(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)
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I want her long blonde hair, I want her magic touch,
yeah cause maybe then you'd want me just as much.
Harry | Girl Crush
Late 2011
When the Up All Night tour rehearsals started, we stopped seeing each other, mostly because there was just no time. When we weren't busy with promo and press events during the day, or performing in the evening, we were dead tired and only had time to sleep. Weeks passed and we kept our distance altogether, because it was safer that way. We knew that if we met up, neither of us had the willpower to stop ourselves from doing something regrettable.
Eventually our normal banter and friendship returned, for which I was grateful, and it sustained me through our 'time apart" (figuratively speaking). Literally, however, there was no real distance. Work kept up as close as cellmates, and there was rarely a day we didn't see each other. Before long, we reverted to our platonic normalcy, which at times vexed me, but at others made me feel emotionally unburdened.
Things only became conflicted again when word began to circulate that he was into Perrie Edwards from Rhythmix, and was contemplating asking her out. I learned all this courtesy of Louis who happened to be in both of our strictest confidence, and often unknowingly swapped intel between Zayn and I, not knowing that this information had the potential to damage us. Lou was, for a change, completely innocent because he remained ignorant of the intimacy Z and I shared over the course of our time at the bungalow, and that I had developed feelings for him. As far as he or anyone else knew, Z and I were just good mates who shared a laugh occasionally, and it was vital that we kept it that way.
Now I had a new threat on my hands. Perrie Edwards. I shivered each time I said it to myself, realizing how similar our names sounded. Perrie Edwards vs Harry Edward Styles. Pez vs Haz. Zerrie vs Zarry. Little did I know how much of a bane she would become in the coming months, amounting to years (nearly succeeding in driving me certifiably insane within that time.)
Rhythmix was a girl group comprised of four incredibly talented contestants from the current season of X-Factor, thrown together on the show in much the same manner as us. They were adored by the viewers, quirky, down to earth, had started off as total strangers but now displayed amazing chemistry (basically like a female One Direction.)
Perrie was the blonde (and for Zayn the most notable.) She proved to be a strong vocalist and was the same age as him. Apparently, they had a lot in common; so I tried so hard not to compare myself to her but ultimately failed. Google became my friend, connecting me with her social media so I could learn all there was to know without following her around in the streets. From what I could observe, she seemed like the antithesis of everything I was physically. We looked nothing alike. I wasn't sure how he could be attracted to us both, but then reconsidered and decided I would've felt disturbed if he'd replaced me with someone too similar.
Perrie was a true Geordie with a proper accent. A blue-eyed, bleached blonde, bombshell-in-the-making with just the right amount of attitude; and apparently she liked to play hard to get (from what I could tell). Her games were driving Z madder by the day. He seemed to subtweet her a lot, and to me it came off as a bit desperate at times, like he'd never had a girl before. What the hell was so special about her that he needed to tweet about it? He had never done that for anyone before.
Over time I learned that he sometimes got that way about girls, as if his ability to conquer them was the only thing holding his delicate ego intact. Whenever he was rejected, which happened rarely, it was the lousiest I ever saw him. Even if I or any of the boys rejected choosing him in a hypothetical dating scenario, he got so butthurt and quiet you could tell he felt deeply unspecial.
Brooding and self-pity followed in the wake of a rejection for most, but for him it was tenfold— that is, until he found another who suited his fancy and he started the cycle all over again. In many ways, he and I were alike when it came to chasing girls, which is why we always ended up hanging out together and making sure our dates brought along friends when he and I couldn't hook-up anymore.
Seeing him in action ultimately made me feel set-aside and irrelevant, but pretending to be his wingman was the only consolation I could find in letting him go. At least this way I was still involved with getting him laid on some level (always working to ingratiate myself with him, no matter how pathetic it made me look.)
In any case, I still couldn't understand what attracted him to Perrie in particular. She looked nothing like Stephanie, who dumped after a few months and left him heartbroken for several weeks. When Perrie came along, she proved to be the perfect solution to repair the damage Steph had inflicted on his self-esteem, and was all he could talk about when the cameras were shut off. Part of me was jealous that he had looked elsewhere for a distraction instead of returning to me, and the other part of me was pissed he wasn't as upset over losing me as he was with Stephanie. Either way, I kept my distance and kept quiet on the matter, since he seemed so far past us already.
