live through this and you won't look back (2/2)
previous part here
Liam’s spent half of the month they’ve been in Chicago listening to doctors and jargon and advice from every facet of the media slowly leaking back into their lives, and he’s mostly certain that one of Zayn’s scars is infected. So after herding him to the clinic and spending twenty minutes in the pharmacy picking out an antiseptic cream, he wraps a hand around the nape of Zayn’s neck and guides him into the master en suite Louis hates using.
The centrepiece of the room is this rounded porcelain bath with a rainfall showerhead. It’s nothing like the one three flights ago, where it felt like the only heat in the world was produced from the friction between them. There’s all this empty space but when Zayn settles by the tap, Liam slots a knee between his and presses close and down, and there’s a part of him that claims practicality when, really, it’s mostly because Zayn is beautiful from this and every angle.
Zayn’s laugh turns breathy when Liam pulls away. “Tease,” he scolds as he curves his spine to pull off his shirt without jostling Liam, and hypocrisy has never looked as beautiful as it does on Zayn Malik.
He’s quiet as Liam washes his scars in these methodical strokes of the washcloth that leave goosebumps in their wake, with his neck stretched towards the window to show all the roots , deeper and a burning pink at the edges. The gel is slick and heavy and leaves behind an artificial shine that makes Liam’s fingers stick for a moment too long.
“It’s a shame,” Zayn laughs suddenly, even though there’s no humour in his voice. His fingers still and Zayn nudges back into the touch and Liam studies the twitch of his jaw. “I was meant to get the next piece this weekend in Seattle. The contrast with the half-sleeve would have looked perfect.”
There are a thousand ways Liam could react to the situation and he decides on tracing his name into Zayn’s collarbone with sticky, trembling fingers. “The one with the lines and colours?” he mumbles, and he thinks of the distorted nothing etched into napkins, draft setlists, on the pavement outside their venues. “Wouldn’t the scarring add an aspect of industrialism to the post-modernist abstract?”
Zayn looks down at the space between them and grins, like he doesn’t want the world to see but can’t quite keep from it. “Do you even know what you just said?”
“It was off the tattooist’s facebook,” he admits, and when Zayn laughs with crinkled eyes and stretched lips, he adds, “I walked around with it written on my hand just in case you brought it up.”
The bath’s faucet is detachable and Zayn knocks it deliberately, Liam’s shirt soaking in seconds and the water trickling down his spine like a caress. They fight over the cord and by the time Zayn uses the hem of Liam’s white shirt for a surrender, there’s water all over the tiles and the shower’s pelting hot water onto their faces and there’s nowhere else in the world he would rather be than in their fake rainstorm, even if that means they need to stifle their laughter as they reapply the cream for a second, third, fourth time.
+
(that night, he’s curled all the way around Zayn with a hand on the dip of his spine and spare fingers tangled in his hair, because it’s his turn to be brave, when he hears-
“I was in your chair,” Zayn whispers, and he’s mastered the art of breathing out words, “the glare from the wing lights kept hitting my eyes and I missed you and I know you won’t see it this way, but that was the only thing anchoring me while we were falling out of the sky.”)
+
(and it’s a shame, really, that four hours later Liam’s still stuck on your chair.)
+
Two years ago, backstage before their very first television appearance as a Real Band with a Real Album and Real Career to match, Harry overworked his throat and forgot how to breathe and fainted into Louis’ lap. It’s been this dumb inside joke in the band since then, even if they hold hands before every show to calm him down.
Harry’s perched on one of the bar stools by the breakfast table with a book balancing precariously on his glass of apple juice. As Liam stumbles sleepily around the kitchen cooking a fry up because Zayn’s out buying groceries and he always wants scrambled eggs when he gets home, he catches a glimpse of the title - Paced breathing: A comprehensive analysis on the diaphragm under pressure - and slides a plate of too hot toast across the table instead of commenting.
Their elbows knock as they eat and Liam’s soothed by the sound of Harry chewing each mouthful six times before swallowing. It’s taken them a few years to classify the quiet between them as an ease instead of discomfort and now they have this down to an art, so it’s only a matter of time before-
“Liam,” he sighs, all put upon and pouty. “There’s nothing in the world to fix me.”
He grins and shoves away their plates and the heavy textbooks from fuck knows where out of the way. “It’s not something that can be studied,” he explains, and Harry rolls his eyes because he’s heard it all before but Liam’s going to get it through his thick skull, thick head, thick hair, if it’s the last thing he does. “With practise, your breath capacity will be back in a few weeks.”
Harry snorts. “At least now I know what you were doing while I was lying on my death bed,” he teases and smiles beatifically at Liam, “is this another occasion for marathoning we didn’t start the fire?”
They’ve been singing dumb warm-ups and trading quick verses for the past half-hour with increasing intensity when Liam loses a note.
“Out of breath?” Harry mocks, even though he’s doubled over heaving and refuses to stop. “Zayn clearly hasn’t been riding you hard enough.”
“Excuse you,” he says with his voice cracking for the first time in years at the thought of strong thighs straddling his hips and fingers curled into fists against his sternum.
Harry looks at him like he’s the one speaking in code. “His right hand was fucked up for weeks,” he says slowly and then, like he gets it, “Wow, imagine all the thank-god-we’re-alive sex you’ve missed.”
He knows he’s blushing from the way Harry’s giggling but he’s too flustered to care. “Oh shut it,” he scolds, and Harry only stops when he adds- “I will tell Jake Gyllenhaal he’s your celebrity crush on Jay Leno I swear to god.”
(by the time Zayn walks into the room with three plastic bags in each hand, Harry’s a little more familiar with the top of his lungs and only ruins the second chorus when he sees Liam watching the play of muscles under Zayn’s jumper, and Harry’s smug and hums uptown girl under his breath all day.)
+
Their room is only half-furnished and the feature wall is still just a base coat and the way the sunlight dances across the room and sets fire to Zayn’s eyes is the most beautiful thing in the world. They start sleeping tangled together, like they’re taking turns shielding each other from the world, and Liam still cries a little too often and sleeps a little short of enough, but sometimes Zayn wakes up like he’s taking his very first breath out of the wreckage and Liam can deal with pins and needles and a mouthful of hair and a little emasculation if it means they’re not alone in it.
He wakes up just before dawn to an inky blue sky and Zayn doing push ups on the floor. There’s a thin line of sweat down the nape of his neck that stains his t-shirt dark and soft hair keeps falling in his eyes and Liam loves Zayn’s back, loves the curves and contours of his spine and how every inch of him is so damn harmonic.
Zayn falters when he sees Liam watching but recovers enough to flash him a grin. “Good morning,” he whispers as he climbs back into bed. “I think it’s getting stronger.”
Liam laughs a little too loud and it’s right now, with the sun in his eyes and something warm in the air when he couldn’t bear to die because that would mean leaving this. “Reckon you could take me?”
Zayn raises his eyebrows when Liam doesn’t bother to correct himself, just clasps their opposing hands together with his pinkie caught in Zayn’s sweatshirt. They hold tight and Liam is so entranced in the tension in his spine that he slacks all over and Zayn follows his momentum, halfway onto his chest with this smirk that he usually reserves for words Liam doesn’t know and winning arguments against Louis. His lips are chapped from the run yesterday and Liam thinks of that kiss in Casablanca Harry has made him watch a thousand times and thinks, yeah, this could be something magical, right now could be what he remembers for the rest of his life-
But then his fingers catch on the smooth lines scorched into Zayn’s wrist and they both flinch away and Zayn is the only one who leans back in.
He exhales too harshly and shifts to the edge of the bed, presses fists into his eyes, and Liam does the same until technicolour blurs his vision. “You don’t have to look at me,” Zayn mumbles. He sounds so lost and Liam doesn’t know what to say. And when he gets tired of the space between them or waiting for Liam to fucking get it together, Zayn bites out- “Well I don’t want to look at you either.”
+
Guilty, he thinks, with his lips buried into Zayn’s cold pillow, when it’s four a.m and Zayn’s still in Harry’s room, that’s the way he feels, because thoughts of being waist-deep in muddy water and I ruined our date and I hope your damned plane crashes all leave something awful stained to his tongue, and he will never be able to get it off, and the sleeves Zayn swims - drowns - in are all his fault-
+
It’s rainy and miserable and so, so fitting outside when Louis nudges open the door with his hip and climbs all the way under the blankets with him. In the soft blue light, he looks lost, like he did on the stretcher.
“I’m not sure what happened,” Louis whispers as he presses his shoulder against Liam’s and it’s so hot it burns through his skin, not that either of them will admit to the pain. “But we’re going to fix it. You are not a product of Mills and Boon.”
He frowns into Louis’ hair and wriggles a hand down to press a thumb into the muscle belly of his calf. “I thought those were romantic?”
Louis nudges into his touch until Liam starts rubbing in slow circles. “They are, until you find out he’s a cult leader or a vampire or a murderer and you’re not one night in an abandoned village away from losing your only chance at true happiness so put a fucking shirt on and let me orchestrate my magic.”
“You are not Sebastian from the Little Mermaid,” he groans, even as he follows Louis all the way to the paint store.
They’ve been studying a wall of paint swatches for twenty minutes, deciding between stolen emerald and green gentleman and the legal team is working on a settlement, today, so the press is hovering by the bleach.
Liam catches a glance of the swatches Louis is hoarding and flips his sample of smoke morning at his face. “Zayn hates purple,” he says, snatching away the toxic valentine and replacing it with pavlove, a pale shade of sanguine that he can’t help but think will look beautiful against Zayn’s bare skin.
Louis flicks a look at the press and then, louder, says, “pas de cheval or exile blue?”
And soon enough it’s not his choice at all, with strangers arguing over the representation of contrast and harmony between shades and intensities while Liam adds little things like-
“I am not waking up to martyrdom mirage tomorrow.”
- and very, very deliberately doesn’t think of how he presumed the room would still be theirs in the morning.
+
When they get home (and it’s a home and it is most definitely theirs), Louis pleads a swollen foot and makes Liam carry the cans of paint upstairs. He’s halfway into the room before he realises the sound of quick footsteps down the hallway and Zayn watching him with a certain fascination and the door slamming behind them.
“Again?” Zayn groans as the deadlock - installed, this time - clicks behind them. They’re pressed together from shoulder to hip and Liam loves the solidarity, and loves a little more, too. “I thought you weren’t one for repeat schemes, Lou-”
Niall laughs out a shut the fuck up from the other side of the door while Liam looks at the remains of their bedroom. The bed is pressed against the wrong corner and there’s newspaper all over the floor and he didn’t realise how much stuff they’d accumulated (dumbbells, albums they fall asleep to and these old novels Liam tries to read to impress Zayn but can’t get past the first few pages) until it formed a mountain on their bed.
“No more almost or pining,” Louis yells, and he sounds like he does when he’s terrorising the staff backstage, chasing Zayn’s nieces through the backyard, sneaking out through the fire exit. “Zayn, Liam knows the most pointless shit about you. He thinks you hung the moon and have the voice of an angel and probably daydreams about posting an engagement announcement in The Times. I have no clue why you think he’s not mad for you.”
“Liam,” Harry says, softer, and he’s so sick of the way Zayn tenses against him. “Zayn stood outside your bedroom for two hours last night to make sure you were okay. And I watched you sit in that hospital room for a fortnight doing the same. Now sort your shit out.”
