making love to the camera (1/2)
Title: making love to the camera
Pairing: Liam Payne / Zayn Malik
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 13 525
Warnings: barebacking. oversensitisation, dirty talk, a little bit of angst, and references to polyamory and pretentious authors.
Summary: "that's how Liam makes him feel - like there's something between them bigger than the rest of the world."
A/N: Pornstar!AU which turned into a Uni!AU. Big love to sarah and cat for listening to me whine about it for forever and a day.
When Zayn was sixteen, he read that ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules’, and he thinks of that quote all through high school until he’s eighteen and disillusioned and decides George Bernard Shaw didn’t know anything about the real world.
(later, he’ll find out that Shaw won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar before he turned fifty, and maybe Zayn should have listened to him instead of the pessimism of adolescence.
But not yet.)
So when he’s accepted into the University College of London, he sets himself Three Rules. With absolutely no exception or asterisk or unless, he (one) is not allowed to pine over some uni boy like a virgin in heat; (two) will never ever read Shakespeare again after he cried for three hours over Mercutio’s death in high school; and (three) will not be reduced to free verse.
Because he’s tattooed and cynical and studying European Literature and three seconds from making the transition from ‘brooding’ to ‘tragic’ and-
- no-
- he is not the Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester of this story.
||
(he is not a footnote in his own fucking happiness)
||
On-campus living is an absolute nightmare which Danny dedicates too many of their last nights together discussing in excruciating detail, all of which end the same way-
(“I will not let you suffer, Z, I did not spend all weekend at a graduation party for you to throw away this phone number.”)
- until he caves and calls Harry Styles, who talks like he’s just deep-throated and says ‘Zayn means beautiful in Arabic, right?’ in this flirtatious voice he’s a little too familiar with.
He meets his four roommates on the first Friday of term in a big, airy loft with windows for walls and bolted steel for doors and a shiny new kitchen. Harry’s decidedly intense and Niall’s all laughter and Louis is this crazy embodiment of summer, he thinks, with tanned skin and eyes like the sky.
The hallway is exposed brick and dark floorboards but Zayn forgets how pretentiously hipster his life’s become when he finds a boy shuffling all the furniture. He’s wearing half a suit (sleeves rolled to his elbows, buttons haphazardly undone) and looks like something out of Zayn’s dreams, with five o’clock stubble and a buzz cut and Usher in the background.
Zayn stares at the tension captured in tanned arms and the gentle twist of foreign lips, reaching for the other end of the table the boy’s lifting. “Hey,” he says, just over the music, “I’m Zayn and we’re sharing a kitchen.”
He smiles brilliantly and wow, he’s almost a traffic hazard. “The literature student?” he says, readjusting his grip to shake Zayn’s hand. His grip is tight and his thumb catches over Zayn’s knuckles. “Liam Payne. I’m studying business and losing years off my life with every passing number.”
“Sounds dreadful,” he teases, and Liam has big brown eyes that crinkle when he laughs. The table is crooked when they set it down. “What is it we’re doing?”
Liam looks a little abashed and grins into his shoulder. “We’re moving all the furniture to the right so the others stub their toes,” he says sheepishly. “It’s payback for dying my shirt pink.”
“You pull it off,” Zayn says - because it’s the truth - and laughs when Liam’s cheeks burn. “Want help?”
The music fades out halfway through, leaving silence and the sounds of the city all around. Zayn doesn’t notice, though, because Liam doesn’t ask about his tattoos and instead talks about worst lectures and horrible nightmares and best memories.
Spring, he thinks. Liam’s like spring. With sunshine behind his eyes and that earthy voice and those strong hands for creating something new.
(it’s a little telling, really, a sign he doesn’t notice yet, because spring’s always been his favourite season)
And that night, between cold sheets which won’t warm up, he thinks he’s a little in love with Niall’s booming laugh and Louis’ frankly alive eyes and the way Harry nuzzles into the crook of his neck over tea.
But that first smile of Liam’s, with the sharp jaw line and loose lips and crinkly eyes, is the only thing on his mind.
||
(later - almost a week later - he learns that Liam is actually all sex. He’s cock and strong arms and a filthy mouth, with blowjob lips and a wicked smile to distract from the press of fingertips along his spine. It’s a total deception and a juxtaposition and it’s incredible, how he’s got everybody fooled.)
||
(belatedly, he’ll realise that Liam’s all warmth, like that ache stinging your skin after lying in the sun too long or the first breath of fresh air after a flight or even the words ‘I’m proud’ in any context.
But not yet.)
||
A fortnight into term and Zayn’s gained a reputation, one that makes him feel dirty and hollow. He’s called all kinds of things like mysterious and exotic and dark, as though he’s forbidden.
(dangerous, even)
It reminds him of high school and that feeling which characterised his senior year, like his skin is too tight around his body, sets an ache in his bones. Acidity coats his lips because it’s not that the rumours are terrible, it’s that they’re so easily believed. Like it’s feasible that he would burn lines of poetry into a hooker’s skin, or get off while some boy is bleeding and crying and humiliated, just because Bret Easton Ellis wrote about it.