The other boys teased him about his hang-up over Perrie, so I figured I needed to join in occasionally to save face, although it made my stomach turn to pretend to be supportive about "Zerrie". As weeks turned to months and the tour began in December, we became very distant. I tried to devote myself to Caroline, and when that didn't work out, I found myself alone again at the beginning of 2012 when we split on a mutual understanding. She and I wanted different things. She said I wasn't emotionally mature enough to handle her heart, and to be honest, I was simply too preoccupied with how conflicted I felt over Zayn to give her the attention she both needed and deserved.
Z and I continued to drift closer as friends and then suddenly become strangers again, in a sickening cycle that gave me whiplash and left me unsure of how to feel about his character. Why couldn't we just be one thing and have it make sense? I couldn't figure him out anymore, and over time, the memory of his touch escaped me entirely. It was as if we'd never done anything in the dark. Like he'd never sucked my nipples and stuck his tongue in my ass and told me he loved me. Like it had been some fevered and prolonged hallucination. Day by day, he seemed perfectly unbothered by the unhealthy back and forth, as though his feelings for me were a switch he could flick off and on with ease.
The more the rumors of Perrie circulated, the more irritated I became, resolving to give him a taste of his own medicine. I wanted to take control. I wanted to make him crazy for me, so I began to ignore him onstage, dedicating my attention to Lou and Niall, and even on occasion Liam.
I also talked to as many girls as I could find, but it had the opposite effect. He tended to encourage me in the realm of hooking up with random 'birds' (as he called them) and was oblivious to the fact that I wanted to make him jealous. When I became desperate to get a reaction, I did little things to piss him off (needing to know he still felt anything for me) and it was then that I discovered his detestation for Larry Stylinson, That was the ship name given to mine and Lou's "bromance" since we appeared to be the closest out of the band, and the fans tended to think that since we flatted together, we were domesticated and in love.
As ridiculous and baseless as it was, Larry turned out to be the perfect vehicle to keep Zayn on his toes and concerned about me. With girls, he couldn't care less who I hooked up with. But with guys? It made him murderously jealous to even think I was getting close or physical with someone else. Once I figured this out, I felt like his puppeteer, able to piss him off at a moment's notice with one whisper too many, or a bit too much physical affection towards any of the other guys, especially Louis.
As Larry became more popular and more sensationalized throughout the media, I noticed his reluctance to let go of me after all, and his determination to personally dispel the rumors about Louis and I hooking up. Suddenly, despite his hooking up with Perrie and tweeting about her from time to time, he still went out of his way to keep an open line of communication with me and always tried to interact on stage.
His compartmentalization skills were scary. It's like he was two different people. The one that was into Perrie, and the one that was into me and refused to let me move on with a guy if I so chose. It was the most confusing period of my life so far, and left me reevaluating everything about us to an obsessive degree. Did he or did he not want me? Why didn't he care when I hooked up with girls, and why did he think I was capable of being unbothered when he did the same? Why did the idea of me hooking up with guys seem to bug him? When would it all end?
These are questions I never had the balls to ask him, despite my longing to define us for once and for all. The minute I was in his presence, all semblance of logic fled my brain, and it became a battle not to rehash my darkest feelings for him from late 2011. It was as if when we were together, we just knew what we were, and there was no reason to discuss it beyond that.
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June 2012
During the last few UAN shows in mid-2012, we were becoming closer than we ever had and couldn't keep our hands to ourselves during the breaks between songs onstage. The minute we could steal away to a darkened corner of the set-dec, our lips were to each other's ears, fabricating reasons to speak just so we could whisper; just so we had an excuse to get as close as possible (short of kissing.)
Feeling the heat of his breath in my ear reminded me of our nights in the bungalow when we would stay awake into the wee hours, drowning in mindless pillowtalk and lazy makeout sessions; half asleep and legs intertwined. Whenever his lips brushed my ears under the scrutiny of the audience, I felt a jolt straight down to my cock, and it was all I could do to keep my knees from buckling. In front of thousands of screaming fans, my feelings for him were twice as powerful. Together we were depraved, enjoying being seen in some respects. Filthy, arrogant exhibitionists eager to let the world know that we found each other attractive. That we had been intimate in the past and knew each other's bodies better than we knew our own, and always were on the cusp of returning to that intimacy.
During each show, there were times we ran out of words but snuggled close anyway—the breath-play and ear-kisses and stolen licks too much to pass up once the adrenaline started pumping. Adrenaline, mixed with countless other chemicals were exuded whenever we were together created a dizzying cocktail of hormonal bliss that fried our brains and overtaxed our hearts; and the electricity we emitted in those moments was enough to power the entire room, marking the onlookers with a contact high from being in our vicinity.
