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Out of a red mouth washed pink in the pale moonlight, the furls of smoke drift quietly and unassumingly into the humid air. His face is a triangle of bony white, half cast in shadow, half struck in harsh relief against the graceless bump of his nose, the crooked jag of his upper lip. The cigarette dangles loosely from his lips, the red tip of it glowing against the dark.
Zayn lies in bed and traces the line of Niall’s pale shoulder with his topaz eyes, and his artist’s fingers hold a pencil delicately, as if pressing too hard into the thick paper will sink deep depressions into the milky skin of the boy sitting mere feet away. Niall’s sprawled across the chair, leaning back on two legs out on the balcony, his feet crossed and balanced on the railing and his head tilted back. The creamy expanse of Niall’s throat is a map, begging to be explored by calloused fingers and Zayn itches to wrap a hand around his neck and marvel at the contrast of the white skin against the dark of his hand, the way the small delicate bones of Niall’s neck would twitch at his touch. Zayn twists his fingers around the pencil a little more tightly. He wonders if Niall’s eyes are closed or not, whether he’s counting the stars in Zayn’s favorite constellation, or if he’s sitting there and the only thing in his mind is the rough glide of the smoke in his throat.
It’s so warm. The thick air sits in Zayn’s nostrils, the muggy smell of rotten garbage and Indian food mixing with the wafts of Niall’s cigarette smoke. His hair is sweaty across the back of his neck and if he presses his fingers under his hairline, he can feel the sweet burn of the bruise formed by the lazy mouth of a blonde boy.
The streets of Mumbai below them are bustling with late night markets and the distant calls of shopkeepers. The old man with a thousand wrinkles and the toothless smile called Mumbai “the city that never sleeps” and as Zayn lies in sheets damp with perspiration and listens to the world below him, he thinks the old man speaks no truer words than those. Up here in the one room flat that holds the secrets of two boys, the world seems small, like it exists in the spaces between Zayn’s fingers as they spread on the hollows of Niall’s ribs. And then the soft dark falls away, another Indian sun rises and Zayn is always reminded that the moonlight holds their secrets close to its chest, but the sunlight rips away all of Zayn’s steel walls and oh, right, there’s the golden boy with his secrets on display at the corners of his mouth, walking around in the world, flying a kite with his name splashed high in red. Zayn sighs. Niall is cosmic wind, eyes like smashed sapphire and a mouth tattooed with the plush of Zayn’s lips. Zayn thinks Niall is untouchable. There are whole sketchbooks filled with delicate drawings of the rounded curve of Niall’s shoulder, a dozen receipts with sketches of Niall’s hands on the back, and yet Zayn knows the lovely bones of Niall’s lanky body with only his eyes, and his heart is always one beat behind Niall’s.
The paper in Zayn’s sketchbook has smudges from where his sweaty fingers have rubbed the soft gray pencil, smeared the inky shadow under the defined lines of Niall’s jawline.
Zayn studies Niall’s bare feet, long and skeletal. His toes wiggle to some unknown beat and Zayn is simultaneously fascinated by the mystery of what beat is running along the inside of Niall’s head and jealous of whatever it is that holds Niall’s attention away from the naked boy in his bed.
Niall never hides, Zayn thinks. In plain sight, out there on the balcony of this shitty flat in the midst of a world of heat and color and vibrancy, Niall waves his pale feet in the air, flicks his cigarette ashes into the streets below, and unabashedly stands out, a pale boy with skinny legs and freckled arms, a ghostly mirage amongst all the burnished gold and sun-fire reds that surround him. This land, the moving, breathing city, seamlessly accepts him into its tidal wave and he sinks in and paints his face with the lusty colors of Indian soil.
