn huffs a small breath near Harry’s ear again, like he too can’t believe what he’s seeing.

“Holy shit,” he murmurs, moving to Harry’s right so they’re side by side.

“Get it, Anthony,” Harry says in the low voice, shaking his head.

“Can you…”

Tell who it is?

“No,” Harry answers the thought. “But she…”

Looks like she’s good at it?

“Yeah,” Zayn nods dumbly.

They continue to watch as Anthony makes a sharp inhale of breath, this moan and gasp at the same time. He tries to remove his hand from the girl’s neck, like he’s afraid he’ll press down too hard, so he balls it up in a fist and rests it on her shoulder. But then it must all be too overwhelming because his eyes slide closed and his head tips back to hit the tree behind him.

The girl grips his thighs, her nails digging into him like she’s holding on for dear life. And Anthony must like that because he curses and the fist on her shoulder tightens as he exhales through his nose.

“We should go…” Zayn tries, even though he doesn’t move.

“Yeah,” Harry nods in agreement, at how rude they’re being, watching people who don’t know they’re there.

Anthony bites his bottom lip and opens his eyes so he can look down at her again, at the girl doing this for him. He smiles for a second, like they have some sort of inside joke or maybe like they’re both enjoying it. And then his hand goes to the back of her neck again, tenderly, which is quite nice, Harry thinks. In porn, sometimes the guy slams the girl’s face down on his dick so forcefully, it sounds like she’s about to puke. And honestly, Harry never got the appeal of that so much.

“Yeah, like that,” Anthony whispers.

Harry and Zayn both tense up, at how they can really, truly fucking hear Anthony, at how close they actually are to the scene in front of them. It’s like maybe they forgot, in their drunken minds, that this was real life and not a movie. And if they can hear him, maybe Anthony can hear them, if they move. Suddenly they’re both tense and nervous, Harry sweating like crazy. He feels hot all over, his face red, his skin on fire. He glances to his right and sees that Zayn’s eyes are wide and staring right back at him.

“Babe, I’m gonna come,” Anthony says with a low groan.

And that’s when Harry feels it, when his head snaps forward again despite himself. He wants to watch. He looks back towards Anthony and the girl, to see Anthony finish. He feels the back of Zayn’s wrist against his own, skin touching skin, and they’re both scorching.

Anthony comes in her mouth. Fuck, he comes right in her mouth. He was polite and warned her, and she didn’t back away or use her hand. She moves up even, on her knees to get closer to him, and lets him get both hands on her face and neck. He pumps himself into her mouth at least six times in a row, in solid strokes, almost wheezing, as he comes. The muscles in his forearms and shoulders tense, his thighs taught in his jeans, as his entire body feels the release. Harry’s not sure when his mouth got as dry as it did, but he finds himself having to swallow over and over again, to get his salivary glands working.

And all the while, Zayn doesn’t move his arm. He doesn’t move his wrist away from Harry’s, so Harry doesn’t either.

 
art by https://ablavalba.tumblr.com/

It’s like they both know not to move, that their hiding spot behind those trees has become a little oasis from the rest of the world. They can’t move until Anthony and the girl do. They need to go back to the party first. In no time at all, in what feels like warp speed, Anthony helps the girl up off her knees as they whisper and do up his jeans together.

Zayn and Harry don’t move. They can’t until Anthony and this girl go. They wait, as they walk past without a care in the world, Anthony and the girl (holy shit, Mackenzie Highdecker), giggling and kissing. Harry and Zayn weren’t caught. They stand close together, resolutely not looking at each other, until the coast is clear, and they’re the only two people out in the woods not currently at the party.

Finally, after about a century, Zayn moves his wrist. He steps away.

“We should go,” Zayn says for the second time that night, looking down at the ground.

“Okay.”

They walk back to the party and don’t talk for the rest of the night.

---

Exactly an hour and thirty-nine minutes later, Harry quietly stumbles his way back to his dorm floor and slams a bathroom stall door behind himself. He plants a hand above the toilet and closes his eyes so he can ignore where he is and what he’s doing.

He can’t go back to his room, he can’t be drunk in his own goddamn home, he has to do this here, alone, where no one can see or know or wonder what he’s thinking about.

Normally when faced with a negative emotion, or one that’s too overwhelming, Harry throws it at the world instead of feeling it. He gets rid of it, erases it, disposes of it. He crumples it up like an old piece of notebook paper and throws it away. On any given day, he’s not sad, angry, nervous. He’s happy. Gemma always said to be good, to force it, if they had to.

So Harry usually makes a scene. Look at me! I’m okay, see! Look at how okay I am! If I’m telling you I’m fine, then I’m fine! Everyone look at me, I’m the center of attention! And the center of attention can’t be anything other than a burning star!

The fact that Harry has to be alone right then, after his time in the woods with Zayn, in a quiet space, to level himself, should’ve been a clue. Jack Darcy or not, Harry needed the space.

Before he can process anything else, before the high can wear off completely, Harry undoes his jeans with shaking fingers. He jerks off as fast as he can there in the bathroom stall, with his bottom lip between his teeth, the vision of what he just watched in the woods behind his eyelids, and the scent of pine needles and firewood permanently etched into his nostrils.

---

Thankfully, the Foster Montgomery dining hall opens slightly later on Saturday mornings, to allow students to “sleep in” one day a week. It doesn’t do much good, seeing as how it’s a little after nine the next day, and when Harry looks around with his chin propped on one hand, over half of the students around him are already buried up to their ears in books. F.M. students rarely have the luxury of sleeping in, resting, slacking off. They party, sure. But they pay a price every other day of the week, to be here.

It’s depressing, is what it is. They work their entire little lives to please their parents, who they barely talk to while in high school, to end up in expensive Ivy League universities, to work for rich companies, so they can send their own kids to places like this. It’s a vicious cycle. Harry sighs and pushes his untouched bowl of Cheerios across the table, suddenly grossed out at the thought of ingesting dairy while hung over.

He also feels his phone buzz in his pocket, which means he either has an incoming text from Gemma about her arrival later that night, the copy-and-pasted weekly text from his parents to say hello, or the one featuring his daily horoscope. All three sound quite depressing, so he ignores it.

Right when Harry decides to give up and head to his room after having spent the night on Niall and Liam’s floor after the party, Niall himself plops down in the chair opposite Harry.

“Morning, fuck face,” Niall intones, doing that thing he does to open a straw, by banging it into the wood of the table. He then blows into it, shooting the paper straight at Harry’s face, before depositing it into his glass of orange juice. “I woke up and both you and Liam were gone. How did you sleep?”

“I used your mother’s panties as a pillow, thank you.”

Niall blinks.

“I slept fine,” Harry deadpans.

“Why didn’t you stay with Lou and Zayn?”

“Because I wanted to stay with you,” Harry says with a sly grin. “I like to sleep on your floor sometimes too, you know. I enjoy your company.”

“Yeah, okay,” Niall says with a snort. He also pushes the bowl of cereal Harry didn’t want back towards Harry’s weak and feeble hands, with a motherly nod, to eat his breakfast. Harry frowns at him. Whiskey Stomach and Cheerios do not mix.

“You smell like shit,” says a hoarse voice over Harry’s messy head of hair.

Two hands follow, gripping his shoulders to knead at them at bit, the pressure heavenly to Harry’s fucked up muscles. Harry even groans and leans back into it, chasing after the massage.

But the hands don’t stay, and neither does the boy attached to them. It's Zayn, who instead sits in the chair to Harry’s right, his hair a mess, his t-shirt on backwards. He even wore his fucking slippers to the dining hall, something Harry would never do for how fucked he would look, and goddamn it, Zayn makes it look nice and on purpose, his entire wardrobe top of the line, expensive, high end. Zayn’s a walking Vogue editorial.

“I swear to God,” Zayn says to Niall, his voice raspy and low, shoving any and all food away from him, “that’s the last time I do shots of Jager with Cody Ornish.”

“I could’ve told you that,” Niall rolls his eyes, pointing at Zayn with his fork, to teach a lesson. “Haven’t I said? This is your first year with us fucked up little shithead boarders, Zayn. We’re the Weekend Kids who never had supervision during these ‘important formative years.’ We live on the edge. You need to learn the ropes to keep up.”

Harry snorts, even though Zayn hasn’t really spoken to him yet.

“No really, it’s like, Rule Number Seventeen,” Niall says. “Never do shots of anything with Cody Ornish, or any of the lacrosse team. Young Padawan, you have much to learn.”

“Fuck off,” Zayn mumbles with a smile.

Harry smiles too, but he tries to keep out of the way, with his mouth shut. He ends up staring at the table for most of the conversation, his brain suddenly remembering what he saw in the woods the night before. What they saw, Harry and Zayn. Anthony and Mackenzie together, tucked away in a heated, private moment. With their wrists touching. And how they walked away afterward, without another word, until now when Zayn said he smelled like shit and then touched his shoulders. Harry cracks his neck at the lingering pressure in his muscles.

“Right, Haz?”

Harry’s head snaps up, minutes later, suddenly aware of the attention back on him.

“What?”

“I said you didn’t drink much, but were fucked up,” Niall says with a nod. “You were rolling pretty hard.”

“Yeah,” Harry agrees with Niall, looking right at him. He doesn’t really want to look at Zayn.

“Do you remember much?” Zayn asks, because the universe hates Harry Styles, and forces him to face Life’s Questions at all opportunities.

Harry takes a second to rearrange himself, to shift his body in his chair. More people have filtered into the dining hall, most of them alert like Niall, a few hung over but held together like Zayn, and only a handful in last night’s clothes like Harry. Both Louis and Liam are unaccounted for, Louis definitely too dead to the world to wake up for hours, Liam missing in action. A sophomore over near the vending machines catches Harry’s eye, her hair a mess, her eyes wild with worry, her arms overwhelmed with a laptop and books. She needs something, anything, to get through the week. Harry knows: she’ll find him soon, slipping him a wad of cash. She’ll need a fix.

But Niall hasn’t forgotten him. He nudges Harry’s hand with the edge of his breakfast tray, to pay attention. He probably thinks Harry is still out of it, coming down from the molly, the after effects of the drug still wearing off. Sometimes if they don’t smoke weed after doing ecstasy, to take the edge off, the come down can last days. Niall, their mother hen, could fucking peck at them and it wouldn’t make a difference.

“I mean…” Harry starts to speak, shrugging a shoulder.

But Zayn cuts him off.

“I don’t remember much of anything,” he says, stretching a bit, his shirt getting caught on the back of his chair, suddenly more energized.

Harry snaps his head over, to look straight at him. But Zayn won’t look at anything other than Niall.

“I just remember getting to the campfire and having a few drinks. Lit a J with Louis. Hung out. Then had those last few shots with Cody, and then something about us talking shit about Stefan not showing up because he was worried about his summer girlfriend being pregnant? I don’t know.”

Harry blinks.

“Holy shit, that’s right. Amy and Jess said something about that,” Niall says, getting excited over a bit of gossip.

“Yeah,” Zayn nods, eyes finally bouncing from Niall to Harry, like everything is fine, everything is cool, the world is as normal as any other day. “But that’s… that’s it, that’s all I remember of last night. Not even sure how I got back to my room.”

Harry stops staring at Zayn and looks down at the table.