I was addicted to the sound of his voice. In these moments, his accent softened and attuned for my ears only. A languid poetic inflection only I could decipher. Never once did I realize this onstage tenderness was a sure-fire gateway to us hooking up again, so we kept it up until it got extremely dangerous and nearly exposed us.
In that time, Perrie (his official girlfriend since May) was an afterthought. Never once did I think we were only months away from "going all the way," rushing past the point of no return. Somehow, the tipping point had snuck up on us while we had been pretending for months that we only wanted friendship; while he was locked down in a relationship with a newcomer, and while I was being papped snogging a friend in New Zealand (Emma Ostilly) and sleeping with every girl (and woman) who'd have me after my breakup with Caroline. Somehow in the midst of all of this, he and I still managed to return to the former us.
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August 2012
When the UAN tour ended in July, we played a few radio gigs and one-off events and then returned home to England. There, we were allowed a stretch of time off before the gig at the Olympics—an event so epic and inconceivable that at times I could hardly remember what it felt like to stand in the center of that arena. The only memories I could evoke of the closing ceremony were as surreal and indirect as a dream, the kind where you could only recall fragments like shattered glass reflecting lights, sounds, blurry faces, and smells. No real substance.
Following the ceremony, we took another respite before rehearsals for the MTV VMA Awards in September. During that time, I started studying Hebrew, Zayn rebelled and got a blonde streak, he and I grew close again since there were no public appearances inhibiting us from hanging out, and I moved in with Ben Winston and his family (the director of our "Year In The Making Documentary" from 2011). He and his wife lived close to my new house, which was being renovated from the ground up and left me needing a place to crash for a few weeks.
They set me up in the semi-finished attic, and I had nothing but a mattress, my luggage, and several boxes left behind by the previous house owners to keep me company. Sometimes I searched them and found creepy photos and antique relics, and even someone's old stitchwork. Apart from that, I had no bed frame, no nightstand, no TV, just the silence of solitude and a few cobwebs along the rafters that jiggled whenever there was a draft.
In the first stretch, I'd snuck a few girls upstairs after my housemates had gone to bed, but stopped when I realized it was utterly disrespectful to my hosts, since they were kind enough to treat me like a member of the family ( and also practiced Judaism devoutly.) Soon I considered that if they wouldn't permit me to eat pork in their presence, there's no way in hell they'd condone me "fornicating" just beneath their noses (or quite literally above their heads.)
How could I possibly repay their warmth and charity by bringing casual hookups back to such a pious place, then subsequently praying and reading Scripture beside them on the sabbath? Out of respect, I made the decision to practice abstinence unless I was able to hook-up elsewhere, outside of the Winston household. I became proactive, educating myself on their faith so that I could practice the guidelines and enforce a few for myself, which would in turn prove I wasn't taking their kindness for granted or disrespecting their values.
In the end I became more disciplined, learned to appreciate the faiths of others, and absorbed as much as I could about Ben and the way he conducted himself as God-fearing, principled businessman who had achieved impressive feats at an early age. And it didn't hurt that he had a smile like a million bucks, so I wanted to emulate that adult charisma and at last shed the cheeky boyhood persona I'd garnered since the X-Factor.
But that change came at a cost. Lou and I had grown apart since the big move from the shared flat at Princess Park, and the distance between us only broadened as he spent his time with his girlfriend and friends who'd moved nearby from Doncaster. As for me, I entered new circles and acquainted myself with people who offered me a new perspective, many of them twice my age. Among the best was the inimitable, quick-witted, and hilarious Nick Grimshaw. To watch this loud-mouthed, openly gay, social networking genius navigate London's upper echelon like he had the whole of it wrapped around his finger was downright mesmerizing.
Right away he styled my hair and dressed me, took me out with him and introduced me to the London nightlife, taught me how to order adult drinks and gourmet food, and improved my wardrobe tenfold. He also informed me who to steer clear of in all the intersecting industry circles, and who was safe to associate with (but only to varying degrees since I got more attention than I bargained for whenever I went to clubs and parties.)
Unlike the other boys, for me, life was changing rapidly. Faster than I could keep up with. I was leaving my old self in the dust and evolving into some debonair, overly groomed, socialite who'd witnessed too many people I respect do coc*ine and debase themselves in the darkest, most sleepless corners of London.
The things I desired shifted quickly, so had the networks I was integrated in and the list of people I hoped to make connections with in the near future. And finally, one day I looked up and noticed I'd leveled up (nearly beyond recognition.) This was yet another new Harry Styles, but fortunately for me, the only person in the band I remained truly close to in spite of these changes was none other than Zayn.
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