Zayn hides. Zayn wraps himself in white cotton sheets from England, breathes in the charcoal scent of pencils bought on 4th street in Bradford, and loves a pale boy from Ireland. He lies in a bed that smells of sun and broken smiles and the heavy smoke that lingers on Niall’s skin, and he dreams of cool rain on the streets of London. Zayn is lost in Mumbai, directionless. Niall charges ahead and smiles rakishly at the shopkeepers’ daughters, juggles exotic fruit for the small children with dusty feet and occasionally looks back with a raised eyebrow and a shattering grin at Zayn, who lags behind and memorizes the golden swoops of Niall’s hair as it catches the beating sunlight.
Zayn often forgets why they are in India. If you asked him, he’d probably say “because Niall wanted to”. And really, that’s not much of a reason, so Zayn just really doesn’t know why they’re here; all he knows is that there’s a thread that winds through the city and links Zayn to Niall, even when the Irish boy is hidden away in smoky opium dens, foggy and underground in a city that will never feel like home to Zayn, but is as familiar to Niall as the veins on the back of his hand. He loses Niall sometimes. The thread is caught on a jagged brick on the corner of a crumbling building, or someone picks it up and looks at it too closely and wonders what spun silk is doing running through his fruit stand. But it never breaks, and that’s the reason Zayn hasn’t packed his three shirts and two pair of pants in the bag that sits unzipped, ready, under the bed. The rest doesn’t matter really.
Niall tips his head towards Zayn, neck lolling, and the planes of light on his face shift subtly until the light from the flat across the street glints sharply in his eyes. His mouth twists into a smile when he catches Zayn staring at him. Zayn would be embarrassed if he weren’t so in love. Zayn unabashedly stares at Niall, at the small wisps of hair that curl around his ears in the humidity, and the threatening white of his graceless grin.
“See something you like?” Niall’s mouth is wide, loopy, and full of teeth. He falls forward in the chair, landing with a thump, swings his legs off the railing and stands up. His chinos hang low on his hips, the sharp juts of his pelvic bones like little mountains, the only thing holding up his trousers. There’s a light dusting of blonde hair from his navel, disappearing into his waistband and Zayn remembers lying in a shitty dorm room in Manchester and tugging on those hairs with his teeth until Niall groaned out a “fucking hell, I love you” and let his head thunk against the wall behind him.
That was before Mumbai. Before Mumbai, Niall tasted permanently of Zayn’s lips and his knobbly knees knocked together in a too-small dorm bed when Zayn went down on him. Before Mumbai, Niall laughed loudly and brashly, with food in his mouth and his lips effortlessly stretched in a too-wide grin. He snuck food into the library and smirked at Liam when he tried to shush him, he got wasted on pints with Harry at underground clubs until Zayn had to carry them both home. Niall would pull Zayn up to the second floor of some house party and press him into a bed and leave pale ribbons of scratches down Zayn’s back until Zayn was howling above the thump of the music. He carried a bottle of whiskey around in his book bag and during class, he’d pass it under the desk to Louis until they were both giggling and no one was paying attention to a lecture on Dostoevsky. He smelled of juniper and peppermint and a bit like charcoal, because the inky chalk always smeared Zayn’s hands, and Zayn’s hands eternally roamed the dusty dips of Niall’s 17 year old body. Before Mumbai, Niall would smile quietly at Zayn, press his raspberry lips to the secretive skin behind Zayn’s knee and gently bite the corded tendons under Zayn’s amber skin.
After Mumbai, Niall’s hands did the roaming and his eyes were sometimes clouded when he slipped into Zayn’s bed smelling like smoke and heat and perfume that Zayn had never worn. He wandered streets they had once explored together, he met people that would come to know the inner workings of his organs probably better that Zayn ever did. Zayn would press his fingers into lingering bruises the color of faded lilacs and wonder when Niall would next sink his teeth into someone who was not Zayn, ponder if the light streaming through Niall’s veins was artificial plastic or harvested from a blistering sun. Zayn was left stretching his mind to remember the hollows of Niall’s collarbones and draw them on paper, so he had something to look at while the blonde boy was gone. Now, after Mumbai, Niall’s smile is sharp. Everything about him is too sharp. And Zayn is still so soft, still soft fingertips and smoky gray charcoal and soft eyes and Niall barges his way through and his sharp edges catch on the filminess of Zayn’s soul and rip the stitches apart until Zayn has to scramble to hold himself together. He never succeeds.