“I mean, it was a good party, right? I think I had fun? Was that a normal party for you fuckers, and what I can expect from now on?”

“Sure,” Niall says. “I mean, when we throw them, they’re always better. You’ll remember ours. But it was good.”

Harry doesn’t say much after that, and focuses on his cuticles. He sits with Niall as he finishes his breakfast and sides with Zayn when he says he’s too hung over to eat. The three of them walk back to their building together, Harry suddenly dying to get out of his jeans and patterned Gucci shirt. He squirms under the weight of the fabric, his skin hot, as they wave to Wallace when they see him on the bike path. Students jog around them, girls sprawl on the grass to study and sun bathe in shorts before the fall weather sets in, and Harry makes sure his hands stay in his pockets as Zayn tells them about the arm piece he designed for some junior transfer.

Harry keeps his hands in his pockets, in fists.

He can’t chance having his wrist touch Zayn’s, not again.

---

“This is an embarrassment of riches,” Liam sighs that night, as he takes a swig of the flask he always keeps in his breast pocket.

They’re in their nicest suits in the large, obscenely decorated banquet room just off of Hagerman Hall, for the alumni reception before the homecoming football game that night. It’s a parade of wealthy donors, their wealthy children who are required to attend, and the athletes in their jerseys who must show off the uniforms these people paid for.

As always, the boys shield each other as they drink and pass Liam’s dad’s flask around amongst themselves. Louis maneuvers to the right, as Harry shifts to the left, so that when two passing faculty members greet them with fake smiles and haughty laughter, Zayn can graciously compliment the candles over near the Class of 1964 banner (while pointing at it to divert their attention).

Liam slips the flask back into his pocket before anyone can see, right as Mrs. Harrington goes flying past them to go talk the ear off of Senator Braxton.

“If they don’t throw a party to suck each other’s dicks about how much money they make, and spend, for their children,” Louis shrugs, “then what is the point?”

As if on cue, Liam’s stepmother and Louis’s father both take the opportunity to gesture over from their table for their sons to straighten their ties. All five boys, even though they have flutes of sparkling cider in their hands, do their best to make sure their ties lay flat.

“Good boys,” Zayn mumbles.

“Thank god my parents aren’t here,” Harry intones, bored, grateful that the Styles rarely have time for their children, let alone for school functions. They say their monetary donations are enough. He does glance around, anxious for Gemma to finally arrive. Many of last year’s seniors come through for their first post-F.M. homecoming, to cause a little havoc.

“Ditto,” Niall and Zayn say together.

Smiling, they touch their noses with their pointer fingers, as a way to jinx each other.

Another hour and they’re all a tad tipsy, as the F.M. students mill around each other and try their best not to be bored to tears. The girls in their cocktail dresses and the boys in their crisp suits avoid the parents like the plague, while also showing just enough face to make sure they’re seen. Various alumni and faculty pull at the AP students who show the most promise in their classes, the ones who will attend Harvard and Yale, and make the right connections. Louis sidesteps his father every so often, not quite ready to discuss the recommendation letters they all know he keeps texting Louis about. It makes Harry a little nauseous, to think about the fact that they’ll be leaving at the end of the year, to head off to so many different places. So talking about the inevitable college applications in the coming weeks makes him even more upset.

Zayn must notice Harry’s discomfort, because all night Zayn has had a strange look on his face whenever they lock eyes. Harry thinks Zayn must know him pretty well now, after being in such close quarters. It’s like he must sense it, what Harry needs: he makes sure to grip Liam’s arm every so often, to reach into his jacket pocket so that he and Harry can pass the flask back and forth behind the other boys.

It’s finally the end of the reception, before the students are allowed to go change into more comfortable clothes for the football game, and they’re tucked in a corner. Liam, Louis, and Niall stand in front of Zayn and Harry, loudly talking and pointing over at nothing, practically pissing themselves at being “the distraction” so the two of them can finish off the whiskey.

“They’re good boys, aren’t they,” Harry says in a whisper, his mouth close to Zayn’s as he peels the flask away from his bottom lip.

“S’nice of them,” Zayn agrees, his nose wrinkling as he laughs.

He takes the metal container from Harry’s slender fingers and tilts it back over his mouth, the last few drops falling down onto his chin.

Harry watches them race down, down, down, like he used to watch rain drops race down the glass of a car window during long drives to see distant relatives. He always got the seat in the back of the town car, next to Gemma, shipped off where their parents didn’t have to deal with them. The liquid trickles over the stubble of Zayn’s chin, down the column of his throat, over his Adam’s apple, all the way to the collar of his white dress shirt.

Suddenly Harry has a case of severe cottonmouth, as he realizes he’s been staring at Zayn’s neck for far too long. The two of them watched a guy get a blowjob the night before, mere feet away, and they touched as it happened. Briefly, only their wrists, but it was something. And Zayn said he forgot it. Harry can’t forget, he keeps picturing it, wondering about it, if Zayn liked it. He wants to ask Zayn so many questions.

He’s only jolted out of his drunken stupor, when a hand tugs at the back of his hair playfully.

“Alright there, sunshine,” a voice singsongs. “You’re a mess already, and it’s barely seven.”

Harry almost falls over, his eyes ripped away from Zayn’s throat before he can process if Zayn knew he was staring, to turn and see Gemma standing there with her hands on her hips. Gemma, flash in a pan, her wide eyes and slender Styles nose just a little pink from sunburn, there in the flesh. Her hair’s longer, blonder, in a vintage sundress that can’t have cost more than fifty bucks and Doc Martens. A New Yorker at heart, and now as an NYU student, she truly looked the part.

Harry doesn't even have to say anything, as he scrambles to reach for her. The boys know to give them a moment, the Styles siblings who were practically Irish Twins, needed to hug it out. Harry, the idiot, actually spins her a bit.

And because his friends know him well, when he nearly stumbles from the whiskey, they don't let Gemma fall.

---

Harry learned from Gemma how not to process the things that can be burdensome. The ties that bind. My thoughts create my world, Harry. I read that in a book once. They had a nice life growing up, nothing they can truly complain about. Good schools, caretakers who fed them, access to music lessons and dance classes and antidepressants. When Harry turned sixteen, he was given a car. And when he wrecked that car, he was given the Jag. When Gemma got caught shoplifting handbags from Barneys, Des Styles made a phone call.

But they weren’t expected to excel beyond their grades or their wardrobes. The Styles household didn’t come with much positive reinforcement, family dinners, or scenic trips to the Cape. They went to school and then events. They attended brunches, art gallery openings, fashion shows that Gemma sometimes walked in. Harry learned to ride a bike in Central Park when he asked his third nanny’s brother Cedric to teach him. Gemma lost her virginity to Cedric’s friend Gavin when she was thirteen.

No sex talks, no reassurances about being a loving family deep down, no consequences for selling drugs amongst the upper echelon of their parents’ beloved alma mater boarding school.

So Gemma and Harry took care of each other. They were their own family.

As they watch the ridiculous Foster Montgomery homecoming football game that night from the stands in their best royal blue and white hats and scarves, Harry and his friends, with Gem and her returning friends, it’s almost perfect. Harry feels light as a feather, his long hair blowing in his face and his cheeks red from the crisp fall air. This is what he needed, after coming into this year without Gemma, without Louis only a bed away, on his own. Scared. Upset. Harry doesn’t often admit to himself when he’s upset (he doesn’t admit any of his tough emotions), but he has a feeling it’s written all over his face most days, when he’s not hiding it with a flashing smile.

This is all he needed, tonight. To be with just these people, high on life.

He thinks the boys must know, or maybe the universe knows, because Zayn keeps messing up his hair and pinching his cheeks. Niall slaps his ass, when one of the opposing team’s cheerleaders winks at him from the field. Even Louis and Liam, when they start bickering over something stupid, make sure to hug Harry between their chests, like he’s “holding them back” from beating the shit out of each other, the twats.

Gemma must like it, being back in this place she used to run practically with her eyes closed, Wallace at her beck and call, with her own friends. She keeps twirling her dress and cheering with the crowd, even though she hates sports.

Towards the end of the game, their team scores another touchdown and the band plays a song from across the field to celebrate. Louis almost falls on his ass as Gemma’s old roommate Alice shoves her chest in his face, an old inside joke between them. He laughs so hard he has tears in his eyes.

And maybe that’s what does it, that one small joke.

It changes the tide of the night entirely.

And Harry hates change.

“You all seriously need to get laid,” Alice laughs, wiping at her face. “Lou’s about to come in his pants, just from a pair of tits.”

“I second that,” Liam says solemnly, crossing himself.

Gemma rolls her eyes, hating to hear the conversation right next to her brother. She pushes Alice towards the girls to go to the restroom, reaching into her purse. Harry sniffs a bit, his nose running as he stills. The boys have latched onto the idea. Zayn, on the other side of Liam, peers around the group and listens in, his eyes round.

Niall and Louis begin to discuss the logistics of the after party in the other senior dorm, once all of the older alums and teachers have left for the night. Once it’s quieted down on campus from the weekend’s activities, and the seniors and younger alums can finally party it up for old time’s sake, there are decisions to be made.

Who to go for, which girls are single, who gets what room, are there enough condoms to go around?

Harry frowns.

“I have a few in my desk drawer,” Niall says, fist bumping both Louis and Liam. “We’re covered.”

“We did toast to pussy this year,” Liam says with a laugh, wiping at his nose from the blow he had earlier in the night. “And look at us, it’s almost October and we’re all batting zero.”

Harry looks at Zayn. Zayn looks at Harry. The marching band starts playing another rousing song with horns blaring, which means points must’ve been scored for something, as the crowd cheers in the stands. The game’s almost over. Someone starts yelling over the loud speaker, like they can’t believe it.

Look at us, we’re winning!

“Yeah,” Zayn agrees with the boys, nodding, looking away from Harry. “I think I’ll talk to Amy tonight. We did that English discussion on Tuesday, and it was, like… like, she’s cool.”

“Yes, Zayn,” Niall fist bumps him. “Get in.”

An arm slings around Harry’s shoulders, before securing itself around his neck in a playful, yet firm manner. As is Louis’s way.

“Harold, think you’ll finally bag Mo Voorhees before your dick falls off? She’s been practically begging for it since freshmen year,” Louis says, pinching Harry’s cheek.

My thoughts create my world.

Harry blinks. His eye twitches.

Maureen on her back. You wanted that. You want that. Her looking up at you with wide, set eyes. The both of you in her bed because Jack would never let you in with a girl on your arm. Her long hair splayed on the pillow, the feel of her writhing around from just your fingers. Fucking into her until she’s panting, her face in your neck, her red fingernails digging into your hips. Girls girls girls.

My thoughts create my world.

“Yeah,” Harry finally says, resolutely not looking at Zayn Malik or remembering the strong, muscular thighs of a boy in the woods, because those are things he has to concentrate on not doing sometimes. “Yeah, I’ll fuck her tonight, I think.”

The five boys, in their excitement, missed another touchdown and a fumble from the other team. So when they finally turn back towards the field, Louis makes them cheer obnoxiously loud to show their support and “school spirit.”

Gemma and the girls she graduated with in May once again rejoin the little group to watch the final seconds of the game, their eyes a little more glazed than before. She can read Harry like a palm reader, a medium, some fortuneteller with stars in her eyes. It’s like she can search the planes of his face like his whole life is written there for the world to see.

