Chapter Text
Harry has never been dumped. It’s not a fact he’s particularly proud of, it’s not like he swaggers around the morning after he breaks up with someone smirking and saying, ‘I wish she’d get the message and stop calling’ like the other boys at school. But then, it isn’t something he’s ashamed of, either. After all, there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that someone’s thinking about you even if you’re not thinking about them.
That’s an awful thing to say, he knows, but he’d never say it out loud, not when he prides himself on being such a nice guy. Nice guys don’t say things like that; they hold the door open for you and stop to help if you have a flat tire. And he kind of likes it - being the nice guy - not the best looking one, the one girls lose their virginity to on top of a pile of coats at a party, but the one those girls go to when that guy doesn’t call.
‘You’re so sweet, Harry,’ they tell him between sobs as he kisses their forehead and tells them that it’ll be okay. And he is sweet, too sweet sometimes. He’ll go hungry giving his lunch to a friend just to prove that she doesn’t need to go on a diet and always makes up the difference when old ladies give him the wrong change in the bakery.
But his intentions aren’t always pure. Sometimes, when his fingers sweep across a girl’s cheek, it isn’t just to wipe away her tears, it’s so he can feel the heat of her skin as well. That’s only natural, he supposes, he’s sixteen and those curiosities – like if a girl’s cheek is as warm as it looks – are becoming harder to ignore. And it’s not like he’s taking advantage, but he kind of is, because he knows that when he’s comforting a girl in a dark corner of a party, far away from where her boyfriend is sloppily kissing someone else, Harry knows that when she stops crying and lifts her wet eyelashes to look at him, she doesn’t see that skinny kid from school any more, the one with too much hair. Harry knows that he’s growing into his looks. Every day he fills out a little more and feels a little less awkward. He’s still clumsy, of course (if he only knocks over one cup of tea a day, he’s doing well), but he knows that girls look at his big eyes and curls and find it endearing now.
He felt it – the shift – as soon as White Eskimo won Battle of the Bands, but it got worse when word got around that he was auditioning for X Factor. It used to be that he was lucky to find anyone to kiss at a party, but now girls pull him into the spare room and lick their way into his mouth. Last month, a girl called Laura Mann, who had a pink mouth and a turquoise bra with butterflies on it, gave him a hand job. ‘You gonna write me a song, Harry?’ she panted into his ear and he came so hard he nearly blacked out.
Something changed after that. Now he wants to touch every girl he sees. He’ll be standing next to a girl at the bus stop and be in love with her by the time the bus comes or be sitting next to someone at Fortune City, waiting for his crispy beef, and his hand will move along the sofa until his little finger and her little finger are almost touching.
He has a nice smile, he’s been told, and he knows what to say when she looks up, to compliment her nail varnish or ask what perfume she’s wearing, and it’s as if all those years of being a nice guy has paid off. His friend Nick says that he’s been in training and Harry laughs, but he kind of has, because every time a girl cries on his shoulder he learns another thing to say to make her feel better and how to touch her so she feels comforted, not groped. He knows to call when he says he will and to buy her flowers and send text messages for no reason and he loves it. He loves the ceremony of it, of cooking a girl dinner and lighting candles, loves being a dork and putting the napkin on her lap and pouring Diet Coke into her wine glass. All the things her last boyfriend never did.
So maybe this nice guy thing ain’t so bad because the kisses on the forehead are straying, lower – lower – and it’s almost too easy, like a skateboard trick he’s mastered. And he’d never say that out loud, either, how much he enjoys the thrill of whispering, ‘You deserve so much more than him’ to a girl as she looks up and fists her hands in his shirt. It shouldn’t, but it kind of feels like winning when their mouths meet, and while he denies it every time Nick says it, Harry always gets what he wants.
It’s because he’s a brat, apparently. He has a greedy heart. That’s what Laura Mann told him when he broke up with her. He didn’t think about it too much at the time, dismissing it as one of those things someone says when they’re being dumped, a rhetorical kick in the bollocks before they walk away, but that night, he couldn’t sleep because it was digging into him, like the proverbial pea under his mattress.
Maybe he does have a greedy heart. He wants everyone to love him. Everyone. Every girl at school. Every girl who serves him in a shop. Even the women with prams he holds the door open for, he wants them to see his smile and remember when their husbands were that young and spend the rest of the week wondering what his name is.
Is that greedy? Probably, but he always loves them back, even if it’s just for a minute. He’ll pass a girl in the street and fall in and out of love with her in the time it takes to watch her walk away. He’s addicted to it, he thinks, to that feeling, to falling for someone. Actually, it’s more than that, it feels more like falling into them, like walking around the edge of a swimming pool and losing your footing. He savours the shock of it – of being swallowed whole – but even that doesn’t come close to what he’s feeling now, standing by himself in the middle of a stage, the echo of Isn’t She Lovely?in his ears as he waits for one of the three judges in front of him to say something.
