Smoke & Mirrors • Zarry

28. Decisions

Zayn had no idea where he was going or what he was even doing, but all he knew was that he didn't want to spend one more day in that stuffy office, setting up house showings and pretending like he gave a shit about any of it.

So he leaned forward and turned the music up as Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen came on and Zayn immediately started belting out the words animatedly, rolling down all the windows as he whizzed down the busy morning streets of London and he looked over in his front seat and remembered Harry's once dramatic moment to this song, the night that he picked him up from university and they went on their little mushroom excursion, the night Harry pretended to be blind to save Zayn from the wrath of Waseem's paranoia, and he smiled to himself, sinking into that memory and how Harry had his back right from the start.

He took a right onto the freeway just then, heading north, ignoring his ringing phone as he continued singing along to the music with no cares in the world, with this incredible sense of liberation. Maybe he was crazy, maybe he was having a mental breakdown, but Zayn wasn't about to stop that car and turn around for anything because he felt good.

He felt free.

And as he continued driving Zayn thought about the last year and all the changes that he made, convincing himself that it was for the better, that choosing a life with Gianna, a life filled with routines and ordinariness was what he wanted, was what he needed. And perhaps it was the energy of the summer air that brought him back to a different time, a time filled with Harry's laughter, that caused Zayn to unravel the threads of the life he was creating, to reimagine his world.

But if Harry still had that capability to get to him, to inspire him without actually doing anything at all, without so much as even speaking to him once in the last year, then Zayn knew that Harry really made a deeper impression on him than even he fully realized.

He took an exit after thirty minutes of driving and found himself on a familiar back road, one he knew well, and as it winded along the lush greenery, the looming trees and rolling hills, Zayn peered up ahead and saw the sunflower fields, the ones he used to go to for years, and he recollected that day with Harry went they visited them together, just gazing upon the rows of tall flowers that turned and faced the sun, like they always do.

And Zayn suddenly saw himself in those flowers, just looking up into the cerulean sky. Zayn parked his Range Rover on the side of the road and walked toward them, shuffling his feet through the tall grass as he viewed the giant, fiery star above and he smiled warmly as the rays shone down upon his golden brown skin. He took a seat beside the sunflowers in the soft grass and he felt at peace, at home. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, savoring the moment and just cleared his mind, in some attempt to practice meditating, the thing that he thought never worked.

Then Zayn felt all of the convoluted clutter in his mind just release itself into the light breeze, and after a few long minutes his brown eyes fluttered open and he stared up at the sun God Apollo, and even though Harry wasn't there beside him, it still felt like he was.

Zayn ended up telling Gianna's dad that he wasn't feeling well that day and he somehow ended up getting away with it, not without a few curse words and a lecture or two thrown into the mix, but Zayn didn't regret skipping work that day to spend his morning beside the sunflowers, because once he left he started to reevaluate everything and it was all slowly starting to make sense when he really thought about it.

He brought himself back to that moment at The Box, when he was completely smashed and Cara told him that he needed a vacation, a break, to just be alone and really think about what he wanted. And that notion crossed his path several times over the last year, but this time it stuck with him and Zayn realized that that's what he needed; to reinvent himself, to completely start over and become his own person, the person he wanted to be.