But whatever she sees, she keeps it to herself.

She just throws herself against Harry’s side, to make him put an arm around her.

“You okay?” she says quietly, looking up at him.

He nods, lying.

And she knows, but she doesn’t say so. Gemma does what she does best and changes the subject, to something they can handle, something tangible and real and right now, this second, to make us happy. Like when they were little and Harry was crying over something small, something stupid, but he couldn’t stop. Once he started, he could never stop. His mother loathed the sound.

Gemma would grab his hand, twirl him in a circle in his bedroom decorated like a circus tent, when he was still shorter than her. Let’s be happy right now, hmmm? At this moment in time, sunshine. Let’s pretend we’re at the top of the Statue of Liberty, you and me, happy as can be.

My thoughts create my world.

“I got some new shit,” she says mischievously, patting at her purse. “You’ll like it. F.M. will like it too, I think.”

Somewhere to their left, Zayn’s laughter pierces the air like a sharp knife.

Right now, this second, to make us happy.

“Yeah?” Harry asks.

“Yeah. We’ll price it real good, you and me.”

Harry nods.

“You wanna get fucked up?” Gem whispers with a wink.

Harry sees her eyes slide a bit out of focus, like they’re trying not to cross.

And he realizes that being high on life, and life only, has never worked for him before. He realizes he needs something else after all, so he nods again.

“Yeah.”

---

Because he’s a cliché in almost every sense of the word, when Harry gets fucked up and wants to feel maudlin, he listens to classic 80s music. He likes the feel of the notes, the way the music had feeling behind it, when bands actually went into studios together and recorded around one mic. Pop stars had substance, flare, the balls to be different. It was a time that had soul, when the music had actual instruments and guitar strings whining on the tracks, before producers cleaned everything up into HD polished bullshit. They were lucky, those bastards. They had Bowie and REO Speedwagon and fucking Warrant.

And since John Hughes has made an entire generation of kids romanticize the people they swear their parents never were, Harry latched to it. He wishes he could listen now. He wishes a lot of things.

He used to tell the boys it was the way to his heart. 80s music. But on a tape.

“People used to make mix tapes for their beaus, back in the day. Not mix CDs,” Harry would slur to the boys when they made fun of him, as he turned up “Africa” by Toto or “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane in his old dorm with Louis. “Tapes, on little recorders, that you had to start and stop at specific points, just right, to make sure the music flowed. It took work, and man-hours, and so much time and energy. Not some fucking asshole, with a fucking MacBook and shitty files from the Internet. I want a mix tape. It’s a lost art, and I think it’s a fucking shame.”

That’s what Harry thinks about as he leans his head back against the headrest in his car. His beautiful, custom leathered 1956 Jaguar that his dad didn’t need in his collection anymore and handed over to Harry like it was nothing. It doesn’t have a tape deck, or a CD player, or a fancy hookup for an iPhone. As he sits in the parking lot of his dorm, it’s completely silent. No 80s music, no John Hughes score. Just Harry, shitfaced drunk, high on some pill Gemma swore would change his worldview, and a bottle of bourbon in his hand.

“I’m a fucking cliché,” Harry mumbles to himself, before taking another drink.

He had seen Gemma and her friends off awhile before, to their cab just outside the front gate to the school because they’re allowed to leave whenever they want. Gemma, free as a bird. She hugged Harry underneath the wrought iron school motto, strenuis ardua cedunt. The heights yield to endeavor. She didn’t just tell him to be good and make money, or to call her if he needed another supply before Christmas.

She handed him the good bourbon, the stuff from their mother’s special shelf, and also told him to take the gate’s advice.

Be smart, sunshine. Use that brain of yours. Hard work always pays off in the end, if it’s for the right reason.

He smiled like he understood and waved to her, before making his way to his car, to sit in the driver’s seat and have a nice, long think. The party in the dorms didn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. Niall had enough condoms on hand after all. Harry pokes a finger to the front pocket of his jeans and feels one there, the wrapper wrinkling under the pressure. The boys had girls to talk to. Zayn was with Amy DiSante. Amy’s aunt worked at Dartmouth in the biological sciences department, which she only ever mentioned when someone asked where she planned to attend school, because she never bragged about anything. Smart. Pretty. She had perfect teeth and a small waist. She was short, just how Zayn usually liked girls, so he could jokingly rest his arm on her head like he was napping there.

Harry watched them for a while in Stefan’s room, as they sat on a bed and shared a bottle of beer between them. They kept passing it back and forth, as Zayn made her laugh, like how Harry and Zayn did with Liam’s flask during the alumni reception. But they didn’t have to hide it. The boys didn’t have to stand in front of them to point at random shit hanging on the walls (band posters, an F.M. flag, pictures from Barcelona), to shield Zayn and Amy from wandering eyes.

They shared a beer out in the open, their lips touching the same cool glass, over and over. Zayn could sit with someone and not have to worry about people staring. None of the boys had to worry about that. Zayn liked girls. They all liked girls.

And Harry knew he couldn’t watch anymore, that whatever Gemma gave him didn’t settle right, not tonight, not for him, and he had to end it. He had to do something.

Look at me!

Harry ended up grabbing Kash Vahdat by the lapels of his jacket. He said, “Kash, show us what Zayn did for you! We all want to see!” as loudly as he could, so everyone in the room would stop looking at other people, and instead look at Harry. They all looked at Harry and Kash, as Harry shoved Kash’s shirt up to reveal the tattoo Zayn did on his ribcage.

That caught attention. Some of the girls had to touch it, their clumsy fingers making Kash giggle and blush. Kash was beautiful, honestly. He had a good face. A nice face. Pretty skin and long eye lashes and black hair that Harry wanted to touch a little bit. He even had a rather nice ribcage, from what Harry could see.

People from the hallway, from other open doorways and other parts of the dorm party, even came in to look. Not everyone knew what Zayn’s work looked like. And Harry wanted everyone to see how talented Zayn was, how his tattoos were the best, how Liam said he wanted his entire arm covered in Zayn’s ink. Harry wanted it too, something on his hipbone first. He just needed a good idea.

Zayn stood up eventually, when people started asking about the design of the roaring lion, how he made the curves of the bottom. He said he needed to work on his layers and shading, which Harry almost growled at. Your layers and shading are great. Zayn pointed out how he created a bit of a shadow on one of the letters beneath the animal’s mane, and Amy giggled at him from where she watched over his shoulder, as Zayn gently poked and prodded Kash’s exposed torso in the low light of the room, hazy with smoke.

Zayn blushed a bit, when she made that sound and touched his arm and nuzzled his cheek. And that’s when Harry left, his hand dropping Kash’s shirt where he still held it up for their friends to see. Without another word, or a backwards glace, he fell into the hall and had to find Gemma. He didn’t want to be around Zayn Malik or Amy DiSante or Kash’s pretty skin that sort of made Harry want to cry. He wanted to be around his sister and her friends, her really nice friends, and Louis. But Louis was behind a closed door, with a really nice girl named Danielle, and a condom from Niall’s drawer.

Harry presses at the condom in his pocket yet again there alone in his Jag, before wrestling it out of his tight black jeans. Before he knows it, he’s rolling down the window and flinging it out into the night.

If only he had a song to listen to.

Just then, the passenger door to his right creaks open. Harry whips around to see the stranger coming to join him, when none other than Zayn Malik himself drops into the seat with a huff.

“What the fuck,” Harry says, gesturing with the bourbon towards the boy next to him in his cramped car.

“Was walking by,” Zayn huffs again, wrenching the door closed, the top canvas shaking from the movement, “and saw your lanky ass sitting out here alone, about to drive off into a ditch and get yourself killed. Where were you going?”

“M’not driving anywhere,” Harry scoffs, incensed.

“Is that so?”

“Do you hear an engine?”

“You’ve done dumber things,” Zayn intones with an intense glare. “How was I supposed to know you weren’t planning on driving?”

Harry snorts at that and rolls his eyes. And they say Harry’s the dramatic one. Yeah so he’s drunk inside his car; he didn’t start the engine, did he? There’s nowhere to go, no one to go see. And what could possibly be gained from fucking up his Jag?

“You never give me any credit,” Harry shrugs, taking another drink of bourbon. “I should be angry with you for even asking.”

“What you should be,” Zayn mumbles, reaching for the bottle, “is in bed.”

But he too takes a swig of the brown liquid, leaning back against the seat. The two of them look out towards the sprawling campus of their school, all bought and paid for by people with their same last names, but who barely know them. The academic buildings they’re supposed to apply themselves in, the sports fields neither of them excel on, the cramped rooms they sleep in. And where they apparently fuck girls.

“Where’s Amy?” Harry asks quietly, taking the bottle back.

He’s long past the stage where the bite of liquor could get to him tonight, but that one does. After he asks that question, suddenly it hurts to take a drink. Harry feels the bile in his throat, that feeling of intense saliva kicking back at him, like he’s about to be sick. So he has to tell himself to relax, to breathe, to swallow it.

“She went back to her room,” Zayn says just as quietly, grabbing the bottle once again, like they’re fighting for it.

When he takes a drink, it goes down easy. Harry watches his throat again, without any droplets having a race, as he downs it as easy as lemonade. Water. Root beer, which Harry knows is one of his favorites.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Not tonight then, huh,” Harry says. He has to cross his fingers a bit, suddenly nervous to hear the answer. Did you use your condom, did you need it, are you like me Zayn, are you good at opening them with your teeth?

“No, not tonight,” Zayn agrees with a nod.

Harry nods, too.

Zayn hands Harry the bottle of bourbon. They’re almost to the bottom of it now, the last few shots left in the clear bottle. Harry swishes it a bit and suddenly doesn’t feel so sick. He swallowed it. Whatever it was, whatever threatened to come up, he swallowed.

“How’d the other boys do?” Harry asks, curious.

“Louis and that junior girl. Don’t know her name,” Zayn says with a smirk. “Then Niall and Ruth, most likely just making out. They were both pretty fucked, last I checked. But then I saw Liam with Julie Hathaway. He had his hand on her ass.”

“Cheers,” Harry giggles.

“It’s good for him, I think,” Zayn says, slightly more serious. “He’s… stressed.”

“Yeah?” Harry eyes him, a tad caught off guard by that.

“I mean, just to have a night with a girl, even if they’re just talking or whatever,” Zayn says, grabbing the bottle a little more harshly than he had before. “Like… it’s important to have someone to talk to sometimes. Someone you can touch. And he’s having a rough go of it so far, so…”

Harry scratches at the denim of his jeans, suddenly wishing they weren’t in his cramped car, or wearing their boots, if he needs to pass out. Harry can’t stretch his legs out and it’s warmer with two people breathing inside it. The windows could start to fog up soon.

But he can’t focus on much beyond the fact that Liam’s off talking and touching a girl. Which Zayn says is important, to touch. They’re talking, but they’re not touching. Not like they do when they joke around sometimes, like all the boys do. And definitely not like in the woods, when they watched another boy jizz right in front of them. When their wrists connected and Harry felt his insides light on fire.

“I didn’t…” Harry says, to quiet his brain, still so out of it. “I guess I didn’t notice. Like with Liam, I mean.”