The thing with Niall is that he was bored. He was restless. His feet jiggled and his fingers tapped and he had wanderlust embedded like diamonds in his dusty skin. They lay in that too-small bed and Niall whispered into Zayn’s collarbones “let’s leave, let’s go somewhere”. And Zayn said “alright, shall we go see a film?” and Niall sighed heavily and didn’t say anything more.
So that’s how they found themselves in Mumbai. One afternoon, Zayn came home from class and found Niall in his room, haphazardly throwing random t shirts and pants into a duffel bag, and when Zayn cleared his throat, Niall barely threw him a glance and said “c’mon, our plane leaves in an hour”.
And Zayn said “okay”.
All he knows is that in a world of gray roses and dull watercolor portraits, Niall is that one tornado of indigo bruises and loud laughs and a cavernous heart, and Zayn is destined to ride the waves with him until they reach the end of the world and fall off the face of the planet together, fingers linked.
They fall off the face of the planet together in Mumbai. Letters home go unwritten, phone calls unreturned, and they lose themselves in the labyrinth of streets. They fuck viciously and mercilessly on a skinny mattress with the sun blazing into the room and Zayn works his way through sketchbook after sketchbook until the wall opposite the mattress is covered in sketches of Niall’s feet, his hands, his mouth, his heart, his soul. They eat too much spicy food and they meet people that open up their skeletons and force them to take a look at their English hearts and Zayn grows like ivy on Niall’s skin and Niall’s freckles become Zayn’s addiction and the vertebra of Niall’s spine become mountains to conquer.
Someone once said that you fall in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once. Zayn thinks the same is true of losing someone.
Zayn was losing Niall slowly, to the winding roads of a blissful oblivion that kept Niall panting for more, and he didn’t realize it. And then one morning he woke up in an empty bed, and he knew. He knew that Niall’s heart no longer beat for a boy with satin skin; that his heart now beat for foreign streets and wide-hipped women in saris and grinning men beckoning from behind a smoky curtain. He woke up to the realization that the Niall of yesterday only existed in grays and blacks on manila paper, just a ghost created by the desperate longing of Zayn’s nebulous gaze. That shadow of a boy was nothing compared to the person who’d once held Zayn’s heart in his hands, delicate veins trailing over his fingers. Zayn had tried to recreate that boy, capture him and hold him still against the paper, but his wanderlust had been triumphant and the boy made of light slipped through Zayn’s fingers.
This is where we are at in our story now. Slowly, in a haze of scarlet laughs and dancing eyes, Niall tiptoed away from Zayn and wrapped himself in a gloss that no matter how hard Zayn tried, he couldn’t penetrate.
Which is why now, Zayn sits in the bed against the wall and Niall stands on the balcony and the space between them speaks of journeys made alone and secrets spoken quietly into walls marked with graffiti of Sanskrit characters and lonely dreams inscribed by careless travelers with heavy hearts. Zayn could stand up and walk over to Niall and smile at him and yeah, Niall would smile back and the moonlight across his face would make Zayn fall even more in love with him.
But he doesn’t.
Instead he says, “come to bed, love” and pats the sheets beside him. Niall’s pale eyebrows twitch and he walks like a panther across the floor. His hair is messy, sticking up in the back and Zayn itches to run his fingers through it. He doesn’t though. He’s not sure that’s something they do anymore.
Niall slides his trousers off his legs and climbs into the bed next to Zayn, sliding their legs together and settling into the sheets. He props his head up on one hand and looks down at Zayn.
“Drawing again?” Niall asks quietly. The question is loaded, heavy with accusation and Zayn knows that the old Niall wouldn’t drip his words in second meanings and implications. But this Niall, this is not Zayn’s Niall, so he doesn’t know what to say and instead closes his sketchbook and gently places it on the floor beside the bed.