Silence echoes but that never lasts too long, here. Niall clears his throat. “Dramatic,” he teases. “We’re going to be perfecting flatbread. Fix yourselves.”
Liam waits until the others leave and twists to bury his face in Zayn’s neck before he can pull away. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. Zayn’s wearing this threadbare white crewneck designed to drive him insane, what - with the way the edges of his collarbone are showing and the hints of the tattoo by his hip under the fabric.
“Do you even know what you’re apologising for?” he asks as he knocks their ankles together. He’s barefoot in Liam’s jeans and Liam can’t look away.
“Almost,” he promises and Zayn just stares at him.
They take turns choosing colour combinations and it’s easy, falling into that pattern where they spend too much time watching each other and Liam finds any excuse to touch him (put your hips into it, Zayn) and he’s having the time of his life deliberately not thinking about anything other than right now.
He’s taken to dipping his fingertips in too much paint and flicking it at the wall when Jack Mannequin’s you can breathe follows all you need is love. “I’m noticing a reoccurring theme here.”
Zayn looks at him indulgently and there’s a line of burnt orange along his cheekbone that Liam loses breath over. “Feeling empowered?” he teases, refocussed on the wall. “Sceptered? Sanguine-?”
“That’s a colour,” Liam groans, and the look Zayn gives him could set the world on fire. “And no more big words, it’s not fair.”
They swap colours and while they’re busy mixing paint and testing colour combinations on the newspaper floor, Zayn smirks at him. “How about auspicious?”
The way Zayn’s lips form around the syllables is nothing short of obscene and Liam can’t take it, just dips his whole hand in the paint and shoves Zayn back with a bright green hand on his chest.
Zayn glares at him and coats his hands in paint, knuckles in pink and fingers in red and palm in blue and wrist in green. Fingers tangle in his shirt and pull him close and they wrestle for the most damage, a handprint dragged right across Zayn’s neck, a scoop of paint down the front of Liam’s shirt that stains a line of yellow to his chest.
It’s innocent until it’s not, until it’s very deliberately not about winning, and they’re knocking over paint cans and sparring on the floor and it looks like a rainbow rushed through their bedroom when they stop for breath. There’s a forearm over Liam’s chest and a fistful of bright blue hair in his fist and a knee pressed to the hollow of his stomach but he’s never felt so much like floating.
Liam wants to kiss him. And right now, with the sun in his eyes and a bright pink streak on Zayn’s forehead like a crescent moon, he thinks he can. He tugs Zayn close with the hand in his hair and thinks he might die, like his heart will stop beating, when Zayn stands up instead.
“Just let me grab another shirt,” Zayn says. He’s not looking at Liam and one of his sleeves was ripped in the scuffle and he’s using both hands to hold it together, so Liam grabs Zayn’s wrist to hoist himself up and his grip stains the skin there bright blue. “I really don’t want to see your face when you see them so-”
“What?” he asks - begs, really - and tries to sneak into Zayn’s field of vision without prying his eyes open and pushing too close.
“It’s okay,” he says, but it’s really, really not if okay is nervous lips and wet eyes. “I know I’m not - the way I was. You don’t need to pretend to be alright with it and you don’t need to see them.”
And then, quieter, he adds, “You don’t even need to look at me.”
Liam stares, for a moment, and wriggles blue fingers deliberately under Zayn’s tattered shirt to touch one of the scars. “You are the most beautiful thing in the world,” he swears, a little fervent, and tightens his grip until Zayn’s next breath comes out shaky. “You have been since you wore that ugly red jumper three weeks after we met for the first time, and there’s nothing in the whole world that’s going to change that. Not the words you say or the things you do or the way you look, and definitely not this. Here comes the sun makes sense when I see you and you are my American wedding and that night in Orlando - when we were so sick of our own voices we took to covers, instead - I thought you weren’t something I was able to describe, yet. So I settled on teenage dream because I can’t stop thinking about running away with you.”
Zayn curls forward like he’s collapsing, presses his forehead to Liam’s collarbone. “You’ve barely looked at me,” he whispers.
Liam can’t say anything to that so he carefully slides his kaleidoscope red fingers into his hair. “Well now I’m not going to take my eyes off you.”
There’s something fragile in Zayn’s eyes when they meet his and it’s followed with a kiss that feels more like a hello than anything else. Something slow and dirty is playing in the background and Liam will never remember what the song is because he’s too caught up in the way Zayn groans when Liam flickers his tongue over his lower lip and how he tastes like sugar and the twist of muscles in his forearms while he tries to think of where to touch first.
He’s too dizzy to do much better than an arm around his waist and a hand under one of his thighs and Zayn cheers softly into his mouth when they smash into the door. Zayn tugs off their shirts with a clumsy motion and drags his hands shakily down Liam’s chest to fumble at their jeans and the ache in Liam’s jammed fingers is so, so worth it.
“I’ve thought about this for the longest time,” Liam confesses, because it’s a Tuesday and his turn to be brave and he owes Zayn this. “Whether just grinding would be enough to get you off and the way it would feel, being kept on the edge like that; it’s going to be unbearable-”
Zayn whines and bites Liam’s lip until it aches for his tongue. They shove their jeans hastily down to their thighs and that innate sense of rhythm etched into Zayn’s bones has never been as beautiful as it is when used to thrust their hips together. It’s too dry and a little fast and the absolute best feeling in the world, and Liam wants to look down, wants to see their cocks together and the catch of their hip bones on every thrust but there’s not enough force in the universe to pull him away from Zayn’s lips.
They get desperate fast and the edge isn’t as fantastic as he imagined so he cheats, sneaks a hand between them to trace around the head of Zayn’s cock until his hips stutter and that’s all it takes for him to be gone, gone, gone for Zayn.
“Hey beautiful,” he whispers into his neck when they stop panting, which is a little longer than either of them will admit.
“Unnecessary,” Zayn groans, with a blush staining his cheeks and a body-shaped rainbow staining the white door behind them and this dumb giddy smile on his lips that Liam could fall in love with.
They order a tasting platter from the Chinese place down the road and bribe the delivery guy until he agrees to climb the tree to their window. It’s stuffing wrapped in pastry and fried pork and honey chicken so they forgo the chopsticks and take turns feeding each other off their hands. Zayn loves the honey sauce so Liam dips his ring finger in and slides it between sticky lips, and Zayn keeps it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue.
Liam’s fingers subconsciously trace the line right down the centre of his wrist and Zayn relaxes at the touch for the first time, tips his head back so all of him is bare.
He leans close to kiss the underside of Zayn’s jaw and holds there. “You could on me,” he whispers, because there’s a part of him that wants to keep this secret. “The tattoo for your sleeve. I want it on me.”
The next breath from Zayn’s lips gets caught in his throat and he doesn’t say no or don’t, just tilts his head forward until his lips find Liam’s.
+
It takes an hour or three but eventually they stumble downstairs, even if Liam’s shoved against the banister so Zayn can suck a mark onto his neck.
They’re grinding lazily and he’s desperate for the hollow of Zayn’s hip when Harry makes a wounded noise behind them.
“I did not think the repercussions of your happiness through,” he groans, even as he grins at them. “Please don’t defile every surface of the house.”
Liam loses himself in the hollows of Zayn’s body - the base of his throat, the space between his arms - and blinks up at them both. “Not every surface,” he teases, lips catching deliberately on Zayn’s bare chest. “The oven’s safe from us. And I’m sure fucking on the stairs isn’t very comfortable.”
Harry looks at their position and Liam doesn’t quite remember when Zayn wriggled a hand down the front of his pants, or when he propped his foot against one of the stairs to thrust back a little harder. “The fridge is fair ground,” Zayn offers as Harry stomps outside. Then, louder- “We love you too!”
They trade soft kisses for a little while longer before stealing the cranberry vodka from the cupboard and joining the others on the deck. There’s a space in the pile of blankets for the two of them and Louis looks unbearably smug at the trail of hickeys down Zayn’s neck.
“You two reek,” Niall laughs as he buries into Liam’s side and shoves half of a red velvet cake at them, “I think our downright admirable radio silence about the sounds coming from your room deserves a little dessert.”
Zayn takes to feeding Liam forkfuls and licking the cream-cheese icing off his lips while Louis mixes the vodka with cherry coke and passes around tumblers. “I’ve never ruined my best friends’ lives with my oversexed libido,” Louis says, laughing when the four of them drink and looking positively outraged when Harry shoves his glass towards him. “Fuck off, I’m so discreet I’m basically celibate.”
“It’s a very small bus,” Niall teases, stealing Zayn’s fork and licking it clean. “Remember the time you made up with Eleanor in New York?”
“Remember the time you broke up with Eleanor in Washington?” Harry giggles and kicks up the blanket. “I had that bruise on my arse for a month.”
Louis steals the cake back with a glare and jabs his foot until it hits someone’s (Niall’s) stomach. “I hope you all need Viagra before you’re thirty,” he groans. “And that was nothing in comparison to you and that girl in Vancouver.”
And they trade stories they’ve already heard and dares they’ve had a thousand times over until the mid-spring breeze forces them inside.
+
Their first interview back as a group is the very next day with the host from The Morning Show so Liam doesn’t get the breakfast in bed and sleepy blow job and cocoon of blankets he’s always associated with Zayn and their first night together, but he does get careful fingers feeding him slices of toast and a mutual hand job in the shower.
“Harder,” Zayn whimpers, with an arm wrapped tight around his shoulders and his spare hand wrapped around Liam’s cock and water running down his back as Zayn thrusts slow into his fist. “Is it tight enough?”
He groans and slips down to trace the scar curled around Zayn’s shoulder with his tongue, just like he thought of doing while Zayn stroked it absently reading The Odyssey for the sixth time. “Just keep talking, please don’t stop, please don’t stop-”
“I could suck you off,” Zayn whispers and he is beautiful always but especially like this, with wet hair and bedroom eyes and arched back, “Get on my knees for you and anchor your hips and use my tongue. I used to think of you when I practised with other guys, whether I’d be able to deepthroat you, what you would be like, how you would sound, if you’d be as reactive as you are on stage with your fingers tangled in my hair-”
Liam dislodges the tidy row of body wash in their shower when he comes hard enough to see stars and Zayn follows with an oh on his lips and they spend so much time washing off that they’re still damp in the car on the way over.
+
“So aside from rehab,” the host starts, twenty minutes into the interview, “what have you been doing for two months?”
They’re all holding hands and Liam’s a little nervous and the roar is deafening, louder than it’s ever been, louder than Madison Square and arriving in Australia and the Olympics combined, at least that’s the way it feels. He blushes at the question when Zayn squeezes his hand like a heartbeat, like a reminder of what’s been and what’s to come, as Niall grins at the audience to distract them.
“Personally I’ve perfected the art of a fine tiramisu,” Harry says, curling his fingers against Louis’ palm. “It was just really fantastic to do all the things we talked about.”
Zayn leans forward and one of his buttons is missing from where Liam grabbed him for a pre-crowd kiss that lasted five minutes. “And we’d just like to say a massive thank-you to everyone for being so respectful while we recovered.”
There’s a beat of silence and then Louis snorts from the other side of Niall. “You can tell that we’ve morphed into one being without contact with the outside world,” he laughs as he leans forward, because he’s mastered letting the world in on a secret.