“He’s said it. In his own Liam-like way. With his parents and with college applications soon, it’s a lot to live up to. He didn’t have a great SAT score, and with everything coming so fast… it’s been hard for him.”

“I didn’t…” Harry mumbles, realizing he hasn’t checked in with Liam, or asked about him lately. He hasn’t really asked any of his friends how they’re feeling about life. And how it’s changing. How they’re coping.

“Yeah well,” Zayn sighs, tipping the bottle back to get the last few drops of bourbon. “Maybe you should pay more attention.”

He looks over at Harry after he says it, to hand him the empty bottle. Harry blinks at him and takes it, his fingers fumbling slightly. The pill has all but worn off by now, but his stomach is full of liquor. So later, when he thinks back on it, he can’t blame himself for thinking about John Hughes and what kind of song would be playing.

Harry wishes he could hear a song inside his head as he looks at Zayn and bites his lip a bit.

Did you really forget what happened in the woods? Were you looking at Anthony or Mackenzie? I wanted to look at Mackenzie, I swear. But all I can think about now is looking at you.

Zayn doesn’t meet Harry’s eyes, though. He doesn’t say anything about getting out of the car anytime soon either, or about going to bed, even though it’s late. He just leans further back into the leather seat and folds his long fingers over his stomach and looks out towards the tree line where the sun will eventually rise.

Harry watches him for a beat longer, as he gets comfortable, and then decides to do the same.

---

It becomes their place.

Over the next two weeks, every night after everyone settles in to study after dinner hours, Harry finds himself climbing into his Jag to sit in the front seat and look out at everything and nothing. Maybe Harry tells himself it’s to get away from Jack’s nervous SAT energy. Or maybe he just wants to be alone, now that he’s the most lonely he’s been since coming to this school three years before.

But inexplicably, without ever asking if he can join, Zayn shows up a few minutes later, wrenching open the passenger door with a beanie over his head and cigarette smoke trailing in his wake.

Sometimes they talk, and sometimes they don’t. Politics, the world, school, their friends. But mostly it’s quiet. Harry brings a book some nights, if the moon is out and he can see the words. Other nights he watches Zayn draw in his sketchpad, since he’s been getting more and more commissions for tattoos.

A few times, people come up to Harry’s window asking if they can score for the week. But it looks even sketchier than it already does, when kids come up to Harry Styles unprompted with their hands out full of cash, so Harry shoos them away before he gets caught and the magic is lost. He doesn’t want the magic to be lost, for their place to go away or get tarnished because a faculty member sees them sneaking into his car night after night.

Harry also spends the next two weeks paying more attention. He asks Liam if he’s doing alright, if he needs help studying. Harry has the idea for the five of them to spend some of their lunch periods in the library, just because, which Louis absolutely abhors. But it gives them a chance to sit in silence and focus, for Niall to put on headphones and type out his essays, for Liam to press his fingers to his forehead to read over Chem II notes, for Louis to actually try. Zayn winks at Harry sometimes, whenever Harry says it’s a nice day to study in the lounge.

And on the nights the boys want to get fucked up, they do. Niall doesn’t just make out with Ruth anymore, which forces Liam onto Harry’s floor some nights. Jack tolerates it. Zayn and Amy still chat during small dorm get-togethers, when the lacrosse boys beg Harry to bring his best shit to their floor. Something snaps in Harry whenever he has to watch, but no matter how many times Louis tells him to go knock on Mo’s door, the more Harry can’t.

He does jerk off in the bathroom more than he ever has before.

Gemma knows something is off, whenever they talk. She asks and asks, but Harry doesn’t have an answer. Well he does, but not an answer he wants to say out loud. If he says it, if he puts a capital letter onto the word to describe himself, there’s no going back. And even though it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s not something to be ashamed of, it’s new. And Harry doesn’t like new. Harry likes old, classic, vintage, The Same. He likes the old Harry, the Harry he was last year when he roomed with Louis and everything was normal, when he fucked around with three different girls because he could. Back before they had to think about leaving for college, and boys with strong thighs coming in the woods, and other boys with inked skin and wide tongues.

My thoughts create my world.

Whenever Harry sells a gram of coke to a junior freaking out over SATs or to a sophomore gearing up for Mr. Domingo’s annual Death Week of quizzes every day, Harry also “sells” a gram to himself.

It’s easier that way.

---

Desmond Richard Mercland Styles rarely contacts his children unprompted. That’s not to say that he’s incapable of loving them, or disinterested in their well-being as a whole, but Harry very rarely gets a phone call or text from his father that doesn’t start out with, “Your mother said I should ring you.”

Every weekend, Harry gets a text from both of his parents (if they happen to be staying in New York the same weekend), or from each of their phones, if they’re both away on business. It’s usually the same type message to say hello, ask how his studies are coming along, if he’s eating well, and if he’s gotten into any trouble. Every so often Des will ask about the Jag, if it’s running smoothly, or if it needs a tune-up under the hood. But those father/son types of messages are few and far between.

Once, the summer before, Harry removed what he believed to be a spark plug from the Jag’s engine, when his father was in the city for some gala they needed to attend as a family, to test a theory. If the Jag really was fucked up and needed a repair, would Des take it in with him? Would they do it together, find some specialty shop that smelled of oil and gasoline, with gruff men who would tell Harry to hold their tools while they worked?

Or would it be carted away by strangers, when Harry was dead asleep, before he ever even knew it was gone? Poked and prodded, like the prized possession it was, in a fancy dealership that Des probably owned, somewhere Harry never even knew existed.

As it were, all Des had to do was make a phone call.

When Harry descended the staircase the next night for the gala, his Tom Ford suit pressed and elegant on his shoulders with Gemma shuffling behind him with a crazed look in her eye from the bumps they shared beforehand, Des mentioned it. He’d had almost the entire engine refurbished, without a second thought for Harry or the bonding experience they could’ve had.

“The Jag is good as new. Not to worry.”

And that was that.

Harry’s phone buzzes in his pocket as he waits in line in the dining hall on a Sunday morning, and he knows it’s his parents. Both of them, one of them, whichever. He has two bottles of root beer, one for himself and one for Zayn, because he wanted to do something nice. To surprise Zayn, while he worked for a few hours that day on a tattoo for a girl he’d befriended. Some sophomore who wanted “something special.” Zayn had said he needed to concentrate for this one, extra hard. “To make it good for her.”

And Harry thinks that’s nice, for Zayn to want that for someone. If the artwork he comes up with is going to be permanent, it’s nice that Zayn takes it so seriously. It’s the least Harry can do, to bring him something to drink.

As he gets closer to the front of the line to swipe his dining card, he finally reaches for his phone as it buzzes again.

Desmond Richard Mercland Styles.

Hello Harry, hope you’re well. Mom said to text you, and that you’ve been studying hard. Applications go out soon, don’t they? Do let us know if you need money for the fees, although we know Columbia will be lucky to have you next year. I expect we’ll be down to see you in November, for Parents Weekend. How’s the Jag running? –DRMS

Harry’s jaw clenches against his will, like it does every time he sees his father’s stupid text signature. He tried to tell him once, that a signature is deletable, that when it’s not business and he’s texting his kids, “by all means hit the backspace.” But it fell on deaf ears, clearly.

Gemma likes to end her texts to Harry with her own initials sometimes, to make him smile.

Harry doesn’t even respond. He just puts his phone back into his pocket and steps to the woman at the card reader, pressing at his eyelid where it's started to twitch. Even if he did say something back, to engage in any sort of conversation, his father has already forgotten about it. If he’s in New York for work, he’s already disengaged and is probably once again buried in his old school Blackberry answering emails. No time for his son.

Back in Zayn and Louis’s room, Harry slips in as quietly as he can. The only sounds reverbing against the wood paneled walls are that of a low-simmering album Harry can’t place, and the sharp buzz of the tattoo needle.

Harry settles himself at Louis’s desk and watches with wide eyes.

The girl, Lennox, reminds Harry of Gemma a bit, when she was going through her "phase" as their parents called it. Long dyed black hair, black nail polish, dark eye makeup. She’s on her side, on Zayn’s bed, with her Slasher t-shirt up under her armpit and a hand covering her breast. Zayn hunches over her in his low-backed desk chair, and works on her ribcage, like where Kash had his tattoo done. He looks like a fucking professional, in his jeans and tank top, his black gloves a bit shiny from the alcohol, a towel in one hand, and the gun in the other. Whoever taught Zayn how to do this over the years taught him well.

Harry can’t stop staring at him, at this boy in front of him, with his glasses and backwards snapback. It’s smooth, how he runs the needle across her skin like it’s a pen, just a simple pen, quick motions, before wiping away the excess with the towel. Over and over again, dipping into the ink on the corner of his desk, before moving back to hunch over her.

Zayn gets in a zone when he’s working, and it’s beautiful. He’s the artist, the one making the art, creating something from nothing, and yet Harry doesn’t ever actually look at what he creates as it happens. Every time Harry comes to Zayn’s room, when Louis isn’t around so he won’t get caught staring, he barely even notices the tattoos themselves.

He only looks at Zayn.

“How’s it look?” Lennox finally says, her voice a little anxious at Harry in the room again, but not saying anything besides staring.

Harry clears his throat and blinks.

“Oh shit, yeah. Yeah, it looks great.”

“You hanging today?” Zayn murmurs, almost too quiet over the buzz of the needle for Harry to hear. It’s the second session Lennox has had with Zayn, after he did the initial drawing and various starter base parts of the piece that covers her side. In total, it'll be about seven hours worth of work.

“Yeah,” Harry nods, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Was bored. Thought I’d sit and watch the final result.”

“You didn’t bring us anything?” Zayn says over his shoulder with a smirk, using his shoulder to move his glasses up his nose.

“Root beer!” Harry suddenly remembers, presenting the two bottles. “Shit… Lennox, you should have mine.”

Lennox snorts a laugh and gives Harry a look. A calculating look. Piercing. Like Gemma would give him, or even one of Louis’s sisters.

“I’m good,” she says with a wink. “They’re for you two. Date night.”

Harry blinks a few more times and cracks the caps off of the bottles, before moving to set one near the ink on Zayn’s desk. Zayn mumbles a thank you, but keeps working. Harry uses the close proximity to actually study the tattoo Zayn created, the one he’s currently shading out on Lennox’s side.

It’s… a sight to behold. Harry saw the beginning stage of it, when it was nothing but a drawing in Zayn’s sketchpad, when he told him about it in Harry’s car. When it was halfway done, during the last session, all Harry remembers is the way Zayn’s hair fanned out onto his neck, the shirt he was wearing, the way he was barefoot. How his toes curled onto the wood floor when he concentrated hard.

But now it’s almost finished. Just about done. And it sort of takes Harry’s breath away. It’s a collage of sorts: the face of a large clock, a delicate rose, a string of music notes, woven together with other mementos of a lost life. A woman’s name inside a frame, with a set of dates. It’s for someone special.

“My mom,” Lennox says quietly.

Harry looks up at her face, to see the harshness faded a bit, her eyes a little bluer than he thought when he first saw them. Not as gray.

“It’s really something,” Harry assures her. “Once you see it, I just… Wow, I think… I think you’ll be very happy with it.”