Niall slips out of the sheets, like he can’t lie in one place for too long, and pads across the room to the old record player they had found in a little shop that sold things that Americans had left behind in grand homes now falling apart. They lugged it home in a red wagon borrowed from a small child and the first record they bought was Elvis’s Blue Hawaii and they listened to Can’t Help Falling in Love on repeat while making love on the floor and gathering bruises in the hollows of each other’s hips. They made somber love, they made silly love, they fucked fast and furious, and the flat had probably never seen so many flailing limbs and never heard so many groaning curses as it had when the boys with the English accents lived their love on its worn floorboards.
Niall flips the record on and the scratchy music is barely audible over the continuing yells and clatter of the city, but it’s enough for Zayn.
Niall hums along and lights a cigarette, swaying slowly as he cups his hands around the flame. He lets out a sigh and his mouth curls into a lazy smile. Zayn watches as he holds the cigarette between his lips, puts his hands up like he’s dancing with someone, and slowly twirls around the room, waltzing with an invisible person. Zayn wants to laugh, wants to stand up and slip into the empty space in front of Niall and pretend like nothing is wrong, pretend like the two of them can dance in the dark with the only light being the red tip of Niall’s cigarette. But the swing of Niall’s arms and his skinny legs dancing around looks like the motions of a puppeteer and Zayn thinksno, no more pretending.
He gets up and moves across the room. Niall’s eyes are closed, he doesn’t see Zayn coming.
Zayn lifts the arm of the record player and the music comes to a halt, but Niall keeps swaying around as if he didn’t even heard the music stop.
“I think I need to go home,” Zayn says softly, as if he’s trying the words on for size in his own mouth. Niall ignores him, although Zayn knows he can hear him. Niall’s eyes are still closed, eyelashes brushing against moonlit cheeks and his fingers come up, take a hold of the cigarette and he blows smoke in a curl into the air, throat bared like a wolf howling at the moon.
Zayn says it again and this time, Niall stops and turns to look at him. His eyes glint sharply in the light, slate gray and menacing and a shiver runs down Zayn’s spine because this isn’t the carelessly happy boy he once knew.
“This is your home,” Niall says calmly, as if he doesn’t expect Zayn to refute the veracity of his statement.
“No…” Zayn looks at the boy he once loved, still does, and wonders when all that space grew between them. “No, Niall, it isn’t.”
“It’s my home,” Niall says, still staring into Zayn’s eyes. His lanky body is pale in the moonlight, his arms long and gangly hanging by his sides. Zayn used to marvel at the smoky skin on Niall’s chest, be desperate to lay hands on the creamy expanse of his skinny thighs. Now all he feels is a disconnect.
“But it’s not my home,” Zayn says. He thinks they may be the truest words he’s ever spoke. His soul used to be threaded carefully through with Niall’s, and the delicate skin on the insides of Niall’s wrists used to be for Zayn’s lips to gently brush against, but this boy, this boy with hipbones that belong to someone else, who knows who else, with hands that have touched people and places and things that Zayn can only dream of, this Niall is not Zayn’s home.
“My home is your home, mi casa es tu casa,” Niall laughs loud, and it sounds like plastic sunshine, forced merriment that falls flat against the dark air.
“Niall, we can’t live like this anymore.”
“Like what?”
“Hiding. Hiding from everything, from our parents and the boys and the world.” I can’t hide from you any longer.
“You’re a coward, Zayn Malik,” Niall sneers bitterly. “This is where the world’s center is, this is the only place worth living. And you are not brave to engulf yourself in it.”
“I love you,” Zayn says quietly. His chest is caving in, the breath leaving his body too quickly and he is desperate to forget this, to go back to those lazy Tuesday afternoons spent tracing the crimson lines of Niall’s lovelorn heart.
“Yeah?” Niall says, coming closer until his face comes out of the shadow and Zayn can see the furrowed clench of his brow. “Then why are you leaving?”