“Liam’s definitely rubbed off on me,” Zayn says and Liam chokes on his next inhale at the implications while Harry tries his hardest to look extra charming.
Niall clears his throat awkwardly. “We’ve actually been filming for our movie.”
The screen just behind the host is playing snippets from that camera and the crowd shrieks when a recording of the five of them half-naked in the mirror shows.
On screen, Harry rubs shaving cream into his cheeks and pouts when Louis plucks the razor from his hands. “I don’t know why you bother shaving,” Louis teases as he swipes at the foam on Harry’s face and rubs it into his own neck, “you have the face of a pre-pubescent child.”
He glares at them in the mirror. “I’m a man, Louis Tomlinson, and I will not stand for that blasphemy.”
“You keep using that word,” Zayn says, from where he and Liam are washing temporary dye out of Niall’s hair since he lost a bet about mattress surfing. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Out of camera, Liam knocks his ankle against Zayn’s and mumbles, “as you wish.”
Niall blinks up at them with bright pink hair and the detachable showerhead in his hand. “Stop flirting,” he groans, and squirts water all over the four of them until they tackle him into the bath.
(Liam doesn’t remember the rest of the interview and when they watch it back that night, he sees the exact moment he thinks I love you as hard as he can in Zayn’s direction)
+
They’re high off adrenaline and reluctant to return home and it’s the 22nd, Haz, don’t doubt the power of tradition so they go exploring. There’s a baseball game on that afternoon and Liam knows even less about it than he does American football but Zayn’s indulgent, keeps a hand in his hair and steals his aviators in the late morning sun and whispers you’re going to set me on fire whenever he stares too long.
There’s a kiss cam and when it stops on Niall, halfway through a drag of beer, he knocks off his snapback and turns to the girl he’s been flirting with all game. He tilts his head like a do you want to? and presses his lips to her cheek when she teases him about his blush, and keeps kissing her for the rest of the game.
It’s still light out when the game finishes and they’re debating the merits of the Sears Tower and Buckingham Fountain the whole way back to the car before they realise that Niall’s five hundred people behind them.
“Tiebreaker!” Harry yells and throws himself onto Niall’s back once they’re close enough. “Would you rather watch a spontaneous performance of can you feel the love tonight at a moonlit fountain or to the blinking lights of a skyline?”
Niall’s got a hand on the small of the girl’s back and she’s pretty, gorgeous, even, so he barely notices the four of them. “I was actually going to drive Kiah home,” he says, still staring at her with that blush high on his cheeks.
“We could drop her off on the way?” Harry offers and yelps when Liam flicks him on the back of the head. Then, grumpily- “Or afterwards.”
Zayn tugs Harry off them by the scruff of his neck and throws the keys (stolen from Liam’s back pocket, fuck, when did he manage that?) to Niall. “Drive safe.”
(they end up on the top of the Sears Tower with their foreheads pressed to the glass and Zayn speaks in lines Liam doesn’t understand but loves to death while Harry and Louis sing the sweet caress of twilight- there’s magic everywhere like they’ve been waiting to for years.)
+
(“We have the backyard for a dog,” Harry says suddenly that Friday morning while they jog around the pond down the road. “I’ve always wanted a husky. We could call him Holden like that character in The Catcher in the Rye Zayn has a hard on for.”
It’s quiet, then, until Louis pleads ankle and stumbles off the track. “What about when we go on tour?” he asks, careful, careful, watching them all like he can protect them from this. “I mean, we’re going back, right?”
There’s nothing say to that so they get back on the path and run it off in silence. When they’re ten minutes from home, Zayn slows down to flick Harry’s headband against his forehead. “And fuck you, Holden Caulfield was written to transcend generations.”)
+
“Niall Horan,” Louis yells a fortnight later, following him upstairs and receiving a spray of cologne into his face in retaliation, “can you repeat that last part?”
Niall fiddles with his sleeves until Liam slaps his hand away and fixes the cufflinks himself. “The part where I really really like her and want you to leave before she gets here, for fucks sake, even the strongest people can’t stand you?”
Louis pouts and hands over his bow tie, previously hidden in the coffee jar until Niall told him where he was going. “No,” he says, “the part where you’re going to prom with her.”
“Fuck off with the condescension,” he scowls, tilting up his neck patiently as Harry steps in to fix the complicated knot. “You know I’m a sucker for acoustic bands and corsages.”
Zayn snorts and lowers the camera in his hands onto Liam’s shoulders with a kiss out of view. “And spiked punch.”
The doorbell rings downstairs and Niall lights up and tones it down in time to glare at them as he walks out the room.
“You don’t want to cascade down the stairs with Jesse McCartney in the background?” Harry exclaims, honestly, with big eyes and a huge camera around his neck. “We’re getting a photo of you two by the fireplace whether or not you want one!”
+
Zayn’s got him pressed face-down on their bed within twenty minutes, teeth scraping across his bare shoulder and his legs spread wide to feel the press of Zayn’s cock against his arse and it feels like a certain kind of torture, just for him, when they’re interrupted before they can get out of their sweatpants.
“You two are shameless,” Louis groans as they separate slowly, not without a kiss or three. He’s wearing tight jeans and an oversized sweater of Harry’s, with a Harry to match. “Public indecency should be defined by the number of times the two of you give each other that look like oh, I don’t know, right now, we are still here.”
“As fascinating as the two of you leaking serotonin and candle wax is not,” Harry teases, “we have reservations at Viva. Please fuck it out of your system so the scent of frustration wanes from the walls.”
Liam waits for the front door to close and bites at Zayn’s lips until he groans into his mouth. “We could,” he whispers, because Zayn’s taken to kneeling between his legs and slipping crooked slick fingers inside Liam until he whimpers and he loves the way Zayn thrusts against his leg when he grinds back and he wants, wants wants the more it promises. “I’m still-”
Zayn interrupts him with a kiss and a hand wriggled down the back of his sweatpants, like he can imagine what Liam’s thinking, the I’m still a little wide open from you fingering me in the shower after lunch just on his lips. They strip down in maybe the most inefficient way because Liam can’t take the thought of ending the kiss and Zayn refuses to move his thumb from the rim of Liam’s hole. “Bare?” he asks softly, since they got tested a week ago and Liam’s nodding frantically before he can say anything else.
The lube is still wedged between their pillows and Zayn slicks up his cock, eases Liam onto his back with a shaking hand on his hip, maybe from nerves or maybe from anticipation or maybe a little of both. Zayn kisses out something in Morse code into his neck as he slides in one, two, three fingers, always so damn ruthless, like he just wants to take and take and take until there’s nothing left for Liam to give.
“Zayn,” he whines, when he can’t stop the roll of his hips or the breathy moans which punctuate his want, “babe please don’t you want to-”
“Not if you call me that,” he laughs, but he’s hitching Liam’s legs over his shoulders and mouthing at his jaw sweetly as he thrusts in and-
oh
It’s dark in the room but Liam can still see Zayn’s eyes, blown wide and fluttering as they watch his cock slide into his arse with this kind of avid fascination that Liam wants to drink in. They’re hardly in sync and the slow slow fast slow is maddening and Liam doesn’t do anything to change it, just grinds upwards until Zayn’s cock sinks a little deeper.
Zayn drags a hand down the centre of his chest to touch all the places he loves most - the muscles over Liam’s hips, the rim of his hole, that vein along the underside of his dick. He balances precariously on one arm (with the scars, so Liam can mouth at them when it feels right) and jerks him off and the friction is still as intoxicating as it was the first time.
“Look at me,” Zayn says, like it’s possible to look away from the beads of sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbone or the desperate look in his eyes or even the fading teeth marks bruising his lips red. His thumb rolls back Liam’s foreskin to drag over the head of his cock and Liam is fascinated, awestruck by the way Zayn’s losing all that control and tension caught in his shoulders because of him and he automatically presses his heels into Zayn’s back so their lips bump together and his cock grazes just so against his prostate and that’s all it takes before he’s coming all over his hand.
Zayn’s erratic and Liam loves the taste of how close he is on his lips. “Come on,” he urges, still shaking with how much he wants it, “come on, come for me-”
His hips still, right against Liam’s thighs, and the grin Zayn presses against his chin afterwards is sweet enough to burn right through him.
+
They’re backstage at their first show in almost four months and it’s true, the bullshit people say when they can feel your heart beating out of your chest, it’s like riding a bike and you’ll never forget how to do this and it’ll feel like it was just yesterday. The earpieces are still lined up in a straight line by the stage and Louis stretching in his skin tight jeans is just as oddly fascinating as it was before, and the crowd counting ten nine eight sounds like coming home.
(it’s different, of course, with the new set list so Harry can catch his breath and Zayn mouthing words into his neck)
His heart is racing but in the good way at three two when Zayn’s lips drag up to his jaw. “Ready for this?” he asks, with this dirty, slow kiss that Liam feels for hours after he says yes.
+
(halfway through loved you first, Zayn grins at him like there’s a joke in there somewhere Liam’s not meant to understand quite yet)
+
Liam’s so, so high on the buzz of the amps and the sound of Louis’ laugh and the taste of peppermint on Zayn’s lips that he feels insane, impulsive, like he’ll crawl out of his skin and into someone else’s if he doesn’t get it out of his blood.
Zayn notices right away - of course he does - and herds him into the car and right up against the front door the second they get home. “Want to blow you,” he mumbles, already on his knees, because this is what they do - they kiss when they can and tug each other into their axes and they say what they want after holding their tongues for so long. “Want to be whatever you need, Li.”
Liam loves that about him, the genuine ache in his voice like it’s something physical. He thumbs absently at Zayn’s lips and slips it into the space under his tongue when he opens up. Zayn tugs urgently at his jeans and traces his tongue over Liam’s first knuckle with that patient look in his eyes and, when Liam presses down until his jaw hinges open, his eyes fall shut.
“Just stay like that,” Liam groans and thrusts in as steady as he can with Zayn Malik on his knees for him.
His fingers automatically tangle in Zayn’s hair to hold him just there, right here, so the only movement is the product of the momentum of his hips and the helpless noises Zayn keeps making in the back of his throat.
Liam’s close from the adrenalin and the tongue tracing the shaft and the way Zayn’s lips twitch as he pulls out like he wants to suck on the head but wants to be what Liam wants more, and there’s something missing, something he wants, and he doesn’t figure it out until he says open that mouth for me, baby. Zayn just blinks at him like a fuck no and a fuck yes all at once and slacks his lips until Liam can hear the sound of his cock bumping against the back of Zayn’s throat. It’s obscene, the kind of filthy he always associated with keeping lube in the car, and he comes so hard he sees white.
Zayn mouths absently at his cock until Liam’s ready and the grin that crosses his lips when Liam nudges him backwards to the foot of the stairs is the kind of pleased he wants to taste. He’s careful as he tugs down Zayn’s jeans and presses his legs to his chest and anything but gentle after that, when he traces his tongue around Zayn’s hole and rubs his stubble on the inside of his thighs and strokes him too slowly until he comes with a curse.
Liam stays there, with his forehead pressed against the indent of Zayn’s hip and fingernails scraping along his scalp, until Niall knocks incessantly and yells at them to take it to the bedroom, you bastards, some of us want to sleep through the door.
+
The tattoo artist - the one Zayn had wanted, and Liam will always do anything, anything, anything for him - is in town that weekend so they catch a taxi over to his studio and sit side-by-side on the parlour chair while Zayn explains the concept behind the piece.
