The Beauty of Defiance

Chapter 4: Pints

Chapter Text

It took Zayn exactly two weeks to find out about Perrie’s affair with Brody Rogan.

He might have found out earlier, but since Rogan still had to keep a clean shirt on his wife’s front, they were sneakier than Perrie would’ve usually been. He came home early from a shopping trip, restocking his closet with clothes that he deemed suitable for someone post-modeling, but still with a bit of high-fashion edge.

He ended up buying five or six identical black generic T-shirts.

In the days before he left home, walked runways and snorted coke, Zayn had had a youthful, almost athletic sort of glow, even if he’d never been truly a sporty type. Now when he looked into the mirror he saw a sunken version of his younger self, and he couldn’t bring himself to buy the colorful, tight fitting pants he would’ve worn nine years back.

In his worst days, where he could barely squint in the flashing light, the creative directors had hired him for shoots where they wanted the dark circles, the vulnerability, the skinny curve of his hips.

Now he was something in between those things, floating, frowning at nothing and doing basically nothing about anything.

That was how he walked in on Perrie and Brody Rogan making out heavily in their hallway, clothes already discarded. The panicked shout Rogan gave almost made Zayn smile, while Perrie just stood there with her manicured hands on her bare hips, eyes hostile.

“Don’t mind me.” Zayn waved them away and headed to his room, and a few minutes later he heard the door to their bedroom snap shut with a curt force he knew only Perrie possessed.

Two and a half hours later he realized, while painting the glister upon a flat wave, green and white and strangely enough, purple within the sea – he realized with all force that he couldn’t have gotten any more pathetic. Married a woman who didn’t take him seriously. Chronically unemployed for two years now. And now the sounds of their lovemaking melted into the wall while Zayn painted central European scenery and marveled over the color of water.

Then after a few moments in which the paint on his little plate dried into clumps, he shrugged and went back to his art.

He probably didn’t deserve any better.

That’s also what Harry told him when they went out in the evening, both in battered leather jackets, both too tired with the day to bother speaking in proper sentences.

So Harry was his mate from university. They had fit together like puzzle pieces, right from the start – both studying subjects deemed useless to practical life, both not uninterested in the delicious rubbing of stubble against their groin while receiving a blowjob, both too off their head trying to idealize while not really having an ideal at all.

Then Zayn went off modeling and sipping Champagne, and naturally, he forgot about Harry. Forgetting was really the nicest of things, back in those days.

They met again, three months after Zayn’s big crash, two weeks after his shotgun wedding in Las Vegas, and on the exact first day of Zayn’s therapy session. Of course he ditched and went to have beer for old time’s sake.

Opposite to Zayn, Harry had done close to everything with his Philosophy degree. He’d invested in grapes, hitch-hiked all the way to South Africa, got married in a Hungarian village where he tried to spend the summer (His wife still wrote letters, to which he replied in French), worked at a bar, worked at a swimming pool, worked at McDonalds on the Isle of Wight, bar again, and now he was waiting tables at a restaurant he claimed he liked because of the lightning.

“I think you should cheer up.” He told Zayn while they ordered their first pints, shrugging back his old, battered blazer-jacket. “And let me fuck Perrie, too.”