Why indeed. Perhaps because Zayn has memorized the shift of the muscles in Niall’s back as he slips out the door, and that’s not a healthy thing to know so well. Perhaps because Zayn can feel his insides crumbling like dust, like an abandoned cathedral waiting for something, anything. Perhaps because even when Zayn wanders around in a sea of people, faces young and old rushing by, the colors exploding around him, he has never felt so alone, so cold and so insignificant to the eternal orbit of the planet.
“Because I’m not willing to watch you destroy yourself.”
“This is life, Zayn,” Niall is so close now, close enough that Zayn can feel the heat from him, and his nostrils burn where the smoke of Niall’s cigarette wafts into them. “This is how you do it, this is how you live.”
“Tell me you love me, Niall.” The words fall out of Zayn’s mouth.
Niall stares at him, hard and unrelenting.
“What?”
“Tell me you love me,” Zayn repeats.
“Zayn, I-“ Niall ruby mouth is twisted into a grimace and this is it. This is the beginning of the end, the snap of the thread, Zayn can feel it, knows that his life will no longer be divided into before Mumbai, after Mumbai, but before Niall, after Niall. And that is a terrifying thought.
“Say it.”
“This is stupid,” Niall flicks his ashes. “You know I do.”
“No, you don’t.” Zayn sighs deeply and thinks of a wall on a crammed alley way, a wall covered in graffiti of Sanskrit characters and secrets whispered by passersby with words heavy on their lips and a tenuous grasp of their languid sanity. It is here, at this wall, that he wrote a Z+N, only days after they had started their life here, and he laughs at himself now, inwardly mocks the innocence he arrived in this godforsaken city with. He landed in this city with high-ceilinged dreams for him and Niall, for breakfasts of exotic fruits and love flourishing. They had it for a while, hands clasped and hearts fused together.
It’s gone. Nothing good ever lasts in this life. Exotic fruits go bad, their skin bruised by impact. Zayn’s delicate soul has been bruised by the unforgiving punch of Niall’s diamond-ridden wanderlust, the itch in his feet that leads him to places Zayn can never follow.
Niall tilts his head and considers Zayn.
“You will die a lonely man, Zayn Malik,” Niall says, and the words sound like an omen, like their smoky imprint is tattooed onto Zayn’s skin alongside the other inky marks that litter him, marks that Niall once traced with his tongue and knew the intricate meanings of.
“Perhaps,” Zayn shrugs. “But you will die in a smoky room and a man will steal your gold watch and pawn it off to the next addict who stumbles through his opium den and I pity you.”
There’s silence, silence as loud as the roaring rush of wind.
Niall stalks over to the record player, picks up the record, and throws it against the wall. It shatters. In a poetic world, this next sentence would read “as does Zayn’s heart”. But in this world, this reality of love torn away, Zayn’s heart has already been shattered by the same boy.
Niall turns away from Zayn and walks, so leonine, over to the balcony and stands at the railing, his hair glowing in the harsh lights from the shops below. The moon is behind a cloud and all Zayn can see of Niall is his silhouette, the bare roundness of his bum shadowy, and the lines of his back tall and rigid and ruthless.
Zayn pulls on a pair of trousers, throws his few articles of clothing in his bag, tosses his almost-empty sketchbook on top and zips it up. Niall has not moved from the balcony.
“Goodbye, Niall Horan,” Zayn says softly, speaking to the wall that is covered in sketches of Niall. This is the Niall that he knows, a Niall not stripped of his character and his saffron soul. This Niall, although only a gray and black shadow of his former self, is the Niall that Zayn fell in love with. The Niall on the balcony is a man with a soul swimming in desperation and Zayn knows him not.
He slips out the door, leaving Niall behind for the first time in his life.
***
Three days later, an Indian man finds a golden boy lying on a floor worn by love-making, with a pistol in his hand, a hole in his head, and his hair soaked in blood. The wall opposite him is bare.