Zayn, throughout the exchange, doesn’t stop working. He shakes his head a bit, like he’s embarrassed. But he doesn’t stop. A line with the gun, a wipe of the towel. A shade with the gun, a wipe of the towel.

But when Harry brings a hand to the back of Zayn’s neck and squeezes slightly, to tell him how lovely it is, he stills momentarily. Zayn lets Harry stand there, looking over his back at the skin of the girl on his bed, at his gloved hands on her, to place something on raw, untouched skin that he drew with the intent to give her something special, and he lets Harry do it.

It’s like in the woods, when their wrists touched.

It’s skin touching skin, and they’re both scorching.

---

It’s becoming increasingly harder for Harry to concentrate on anything other than Zayn Malik. It’s what Wallace reminded him of, when he caught Harry straight up giving a kick back to a freshman in the middle of the arts center, as if it was no big deal.

“Are you insane?” Wallace hissed, pulling Harry by the elbow, so the freshmen band practice traipsing by couldn’t hear them. “I just saw you hand a baggie of something to that kid!”

“Wallace, we’ve been through this,” Harry said in mock disappointment, pressing at his eyelids, just to be a little shit. “That’s how an exchange of goods and services works. They pay me U.S. currency, in exchange for illegal narcotics.”

Wallace almost had a heart attack right then and there.

But it did remind Harry to be a bit more careful, when out in the open. Wallace is the only faculty member in his back pocket, the only one at F.M. who actually gives a shit if he’s caught. As Gemma told him years previously, if a Styles kid is caught red handed by anyone, Wallace goes down with them. She made a deal to ensure it.

Harry blames it on Zayn Malik, and those godforsaken shirts he always wears after classes, once he’s thrown his school blazer off. The ones that show off the chest pieces his cousin gave him over the last year: wings, the kiss of lips, random skulls wearing top hats.

He can’t focus on studying, so he begins to take a ridiculous amount of Adderall to stay awake. Jack has started to wrap a shirt around his head most nights, so the light from Harry’s desk won’t keep him up until dawn. He hasn’t even touched his college applications, which his father keeps reminding him of. Columbia waits for no man, Harry.

Louis even gets mad at Harry one night, when they're supposed to be coming up with a plan to get Danielle to actually date Louis, instead of just sleeping with him when they were both hard up for it. The more Louis lounged on Harry’s bed, kicking at him with bare feet to pay attention to his sexting conversation with Danielle, the more distracted Harry felt. He kept looking at his own phone, with a frown.

If the universe were a fair and just place, Harry would have someone to sext. Someone with a vagina, preferably. Since he at least knows his way around one of those. A dick seems scarier. Certainly more intense and in your face, when aroused. But Harry doesn’t like to think about that sort of stuff, if he can help it.

“You know, I bet if I was Zayn, and we were fucked up in your posh little car right now, talking shit about our hopes and dreams, you’d give a shit,” Louis says with a sneer, pushing himself up off of Harry’s bed.

When he pushes past Jack, coming back into the room from having a hot shower, he almost knocks Harry’s entire dresser over just out of spite. Jack, never one to get himself involved in what he calls “Harry Drama,” just shrugs and steps to his closet.

So Harry tries to forget over the next few days, the closer they get to the end of the month, the overwhelming sense that he has too much shit to do and not enough time to do it in. He doesn’t go to his car, to see if Zayn is there in the passenger seat with his sketches, because Harry knows he’s not. They’re too busy. Tests, papers, grades. Applications. Faculty recommendations. Admission essays. Practicing for the entrance interviews in his head when his mind is racing, higher than a kite.

Where do you see yourself in five years, Harry?

Uh, I don’t know.

How about ten years?

That I definitely don’t know.

What three adjectives best describe you?

Anxious. Rebellious. Gay.

What do you want to do after you graduate college?

Go to the top of the Statue of Liberty.

That’s not a real goal.

Sure it is.

All of the seniors feel the stress just as equally, so Harry tries to keep it to himself. When Jack gets especially jumpy, when he paces their room conjugating Latin verbs over and over again, Harry tries to block him out with music. You can only offer someone something to take the edge off so many times before they start throwing foreign objects at your head. Harry turns towards his desk and faces the corner, music blaring in his headphones. He pretends both Jack Darcy and Columbia University don’t exist at all.

He’s too distracted and not distracted enough most nights, making his head feel like a blender left on High for too long.

One Thursday night, right when Jack seems to have settled himself slightly, shutting his books and turning off his desk lamp, a knock comes at the door. Jack and Harry look at each other warily, as if they’re both thinking it. They have a silent conversation.

Did you invite someone over to sell? Or a girl to spend the night? We talked about this.

Jesus, get a grip Darcy. I’m not a moron.

Harry goes to answer it, wearing just his boxers and a thin tshirt, expecting to find one of Jack’s study partners or his lame friend Brian, who plans their group’s Friday movie nights.

It’s Zayn.

“Hey,” he mumbles, eyes tired.

“Hey,” Harry can’t help but smile, like he hasn’t seen Zayn in days, instead of only a few hours since they sat together as a group at dinner. “What’s up?”

“Lou snuck Danielle into our room.”

“Say no more,” Harry says, opening himself up so that Zayn can step into the room. He didn’t bring anything with him, not a change of clothes, or his books. It’s like he left behind a burning house, nothing to his name at all. It’s just Zayn, in his gorgeous designer jeans and that Marc Jacobs shirt he bought off the fucking rack, the bastard.

Jack, seeing Zayn Malik instead of someone looking to score, or a girl with flitting eyelashes, actually says hello. Harry frowns at that, the fact that Jack doesn’t see Zayn and think of pretty eyelashes. Zayn, who has the best looking face in their entire class.

He forgets as Jack asks Zayn if he needs a pillow and blanket for a makeshift bed.

“I’m good bro, thanks,” Zayn mumbles. Jack shrugs and goes back to getting ready to turn in for the night.

Zayn starts looking around at Harry’s pile of clean but unfolded laundry in the middle of the rug, before looking down at the one thing he did bring with him: his phone. It buzzes in his hand, and he must not like what he sees, because Harry sees his jaw jump. He looks about ready to throw it at a brick wall, to smash it to pieces.

Zayn starts to kick off his boots, like he’s going to get down on his knees.

“You should sleep in my bed,” Harry says quickly, realizing that both Jack and Zayn assumed Zayn would sleep on the floor.

Zayn stills his movements and looks at Harry, his jaw jumping again. Almost like he’s upset. Or confused. Or angry.

“I mean,” Harry shakes his head, “you know me, I can sleep anywhere. I love the floor. You sleep in my bed, I’ll sleep with my laundry.”

“I’m not taking your bed from you.”

“I won’t be able to sleep with you huffing and puffing from the floor,” Harry says, his hand suddenly on his hip from annoyance. “You hate the floor.”

Zayn doesn’t refute that.

“And I’m giving you clothes,” Harry finishes, walking to his dresser. He ends up handing over a pair of shorts and a Van Halen tshirt he found somewhere in the Meatpacking District when he was fourteen.

When the three boys eventually all settle in and all of the lights are shut off, Harry can’t help but wonder why Zayn came to him instead of Niall and Liam. Even though they have their thing, their space in the Jag, and their time when Harry watches Zayn tattoo their classmates, it still feels… weighted.

Like if Zayn needed a place to stay, somewhere comfortable and safe to sleep, to wear the clothing of someone else, it should’ve been in the room of a boy besides Harry Styles. And yet there they are, Harry on the floor staring up at his ceiling, and Zayn in his bed, wearing his shirt.

That doesn’t mean nothing.

Harry grew up on 61st and Park. He went to prestigious schools his entire life. And Zayn was practically MENSA, almost tested out of fourth grade. At the end of the day, they’re very smart young men.

So when Harry eventually looks over at his bed, to see Zayn looking down at him with unblinking eyes, before quickly turning over to face the wall, Harry should’ve realized what that meant.

---

Harry has zero interest in attending Dartmouth, the same way Liam could care less about BC and Niall barely remembers Princeton is a real place. But it’s a necessary evil, applying to the Ivys their parents require of them. So once Zayn hits send on his Notre Dame application and Louis screams, “Fuck you, Yale! I’m done!” all five of them have sent in their most tedious (and useless) applications. And they certainly all need the release.

They’re in Niall and Liam’s room, since they claim it’s “bigger,” and start the celebration early by lighting one of Harry’s biggest and best joints. OG Kush, rolled by one of Harry’s favorite guys in SoHo.

“I told everyone to meet us there by ten,” Louis mumbles around the slightly damp rolling paper between his lips. “Said if we’re the ones throwing it, these fuckers better be on time, and bring good alcohol, too.”

“Amen,” Harry agrees, reaching for the joint.

They pass it around until it’s nothing but ash, until Harry can’t really feel his toes, which is a good sign. The five of them planned on throwing their own bonfire for everyone, at the same secret location in the woods. They all spread the word throughout the day, to meet up later that night in good clothes, instead of the usual sweats and comfortable shit they normally wear in the woods. Before it started to get really cold, before the first snowfall, Niall made a comment about seeing the girls front and center, in low cut dresses and tops.

Which is exactly what they’re reminded of, as Niall gestures to his own chest, at what it would be like to have tits sitting there all the time.

“I’d never stop playing with them,” he mumbles, with a lazy wink.

Harry almost pisses his pants he laughs so hard. Zayn, sitting right next to him on Niall’s bed, throws a pair of panties stuffed under Niall’s pillow, a memento from his time with Ruth, right at Niall’s face. Harry laughs so hard, Zayn has to catch him by the arm before he falls over onto the floor.

And then Louis drops the bomb onto him, snapping him out of it immediately, practically fucking him up beyond repair.

“We need to get you two laid,” he says wiping at his face, flicking a finger between Harry and Zayn.

Zayn blinks at Louis, his eyelids moving at a glacial pace, like they do when he’s especially blazed. It’s one of Harry’s favorite versions of Zayn: when he’s mellow and calm, not like when he’s just been tattooing someone and he’s tight and wound like a guitar string. Harry likes Zayn both ways, but this is good. When all of his body parts, his eyelids and lithe fingers and impossibly long arms, all know to take it easy. To relax.

Harry blinks, realizing he hasn’t answered Louis’s declaration.

“Why?”

“Because the rest of us have been fucking around, like we said we would,” Louis huffs, like it’s obvious, grabbing for the underwear from Niall, to throw it back at Zayn. He gets Danielle to finally be his sort-of girlfriend, and suddenly he thinks he knows everything. “And you two have been sitting around in Harry’s car night after night, reading lame books and talking about lame shit.”

Zayn rolls his eyes with a laugh.

Harry frowns.

“Amy seems into it,” Liam agrees from the floor, kicking back to put his feet up against the wall, looking at Zayn upside down. “S’what Julie said.”

“And Mo is seriously still into you, Harry. I don’t know what your problem is,” Louis shakes his head like he’s disappointed.

“Try talking to her tonight, feel it out,” Niall says with a shrug, shoving at Liam’s legs so his feet don’t dirty up their wall. Then he smiles and says, “You still have my condom, right?”

Harry wonders if anyone found it, the condom he threw from his car that night, the night he thought Zayn hooked up with Amy. He looks over at Zayn, who is smiling like the rest of the boys, all of them chilled and satiated as the sun starts to set over the tree line outside the window.

