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Zayn doesn’t know how long the human body can go without breathing (Liam would, Liam is full of random facts) but he’s pretty sure it’s not two hours and fifteen minutes. Pretty sure. Not sure enough to take a breath, though, and risk breaking the spell of utter concentration on Niall’s face.
This is literally the worst idea he’s ever had.
Writing the thing in the first place was a bad enough idea—who airs out that kind of emotional laundry, even if you’re sure that the boy whose shirts you wore for a year after he left you will never find out? Even if you’re sure you’ll never, ever see him again, so the tattoo on your hip doesn’t matter and it’s okay that you feel like crying every time anyone starts playing House of the Rising Sun on acoustic guitar?
And once you realize that you will see him again, who the hell decides to take him by the hand, march him right up to that line of laundry with all his shirts hung out, your heart sewn bright on their sleeves, and say, hey, so, what do you think?
“Hey,” says Zayn, outside after the show, sliding a cigarette out of his pack to hide the way his hands are shaking. “So, what did you think?”
Niall has his hands shoved into his pockets. He dressed up for the show in what Zayn is convinced has to be one of Harry’s shirts—it’s about three sizes too big, but it buttons up the front and it doesn’t show off his nipples, so it’s slightly more appropriate theatre-wear than everything Zayn’s seen him in since he got back.
Maybe he should feel weird about Niall coming to what was basically a declaration of love wearing his boyfriend’s shirt, but Zayn’s given up feeling weird about the complexities of the five of them, as much as possible.
He starts to feel weird about it again in the space it takes for Niall to answer just because he has to feel something besides impossible, blinding terror.
“I don’t know,” says Niall.
Zayn flicks his lighter and draws a frustrated, impatient breath of smoke. He blows it out again and doesn’t look at Niall, because Niall’s not looking at him.
“I guess,” Niall continues, “it depends on what it means.”
At that Zayn has to look at him, just a quick flicker of a gaze. Niall’s weird but he’s not stupid, so it’s not that he doesn’t get that the play was about him. There’s something else here, and Zayn doesn’t have the pieces necessary to fit it together.
So he does something he’s gotten incredibly good at over the past six months, with one frustratingly quick lover and another even more frustratingly slow one: he waits.
Niall looks at him at last, and then chuckles, the strange cast to his face disappearing. He reaches up a hand and Zayn’s brain stutters over the thought that he might be pulling him in for a kiss, but he just traces it up Zayn’s cheek and snags the cigarette from behind his ear. “Forget about this one?” he asks cheekily, and Zayn is glad of the dark because he’s pretty sure he goes red.
It doesn’t help that Niall then slips his fingers through Zayn’s to filch his lighter, and lights up with a practiced flick of his thumb. It’s weirdly displacing to watch him smoke, like real-Niall is superimposed over the Niall Zayn always imagined coming back.
“When did you start smoking?” he asks, watching Niall blow out smoke slow.
“Australia,” says Niall. “Was the only way to get a break, some days, was the beg off for a fag.” He grins sideways. “Tobacco’s my second choice of herb, though.”
Zayn swallows, imagining high happy pliant Niall, Niall in a haze, Niall in that perfect stoned space where all sensation was just on the edge of too much. He imagines swapping smoke between their mouths, and god, old daydreams die hard.
“What about you?” Niall asks, raising his eyebrows at him.
Zayn shrugs a little too sharply for his own liking. “When you left, pretty much,” he says without meaning to, and the guilty flash in Niall’s eyes makes him want to slam his head into the wall behind them. “I didn’t mean—“
Niall shakes his head, once and then again, like he’s shaking something free or fixing his hair. He’s bouncing a little on his toes as he smokes. “That’s what I mean, though,” he says, his eyes on the street beyond the theatre, “when I say I don’t know.”
He drops his eyes. “If it’s a goodbye,” he says quietly, “it’s the most beautiful goodbye I’ve ever seen in my life, and I don’t fuckin’ deserve it.”
Everything suddenly makes an enormous amount of sense, and Zayn starts on a denial because no, god, it’s not, but Niall cuts him off before he can do more than open his mouth.
“Just,” he says, holding up a pale hand, cigarette caught between two fingers. “Let me, yeah? I need you to hear it.”
Zayn nods, falling silent.
“Louis,” says Niall, which is not at all where Zayn expected him to start. “Um, Louis said I broke your heart. I thought—I figured he was just being dramatic, or misreading it, but.” He shakes his head. “After tonight? I don’t understand it, I don’t know why you’d want to give me your heart to break in the first place, but it’s clear you did and I treated it like shit, which, fuck, Zayn, you have to believe me, I never wanted to.” Agitated, he breathes in too much smoke, the next words coming out cramped and raspy as he tries not to cough. “Christ, that was why I turned you down in the first place, I didn’t want you getting attached when I knew I was going to be getting the hell out, and.” He shrugs, clearing his throat. “I figured it’d be better if I only hurt myself by leaving you. So I lied.”