He’s a tornado when he comes home, three hours later, after a girl sprawls over his lap and whispers things that turn his blood cold. He accepts the beer Niall offers and the strange threeway cuddle Harry and Louis draw him into before stomping into his bedroom.
Except it’s not his room, it’s Liam’s, with a Liam to match. He’s stretched across his bed with his laptop anchored on hips, wearing chinos and a t-shirt that’s tight all over. The floor is covered by a king mattress on a low, minimalist bedframe with a few dozen throw pillows filling in the spaces between.
It kind of looks - feels - more like home than anything Zayn’s seen in years.
Liam tugs out his headphones when the door’s shoved open and looks at Zayn like he’s staring at his organs, instead. He piles up pillows without hesitation and creates this little nest for Zayn, right beside him.
“So you’re a Marvel boy, right?” he asks, browsing through his tabs while Zayn curls up, knocks against his ankles and slots his hip against Liam’s waist. “Trick question, of course you are. The new trailer for Iron Man 3 leaked today. We’ll start there.”
||
Sharing headphones is as over-romanticised as he remembers from the tenth grade, but there’s something tender about Liam speaking in hushed tones about the cinematography and comic canon with only centimetres between them.
They don’t jump apart when the others come in with pizza covered in every topping (because they don’t know each other’s favourites, yet). Instead, they press close and nudge shoulders whenever it feels right.
“So,” Harry says, a mouthful of pizza with his feet in Niall’s lap and an arm around Louis’ shoulders and no space between the three of them. Zayn considers commenting on it, but then Liam swipes some grease off his cheek with tanned fingers and he decides otherwise. “I’m thinking of psychology.”
Louis laughs, affectionate, and steals all Harry’s pepperoni. “I thought you were in psych already.”
“I’m doing commerce,” he scowls.
“But it was physiotherapy last week,” Liam offers, “and didn’t you apply for engineering on Wednesday?”
Harry jabs him in the ribs and Liam presses into Zayn from the momentum and that pressure is somehow so, so much louder than the laughter of five boys.
They’re drowsy, afterwards, and Zayn’s absolutely incapable of looking away when Liam’s so pliant and happy, so he settles between the sheets and falls asleep when Liam turns out the light.
||
In sixth form, Zayn studied French romanticism while the rest of his class read Robert Frost. Arthur Rimbaud - a libertine who characterised surrealism in imagery for the next century - was his favourite. He described orbits and gravitational pulls and a thousand other things to explain how two people could share a bed and always awake tangled together.
There are also twelve dozen movies where sexual tension stems from an absolutely unavoidable night in bed together, and authors who exploit that feeling, and millions of songs about here in your embrace, so, really, society has predisposed Zayn to expect those strong arms around his torso, or maybe a casual press of their ankles together.
Their reality, though, is waking up on opposite sides of the bed with achingly cold skin. Zayn’s spread out on his stomach like he’s eager for it and he’s not sure what he expects when he opens his eyes, but Liam with a sleepy smile and heat flushing his bare chest pink certainly isn’t predictable.
“Morning,” Liam says, and Zayn will never forget the way his voice sounds. Maybe being a literary cliché would be preferable to Liam’s eyes tracing all his tattoos (even the one that disappears beneath his waistband) like a promise.
Zayn shuffles closer and thinks in poetry (Frost, Auden, Yeats) when Liam succumbs to goosebumps at their touching skin. They watch each other and everything is wintry when Liam flutters his eyelashes, like he’s teasing, and kisses him.
It should feel like a hurricane, with shiny lips and a saccharine taste, but Liam’s lovely with him like none of his first kisses have been. He brushes their lips together until Zayn whimpers at the touch and uses his tongue like an anaesthetic instead of a weapon and just kisses him in a way that feels like worship.
They grin when they separate - a little more aware than they were before - and Liam glances at his eyes, wrists, lips, kisses him hard, and crawls out of bed before he can kiss back.
||
They’re sharing a plate of scrambled eggs over the kitchen counter when Liam bumps their hips together and knocks his fork away.
“So,” Liam says, piling eggs and hot sauce and pepper onto a piece of hot toast and folding it up. He looks a little embarrassed but smiles beatifically when Zayn takes a bite. “Are we going to talk about it?”
Zayn shakes his head and feeds him a forkful. Grease stains Liam’s lips a shiny pink. “We don’t need to,” he says, and Liam looks so relieved it makes his heart ache. “Instead you can tell me why you’re wasting away in business.”
He grins and absently adds milk to Zayn’s coffee, even though he’s had two cups black already, just to calm him down. “I want to be a firefighter,” he says. Zayn stutters over the mental image. “I need a degree first, though, and an in-between-”
I could be your in-between, he thinks, but instead peels off the crusts and feeds them to Liam. “Boys or girls?”