“It’s kind of the remnant of everywhere we’ve been,” he explains, and Liam doesn’t see anything in the practise outline traced onto his arm but chaos and colour but he trusts Zayn, knows it’s not just ambiguous shapes and vibrant shades and the silhouettes of something absent to him. “Like history and the modern era of expressionism colliding.”
Zayn feeds him little strips of red liquorice and holds his spare hand and makes a thousand soothing noises whenever Liam wrinkles his nose in pain and Liam thinks of that first tattoo, the line of words he felt etched into his bones even before a needle had touched his skin, and wonders if it feels the same to Zayn right now.
“It’s going to look incredible on you,” he says fervently, watching the artist knit something beautiful together with skin and ink. “Liam, fuck-”
The artist pauses to wipe away the spare ink and grin at them. “Keep it clean,” he teases, probably a little less serious than he should be because Liam can’t sit still when Zayn’s watching him like that.
“Tell me about the blue,” Liam says instead as Zayn lights up at the chance to talk poetic to him. “The part by my shoulder.”
“It’s symbolic of last April,” he whispers, a hand on Liam’s hair, gentle and tight at the same time. “Remember that forty-eight hour stopover in London before we went to Australia and we stayed at the museum instead of going home? It’s about the contrast between the British Royal Navy circa 1945 and the role of Sydney Harbour in modern society as a sight of leisure.”
Liam doesn’t say what he thinks - you’re too brilliant for me and how opposed would you be to talking like that when we fuck and wow wow wow - just stares at Zayn until he’s sure he knows that he wants to kiss him the second they leave and asks about the forest green on the inside of his elbow.
+
(Zayn doesn’t stop stroking the tattoo absently for weeks and Liam claims oblivious for the chance of Zayn rubbing aloe vera all over his shoulders and kissing him better)
+
It’s not instantaneous. There are still some days when all Liam wants is to lock himself in that empty room downstairs until I hope your damned plane crashes stops echoing in his head, but Zayn’s always sitting on the other side when he comes out and that’s all the difference.
They’re sitting around the dining room table in the seats they claimed months ago (Niall at the head, Louis and Harry on the other side of him and Zayn, close enough to kick four different boys without wriggling out of his seat) and Harry’s bragging about his newfound maturity because of his successful pork crackling and clearer psyche after months of abstinence-
Louis snorts. “S’not abstinence if it’s not by choice.”
Harry flicks over a forkful of his peas and steals his wine. They’re having a Sunday roast and just the idea of that would have made Liam laugh a year ago. “Well it’s still douchebaggery if it’s by choice, you twat.”
(Liam in collars has been ruled illegal since Zayn realised he could see one of the splatters of the tattoo in most of his shirts so the kiss pressed to his clavicle is no surprise)
“Better than being cockblocked by early admission to MIT,” Niall groans and their twined feet clumsily tap one of his.
The rest of the boys look at them expectantly because the absence of getting laid was one of the foundations of their relationship but Zayn just grins, right into his skin. “Sorry lads,” he teases. “We’re having fantastic sex. All the time. Everywhere.”
“Guess where I blew him a half-hour ago,” Liam laughs, just for the look of disgruntled horror and acceptance on Harry’s face. The conversation switches to the likelihood of a Brit winning America’s Next Top Model and Zayn kisses his cheek when he says they could if it was one of us and it hits him, it hits him like a fucking brick through the glass window overlooking the backyard. They know the supermarket backwards, held a fondue night for the neighbours and started whining about what the weather will do to their denims, and all these things designed to make them feel normal are suddenly so, so unimportant because he has this, he has them and he has Zayn, and that’s enough, it’s enough for him-
+
(he doesn’t say it then. Instead, he waits until they’re in the middle of a game of Mario Kart and says if you want to leave, I think I could get on a plane without having a panic attack in an airport, maybe so everyone except Zayn - and he remembers, of course you could, you’re Liam goddamn Payne - crashes)
+
Getting on the plane is the hardest thing Liam’s ever done. Zayn’s right beside him, though, squeezing his hand like a heartbeat because it’s always soothed them both and kissing his cheek, their tattoo, the nape of his neck, when he thinks they can get away with it.
They all hold hands on board and instead of spreading out like they usually do when they’re on a commercial plane, they squeeze together in a corner of business class with a pile of blankets and those lucky woven bracelets Louis bought them all from somewhere in Sweden.
He presses his forehead against Zayn’s and drinks him in, the look in his eyes, his wet lips, the hickey on his neck from Tuesday morning. “There’s something I really want to tell you,” he admits softly as the plane takes off, “and I’m not saying it now because I can hardly see straight but I can’t stop thinking about it and I’m definitely incapable of not thinking of you, so in seven hours, we’ll be home. And I’m going to tell you that I noun you.”
Zayn grins and even if it’s a little shaky, it’s still stunning. “Verb,” he corrects and ducks closer to kiss him stupid while their three best friends cheer from behind them.
+
When they land, Liam’s lips are chapped and dry from rehearsing I love you, I love you, I love you under his breath and he’s so, so ready that he doesn’t notice his phone in Zayn’s hand until it’s pressed into his own.
“Remember the voicemail from forever ago?” he asks. Liam plays dumb because they’ve got this - whispering between the sheets and reading comic books at midnight and sharing toast and kisses in the morning - down to an art.
“I was much too busy learning how to suck you off,” he teases and his heart’s throbbing out of his chest when Zayn grins at him and calls his message number.
Liam’s looked away a lot in the past few months and he knows he’s about to cry, about to start shaking, but there’s something brave in Zayn’s eyes that anchors him to the ground. “Liam,” Zayn says, distorted through the phone, and Liam’s falling in love. “It’s the middle of February and right now, I’m sneaking peeks at you through the plane window even though we’re meant to close the blinds for take off. You’re sitting on the bus and you’re about to find my lolly stash and I’m just certain I love you.”
Zayn grins indulgently at the look in his eyes and, months ago, laughs into the phone and adds- “I hid your phone so with any luck you won’t get this until after our date but it’s going to be the proof at our wedding that I loved you first.”
The message ends and Zayn looks a little embarrassed at that last bit and Liam burns the image into his memory. “Well you’re definitely wrong on that last word,” Liam teases cautiously and whispers eight letters into Zayn’s mouth and they trade wrong right wrong right until they’re in his apartment, curled up in a cold bed to keep each other warm.
+
A whole year later and they’re back in Chicago and it’s like they never left, with one of his shoes wedged under their mattress and the car keys in Niall’s old snapback and the paint stain on the door from their finally.
“Zayn,” he mumbles sleepily, just outside their bedroom and just after a second show, and he doesn’t have to say anything else because Zayn just rolls his eyes and holds open the sleeve so Liam can wriggle his fingers under and finds a scar off touch memory alone.
“Love you,” Zayn says and Liam doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of hearing that, or the way he always follows it with a kiss.
They’re fumbling for the door handle and this is so, so familiar, reminds him of being outside hotel rooms, in a hundred different public bathrooms, by the door of the plane where Zayn lips at his neck as they board. Liam kisses the underside of his jaw just for the way Zayn loses balance and leans close so Liam can wrap an arm under his arse and lift him up.
“Carrying me over the threshold?” Zayn teases, with fingers dancing down the front of his shirt to palm at the front of his jeans lazily. “You’re going to give a boy the wrong idea.”
(or the right one, Liam thinks, as hard as he can)
Kisses always make him lightheaded and Zayn gets this silly-happy smile when his lips are bitten raw that has been dizzying to Liam for years, now, so it’s no wonder that they end up slumped against the door with that vibrant shadow of Zayn’s back from half a lifetime ago right behind them.
They switch to mouthing lazily at each other’s throats and Liam can’t help himself. “I have something to ask you,” he whispers, between kisses, and Zayn doesn’t tense, just melts under the hand on his wrist and the other cradling his messy hair. “Will you move in with me?”
Zayn huffs into his mouth and Liam bites back the urge to backtrack and kisses him instead. “Aren’t we already?” he mumbles, but he doesn’t sound unsure, just indulgent, when Liam makes a noise of agreement. “I actually had something else in mind.”
There’s a loud thump from the other side of the door and then three identically outraged voices are shouting nope in an eerie type of unison. “Let me in this instant Zayn Malik,” Louis yells, tapping out that dumb rhythm with a certain urgency, and there’s something a lot like déjà vu in the air. “I can understand why you want the wedding night but seeing as things are heading in One Direc-”
“Oh shut it, Lou,” Harry scolds, and then, to them- “you are not proposing in a room that’s more dust and sex residue than it is oxygen. I didn’t read The Art of War when I was sixteen for the penultimate moment of your relationship to be when you are jetlagged and on a foundation of something else in mind.”
Zayn grins and uses the hand on Liam’s back to pull him closer and bite at his lip. “I guess he has a point,” he sighs, not romantic or breathy like he should be with Liam grinding against him, more like he’s coddling everyone under the roof. “Besides, I already have it planned out.”
“Does it involve a bath?” Liam teases, only half-joking because he’s thought of it, thought of a thousand situations where yes is always the answer, “maybe a voicemail?”
He buries his face in the crook of Liam’s neck. “More like the front row of The Winter Soldier,” Zayn admits and Liam’s sure he can feel the way his heart’s thumping out his chest.
There’s a reply and a kiss and a laugh on his lips when the pounding on the door gets a little more urgent. “Boys,” Niall scolds, “if you two are done with discussing your long and glorious life which will undoubtedly involve woodland creatures and sunshine streaming through an oak tree-”
(“maple,” Liam whispers into his hair, “like the one in the front yard.”)
“Don’t forget the The Lumineers swelling romantically in the background,” Harry cackles. “Or the nine dozen rose petals guiding the path to their forever-”
They blush and throw open the door. “The take-out is going cold,” Liam scolds, but he grins at Zayn when their fingers twine together on the way down the stairs.
They eat on the couch (Zayn half in his lap to grind down when the others aren’t watching) with reruns of Hannah Montana in the background and a thunderstorm outside.
“This is the dumbest show in the world,” Harry groans, even as he stares with this silly awed expression and gets tikka masala all over his cheeks from his fixation.
Zayn swallows the laksa Liam’s been feeding him and laughs into his shoulder. “You’ve worked lyrics from The Best of Both Worlds into a majority of our interviews.”
Louis’ arm is curled sweetly around Harry’s waist to hold Niall’s hand but that doesn’t stop him from laughing until he’s out of breath. “You cried in the movie when the crowd accepts her for who she really is.”
“I hate everyone in this house,” he grumbles, even as he tears up strips of paratha for all of them while they sing along to the opening credits.
Liam wakes up first to the smell of rain and the early sunlight in his eyes and, when he’s finished staring outside until his eyes burn gold, Zayn’s watching him sleepily from his favourite spot on Liam’s shoulder. He’s spent a lot of the past twelve months thinking about missed opportunities - the years it took for them to get their shit together, the tarmac in Iowa, the month they spent curled up in the same bed without realising the implications - and realises that he doesn’t want to miss this one. So he twists his neck to mouth lazily at Zayn’s lips and thinks that he was wrong, last year, when he said he’d never felt as alive as he did screaming at Louis from a foggy bus window because right now, with Zayn grinning into the kiss, he can’t help but think that maybe alive is just the new standard with Zayn Malik pressed against him.