He’s trying not to look at Simon in case he starts begging because Harry wants this, wants it more than any girl he’s stood next to at a bus stop or passed on the street. Wants it so much that want doesn’t feel like a big enough word. He needs a whole new one – something big enough to describe the pain in his chest – and that feels kind of greedy as well, like he hasn’t eaten for a week. He’s weak with it.
Mad with it.
The closest thing he can think to compare it to is leaning in to kiss someone and waiting for her to kiss you back. It’s the same agony, the same dizzying clash of panic and hope as Harry holds his breath and thinks of his family backstage and his friends who’ve been texting all day to tell him that he’ll definitely go through to the next round.
Nicole says something nice, but Harry isn’t looking at her, he’s looking at Louis, who’s shaking his head. Then Louis says it – ‘I think you’re so young. I don’t think you have enough experience or confidence yet’ – and it’s as if Louis’s rolled up a newspaper and smacked Harry in the heart. The disappointment is crushing. He’s heard people say that before, but he’s never really felt it. He’s felt the sting of a girl not liking him back and the shame of failing a test, but he’s never felt that before and it is crushing. He’s sure that he can feel his bones detaching – one by one – and dropping to pile at his feet.
Usually he’d do what he always does when he’s late for class or he’s trying to get a girl to go out with him – say something charming or do that thing Nick says he does, where he tilts his head with a slow smile – but he’s in shock. He can’t move, every bit of him shaking as he realises that it’s too late, there’s nothing he can do. He just has to wait.
So he doesn’t hear what Louis says after that, not over the sound of his heart in his ears, his cheeks burning as he thinks about his family backstage in their WE THINK HARRY HAS THE X FACTOR t-shirts and he can’t go back there without this. He can’t.
Then Simon raises his hand to silence the crowd and when everything goes quiet – even the sound of Harry’s heart in his ears – there’s a sweet second of hope, before Simon says, ‘I have to agree with Louis. I don’t think you’re ready for this, Harry.’
And it’s over.
+++
This would be much easier if Zayn was drunk. It’s just started raining and half the queue is singing Umbrella and the guy behind him is dressed as Britney Spears from the Hit Me Baby One More Time video – in the grey pleated skirt, the knotted shirt, the pigtails, everything – and yeah, this would be much easier if he was drunk.
He considers legging it, but they’re almost at the front of the queue, so when he looks back at everyone behind him, at the girls in their best dresses and the boys in their neatly ironed shirts, their quiffs wilting in the rain, he realises that he can’t get out now even if he wanted to. So when a camera pans in their direction and the guy behind him starts singing, ‘My loneliness is killing me’, Zayn leans against the barrier with a sigh.
Not that he’d be allowed to run away. He’s just heard Doniya tell the girl in front of them that she ordered her dress online especially so he’s pretty sure that if he tried to make a break for it, she’d go after him and tackle him to the ground. But the guy behind him is singing Toxic now and Zayn has to get out, so almost resorts to distracting Doniya by telling her that the rain is making her hair frizzy because that usually makes her run screaming to the nearest bathroom. But he doubts even that would be enough to make her leave his side; she’s determined that he auditions this year, as is his mother who filled out the application without telling him. He had no clue what they were up to until they woke him up this morning, Doniya holding up his favourite t-shirt and his mother thrusting a mug of tea at him saying, ‘Okay. Don’t be mad, sweetheart.’
They had to drag him out of bed – literally, his mother grabbed one ankle and Doniya grabbed the other – but after hours of scowling (which got worse when they got to Old Trafford and he saw the queue), Zayn’s accepted his fate, albeit unwillingly.
‘I like your hair like that, Don,’ he says, biting his bottom lip so he doesn’t smile.
‘Like what?’
‘Curly.’
Her hands fly to her head with a gasp and it’s kind of cruel, but as he turns away to swallow a laugh and sees the guy about to go in – the pretty one he spotted when they joined the end of the queue, the one with the scarf and the unruly hair – Zayn doesn’t feel as bad as he realises that, thanks to Doniya, he’s about to make a complete arse of himself. X Factor isn’t for guys like Zayn. It’s for guys like that. Guys who wear scarves and won’t want to vomit if they have to sing a Westlife song. Zayn can see one of the producers talking to him (of course she is, his friends and family are wearing WE THINK HARRY HAS THE X FACTOR t-shirts) and Zayn doesn’t think he cares that no one's stopped to speak to him until he has to fight the urge to run away again.