Zayn’s smile lights up the whole fucking room.

Harry realizes they’re sitting close, their thighs almost touching. It wouldn’t look weird to the rest of their friends, two of them sitting side-by-side, body parts touching. The five of them touch each other all the time. Kisses on cheeks, hugs, even smacks to the nuts. They sit close, jokingly cuddle for warmth between classes, bite at each other’s necks until it hurts. But for Harry, to be next to Zayn, it means something. And it has meant something, for weeks now.

He’s not sure why he does it, but some part of his brain tells him to try it out. See how it feels. Push Zayn’s buttons a bit. Harry moves his hand slightly on the bed, hidden by his thigh so no one can see, and runs the back of his left pointer finger over Zayn’s thigh. It’s a simple hello, maybe. He doesn’t look at Zayn, or acknowledge what he’s doing. But he hopes maybe his finger sends a little message.

Hey you. Can you believe this? Our friends are dicks. But they’re ours, aren’t they. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Zayn tenses next to him. Harry feels it, Zayn’s muscle cramping underneath the denim.

His finger stills. He stops. He moves his hand back.

The boys touch each other all the time, but Zayn must know it’s different with Harry. He must get it. That Harry wants something else. That Harry thinks about it differently now.

Boys. Dicks. Touching Zayn, watching Zayn, bringing him root beer and seeing whiskey drip down his chin, wondering if he fucked a girl.

My thoughts create my world.

Harry almost smacks himself in the forehead, his face suddenly red and embarrassed. He moves his hands to his lap, to clasp his fingers together, so he’s not tempted to touch again. Suddenly he feels like puking. He should call Gemma. He shouldn’t go to the party, or hang out with Zayn anymore, or acknowledge any of the thoughts in his head. If he’s freaking out because he’s high, if he’s having a paranoia trip, he should go take a Xanax and sleep for sixteen hours.

Suddenly, the panties once again come out of nowhere and hit Harry square in the face. He looks up, bewildered, to see four faces staring at him. The fabric fell into his lap. Some red, lacy thing he never imagined Ruth wearing. Pretty and dainty.

“What?”

“We’re all going to nap for a bit and then shower,” Liam says, gesturing to the door. “We'll come grab you later.”

“Okay.”

“And you missed it, Spacey: Zayn just agreed to hook up with Amy tonight. He said he was going to finally close the deal, so that just leaves you,” Louis says, pinching Harry’s cheek as he stands up. “You’re my new project.”

Harry looks to his left, to take in Zayn’s profile. Zayn doesn’t look at him. He just looks down at his phone, where he has a text open. Probably to her. To the girl he likes. Because he likes girls.

Harry blinks a few times, as he too stands. He should go to sleep. He’s been very stressed. He shouldn’t do this. He can see it not ending well. But as he grabs his boots and laptop from the dorm floor, he glances at Zayn again. He still hasn’t looked up at Harry, not since Harry’s finger found its way to his leg.

Look at how okay I am.

Look at me.

And in that moment, Harry knows what he needs to do instead.

---

Harry lost his virginity over winter break of their freshmen year. It was to Dalia Distenfeld, the youngest of the famous Distenfeld dynasty known throughout New York. If the rumors are to be believed, her grandfather William Randall Distenfeld was targeted by the mob back in the forties. He apparently had an insane amount of property throughout the city, and he practically ran the Mayor’s office from his smoke room in the Baccarat Hotel on West 53^rd where he lived year round.

As Harry told Louis, Liam, and Niall later, as they ate frozen waffles in the dining hall in the middle of the night once they got back to campus, it was... okay. Sure, Dalia went a little too fast, even when Harry told her to slow down or else he’d nut all over the place before it even got good. That got a howl out of Louis, who had been fucking his French tutor’s niece for at least three months beforehand. He thought he was some expert at it, which was wholly unrealistic.

Harry, the third of them to lose his virginity behind Louis and Niall, had to admit he wasn’t exactly well versed at it, as the boys cried with laughter. Up until then he’d only had a few sloppy hand jobs. Harry let them laugh because it wasn’t unfair of them, seeing as how Harry knew the experience wasn’t anything Dalia would write in her diary about. He fumbled around too much, his fingers got caught up in her hair when she tried to climb on top of him, and he snapped her bra against her skin twice when he went to remove it. She probably felt bad for him, honestly.

He didn’t know if he should play with her breasts or nipples, if that was stupid of him to even try, so he ended up just… cupping them a bit, as she fucked herself down onto his lap after they sneaked up to his room in the middle of his parents’ holiday party. Liam almost coughed up his food at the visual: Harry in his pajama pants, with a waffle hanging out of his mouth, hands up to hold phantom tits.

At least Harry can say his first time was memorable, unlike Zayn who blacked out for his, drunk on shitty vodka. Or Liam, who was so nervous about the condom breaking, he told the girl he was just going to “rock into her a bit” so as to not create much friction.

Harry’s first time wasn’t perfect. But it opened up the floodgates.

His first time was with Dalia Distenfeld, a girl he had known for years from within their social circle, someone he still texts from time to time to say hello. Plump lips, hair that fell just so above her collar bones, feet that were a little too big, which he sort of adored about her. They messed around that following summer too, when they both were in the city and bored.

Harry got better at it, which was... fine. He was never afraid to tear into clothing again, never snapped another bra strap on accident. Once Dalia showed him how to hold her hips just right, once he listened to her even when she wasn’t saying anything, he got it. After Dalia, he could make a girl come with just his tongue, could crook his fingers to hit that sweet spot inside someone so he could feel her entire body tense up beneath him, could rip open condoms with his teeth.

Harry might’ve been a lame, virginal square once, for a very short period of time as a freshman at Foster Montgomery. And he may be a confused mess of a human being now, as he contemplates what the fuck he’s doing these days.

But at the heart of it, Harry got better. He is better. He can fuck around, can fuck girls, can make them want him. He’s good at it. Maybe even great. He can put on his best Saint Laurent shirt, the black and white patterned one, sleeves rolled up to show off his arms, and black jeans with holes in the knees, tucked over his motorcycle boots. They’re the black boots his mother picked up for him in Paris, the ones she said all the models were wearing, because she said Harry could model if he wanted to. “Handsome boy.”

Look at me.

He can look at himself in the mirror in his room, at his clear complexion, wide eyes, and longer-than-ever hair, and think, look at me.

Harry grabs for his phone, keys, and large black Tom Ford duffle like he’s going away on a long trip, and he gives himself one more look. He cocks his head and takes his reflection in.

If this is how it is, if this is how it has to be, then Harry can go along with it. If Zayn won’t dare to look at him, maybe tonight everyone else will.

Harry will make them.

---

Even though the fire had already been lit before Harry arrived on his own, it’s like the raging flames become bigger as soon as he steps into the small clearing. Harry had urged the boys to go without him earlier, when they knocked on his door and he opened it in just a towel. He didn’t notice if Zayn noticed.

Harry wanted to come alone, to make an entrance, because he wants to do the night on his own, for once. Gemma had texted miss you earlier that night, but when Harry typed it back, he only halfway meant it.

Because he likes that he’s the only Styles kid here tonight. No Gemma, no one to help or assist him, no boys to hide behind. The one. He wants to truly feel like their guy for the first time this year: F.M.’s dealer. Their one and only provider for all things necessary to get completely obliterated after the insane few weeks they’ve had.

They cheer for him, all of his classmates and even some of the juniors who are cool enough to join in. Harry soaks it up, lathers in it like it’s his special body wash to keep the red bumps on his shoulders at bay, as various classmates kiss his cheeks and tell him how good he looks. Mo, in a pair of gorgeous red jeans and tight little sweater, her cleavage spilling out like it did the last time they were around this fire, gives Harry a look. That look.

And instead of running from it, or wondering where Zayn is, or what it would feel like to have a dick in his ass, Harry returns the look. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t back down. He smiles at her. That classic Harry Styles smile that could knock someone right off their feet. She blinks a few times, surprised, but then she bites her lip a bit. Because she knows.

Tonight is finally the night.

“Alright you fucking heathens,” Harry says, turning in a little circle, his bag between his palms. “Who would like to pick their poison?”

Over the heads of some of the soccer players, Harry sees Louis whisper something to Liam, the two of them holding a few beers and smoking Marlboro Lights even though they’re fucking gross.

But Harry doesn’t worry about them, or what they’re saying about him, not tonight. If Louis really does want Harry as his “new project,” it’s already too late. Harry gave Mo the Smile. He’s done the work for himself.

Harry stops paying attention to the boys, to his thoughts, to everything that doesn’t involve his Tom Ford bag. He just laughs and sells, his hand groping around in the bag for various amounts of coke, weed, and pills. He moves around the party, shaking hands, making change for hundreds, kissing girls.

And then finally someone asks about the 2-CB, which Harry barely ever sells. There’s always too much to get done throughout the school week to go on the PG-13 version of an acid trip, so it always sits in his bottom drawer completely untouched. But apparently since it’s almost the end of October, and most of their applications have been sent out, the seniors of Foster Montgomery Prep are ready to forget. Harry’s just glad he brought some with him.

At one point, after Harry has taken a few bumps from his own coke and has a mixed drink in his hand, he sits on a wooden stump and Mackenzie Highdecker ends up on his lap. She wants it, Harry can tell. She was appointed by her group of friends to get the low down. They’re curious. The pill could be scary.

But Harry wouldn’t sell them anything scary, he thinks.

“No you wouldn’t,” Mackenzie reads his fucking mind, winking at him.

A little group has formed around him as he shakes his head in disbelief. He lets her squirm on his lap, his dick even getting a little hard from it, as they crowd around him. They want in. They want to try.

So he puts on a show, like how Gemma taught him all those years ago when their aunt bought them a mini teatro with red stage curtains, to put on puppet shows about princes and thieves. Harry’s face lights up, like he’s about to tell a good ghost story, as he explains to them what to do. How to take it just right, to make it good.

“I’ll only give it to you, if you promise to be safe,” Harry says solemnly, nodding up at Mackenzie. She blinks and nods at him, her fingers at the base of his neck, as she listens rapturously with her friends. They’re all from Boston, so it makes sense for them to be the most fun and adventurous. Harry almost says hey I saw you give head in the woods once, I know how you like to have fun to her, but he refrains.

“I will, Harry. I promise,” Mackenzie says sweetly. The other girls agree, even Anthony and his teammates nod along, ready for instructions. People trust Harry, just like they used to trust Gemma. When a Styles kid talks, when they tell you what to take and how to take it, you listen. That’s always been their edge.

“15 milligrams,” Harry says with a smirk, reaching for the pill baggy in his bag. He talks about his drugs like he’d talk about a pie recipe. Licks his lips, even. Really sells it. “It’ll give you a nice, solid three hour trip. Giggly, fun, euphoria.”

As Harry gives his speech, as they all hold out their hands in excitement, he senses the new arrival of bodies behind him. The four boys Harry would trust with his life, probably coming back from talking about him, there to tell him to ease up.

Harry feels a hand on his neck, knows it’s Louis. His hand says be careful H, I know you want to get fucked up tonight, get them fucked up too, but it’s still early.

Harry ignores him. He doesn’t even turn around. Because he doesn’t want to see Zayn standing besides Lou, wearing that black shirt with the white stripes going up the arms.