Liam’s spent half of the month they’ve been in Chicago listening to doctors and jargon and advice from every facet of the media slowly leaking back into their lives, and he’s mostly certain that one of Zayn’s scars is infected. So after herding him to the clinic and spending twenty minutes in the pharmacy picking out an antiseptic cream, he wraps a hand around the nape of Zayn’s neck and guides him into the master en suite Louis hates using.
The centrepiece of the room is this rounded porcelain bath with a rainfall showerhead. It’s nothing like the one three flights ago, where it felt like the only heat in the world was produced from the friction between them. There’s all this empty space but when Zayn settles by the tap, Liam slots a knee between his and presses close and down, and there’s a part of him that claims practicality when, really, it’s mostly because Zayn is beautiful from this and every angle.
Zayn’s laugh turns breathy when Liam pulls away. “Tease,” he scolds as he curves his spine to pull off his shirt without jostling Liam, and hypocrisy has never looked as beautiful as it does on Zayn Malik.
He’s quiet as Liam washes his scars in these methodical strokes of the washcloth that leave goosebumps in their wake, with his neck stretched towards the window to show all the roots , deeper and a burning pink at the edges. The gel is slick and heavy and leaves behind an artificial shine that makes Liam’s fingers stick for a moment too long.
“It’s a shame,” Zayn laughs suddenly, even though there’s no humour in his voice. His fingers still and Zayn nudges back into the touch and Liam studies the twitch of his jaw. “I was meant to get the next piece this weekend in Seattle. The contrast with the half-sleeve would have looked perfect.”
There are a thousand ways Liam could react to the situation and he decides on tracing his name into Zayn’s collarbone with sticky, trembling fingers. “The one with the lines and colours?” he mumbles, and he thinks of the distorted nothing etched into napkins, draft setlists, on the pavement outside their venues. “Wouldn’t the scarring add an aspect of industrialism to the post-modernist abstract?”
Zayn looks down at the space between them and grins, like he doesn’t want the world to see but can’t quite keep from it. “Do you even know what you just said?”
“It was off the tattooist’s facebook,” he admits, and when Zayn laughs with crinkled eyes and stretched lips, he adds, “I walked around with it written on my hand just in case you brought it up.”
The bath’s faucet is detachable and Zayn knocks it deliberately, Liam’s shirt soaking in seconds and the water trickling down his spine like a caress. They fight over the cord and by the time Zayn uses the hem of Liam’s white shirt for a surrender, there’s water all over the tiles and the shower’s pelting hot water onto their faces and there’s nowhere else in the world he would rather be than in their fake rainstorm, even if that means they need to stifle their laughter as they reapply the cream for a second, third, fourth time.
+
(that night, he’s curled all the way around Zayn with a hand on the dip of his spine and spare fingers tangled in his hair, because it’s his turn to be brave, when he hears-
“I was in your chair,” Zayn whispers, and he’s mastered the art of breathing out words, “the glare from the wing lights kept hitting my eyes and I missed you and I know you won’t see it this way, but that was the only thing anchoring me while we were falling out of the sky.”)
+
(and it’s a shame, really, that four hours later Liam’s still stuck on your chair.)
+
Two years ago, backstage before their very first television appearance as a Real Band with a Real Album and Real Career to match, Harry overworked his throat and forgot how to breathe and fainted into Louis’ lap. It’s been this dumb inside joke in the band since then, even if they hold hands before every show to calm him down.
Harry’s perched on one of the bar stools by the breakfast table with a book balancing precariously on his glass of apple juice. As Liam stumbles sleepily around the kitchen cooking a fry up because Zayn’s out buying groceries and he always wants scrambled eggs when he gets home, he catches a glimpse of the title - Paced breathing: A comprehensive analysis on the diaphragm under pressure - and slides a plate of too hot toast across the table instead of commenting.
Their elbows knock as they eat and Liam’s soothed by the sound of Harry chewing each mouthful six times before swallowing. It’s taken them a few years to classify the quiet between them as an ease instead of discomfort and now they have this down to an art, so it’s only a matter of time before-
“Liam,” he sighs, all put upon and pouty. “There’s nothing in the world to fix me.”
He grins and shoves away their plates and the heavy textbooks from fuck knows where out of the way. “It’s not something that can be studied,” he explains, and Harry rolls his eyes because he’s heard it all before but Liam’s going to get it through his thick skull, thick head, thick hair, if it’s the last thing he does. “With practise, your breath capacity will be back in a few weeks.”
Harry snorts. “At least now I know what you were doing while I was lying on my death bed,” he teases and smiles beatifically at Liam, “is this another occasion for marathoning we didn’t start the fire?”
They’ve been singing dumb warm-ups and trading quick verses for the past half-hour with increasing intensity when Liam loses a note.
“Out of breath?” Harry mocks, even though he’s doubled over heaving and refuses to stop. “Zayn clearly hasn’t been riding you hard enough.”
“Excuse you,” he says with his voice cracking for the first time in years at the thought of strong thighs straddling his hips and fingers curled into fists against his sternum.
Harry looks at him like he’s the one speaking in code. “His right hand was fucked up for weeks,” he says slowly and then, like he gets it, “Wow, imagine all the thank-god-we’re-alive sex you’ve missed.”
He knows he’s blushing from the way Harry’s giggling but he’s too flustered to care. “Oh shut it,” he scolds, and Harry only stops when he adds- “I will tell Jake Gyllenhaal he’s your celebrity crush on Jay Leno I swear to god.”
(by the time Zayn walks into the room with three plastic bags in each hand, Harry’s a little more familiar with the top of his lungs and only ruins the second chorus when he sees Liam watching the play of muscles under Zayn’s jumper, and Harry’s smug and hums uptown girl under his breath all day.)
+
Their room is only half-furnished and the feature wall is still just a base coat and the way the sunlight dances across the room and sets fire to Zayn’s eyes is the most beautiful thing in the world. They start sleeping tangled together, like they’re taking turns shielding each other from the world, and Liam still cries a little too often and sleeps a little short of enough, but sometimes Zayn wakes up like he’s taking his very first breath out of the wreckage and Liam can deal with pins and needles and a mouthful of hair and a little emasculation if it means they’re not alone in it.
He wakes up just before dawn to an inky blue sky and Zayn doing push ups on the floor. There’s a thin line of sweat down the nape of his neck that stains his t-shirt dark and soft hair keeps falling in his eyes and Liam loves Zayn’s back, loves the curves and contours of his spine and how every inch of him is so damn harmonic.
Zayn falters when he sees Liam watching but recovers enough to flash him a grin. “Good morning,” he whispers as he climbs back into bed. “I think it’s getting stronger.”
Liam laughs a little too loud and it’s right now, with the sun in his eyes and something warm in the air when he couldn’t bear to die because that would mean leaving this. “Reckon you could take me?”
Zayn raises his eyebrows when Liam doesn’t bother to correct himself, just clasps their opposing hands together with his pinkie caught in Zayn’s sweatshirt. They hold tight and Liam is so entranced in the tension in his spine that he slacks all over and Zayn follows his momentum, halfway onto his chest with this smirk that he usually reserves for words Liam doesn’t know and winning arguments against Louis. His lips are chapped from the run yesterday and Liam thinks of that kiss in Casablanca Harry has made him watch a thousand times and thinks, yeah, this could be something magical, right now could be what he remembers for the rest of his life-
But then his fingers catch on the smooth lines scorched into Zayn’s wrist and they both flinch away and Zayn is the only one who leans back in.
He exhales too harshly and shifts to the edge of the bed, presses fists into his eyes, and Liam does the same until technicolour blurs his vision. “You don’t have to look at me,” Zayn mumbles. He sounds so lost and Liam doesn’t know what to say. And when he gets tired of the space between them or waiting for Liam to fucking get it together, Zayn bites out- “Well I don’t want to look at you either.”
+
Guilty, he thinks, with his lips buried into Zayn’s cold pillow, when it’s four a.m and Zayn’s still in Harry’s room, that’s the way he feels, because thoughts of being waist-deep in muddy water and I ruined our date and I hope your damned plane crashes all leave something awful stained to his tongue, and he will never be able to get it off, and the sleeves Zayn swims - drowns - in are all his fault-
+
It’s rainy and miserable and so, so fitting outside when Louis nudges open the door with his hip and climbs all the way under the blankets with him. In the soft blue light, he looks lost, like he did on the stretcher.
“I’m not sure what happened,” Louis whispers as he presses his shoulder against Liam’s and it’s so hot it burns through his skin, not that either of them will admit to the pain. “But we’re going to fix it. You are not a product of Mills and Boon.”
He frowns into Louis’ hair and wriggles a hand down to press a thumb into the muscle belly of his calf. “I thought those were romantic?”
Louis nudges into his touch until Liam starts rubbing in slow circles. “They are, until you find out he’s a cult leader or a vampire or a murderer and you’re not one night in an abandoned village away from losing your only chance at true happiness so put a fucking shirt on and let me orchestrate my magic.”
“You are not Sebastian from the Little Mermaid,” he groans, even as he follows Louis all the way to the paint store.
They’ve been studying a wall of paint swatches for twenty minutes, deciding between stolen emerald and green gentleman and the legal team is working on a settlement, today, so the press is hovering by the bleach.
Liam catches a glance of the swatches Louis is hoarding and flips his sample of smoke morning at his face. “Zayn hates purple,” he says, snatching away the toxic valentine and replacing it with pavlove, a pale shade of sanguine that he can’t help but think will look beautiful against Zayn’s bare skin.
Louis flicks a look at the press and then, louder, says, “pas de cheval or exile blue?”
And soon enough it’s not his choice at all, with strangers arguing over the representation of contrast and harmony between shades and intensities while Liam adds little things like-
“I am not waking up to martyrdom mirage tomorrow.”
- and very, very deliberately doesn’t think of how he presumed the room would still be theirs in the morning.
+
When they get home (and it’s a home and it is most definitely theirs), Louis pleads a swollen foot and makes Liam carry the cans of paint upstairs. He’s halfway into the room before he realises the sound of quick footsteps down the hallway and Zayn watching him with a certain fascination and the door slamming behind them.
“Again?” Zayn groans as the deadlock - installed, this time - clicks behind them. They’re pressed together from shoulder to hip and Liam loves the solidarity, and loves a little more, too. “I thought you weren’t one for repeat schemes, Lou-”
Niall laughs out a shut the fuck up from the other side of the door while Liam looks at the remains of their bedroom. The bed is pressed against the wrong corner and there’s newspaper all over the floor and he didn’t realise how much stuff they’d accumulated (dumbbells, albums they fall asleep to and these old novels Liam tries to read to impress Zayn but can’t get past the first few pages) until it formed a mountain on their bed.
“No more almost or pining,” Louis yells, and he sounds like he does when he’s terrorising the staff backstage, chasing Zayn’s nieces through the backyard, sneaking out through the fire exit. “Zayn, Liam knows the most pointless shit about you. He thinks you hung the moon and have the voice of an angel and probably daydreams about posting an engagement announcement in The Times. I have no clue why you think he’s not mad for you.”
“Liam,” Harry says, softer, and he’s so sick of the way Zayn tenses against him. “Zayn stood outside your bedroom for two hours last night to make sure you were okay. And I watched you sit in that hospital room for a fortnight doing the same. Now sort your shit out.”
