Gravity Always Wins (Zouis Fan Fiction)

Chapter 6

Louis’ tattoo is tiny. So tiny that you probably wouldn’t notice it, but there it is, his first ink coloured act of defiance that, three weeks later, he still can’t stop looking at it.

‘Yes. Yes. It’s very nice, Lou,’ Zayn tells him, padding across the room to pick his jacket off the floor. He stops to yawn and he should go to bed, he knows, because they have to be up in about three hours, but it’s been one of those perfect, perfect days. The sun was out all day – loud and bright even though it’s October - and he’s just had a toe curlingly good shag with a Swedish girl called Rika so he won't sleep now, his whole body humming. Louis seems in no hurry to go to bed, either. He knocked on his door a few minutes after Rika left, vowing never to be in the room next to Zayn’s again.

‘My mum still hasn’t seen it,’ Louis says, bringing his bare foot up and resting it on the seat of the armchair he’s slouched in, then presses his finger to the cross on his ankle.

‘Isn’t that the point?’

‘I’m so rock and roll.’ Louis puts his foot down and grins. ‘Let’s throw a telly out the window.’

Zayn pretends to gasp. ‘But what would your mother say, Mr Tomlinson?’

His eyes widen. ‘I swear she knows.’

‘About the strippers?’

‘No, the tattoo.’

‘You’re just prang from all the coke, Lou.’

‘She always knows when I’ve done something bad.’

Zayn shakes his head, wishing that Louis didn’t think being himself was being bad. But then he hid his first tattoo from his mother for three months. In the end, it was Waliyha who grassed him up when he wouldn’t buy her a pair of Uggs.

‘Let’s do the stripper thing, then.’ Louis waggles his eyebrows, his smile widening as Zayn finds the tin in the inside pocket of his jacket and walks back towards him.

Zayn sits on the sofa and puts it on the coffee table and he would usually be more discrete. He’s only ever smoked in front of Harry before, but the other lads know he puffs and while it’s not something he parades in front of them, it isn’t something he’s ashamed of, either. At least his hotel rooms are bigger now. He remembers when he had to smoke in the bathroom or roll a towel and put it against the door in case Paul smelt it. Besides, it’s Louis. They’re discussing snorting coke off a stripper’s arse; weed’s nothing.

‘Do you want me to go?’ Louis asks when Zayn opens the tin.

‘Do you want to go?’

Louis doesn’t move so Zayn carries on, digging around in the tin for his roach book then gives up when he remembers that he used the last one yesterday.

‘Do you want a drink?’ Louis asks, getting up and walking over to the mini bar.

‘Nah. I’m alright,’ Zayn says, tearing a strip off the Rizla packet and rolling it between his index finger and thumb.

Louis grabs a beer and when he sits in the armchair again, Zayn’s shoulders tense, but he just drinks it quietly, so after a few moments, he forgets he’s there. And he’s glad because Zayn enjoys skinning up as much as smoking, he thinks. He enjoys the alchemy of rolling a joint, of getting the balance right so there’s not too much tobacco and making sure that he rolls it so it’s tight, but not too tight that it burns too slow. But most of all he likes not having to think about anything, about what time he has to be up in the morning and what they’re doing the next day and if he remembered to call his mother and if he has enough cigarettes and all the other things he thinks about for the other twenty-three hours and forty-five minutes of the day. And it’s nice to feel like he’s good at something, like he knows what he’s doing. The first joint he rolled was a mess, loose and untidy, while the roach was so tight it hurt his head to inhale. And it took him about twenty minutes to roll because he was all fingers and thumbs, but now he’s got it down to a fine art and with a few flicks of his fingers and one final lick, it’s done.