Zayn shifts his feet on the pavement just to make sure it’s still there, it’s still solid. “You—what?”
“I lied,” says Niall. “I mean, obviously I lied, because I told you I didn’t like boys and here I am with a boyfriend but—“ He shakes his head. “I lied about all of it. Thought I was lying even more than I was because I thought you—you were crushing, right, that’s what I figured, because there was no way you would actually feel the same as I did, but maybe you would start to, and I wanted to. Stop that from happening, so it wouldn’t hurt so bad when I left.”
Zayn feels his lips twisting and he cannot for the life of him tell whether it’s because he’s going to laugh or cry. “You broke my heart so that you wouldn’t break my heart later?”
Niall hangs his head, running both hands through his hair, the cigarette pinched between his lips. “Pretty much,” he murmurs around it.
Zayn chews that over, rolls it around in his mouth with the smoke. It’s…It’s not that he hasn’t imagined this moment, the moment where Niall appears from nowhere and recants the whole thing, spouting lines that Zayn would be ashamed to ever put down on paper. But this is real, and he doesn’t have dashing, sweep-you-off-your-feet Niall, he has jittery, nervous, guilty Niall smoking too fast and laying all of it at Zayn’s feet in supplication and just waiting, like somehow it’s all up to Zayn, like it doesn’t take two to tango.
“Yo,” he says, and kicks at Niall’s feet to get him to look up. “What do you want?”
Niall blinks at him. “What?”
Zayn stubs his cigarette out on the wall and pretends like he’s not slowly dying of anxiety. “Like, when you decided to come back with Harry, you. You knew I was here, because we’ve been talking and you know about me and Lou and everything. So. How did you imagine it going, when you saw me again?”
“I kind of figured you might punch me in the face,” Niall admits, grinning a little, and then adds, “or Louis would.” He raises a shoulder. “Surprised he hasn’t.”
“I don’t mean what did you expect,” Zayn says, gaze steady. “I mean what did you imagine. Best case scenario. Impossible golden daydream, that kind of thing.” He scratches the back of his head. “Because, like, this is shaping up to be one of mine, and we should be on even footing?”
Niall meets his eyes. “Best, best case, excluding the dumb ones like you picking me up from the airport and declaring that both Liam and Louis were pale shadows in the face of your love for me?” he says, mocking himself, and takes a breath. “We just. Talked. For real, not what we’ve been doing over skype. And I explained to you why I’d been an asshole and you forgave me for being an asshole and then we made out, and kind of never stopped.” He drops his cigarette butt and grinds it into the ground with a toe, and his voice is a little bit thick when he continues, “One time I let myself think you might tell me you still loved me.”
Zayn reaches out gently, a little bit afraid to touch him. “You’re not an asshole,” he says quietly, wrapping his fingers around Niall’s wrist to stop him shoving his hands nervously through his hair again. “An idiot, maybe, but not an asshole.”
Niall shakes his head but doesn’t pull away. “I hurt you so badly,” he says, eyes complicated and unhappy and a little bit wondering. “And you, you made it into something unbelievable, mate. That play…” He swallows. “Louis was fucking right.”
Zayn raises his eyebrows at him. “I mean, yes, generally. But about what in particular?”
Niall licks his lips and slides his wrist though Zayn’s fingers so they’re holding hands properly. He keeps his eyes on Zayn’s tattoos, like he’s never seen them before, like Zayn hadn’t (bashfully and a little bit teasingly, if he’s honest with himself) showed him (almost) all of them over skype. “I told him I was scared I’d changed you. He said if I did, I changed you into someone fucking wonderful.”
Zayn is hit with a surge of incredible warmth, both for the boy in front of him and the boy whose words he’s repeating. He ducks his head and grins hard, reminding himself to kiss Louis for that when they get back to the flat. Right now, though, Niall’s fingers are soft in his and he’s staring at Zayn’s grin and there’s a look on his face like nothing Zayn’s ever seen.
Zayn licks his lips, and Niall’s face veers into a more familiar kind of transfixion, though one he’s never seen on Niall outside of daydreams. But opening night of his play had just gone nigh perfectly and Niall was back and Niall had lied to him and he feels like he may as well be dreaming.
Buoyed up on the feeling, he leans forward and says, “I do still love you, stupid.”
Niall’s fingers tighten on his, his eyes going huge. “Yeah?” he says, more a disbelieving sigh than a word, and Zayn quirks his mouth around a sigh of his own, his other hand coming up to toy idly with the buttons of Niall’s shirt.
“Yeah,” he says, their faces close enough he can feel Niall’s breath. “That okay?”
Niall swallows, and then swallows again, his free hand settling on Zayn’s hip. “How would Liam feel if I kissed you right now?” he asks, voice distant like he doesn’t want to think about the fact that he’s said it in case the answer pulls Zayn away from him.
