Under Summer Sky • Zarry

14. Muse

One night while Zayn was working on his art in the garage I had gone up to Zayn's bedroom and began fiddling around with his guitars and music equipment that he had all over the place, just poking around and experimenting with sounds and melodies. Then I made it my mission to learn every Ray Lamontagne song there was in existence; especially Can I Stay.

And that's when I saw it.

But I wasn't snooping around or invading his privacy this time. I just so happened to come across a yellow lined piece of paper that was tucked into this treasury book of poems by Khalil Gibran. I carefully removed it and saw the Hindi lyrics to that song Zayn had been singing on the yacht the previous weekend, but they were also written out underneath in English.

Are you the full moon or the sun? Whatever you are, I swear to God, you are beyond compare.

But that's not all that was written on the paper. There was this silly looking cartoon drawing next to the words he wrote and it kind of resembled me. And then after a second closer inspection I was pretty sure that it really was supposed to be a cartoon version of me that he had drawn.

I smiled and felt my heart flutter from his sweet sentiment, but he had it wrong.

"If anyone is the sun it's you Zayn. It's you," I said out loud to myself and stuck the paper back in his book.

* * * * *

I sat across from Zayn during family dinner, just like I always did, digging into a caprese salad with pesto sauce surrounded by the typical dull chatter of the Lombardi clan.

Gio was on a rant about how much work it was going to take to restore The Vallone dei Sole, the dilapidated castle-like structure that Zayn and I had bypassed on our way to the firefly forest, Stefano and Leah were bickering back and forth with each other in Italian, Marco and Adrienne were playing footsies under the table while accidentally kicking me, Zayn was passing me those long, intense stares every few minutes and Natalia was back with us and sitting quietly, eating and observing the motley crew that had become my summer tribe.

But I had grown fond of it.

There was something about the way that being around each and every one of them felt to me; homey and comfortable, like I fit right in, like we all belonged together at that dinner table every night and other than Zayn, I knew that I would probably miss that part the most once I was gone.

Natalia had her hands balled up under her chin, smiling warmly between me and Zayn as if she knew something that we didn't, and I kept smiling faintly at her while it remained unnoticed to everyone else. She then cleared her throat and interrupted the conversations, directing her attention towards Zayn.

"You should show Harry the gallery," Natalia suggested.

Zayn chewed slowly on his garlic bread in thought.

"Yeah?"

"Sì, it's too much of a shame that your beautiful work goes unseen. I'm sure Harry would quite like it, wouldn't you Harry?"

I nodded, smiling a little at Zayn. "I'd love to see the gallery."

"Alright," Zayn replied and left the table while I followed behind.

He took me down the right wing hallway and lead me towards a door, opening it slowly while I traipsed behind him down a flight of spiral stairs to the basement, but it wasn't the type of basement I had been visualizing. No, it was completely finished and had been transformed into a makeshift art gallery.

The walls were painted this cherry red color with these shiny, hardwood floors and several square, black tables were set up in the middle of the room the held plenty of interesting looking sculptures, and on every wall hung a myriad of gold framed paintings and drawings. Ceiling spotlights shined down on each one, illuminating the pieces of art as if they were precious, famed, the type of things you'd expect to see at Tate Modern in London.