‘He’ll go through,’ Doniya says, reading Zayn’s mind as the guy goes inside.
‘What do you reckon he’ll sing?’
‘Coldplay, probably,’ she says without looking up from her phone, her thumbs tap tap tapping at the screen. ‘Or Kings of Leon. He looks like a proper hipster.’
She must have spotted the scarf as well.
Zayn chuckles, but before he can say anything else, his mother elbows him and he looks up to find someone with a clipboard gesturing at him to step forward.
He doesn’t know when they got to the front of the queue, but there they are and everything is a blur after that. He’s told to sign this and wear this and wait over there, his mother and sister squealing and taking photos of him the whole time.
He’d tell them to stop if he could catch his breath, but he can’t so he just lets them corral him into a vast room that feels busier than the queue somehow. There aren’t enough seats, but after doing a circuit, past the girls fussing over their eyeliner and the groups struggling to harmonise as a tiny Chinese woman in a purple corset belts out Bat Out of Hell, he finally finds two seats together. He insists that his mother and sister sit down and when they do, he sits on the carpet at their feet, his back against the wall.
His mother asks him if he’s okay and he nods, then closes his eyes and lets his head tip back against the wall. He takes a deep breath and when he pushes it back out of his nostrils, his nerves feel a little looser, but then he hears someone say, ‘’Sup, bitches?’ and they tighten again. He opens his eyes as the guy dressed as Britney Spears struts in. He makes a beeline for one of the cameras and puts his hands on his hips. ‘You want the X Factor? It’s right here, baby,’ he says as Zayn lets his head tip back again.
He bangs it against the wall this time.
Zayn doesn’t know how long they’re kept in there, but it feels like hours before he’s led into another room, then another and another, each one slightly smaller than the last. He’s made to sing each time, made to pose for another photo and answer another round of questions and he’s so done with it that he’s about to say fuck it and peace out when he’s finally – finally – led into another room and told to stay there until his audition.
The guy from the queue – the one with the scarf – is in there as well and Zayn doesn’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, but when the guy’s ushered out of the room, they exchange a glance. He smiles and it’s sweet enough, but it unsettles Zayn for some reason. He doesn’t think the guy is trying to psych him out, but if he is, it’s working. His mother tells him to stop fidgeting, but he can’t so Zayn excuses himself, asking someone with a clipboard where the toilets are. As soon he finds them, he locks himself in a cubicle and presses his back to the door.
He needs a cigarette. Actually, he needs to get the fuck out of there. He did this last year – locked himself in the toilet before his audition – and asked himself the same question: Why am I here? He didn’t know then and he still isn’t sure. He could blame his mother and sister, but he didn’t have to come. He could have told them to leave him alone and pissed off to Ben’s until he’d calmed down, like he usually does.
He wants to sing, he knows that much. That’s the only thing that stopped him from crawling back into bed as soon as his mother and Doniya pulled him out this morning, the only thing that stopped him from telling the guy dressed as Britney Spears to shut the fuck up. But even so, he doesn’t know if he wants this – to be on a show like X Factor, with its pantomime villain judges doing Simon and Garfunkel covers. And it’s more than self-doubt, more than that voice in his head that tells him he can’t do something and not to raise his hand in class when he knows the answer. It’s deeper than that – louder. Then he thinks about the guy with the scarf, who’s probably been practising for weeks and won’t feel like an idiot if he’s made to dance to The Jackson 5, and he asks himself if X Factor is the right show for him. After all, when he daydreams about singing, he’s not dressed in a suit and sitting on a stool, he’s leaning over the edge of a stage singing to a crowd that feels like it’s coming at him like a wave.
I have to get out of here, he thinks, but when he opens the cubicle door, he’s sees the guy with the scarf standing at one of the sinks. His fingers are curled around the edge of it, his knuckles white, and when Zayn steps out, he jumps.
‘Sorry,’ he says, turning to face him and he sounds out of breath, like he’s just run up a flight of stairs. ‘I didn’t realise anyone was in here.’
Zayn shrugs as if to say, It’s cool, but as the guy turns to face the sink again, their eyes meets in the mirror over it. They look at one another for a second, then the guy dips his head and shakes his hair forward into his eyes, but Zayn still sees, sees how red they are, sees the sticky stutter of his eyelashes, and it makes Zayn’s hands shake because he’s crying. Not happy crying, but proper please-don’t-look-at-me crying.
He didn’t get through.
Him.
He didn’t get through.
‘Fuck this,’ Zayn mutters, walking over to the door.
And he doesn’t look back.