“You’ll love it,” Harry says with a bigger smile, placing a pill directly onto Mackenzie’s tongue. “But be careful of the come up, babe. If you’re prone to puking, if you haven’t eaten anything tonight, let’s have some water.”

More people have started to arrive, latecomers to the party Harry and his friends put together for the night. Seniors who never come to the parties, curious to have some fun after the craziness of applications and before midterms. More juniors. Even a few sophomores.

Amy DiSante and her roommate.

Harry blinks a few times and focuses back on the group, the girl in his lap, realizing what it means for Amy to be there, to be here, so close by. He can hear Zayn offering her a drink, so he still doesn’t look.

But he’s not done yet. He has to bring them home.

“Come find me if you need to smoke a bowl on the come down, alright?” Harry says calmly, a slow smile creeping up his face. Serene, happy, carefree Harry Styles. He just became their best friend for the evening, as music gets turned up louder and Anthony starts eying Mackenzie’s lips.

“S’it gonna be good, Harry?” one of the girls asks, hopeful, smiling with stars in her eyes.

“It’s gonna be great,” Harry assures them, bopping the girl on the nose. “I want you to have a clear, positive headspace, okay? All of you. Trust me. This will magnify your feelings and emotions, so if you’re thinking negative thoughts… No worries. No stress. Good vibes with your best friends here, right? Hakuna Matata this shit.”

They all laugh at that, at silly Harry Styles who could sell water to a fish. That’s how he leaves the little group to the left of the alcohol, the brave souls ready to accept the night ahead of them. Harry isn’t mean-spirited and he doesn’t enjoy watching his friends trip their balls off, but it’s not the worst job perk in the world. Harry moves away from them with his drink and can’t help but smile again, as he watches them start to zone out.

Mackenzie ends up sitting on Anthony’s lap next, her knees knocking together as she falls against his chest. They’re cute together, which Harry rather likes. They aren’t officially dating, and they don’t take themselves too seriously. But the bare bones are there. The groundwork to a relationship. A partnership. As Harry watches them flirt, he realizes he’s rooting for them.

“Did you take some too?” comes a voice behind his ear.

Harry turns to face Zayn, no longer smiling, his face blank. If Zayn recognized the two people Harry was just staring at so longingly, the ones they watched in the woods together, he doesn’t say so.

“No.”

“That’s probably best,” Zayn nods, sipping at his beer. “If they all try to go off into the woods, chasing after unicorns and fairies, some of us should probably be coherent enough to bring them back.”

Zayn smiles at him, tries to engage Harry in a joke. But Harry doesn’t take the bait. Zayn, in his fucking Gucci and Burberry, with those pants with the fucking cutouts near the thighs, something Harry could never in a million years pull off. His hair styled up like he tried to look good for her, his facial hair grown in and masculine, manly, burly.

Harry turns towards the fire instead.

“Where’s Amy?”

“I don’t know, probably around here somewhere.”

“Give her my best.”

“H, are you mad at me?” Zayn questions, his hand pulling at Harry’s elbow lightly.

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“You don’t know what I look like when I’m lying,” Harry says, turning towards Zayn. He takes a dramatic gulp of his drink, the whiskey-to-Diet Coke ratio way off. It’s too strong. He needs about three more.

“Yes I do, of course I do,” Zayn frowns, like he doesn’t understand the words coming out of his mouth.

Harry rolls his eyes. If Zayn wanted to be dense and ignore all of the signs, then that’s well within his rights. But Harry can ignore them too. And for him to do that, for him to ignore everything, all of it, every single new fucking piece of himself, he needs to fuck someone tonight. A girl. And standing around talking to sex-on-a-stick Zayn Malik won’t help him accomplish that.

“Have a good night, Zayn,” Harry finishes, toasting him.

He leaves Zayn standing there, that confused look still on his face like it would be stuck there forever. He finds his other friends, jumps onto Liam’s back because Liam always catches him no matter what. He kisses him for it, on his cheek, his chin, his other cheek. He hugs Niall over and over, thanks him for being so nice all the time, for being their dad away from home. Louis, who seemed to be permanently stuck to Danielle’s face, comes up for air every so often, his mouth red from her lipstick, and Harry makes sure to hold Louis by the face and talk to him twelve different times, the coke making him fast and motor-mouthed, his words forming always forming into some variation of, you’re my best friend, aren’t you Lou, we’re the best of friends forever, no matter who we room with right, am I your best friend? Say I’m your best friend, say it so people can hear it.

Maureen finds him throughout the night, their fingers brushing every time they pass by each other. Harry tells her she looks beautiful. She blushes and pretends like she doesn’t know. She compliments Harry’s boots.

And when they’re both too drunk to pretend any longer, they eventually make their way away from the group, to furiously make out against a tree. It’s just that Harry has the nagging thought that someone could be watching them. Which he must say out loud?

“No one’s watching,” Mo murmurs against his lips, as she presses his back into the bark.

“Some people like to watch,” Harry says in a whisper, his lips numb from the whiskey, his brain frazzled from the coke. He can taste the chemical of it in the back of his throat, stuck up in his snot and nostrils. “You never know.”

Mo brings a hand to his dick, and applies pressure to it through his jeans. Harry inhales a sharp breath. This is finally it, after years of build up. Maureen Voorhees, the girl who used to lend him history notes and give him back rubs after long lifting sessions with Liam, the future Doctor Without Borders who can fill out a little sweater to the point that it almost hurts to look at her.

Harry can’t help but close his eyes as she reaches for his belt, the blood rushing to his dick too slowly, like his insides are made of syrup. He feels slowed down. Heavy.

He realizes he’s just like Anthony Yates out here, away from the fire where no one is supposed to see. He has a girl, a really nice girl with so many better options than fuck up Harry Styles, willing to touch him intimately. This is it, he has it. He’s done it. He set out for this tonight, to have Mo just like this. Not upset, not worried, not crazy over someone who is only a best friend, not gay, not gay, not gay.

“So what do you wanna do?” Maureen asks in a low voice, as she brackets one of Harry’s thighs between her legs. She leans back and looks at him, her eye makeup slightly smudged, her bottom lip a bit puffy from Harry biting at it.

Harry opens his mouth to speak, his hand coming down to… stop, maybe. But he’s cut off when two people come stumbling towards them on the narrow path barely lit by moonlight.

Mo, scared half to death, falls into Harry’s chest. They look towards the incoming noise, only to see Zayn and Amy coming into view, giggling like fucking kindergartners over god only knows what.

And since it’s not a psychopath or murderer, Mo exhales and laughs when she and Amy lock eyes. They smirk at the situation, two boys at their mercy.

“Oh shit,” Amy says, holding a hand up to her mouth, and gesturing to Zayn with the other. “We…”

Harry stares at Zayn. Zayn stares at Harry.

Zayn’s jeans had already come undone. Either he undid his belt and fly himself, or Amy did it for him as they made their way to where Harry now stands.

They both know why they came to this spot tonight. This oddly secluded spot between short trees, not too far from the fire. But just far away enough to have some privacy. A place where a boy can lean back against a tree so that a girl can kneel between his legs. A place for couples with inside jokes and cute stories, who hold hands as they walk between buildings and kiss under the famous Arch statue some asshole alum built that is supposedly good luck.

Harry hits a palm back against the tree to get some forward momentum. His skin rips open in the process, his movements too jerky and harsh, the coke squicking him out.

“Harry,” Mo tries to say, reaching for him, confused.

But Harry shakes her off and rushes past Zayn and Amy before anyone can say anything else, before anyone can decide who gets the spot. To see which of them, Zayn or Harry, would be Anthony Yates for the night.

It couldn’t be Harry. He didn’t want it to be after all.

My thoughts create my world.

Harry stumbles his way back to the party, his boots fucked from all the dirt and pine needles. He’ll have to send for them to get polished. Louis tries to talk to him, sees something is wrong. But Harry only has eyes for his bag. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t engage, even as all of his friends and classmates call to him. He’s their guy, the one who keeps them high as kites, satiated, numb. But his thoughts are all over the place, a huge jumble of conflicting images.

He needs to get out of there.

---

Harry gets to the Jag in record time. Thankful that he also brought his keys along with his drugs, he slumps into the driver’s seat and lays his head against the steering wheel, too drunk for his own good. Careful of the horn, Harry.

Everything had been working, until it hadn’t.

Zayn ruins everything.

Except Maureen touched his dick like so many other girls have, and suddenly the thought of it made Harry want to vomit up his liquor.

For some reason, as Harry’s breathing slows and his eyes slide shut, he thinks about when he lost his virginity a few years back. How unprepared he felt. How it didn’t feel the way he thought it was supposed to, this big eye-opening experience that ignites a spark to go “spread his seed” or whatever. He’s fucked around ever since that first time with Dalia, without a second thought about who or what he is, until now.

When he realized all he ever did, every girl he ever touched, was an experiment, a by-the-books experience, to form a roster he thought every boy was supposed to have. A number. Nasty sex shit to talk about between young men, when they sat around and got drunk together.

When he watched a sex act in the woods with another boy and could only concentrate on the parts where their body parts touched.

When he saw Zayn standing on a darkened dirt path just now with his jeans undone and a girl on his arm about ready to blow him.

Fuck.

Zayn in the woods with his jeans undone. Now that’s a sight for sore eyes. Harry breathes in through his nose and out through his mouth, his hands tightening around the steering wheel, as he pictures Zayn’s shirt buttons. How when he moves just right, his tattoos peek out.

Amy may be on her knees right then, giving Zayn her mouth. A hand on his hip, the other hand at the base of his cock, because maybe Zayn’s too big for her to handle. Harry wouldn’t know. Harry has been naked in front of all his friends, was even called Big Dick Styles for a while, but he’s never seen Zayn naked.

He exhales, his eyes slightly damp.

He’s good at making girls feel good. He could probably make a boy feel good too, if he tried hard enough. Harry’s a hard worker, when he sets his mind to something. He leans back in his car then, and envisions a dick in his hand, a dick that isn’t his. How he’d hold it. How heavy it would feel, if it tasted a tad salty. Instead of Mackenzie or Amy on their knees out in the woods, what if it was Harry someday?

Knees cut up from the forest floor, jaw aching, a tear forming in his eye because it’s so much, so fast, so nerve wracking. Anyone could see him like that, Harry Styles the golden boy, with a boy between his lips.

Harry presses a hand down to his jeans where they’ve started to tent. His blood doesn’t feel so thick anymore. It rushes to his dick, to his balls, his entire lower half suddenly heavy for real. Heady, with arousal and want and energy. The feel of fucking up into something, into someone, their hand or their mouth. Their ass.

Fucking Christ, Harry thinks. He slams his eyes shut, wondering what that would be like. Would he like fucking a boy like that? Or would he be the one on all fours, or on his back, his knees up to his chest, looking up at someone with a beard.

Harry almost starts to cry as his cock throbs painfully, but he doesn’t. He holds it in. He swallows it.

What three adjectives best describe you?

Anxious. Rebellious. Gay.

He’s just about to get a grip, to open his eyes and go back into the dorm. He’ll do what he’s been doing for weeks, when these thoughts get into his head and he can’t get them out. He’ll go to the shared bathroom on their floor and jerk off over the toilet. He’ll fuck his fist until he’s practically heaving with it.