“I don’t know,” says Zayn honestly. “Let me check.”
Niall makes a small hopeless noise but doesn’t move as Zayn pulls out his phone, still feeling dreamlike, absurd. He wants to laugh at the whole situation, at himself, at Niall poised for a kiss that’s been three years coming, at the idea of Liam having anything to do with this and the idea that there's any way he wouldn’t. He taps out hey babe call me when you have a minute, nothing bad but concerns n + kisses :)x. There’s barely room between himself and Niall for his hands and his phone and Niall reads the text upside down and does start laughing, squeezing his eyes shut.
Zayn snorts at him, eyes on his face, and remembers falling in love with that laugh, with the way that he gives himself wholly to joy, with his voice and his fingers and his perfect, considerate kindness. His phone buzzes in his hand and he feels like nothing and everything has changed.
He picks up on the second ring so as not to worry Liam, and says fondly, “Hey, babe.”
“Hey,” says Liam, and he doesn’t sound upset. Maybe a little anxious. “Hypothetical kisses?”
“As of right now,” Zayn says, “yes. Which is why we’re talking.”
“Right,” says Liam. “Um. But you want them to be unhypothetical.”
“Very much,” Zayn says, because there’s only so much time you can spend around a Louis who refuses to tell lies before you pick it up yourself.
“Okay,” says Liam. “And you’re calling me because you’re worried I’ll be jealous.”
“Technically you called me,” Zayn says, teasing, and Niall, who’s watching him like a cat, rolls his eyes. “But yes, we both are. Niall asked how you would feel, and I didn’t know, so.”
“So,” says Liam slowly. “I am jealous, yes.” Zayn can almost hear him shift awkwardly. “But I don’t think it’s really my place to tell you what to do? And I like Niall a lot.”
“It’s your place,” Zayn says seriously. “Of course it’s your place, you’re my boyfriend, and we haven’t talked about anyone else but Lou.”
There’s a short silence in which Niall pretty much starts vibrating. “Loving the way you love sounds very uncomfortable,” Liam says abruptly. “Like being pulled in a thousand directions at once.”
Zayn smiles gently at Niall’s shoes, imagining Liam’s face, his serious frown as he works through something he doesn’t quite understand. “It’s all one direction,” he says, “just different methods of travel.”
“Planes, trains, and automobiles,” Liam says, a hint of laughter in his voice, and Zayn throws his head back and laughs. Niall looks up at him, startled, from where he’s been staring fixedly at the ground.
“I love you,” Liam says easily, when Zayn’s got a bit of control of himself again. “Kiss him, and we’ll talk when you get back, the three of us.”
“You’re sure?” Zayn asks, his heart in his throat, because god, he is so stupidly blessed.
“I trust you,” says Liam. “Both of you. Because you called me before, like, unhypotheticalizing.”
“Yeah,” says Zayn. “It was important, you know?” You’re important, is what he means, but Liam knows that. It’s one of the best things about Liam. He pays far more attention to what Zayn means than what Zayn says.
“Good,” says Liam. “Now get on with it, I have work to do.”
“Bye,” says Zayn. “I love you.”
“Yeah,” says Liam, the syllable packed full of his fond smile, and hangs up.
“Well?” Niall asks, and Zayn steps forward and kisses him.
He’s imagined a lot of kisses before having them. He imagined kissing Louis before the night in the bar. He imagined kissing Harry before April Fools. He imagined kissing Liam over and over again and he never got anywhere near to what it was like in reality, but there is no kiss so returned to in his daydreams than his first kiss with Niall Horan. It’s a kiss with literal years of longing behind it.
Niall melts into him, opening his mouth immediately, and what in Zayn’s head had always been a romantic, intense, but ultimately relatively chaste kiss becomes one of the filthiest of his life. It’s not even that Niall initiates it, even, he just slips his thumbs through Zayn’s belt loops and pulls him close and suddenly Zayn needs him. His lips are soft and chapped and perfect, his tongue a slick teasing slide against Zayn’s, and Zayn kisses and kisses and kisses him, crowding him backward until his back’s against the wall and they’re both breathless with want.
“Okay,” he says into the miniscule space they finally allow between them. “Okay. Um.”
Niall’s breathing hard, his hands flickering over Zayn’s back like he’s not sure what to touch, what he can touch, not sure he’s allowed to touch at all. “Jesus,” he says.
“What was that you said was your best, best case scenario?” Zayn asks, running his eyes over Niall’s face, taking in his darkened eyes, his flushed cheeks, the red of his parted lips. He’s a poem and he’s pornography and he’s here.
“We never stop making out,” Niall says, like it’s pre-ordained, prophecy.
Zayn hums in agreement. “Sounds good,” he says, and bites at the edges of Niall’s laughing smirk.