Silence echoes but that never lasts too long, here. Niall clears his throat. “Dramatic,” he teases. “We’re going to be perfecting flatbread. Fix yourselves.”
Liam waits until the others leave and twists to bury his face in Zayn’s neck before he can pull away. “I’m sorry,” he mumbles. Zayn’s wearing this threadbare white crewneck designed to drive him insane, what - with the way the edges of his collarbone are showing and the hints of the tattoo by his hip under the fabric.
“Do you even know what you’re apologising for?” he asks as he knocks their ankles together. He’s barefoot in Liam’s jeans and Liam can’t look away.
“Almost,” he promises and Zayn just stares at him.
They take turns choosing colour combinations and it’s easy, falling into that pattern where they spend too much time watching each other and Liam finds any excuse to touch him (put your hips into it, Zayn) and he’s having the time of his life deliberately not thinking about anything other than right now.
He’s taken to dipping his fingertips in too much paint and flicking it at the wall when Jack Mannequin’s you can breathe follows all you need is love. “I’m noticing a reoccurring theme here.”
Zayn looks at him indulgently and there’s a line of burnt orange along his cheekbone that Liam loses breath over. “Feeling empowered?” he teases, refocussed on the wall. “Sceptered? Sanguine-?”
“That’s a colour,” Liam groans, and the look Zayn gives him could set the world on fire. “And no more big words, it’s not fair.”
They swap colours and while they’re busy mixing paint and testing colour combinations on the newspaper floor, Zayn smirks at him. “How about auspicious?”
The way Zayn’s lips form around the syllables is nothing short of obscene and Liam can’t take it, just dips his whole hand in the paint and shoves Zayn back with a bright green hand on his chest.
Zayn glares at him and coats his hands in paint, knuckles in pink and fingers in red and palm in blue and wrist in green. Fingers tangle in his shirt and pull him close and they wrestle for the most damage, a handprint dragged right across Zayn’s neck, a scoop of paint down the front of Liam’s shirt that stains a line of yellow to his chest.
It’s innocent until it’s not, until it’s very deliberately not about winning, and they’re knocking over paint cans and sparring on the floor and it looks like a rainbow rushed through their bedroom when they stop for breath. There’s a forearm over Liam’s chest and a fistful of bright blue hair in his fist and a knee pressed to the hollow of his stomach but he’s never felt so much like floating.
Liam wants to kiss him. And right now, with the sun in his eyes and a bright pink streak on Zayn’s forehead like a crescent moon, he thinks he can. He tugs Zayn close with the hand in his hair and thinks he might die, like his heart will stop beating, when Zayn stands up instead.
“Just let me grab another shirt,” Zayn says. He’s not looking at Liam and one of his sleeves was ripped in the scuffle and he’s using both hands to hold it together, so Liam grabs Zayn’s wrist to hoist himself up and his grip stains the skin there bright blue. “I really don’t want to see your face when you see them so-”
“What?” he asks - begs, really - and tries to sneak into Zayn’s field of vision without prying his eyes open and pushing too close.
“It’s okay,” he says, but it’s really, really not if okay is nervous lips and wet eyes. “I know I’m not - the way I was. You don’t need to pretend to be alright with it and you don’t need to see them.”
And then, quieter, he adds, “You don’t even need to look at me.”
Liam stares, for a moment, and wriggles blue fingers deliberately under Zayn’s tattered shirt to touch one of the scars. “You are the most beautiful thing in the world,” he swears, a little fervent, and tightens his grip until Zayn’s next breath comes out shaky. “You have been since you wore that ugly red jumper three weeks after we met for the first time, and there’s nothing in the whole world that’s going to change that. Not the words you say or the things you do or the way you look, and definitely not this. Here comes the sun makes sense when I see you and you are my American wedding and that night in Orlando - when we were so sick of our own voices we took to covers, instead - I thought you weren’t something I was able to describe, yet. So I settled on teenage dream because I can’t stop thinking about running away with you.”
Zayn curls forward like he’s collapsing, presses his forehead to Liam’s collarbone. “You’ve barely looked at me,” he whispers.
Liam can’t say anything to that so he carefully slides his kaleidoscope red fingers into his hair. “Well now I’m not going to take my eyes off you.”
There’s something fragile in Zayn’s eyes when they meet his and it’s followed with a kiss that feels more like a hello than anything else. Something slow and dirty is playing in the background and Liam will never remember what the song is because he’s too caught up in the way Zayn groans when Liam flickers his tongue over his lower lip and how he tastes like sugar and the twist of muscles in his forearms while he tries to think of where to touch first.
He’s too dizzy to do much better than an arm around his waist and a hand under one of his thighs and Zayn cheers softly into his mouth when they smash into the door. Zayn tugs off their shirts with a clumsy motion and drags his hands shakily down Liam’s chest to fumble at their jeans and the ache in Liam’s jammed fingers is so, so worth it.
“I’ve thought about this for the longest time,” Liam confesses, because it’s a Tuesday and his turn to be brave and he owes Zayn this. “Whether just grinding would be enough to get you off and the way it would feel, being kept on the edge like that; it’s going to be unbearable-”
Zayn whines and bites Liam’s lip until it aches for his tongue. They shove their jeans hastily down to their thighs and that innate sense of rhythm etched into Zayn’s bones has never been as beautiful as it is when used to thrust their hips together. It’s too dry and a little fast and the absolute best feeling in the world, and Liam wants to look down, wants to see their cocks together and the catch of their hip bones on every thrust but there’s not enough force in the universe to pull him away from Zayn’s lips.
They get desperate fast and the edge isn’t as fantastic as he imagined so he cheats, sneaks a hand between them to trace around the head of Zayn’s cock until his hips stutter and that’s all it takes for him to be gone, gone, gone for Zayn.
“Hey beautiful,” he whispers into his neck when they stop panting, which is a little longer than either of them will admit.
“Unnecessary,” Zayn groans, with a blush staining his cheeks and a body-shaped rainbow staining the white door behind them and this dumb giddy smile on his lips that Liam could fall in love with.
They order a tasting platter from the Chinese place down the road and bribe the delivery guy until he agrees to climb the tree to their window. It’s stuffing wrapped in pastry and fried pork and honey chicken so they forgo the chopsticks and take turns feeding each other off their hands. Zayn loves the honey sauce so Liam dips his ring finger in and slides it between sticky lips, and Zayn keeps it against the roof of his mouth with his tongue.
Liam’s fingers subconsciously trace the line right down the centre of his wrist and Zayn relaxes at the touch for the first time, tips his head back so all of him is bare.
He leans close to kiss the underside of Zayn’s jaw and holds there. “You could on me,” he whispers, because there’s a part of him that wants to keep this secret. “The tattoo for your sleeve. I want it on me.”
The next breath from Zayn’s lips gets caught in his throat and he doesn’t say no or don’t, just tilts his head forward until his lips find Liam’s.
+
It takes an hour or three but eventually they stumble downstairs, even if Liam’s shoved against the banister so Zayn can suck a mark onto his neck.
They’re grinding lazily and he’s desperate for the hollow of Zayn’s hip when Harry makes a wounded noise behind them.
“I did not think the repercussions of your happiness through,” he groans, even as he grins at them. “Please don’t defile every surface of the house.”
Liam loses himself in the hollows of Zayn’s body - the base of his throat, the space between his arms - and blinks up at them both. “Not every surface,” he teases, lips catching deliberately on Zayn’s bare chest. “The oven’s safe from us. And I’m sure fucking on the stairs isn’t very comfortable.”
Harry looks at their position and Liam doesn’t quite remember when Zayn wriggled a hand down the front of his pants, or when he propped his foot against one of the stairs to thrust back a little harder. “The fridge is fair ground,” Zayn offers as Harry stomps outside. Then, louder- “We love you too!”
They trade soft kisses for a little while longer before stealing the cranberry vodka from the cupboard and joining the others on the deck. There’s a space in the pile of blankets for the two of them and Louis looks unbearably smug at the trail of hickeys down Zayn’s neck.
“You two reek,” Niall laughs as he buries into Liam’s side and shoves half of a red velvet cake at them, “I think our downright admirable radio silence about the sounds coming from your room deserves a little dessert.”
Zayn takes to feeding Liam forkfuls and licking the cream-cheese icing off his lips while Louis mixes the vodka with cherry coke and passes around tumblers. “I’ve never ruined my best friends’ lives with my oversexed libido,” Louis says, laughing when the four of them drink and looking positively outraged when Harry shoves his glass towards him. “Fuck off, I’m so discreet I’m basically celibate.”
“It’s a very small bus,” Niall teases, stealing Zayn’s fork and licking it clean. “Remember the time you made up with Eleanor in New York?”
“Remember the time you broke up with Eleanor in Washington?” Harry giggles and kicks up the blanket. “I had that bruise on my arse for a month.”
Louis steals the cake back with a glare and jabs his foot until it hits someone’s (Niall’s) stomach. “I hope you all need Viagra before you’re thirty,” he groans. “And that was nothing in comparison to you and that girl in Vancouver.”
And they trade stories they’ve already heard and dares they’ve had a thousand times over until the mid-spring breeze forces them inside.
+
Their first interview back as a group is the very next day with the host from The Morning Show so Liam doesn’t get the breakfast in bed and sleepy blow job and cocoon of blankets he’s always associated with Zayn and their first night together, but he does get careful fingers feeding him slices of toast and a mutual hand job in the shower.
“Harder,” Zayn whimpers, with an arm wrapped tight around his shoulders and his spare hand wrapped around Liam’s cock and water running down his back as Zayn thrusts slow into his fist. “Is it tight enough?”
He groans and slips down to trace the scar curled around Zayn’s shoulder with his tongue, just like he thought of doing while Zayn stroked it absently reading The Odyssey for the sixth time. “Just keep talking, please don’t stop, please don’t stop-”
“I could suck you off,” Zayn whispers and he is beautiful always but especially like this, with wet hair and bedroom eyes and arched back, “Get on my knees for you and anchor your hips and use my tongue. I used to think of you when I practised with other guys, whether I’d be able to deepthroat you, what you would be like, how you would sound, if you’d be as reactive as you are on stage with your fingers tangled in my hair-”
Liam dislodges the tidy row of body wash in their shower when he comes hard enough to see stars and Zayn follows with an oh on his lips and they spend so much time washing off that they’re still damp in the car on the way over.
+
“So aside from rehab,” the host starts, twenty minutes into the interview, “what have you been doing for two months?”
They’re all holding hands and Liam’s a little nervous and the roar is deafening, louder than it’s ever been, louder than Madison Square and arriving in Australia and the Olympics combined, at least that’s the way it feels. He blushes at the question when Zayn squeezes his hand like a heartbeat, like a reminder of what’s been and what’s to come, as Niall grins at the audience to distract them.
“Personally I’ve perfected the art of a fine tiramisu,” Harry says, curling his fingers against Louis’ palm. “It was just really fantastic to do all the things we talked about.”
Zayn leans forward and one of his buttons is missing from where Liam grabbed him for a pre-crowd kiss that lasted five minutes. “And we’d just like to say a massive thank-you to everyone for being so respectful while we recovered.”
There’s a beat of silence and then Louis snorts from the other side of Niall. “You can tell that we’ve morphed into one being without contact with the outside world,” he laughs as he leans forward, because he’s mastered letting the world in on a secret.