He can’t do it here. He can’t sleep here either. He needs to take off his boots.

But then like a bolt of lightening, too fast for Harry to process if it’s even real or if he just imagined it, Zayn’s opening the passenger door and falling into the car besides him.

Harry hurries to cover his tented erection with both hands, his eyes wide as he stares at the boy next to him.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Harry can’t help but ask, his words slightly slurred.

“You left,” Zayn says, out of breath. “You were pissed off and the boys said you grabbed your shit in a hurry.”

“So?”

“So I knew you’d be here,” Zayn says, angry. “And I didn’t want you to be by yourself. You’re fucked up.”

“You’re fucked up,” Harry says with a frown of his own. “I can smell you, you reek of alcohol.”

“Oh, real mature. Let’s play the ‘who is more messed up’ game right now, that’s just great.”

Zayn crosses his arms.

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” Harry says, turning in the seat so he can look at Zayn more fully. “I left you with Amy, exactly where you wanted to be, Zayn. So fucking go. Go be with her, go fuck her in the woods, I don’t care. Just leave me alone.”

“No,” Zayn ignores him. “I’m not leaving.”

Harry grinds his teeth together and shifts to look out the front window, one again gripping the wheel. Zayn fucking Malik ruins everything. All Harry wanted to do, once he got away from the party and the people in the woods, was to be alone. To think about the things he can’t talk about, especially with the one person currently sitting in his car who refuses to acknowledge the signs. Harry just wants to be by himself, to be alone in his head with the confusing things, the new parts of himself, these images he can’t seem to shake.

Boys. You, Zayn.

Harry realizes he’s still hard, and puts a hand back down in his lap, to cover his erection before Zayn can notice. If Zayn freaked out over Harry’s finger, he sure as shit would freak out over Harry’s dick.

Harry chances a glance to his right, to see if he’s been caught, and almost jumps a foot into the air.

He has been caught, because Zayn’s looking. He knows. He stares at it, in his drunken haze, the tented denim of Harry’s crotch that one hand can barely conceal. Harry’s jaw drops as his cock jerks in his briefs, a bit of precome leaking out.

Zayn stares at it, unblinking, a hand scratching at the hair of his own temple, for a few more seconds. And then he must realize what he’s done, what he’s doing, because he slowly brings his head up and looks at Harry’s face.

They lock eyes and Zayn’s entire head, neck, and chest flare up like he’s embarrassed. Horrified. Seconds away from an aneurysm. They’ve both been caught in the Jag tonight, it seems.

Zayn snaps out of it and looks towards the front window, his breath slightly off kilter, his face a mess of emotion. His hands shake a bit as they run up and down his thighs, like his palms are sweaty and he can’t control it.

And since Harry Styles is a fucking asshole, who went into the night with the sole intention of forcing the world to watch him, look at me everyone, come look at how amazing I am, he gives up. He just… gives up. Instead of thinking it through, or looking into it further, Harry reaches for his belt. In three seconds flat, it’s undone and open.

Zayn practically gasps at the sound, as he realizes what Harry’s done. But he still stares straight ahead, so Harry looks down at his own lap. To concentrate.

He pops the button of his jeans. He reaches for the zipper.

“Harry,” Zayn whispers, crossing his arms tightly across his chest. He still won’t look over. Not again.

“If you wanna go, then go,” Harry says quietly. I didn’t invite you into my car. I never did in the first place. You’re the one who followed me tonight, you’re the one who made the choice.

Zayn doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t move.

Harry slides the zipper down so that his belt and jeans splay open in his lap. The only thing hiding his hard, leaking cock from the rest of the world is a thin layer of black cotton. His favorite Calvin Klein briefs.

Zayn still doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move, doesn’t look.

Before he can stop himself, before his brain can settle itself from the cocaine he railed while at the party, Harry reaches a hand under his briefs and pulls out his dick. He’s so achingly hard, he almost moans at the touch.

The windows have started to fog up, from their breathing. Zayn, drunk and messy and sweating slightly, sits up in the seat. Like he’s fully engaged or watching a car accident take place right in front of the hood. But he still doesn’t look.

Harry strokes his cock a few times, to really let himself have it. It feels like ages since he’s done this in a comfortable position, sitting back, enjoying it, instead of hunched over a porcelain toilet because Jack Darcy is a twat.

He pulls himself off slowly. Twists his wrist a little firmer up at the head, applies that little bit of pressure he’s always needed to get there. The car smells like Zayn’s cologne, like a man, and that more than anything else sets Harry’s senses into overdrive. He bites his lip as he jerks himself off, precome sliding down onto his fingers.

Zayn still won’t look. But he hasn’t left. He’s still here. You’re still here. You liked watching Anthony and you could like watching me, if you’d try. Look at me. Harry stares at the side of Zayn’s face, at the perfect line to his stubble, and practically wills it into being as his arm moves faster. Come on, Zayn. Look at me. Watch me. This is for you.

Zayn doesn’t budge.

Harry removes his hand so he can spit into his palm, loudly, before getting back to work. That does something to Zayn, the sound, because he squirms on the leather seat and inches his way towards the door.

It’s never felt like this before. Never been this good to touch himself. And Harry can’t tell if it’s because he’s in the presence of a boy, or because it’s Zayn. Maybe it’s because anyone could walk by and see him. Or because he always thought this was wrong. Gay. Or maybe not wrong, but not him, not Harry. His thoughts keep running, and the faster they go, the faster he moves his hand.

He’s close.

“Fuck,” Harry can’t help but whisper, his other hand now on his balls.

Zayn inhales sharply.

But he still won’t look.

Harry desperately wants Zayn to see him come, to hear the sound he makes when he releases up onto his stomach. He wants it to look good, to be good, for Zayn as a spectator. It’s like real life porn, to be there next to someone as they do the most intimate thing a person can do to their own body. Look at me, come on. Come on, Zayn.

But Zayn still won’t look. He stares ahead at the trees, his mouth in a pinched line, sweat along his forehead, hands on his knees.

Harry gives himself the final push. He thinks about Zayn and the way his hands look when he’s drawing the beginnings of a sketch. How he hunches in his desk chair when he tattoos their classmates. How he never overcharges or asks for more money, even when the sessions go hours longer than they should have because people keep asking him for more ideas. Tattoos are addictive, Harry. That’s what Zayn said once, with a wink and an arm around Harry’s waist. You’ll see. I’ll give you one someday. And before you know it, you’ll be on your knees, begging me for fifty more.

Harry thinks he would quite like being on his knees, if Zayn asked.

“Fuck,” Harry grunts, his hand tightening at the head. He looks away from Zayn’s profile and focuses on his cock. His entire body tenses up and then he’s done for.

He comes over his fingers, stripes of it pulsating down his fist, up onto the sliver of exposed stomach, even on his nice shirt. He breathes through it, his eyes crazed and wild, as he takes in the fact that he can’t stop.

It feels like it lasts minutes instead of seconds.

When Harry turns his head to look over at Zayn, praying with all his might that Zayn watched him at the last second, he’s disappointed.

Zayn didn’t look. He didn’t watch. He sat in the same position, but now with his arms crossed again. He stared straight ahead. He missed it.

Harry removes his messy hand from around himself and looks between them on the seat, or on the floor, for something to wipe it on. A napkin or towel maybe. But he keeps his car spotless, so he doesn’t have any options.

He opens his mouth to say something to Zayn, maybe about his gross hand, or about how they should go inside. Definitely not about their present situation, or how they arrived at this precipice. Harry does not ask if Zayn liked it, liked hearing it at least, even though he wants to. He wants to say so many things. But his hand has started to get too sticky, and he’s just… unsure what to say.

Zayn makes it easy on the both of them. Without a backwards glance, without any further conversation, Zayn opens the door and climbs out, his hands fumbling with the mechanics of how to shut it behind him.

Harry is left there in the Jag, alone, with jizz all over himself and a frown on his face.

Alone.

---

When the five boys reconvene the next morning, it’s around a small table in the dining hall that Niall saved for them because as always, he arrived first. Various students mill about getting their breakfasts, just as shitty looking as the boys, hung over and coming down from the pills Harry sold them all. At least they had fun, Harry thinks.

As they begin to fall into chairs around him, Niall eyes his four friends in their various states of dishevelment and feels sorry for them. He says it’s the Irish in him that keeps him from being hung over beyond a small headache or a tad bit of dehydration. Harry fucks with Niall’s hair as he sits, wordlessly. Too exhausted to care or say much else to the other boys.

In his most disgusting tank top, Louis holds up a hand before Niall can say anything, and points to his ears with a grimace. It's as if to say, too loud, Nialler, not before I’ve had some caffeine. And eggs. And two chocolate chip muffins.

Liam, who after the party must’ve snuck into Julie’s room if the lazy smile on his face is anything to go by, settles at the table with a “protein plate” full of dead animal: eggs, bacon, sausage, ham. He flicks Louis on the forehead to pay attention, and then pulls at his shirt to show them his hickeyed neck.

“How bad is it?” he smiles, his eyes disappearing entirely. Even in his haze, Harry is glad that this Liam is back. Happy, dopey Liam.

“Looks like you fucked a leech, my friend,” Niall says, cheering him with coffee. “Well done.”

Liam shrugs, the smug bastard, before buttering the stack of toast in the center of the table, tossing pieces onto the five plates. Niall starts pouring their orange juice. Harry, who up until then had tried to make himself look and feel as small as possible by curling up to lay his face down on the table, doesn’t last much longer. They can never just let him be.

“These two look like the walking dead,” Louis says quietly, his lips around a coffee cup.

Harry feels a nudge to his shin. And Zayn, across from him with his head in his hands, as if it’s about to crack open like a melon and he can barely hold it together, must feel a nudge as well.

“Stop, Lou,” he murmurs with an edge to his voice. “I’m fucking tired.”

“You both look pretty shitty,” Niall agrees. “Rough night, boys?”

Harry finally lifts his head from the table, his greasy hair falling across his pale face, still in the same clothes from the night before. He didn’t even try to go to his room after what happened in the Jag. He didn’t feel like begging Jack to let him in, drunk, high, and smelling of come. And he definitely didn’t want to be around his friends, or the girls they were fucking. So he slept on the cramped couch in the student lounge, his boots and bag tucked underneath it.

He probably does look like death.

Zayn scratches at his face for a moment, eyes never leaving the table, even when Harry looks over at him. He stares daggers, willing Zayn to say something. To look at him, acknowledge him, say good morning. Anything.

Zayn pulls at the top of his hair a bit, as the three boys around them stare at both Zayn and Harry, for some explanation about where they both went off to the night before.

Zayn still won’t look at Harry.

And that’s how Harry knows what is about to happen before it happens, because it’s happened before. And it’ll probably happen again. He exhales a breath and gives up.

Harry lays his head back down, right as Zayn speaks.

“Don’t remember anything. Was drunk, left the bonfire and must’ve… went straight to bed.”

Another kick to his shin means the boys want Harry to speak. To prove he’s alive. He kicks back, his foot catching someone in the knee, and covers his head with his arms to block out the light.

Eventually, Harry responds as loud as he can because he has to, his mouth against the wood of the table, voice cracking like it does sometimes when he lies through his teeth.

“I don’t remember anything either.”

---