“Liam’s definitely rubbed off on me,” Zayn says and Liam chokes on his next inhale at the implications while Harry tries his hardest to look extra charming.
Niall clears his throat awkwardly. “We’ve actually been filming for our movie.”
The screen just behind the host is playing snippets from that camera and the crowd shrieks when a recording of the five of them half-naked in the mirror shows.
On screen, Harry rubs shaving cream into his cheeks and pouts when Louis plucks the razor from his hands. “I don’t know why you bother shaving,” Louis teases as he swipes at the foam on Harry’s face and rubs it into his own neck, “you have the face of a pre-pubescent child.”
He glares at them in the mirror. “I’m a man, Louis Tomlinson, and I will not stand for that blasphemy.”
“You keep using that word,” Zayn says, from where he and Liam are washing temporary dye out of Niall’s hair since he lost a bet about mattress surfing. “I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Out of camera, Liam knocks his ankle against Zayn’s and mumbles, “as you wish.”
Niall blinks up at them with bright pink hair and the detachable showerhead in his hand. “Stop flirting,” he groans, and squirts water all over the four of them until they tackle him into the bath.
(Liam doesn’t remember the rest of the interview and when they watch it back that night, he sees the exact moment he thinks I love you as hard as he can in Zayn’s direction)
+
They’re high off adrenaline and reluctant to return home and it’s the 22nd, Haz, don’t doubt the power of tradition so they go exploring. There’s a baseball game on that afternoon and Liam knows even less about it than he does American football but Zayn’s indulgent, keeps a hand in his hair and steals his aviators in the late morning sun and whispers you’re going to set me on fire whenever he stares too long.
There’s a kiss cam and when it stops on Niall, halfway through a drag of beer, he knocks off his snapback and turns to the girl he’s been flirting with all game. He tilts his head like a do you want to? and presses his lips to her cheek when she teases him about his blush, and keeps kissing her for the rest of the game.
It’s still light out when the game finishes and they’re debating the merits of the Sears Tower and Buckingham Fountain the whole way back to the car before they realise that Niall’s five hundred people behind them.
“Tiebreaker!” Harry yells and throws himself onto Niall’s back once they’re close enough. “Would you rather watch a spontaneous performance of can you feel the love tonight at a moonlit fountain or to the blinking lights of a skyline?”
Niall’s got a hand on the small of the girl’s back and she’s pretty, gorgeous, even, so he barely notices the four of them. “I was actually going to drive Kiah home,” he says, still staring at her with that blush high on his cheeks.
“We could drop her off on the way?” Harry offers and yelps when Liam flicks him on the back of the head. Then, grumpily- “Or afterwards.”
Zayn tugs Harry off them by the scruff of his neck and throws the keys (stolen from Liam’s back pocket, fuck, when did he manage that?) to Niall. “Drive safe.”
(they end up on the top of the Sears Tower with their foreheads pressed to the glass and Zayn speaks in lines Liam doesn’t understand but loves to death while Harry and Louis sing the sweet caress of twilight- there’s magic everywhere like they’ve been waiting to for years.)
+
(“We have the backyard for a dog,” Harry says suddenly that Friday morning while they jog around the pond down the road. “I’ve always wanted a husky. We could call him Holden like that character in The Catcher in the Rye Zayn has a hard on for.”
It’s quiet, then, until Louis pleads ankle and stumbles off the track. “What about when we go on tour?” he asks, careful, careful, watching them all like he can protect them from this. “I mean, we’re going back, right?”
There’s nothing say to that so they get back on the path and run it off in silence. When they’re ten minutes from home, Zayn slows down to flick Harry’s headband against his forehead. “And fuck you, Holden Caulfield was written to transcend generations.”)
+
“Niall Horan,” Louis yells a fortnight later, following him upstairs and receiving a spray of cologne into his face in retaliation, “can you repeat that last part?”
Niall fiddles with his sleeves until Liam slaps his hand away and fixes the cufflinks himself. “The part where I really really like her and want you to leave before she gets here, for fucks sake, even the strongest people can’t stand you?”
Louis pouts and hands over his bow tie, previously hidden in the coffee jar until Niall told him where he was going. “No,” he says, “the part where you’re going to prom with her.”
“Fuck off with the condescension,” he scowls, tilting up his neck patiently as Harry steps in to fix the complicated knot. “You know I’m a sucker for acoustic bands and corsages.”
Zayn snorts and lowers the camera in his hands onto Liam’s shoulders with a kiss out of view. “And spiked punch.”
The doorbell rings downstairs and Niall lights up and tones it down in time to glare at them as he walks out the room.
“You don’t want to cascade down the stairs with Jesse McCartney in the background?” Harry exclaims, honestly, with big eyes and a huge camera around his neck. “We’re getting a photo of you two by the fireplace whether or not you want one!”
+
Zayn’s got him pressed face-down on their bed within twenty minutes, teeth scraping across his bare shoulder and his legs spread wide to feel the press of Zayn’s cock against his arse and it feels like a certain kind of torture, just for him, when they’re interrupted before they can get out of their sweatpants.
“You two are shameless,” Louis groans as they separate slowly, not without a kiss or three. He’s wearing tight jeans and an oversized sweater of Harry’s, with a Harry to match. “Public indecency should be defined by the number of times the two of you give each other that look like oh, I don’t know, right now, we are still here.”
“As fascinating as the two of you leaking serotonin and candle wax is not,” Harry teases, “we have reservations at Viva. Please fuck it out of your system so the scent of frustration wanes from the walls.”
Liam waits for the front door to close and bites at Zayn’s lips until he groans into his mouth. “We could,” he whispers, because Zayn’s taken to kneeling between his legs and slipping crooked slick fingers inside Liam until he whimpers and he loves the way Zayn thrusts against his leg when he grinds back and he wants, wants wants the more it promises. “I’m still-”
Zayn interrupts him with a kiss and a hand wriggled down the back of his sweatpants, like he can imagine what Liam’s thinking, the I’m still a little wide open from you fingering me in the shower after lunch just on his lips. They strip down in maybe the most inefficient way because Liam can’t take the thought of ending the kiss and Zayn refuses to move his thumb from the rim of Liam’s hole. “Bare?” he asks softly, since they got tested a week ago and Liam’s nodding frantically before he can say anything else.
The lube is still wedged between their pillows and Zayn slicks up his cock, eases Liam onto his back with a shaking hand on his hip, maybe from nerves or maybe from anticipation or maybe a little of both. Zayn kisses out something in Morse code into his neck as he slides in one, two, three fingers, always so damn ruthless, like he just wants to take and take and take until there’s nothing left for Liam to give.
“Zayn,” he whines, when he can’t stop the roll of his hips or the breathy moans which punctuate his want, “babe please don’t you want to-”
“Not if you call me that,” he laughs, but he’s hitching Liam’s legs over his shoulders and mouthing at his jaw sweetly as he thrusts in and-
oh
It’s dark in the room but Liam can still see Zayn’s eyes, blown wide and fluttering as they watch his cock slide into his arse with this kind of avid fascination that Liam wants to drink in. They’re hardly in sync and the slow slow fast slow is maddening and Liam doesn’t do anything to change it, just grinds upwards until Zayn’s cock sinks a little deeper.
Zayn drags a hand down the centre of his chest to touch all the places he loves most - the muscles over Liam’s hips, the rim of his hole, that vein along the underside of his dick. He balances precariously on one arm (with the scars, so Liam can mouth at them when it feels right) and jerks him off and the friction is still as intoxicating as it was the first time.
“Look at me,” Zayn says, like it’s possible to look away from the beads of sweat pooling in the hollow of his collarbone or the desperate look in his eyes or even the fading teeth marks bruising his lips red. His thumb rolls back Liam’s foreskin to drag over the head of his cock and Liam is fascinated, awestruck by the way Zayn’s losing all that control and tension caught in his shoulders because of him and he automatically presses his heels into Zayn’s back so their lips bump together and his cock grazes just so against his prostate and that’s all it takes before he’s coming all over his hand.
Zayn’s erratic and Liam loves the taste of how close he is on his lips. “Come on,” he urges, still shaking with how much he wants it, “come on, come for me-”
His hips still, right against Liam’s thighs, and the grin Zayn presses against his chin afterwards is sweet enough to burn right through him.
+
They’re backstage at their first show in almost four months and it’s true, the bullshit people say when they can feel your heart beating out of your chest, it’s like riding a bike and you’ll never forget how to do this and it’ll feel like it was just yesterday. The earpieces are still lined up in a straight line by the stage and Louis stretching in his skin tight jeans is just as oddly fascinating as it was before, and the crowd counting ten nine eight sounds like coming home.
(it’s different, of course, with the new set list so Harry can catch his breath and Zayn mouthing words into his neck)
His heart is racing but in the good way at three two when Zayn’s lips drag up to his jaw. “Ready for this?” he asks, with this dirty, slow kiss that Liam feels for hours after he says yes.
+
(halfway through loved you first, Zayn grins at him like there’s a joke in there somewhere Liam’s not meant to understand quite yet)
+
Liam’s so, so high on the buzz of the amps and the sound of Louis’ laugh and the taste of peppermint on Zayn’s lips that he feels insane, impulsive, like he’ll crawl out of his skin and into someone else’s if he doesn’t get it out of his blood.
Zayn notices right away - of course he does - and herds him into the car and right up against the front door the second they get home. “Want to blow you,” he mumbles, already on his knees, because this is what they do - they kiss when they can and tug each other into their axes and they say what they want after holding their tongues for so long. “Want to be whatever you need, Li.”
Liam loves that about him, the genuine ache in his voice like it’s something physical. He thumbs absently at Zayn’s lips and slips it into the space under his tongue when he opens up. Zayn tugs urgently at his jeans and traces his tongue over Liam’s first knuckle with that patient look in his eyes and, when Liam presses down until his jaw hinges open, his eyes fall shut.
“Just stay like that,” Liam groans and thrusts in as steady as he can with Zayn Malik on his knees for him.
His fingers automatically tangle in Zayn’s hair to hold him just there, right here, so the only movement is the product of the momentum of his hips and the helpless noises Zayn keeps making in the back of his throat.
Liam’s close from the adrenalin and the tongue tracing the shaft and the way Zayn’s lips twitch as he pulls out like he wants to suck on the head but wants to be what Liam wants more, and there’s something missing, something he wants, and he doesn’t figure it out until he says open that mouth for me, baby. Zayn just blinks at him like a fuck no and a fuck yes all at once and slacks his lips until Liam can hear the sound of his cock bumping against the back of Zayn’s throat. It’s obscene, the kind of filthy he always associated with keeping lube in the car, and he comes so hard he sees white.
Zayn mouths absently at his cock until Liam’s ready and the grin that crosses his lips when Liam nudges him backwards to the foot of the stairs is the kind of pleased he wants to taste. He’s careful as he tugs down Zayn’s jeans and presses his legs to his chest and anything but gentle after that, when he traces his tongue around Zayn’s hole and rubs his stubble on the inside of his thighs and strokes him too slowly until he comes with a curse.
Liam stays there, with his forehead pressed against the indent of Zayn’s hip and fingernails scraping along his scalp, until Niall knocks incessantly and yells at them to take it to the bedroom, you bastards, some of us want to sleep through the door.
+
The tattoo artist - the one Zayn had wanted, and Liam will always do anything, anything, anything for him - is in town that weekend so they catch a taxi over to his studio and sit side-by-side on the parlour chair while Zayn explains the concept behind the piece.
“It’s kind of the remnant of everywhere we’ve been,” he explains, and Liam doesn’t see anything in the practise outline traced onto his arm but chaos and colour but he trusts Zayn, knows it’s not just ambiguous shapes and vibrant shades and the silhouettes of something absent to him. “Like history and the modern era of expressionism colliding.”
Zayn feeds him little strips of red liquorice and holds his spare hand and makes a thousand soothing noises whenever Liam wrinkles his nose in pain and Liam thinks of that first tattoo, the line of words he felt etched into his bones even before a needle had touched his skin, and wonders if it feels the same to Zayn right now.
“It’s going to look incredible on you,” he says fervently, watching the artist knit something beautiful together with skin and ink. “Liam, fuck-”
The artist pauses to wipe away the spare ink and grin at them. “Keep it clean,” he teases, probably a little less serious than he should be because Liam can’t sit still when Zayn’s watching him like that.
“Tell me about the blue,” Liam says instead as Zayn lights up at the chance to talk poetic to him. “The part by my shoulder.”
“It’s symbolic of last April,” he whispers, a hand on Liam’s hair, gentle and tight at the same time. “Remember that forty-eight hour stopover in London before we went to Australia and we stayed at the museum instead of going home? It’s about the contrast between the British Royal Navy circa 1945 and the role of Sydney Harbour in modern society as a sight of leisure.”
Liam doesn’t say what he thinks - you’re too brilliant for me and how opposed would you be to talking like that when we fuck and wow wow wow - just stares at Zayn until he’s sure he knows that he wants to kiss him the second they leave and asks about the forest green on the inside of his elbow.
+
(Zayn doesn’t stop stroking the tattoo absently for weeks and Liam claims oblivious for the chance of Zayn rubbing aloe vera all over his shoulders and kissing him better)
+
It’s not instantaneous. There are still some days when all Liam wants is to lock himself in that empty room downstairs until I hope your damned plane crashes stops echoing in his head, but Zayn’s always sitting on the other side when he comes out and that’s all the difference.
They’re sitting around the dining room table in the seats they claimed months ago (Niall at the head, Louis and Harry on the other side of him and Zayn, close enough to kick four different boys without wriggling out of his seat) and Harry’s bragging about his newfound maturity because of his successful pork crackling and clearer psyche after months of abstinence-
Louis snorts. “S’not abstinence if it’s not by choice.”
Harry flicks over a forkful of his peas and steals his wine. They’re having a Sunday roast and just the idea of that would have made Liam laugh a year ago. “Well it’s still douchebaggery if it’s by choice, you twat.”
(Liam in collars has been ruled illegal since Zayn realised he could see one of the splatters of the tattoo in most of his shirts so the kiss pressed to his clavicle is no surprise)
“Better than being cockblocked by early admission to MIT,” Niall groans and their twined feet clumsily tap one of his.
The rest of the boys look at them expectantly because the absence of getting laid was one of the foundations of their relationship but Zayn just grins, right into his skin. “Sorry lads,” he teases. “We’re having fantastic sex. All the time. Everywhere.”
“Guess where I blew him a half-hour ago,” Liam laughs, just for the look of disgruntled horror and acceptance on Harry’s face. The conversation switches to the likelihood of a Brit winning America’s Next Top Model and Zayn kisses his cheek when he says they could if it was one of us and it hits him, it hits him like a fucking brick through the glass window overlooking the backyard. They know the supermarket backwards, held a fondue night for the neighbours and started whining about what the weather will do to their denims, and all these things designed to make them feel normal are suddenly so, so unimportant because he has this, he has them and he has Zayn, and that’s enough, it’s enough for him-
+
(he doesn’t say it then. Instead, he waits until they’re in the middle of a game of Mario Kart and says if you want to leave, I think I could get on a plane without having a panic attack in an airport, maybe so everyone except Zayn - and he remembers, of course you could, you’re Liam goddamn Payne - crashes)
+
Getting on the plane is the hardest thing Liam’s ever done. Zayn’s right beside him, though, squeezing his hand like a heartbeat because it’s always soothed them both and kissing his cheek, their tattoo, the nape of his neck, when he thinks they can get away with it.
They all hold hands on board and instead of spreading out like they usually do when they’re on a commercial plane, they squeeze together in a corner of business class with a pile of blankets and those lucky woven bracelets Louis bought them all from somewhere in Sweden.
He presses his forehead against Zayn’s and drinks him in, the look in his eyes, his wet lips, the hickey on his neck from Tuesday morning. “There’s something I really want to tell you,” he admits softly as the plane takes off, “and I’m not saying it now because I can hardly see straight but I can’t stop thinking about it and I’m definitely incapable of not thinking of you, so in seven hours, we’ll be home. And I’m going to tell you that I noun you.”
Zayn grins and even if it’s a little shaky, it’s still stunning. “Verb,” he corrects and ducks closer to kiss him stupid while their three best friends cheer from behind them.
+
When they land, Liam’s lips are chapped and dry from rehearsing I love you, I love you, I love you under his breath and he’s so, so ready that he doesn’t notice his phone in Zayn’s hand until it’s pressed into his own.
“Remember the voicemail from forever ago?” he asks. Liam plays dumb because they’ve got this - whispering between the sheets and reading comic books at midnight and sharing toast and kisses in the morning - down to an art.
“I was much too busy learning how to suck you off,” he teases and his heart’s throbbing out of his chest when Zayn grins at him and calls his message number.
Liam’s looked away a lot in the past few months and he knows he’s about to cry, about to start shaking, but there’s something brave in Zayn’s eyes that anchors him to the ground. “Liam,” Zayn says, distorted through the phone, and Liam’s falling in love. “It’s the middle of February and right now, I’m sneaking peeks at you through the plane window even though we’re meant to close the blinds for take off. You’re sitting on the bus and you’re about to find my lolly stash and I’m just certain I love you.”
Zayn grins indulgently at the look in his eyes and, months ago, laughs into the phone and adds- “I hid your phone so with any luck you won’t get this until after our date but it’s going to be the proof at our wedding that I loved you first.”
The message ends and Zayn looks a little embarrassed at that last bit and Liam burns the image into his memory. “Well you’re definitely wrong on that last word,” Liam teases cautiously and whispers eight letters into Zayn’s mouth and they trade wrong right wrong right until they’re in his apartment, curled up in a cold bed to keep each other warm.
+
A whole year later and they’re back in Chicago and it’s like they never left, with one of his shoes wedged under their mattress and the car keys in Niall’s old snapback and the paint stain on the door from their finally.
“Zayn,” he mumbles sleepily, just outside their bedroom and just after a second show, and he doesn’t have to say anything else because Zayn just rolls his eyes and holds open the sleeve so Liam can wriggle his fingers under and finds a scar off touch memory alone.
“Love you,” Zayn says and Liam doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of hearing that, or the way he always follows it with a kiss.
They’re fumbling for the door handle and this is so, so familiar, reminds him of being outside hotel rooms, in a hundred different public bathrooms, by the door of the plane where Zayn lips at his neck as they board. Liam kisses the underside of his jaw just for the way Zayn loses balance and leans close so Liam can wrap an arm under his arse and lift him up.
“Carrying me over the threshold?” Zayn teases, with fingers dancing down the front of his shirt to palm at the front of his jeans lazily. “You’re going to give a boy the wrong idea.”
(or the right one, Liam thinks, as hard as he can)
Kisses always make him lightheaded and Zayn gets this silly-happy smile when his lips are bitten raw that has been dizzying to Liam for years, now, so it’s no wonder that they end up slumped against the door with that vibrant shadow of Zayn’s back from half a lifetime ago right behind them.
They switch to mouthing lazily at each other’s throats and Liam can’t help himself. “I have something to ask you,” he whispers, between kisses, and Zayn doesn’t tense, just melts under the hand on his wrist and the other cradling his messy hair. “Will you move in with me?”
Zayn huffs into his mouth and Liam bites back the urge to backtrack and kisses him instead. “Aren’t we already?” he mumbles, but he doesn’t sound unsure, just indulgent, when Liam makes a noise of agreement. “I actually had something else in mind.”
There’s a loud thump from the other side of the door and then three identically outraged voices are shouting nope in an eerie type of unison. “Let me in this instant Zayn Malik,” Louis yells, tapping out that dumb rhythm with a certain urgency, and there’s something a lot like déjà vu in the air. “I can understand why you want the wedding night but seeing as things are heading in One Direc-”
“Oh shut it, Lou,” Harry scolds, and then, to them- “you are not proposing in a room that’s more dust and sex residue than it is oxygen. I didn’t read The Art of War when I was sixteen for the penultimate moment of your relationship to be when you are jetlagged and on a foundation of something else in mind.”
Zayn grins and uses the hand on Liam’s back to pull him closer and bite at his lip. “I guess he has a point,” he sighs, not romantic or breathy like he should be with Liam grinding against him, more like he’s coddling everyone under the roof. “Besides, I already have it planned out.”
“Does it involve a bath?” Liam teases, only half-joking because he’s thought of it, thought of a thousand situations where yes is always the answer, “maybe a voicemail?”
He buries his face in the crook of Liam’s neck. “More like the front row of The Winter Soldier,” Zayn admits and Liam’s sure he can feel the way his heart’s thumping out his chest.
There’s a reply and a kiss and a laugh on his lips when the pounding on the door gets a little more urgent. “Boys,” Niall scolds, “if you two are done with discussing your long and glorious life which will undoubtedly involve woodland creatures and sunshine streaming through an oak tree-”
(“maple,” Liam whispers into his hair, “like the one in the front yard.”)
“Don’t forget the The Lumineers swelling romantically in the background,” Harry cackles. “Or the nine dozen rose petals guiding the path to their forever-”
They blush and throw open the door. “The take-out is going cold,” Liam scolds, but he grins at Zayn when their fingers twine together on the way down the stairs.
They eat on the couch (Zayn half in his lap to grind down when the others aren’t watching) with reruns of Hannah Montana in the background and a thunderstorm outside.
“This is the dumbest show in the world,” Harry groans, even as he stares with this silly awed expression and gets tikka masala all over his cheeks from his fixation.
Zayn swallows the laksa Liam’s been feeding him and laughs into his shoulder. “You’ve worked lyrics from The Best of Both Worlds into a majority of our interviews.”
Louis’ arm is curled sweetly around Harry’s waist to hold Niall’s hand but that doesn’t stop him from laughing until he’s out of breath. “You cried in the movie when the crowd accepts her for who she really is.”
“I hate everyone in this house,” he grumbles, even as he tears up strips of paratha for all of them while they sing along to the opening credits.
Liam wakes up first to the smell of rain and the early sunlight in his eyes and, when he’s finished staring outside until his eyes burn gold, Zayn’s watching him sleepily from his favourite spot on Liam’s shoulder. He’s spent a lot of the past twelve months thinking about missed opportunities - the years it took for them to get their shit together, the tarmac in Iowa, the month they spent curled up in the same bed without realising the implications - and realises that he doesn’t want to miss this one. So he twists his neck to mouth lazily at Zayn’s lips and thinks that he was wrong, last year, when he said he’d never felt as alive as he did screaming at Louis from a foggy bus window because right now, with Zayn grinning into the kiss, he can’t help but think that maybe alive is just the new standard with Zayn Malik pressed against him.