Liam’s eyelashes flutter and his tongue darts out to lick his lips. “Boys,” he breathes, pressing a little closer until their bare ankles knock, “London or home?”
“Right here,” he says without thinking, and it’s so worth the rough laugh that echoes through the kitchen.
Liam’s spare hand absently brushes against his sweatpants. “Giving or receiving?” he asks as he outlines Zayn’s cock, smirks at the stain of precome on the cotton.
The catch of metal against Liam’s chapped lips and the brush of thumb over the head of his cock leave Zayn a little dizzy. “Receiving,” he says automatically, imagining being bent over the table, bitten along his spine, pressed against the shelves of the pantry.
Liam grins like it’s the answer he wanted and drops to his knees with lips dragging along Zayn’s bare chest. He mouths at the Chinese symbol on his hip and traces the shaft with his tongue, tugging his sweatpants down with this filthy noise of achievement and happiness.
Liam’s shamefully and shamelessly good at sucking cock. His lips stretch wide and gorgeous around the shaft and his tongue playfully strokes the underside and his teeth graze against the veins whenever he pulls off. He whispers things like ‘you taste like fucking heaven’ and ‘c’mon, be rough, you can fuck me up’, as though Zayn needs it to get off. Really, the way Liam sits back on his heels and slacks his jaw and fucking takes it, even when Zayn stutters his hips and thrusts in too deep, is hot enough to burn him up.
That’s nothing in comparison to the sight of Liam’s hand stuffed down his boxers, or the peaks of a thick and uncut cock between the silk, or the way he moans every time Zayn touches him. That’s what makes him breathless and he’s close, so close it’s curling up his spine, when Liam pulls right off.
“Are you alright?” he asks, a little confused, with swollen lips and flushed cheeks. His fingers are still grazing over his own cock and Zayn whines at the sight and presses him back down a little too rough.
Liam freezes with Zayn’s cock at the back of his throat and comes all over his fist. He’s pliant, afterwards, and it only takes a feeble hollowing of his cheeks for Zayn to arch his spine and shake against the cupboards.
He blacks out, and when he refocuses, Liam’s licking his thighs with his forehead up against his stomach and a sweet smile on his lips. Zayn strokes his cheek and sucks Liam’s messy fingers clean and there’s a heartbeat where everything stills, before footsteps echo in the hall.
They play oblivious until Harry stumbles out with three mugs of coffee and then Liam’s pressing him into the table, curling fingers underneath his thighs, and sharing the taste of their come while their coffee goes cold.
||
They can’t quite keep their hands off each other at dinner that night. Liam’s fingers are heavy and strong on his thigh and Zayn wriggles his toes against the delicate arch of bare feet and every few bites Liam moans like his steak is an orgasm.
And worse, it’s working, and Zayn’s grinding into his palm and Liam’s mumbling shameless words into his neck and he’s about to wriggle beneath the table and swallow him to the root when-
“Hot,” Louis says, lips stretched into a grin around his beer bottle, “you’re better than porn.”
Liam’s eyes widen and he looks like he might interrupt when Harry laughs hard enough to echo. “Unlikely,” he says, “Zayn comes like Charlie Chaplin.”
He buries his blush in the crook of Liam’s neck and nips the skin red until it swears to bruise tomorrow. “Your mouth is a nirvana,” he says, because it’s easier than admitting ‘I wasn’t sure if you wanted to hear’.
The look in Liam’s eyes hints that he knows, anyway. Fingers tangle in his hair and Liam twists his whole body to create a hollow for Zayn to hide in. “I’m going to get you loud,” he whispers, just loud enough for everyone to hear, “you don’t need to hold back with me, I love your pretty mouth, I’m going to make you scream-”
(they make it through dessert but barely, with exaggerated moans from the other side of the table and Liam’s tongue tracing the shell of his ear in a way that gets him impatient between the sheets an hour later)
||
(Liam’s determined, afterwards. It takes all night and by dawn, their lips are chapped and Zayn’s nerves twitch at the slightest breeze and Liam’s careful hands press calculated fingerprints all over his body.
He’s over-sensitised and weak and so desperate for just one last time, Li, please, please, please, as he arches off the mattress and breathes out a loud whine to match.
A smile presses against his bruised neck and, after they come with shuddering breaths and shaking limbs, Liam radiates smugness so thick it diffuses into his cells, too.)
||
Rule three is broken a month into term. He’s on Liam’s bed - their bed, he corrects, since his books are stacked on the dresser and he has a side - writing notes on characterisation in Dickens’ David Copperfield with his feet in Liam’s lap and the radio on low.
Liam alternates between stealing sips of his coffee and highlighting one of his dreadfully heavy textbooks. He’s wearing Zayn’s glasses because if you wear them I’ll get nothing done and yes that is a bad thing, you twat and his thighs tense in time with the music to press against the arch of Zayn’s foot and it hits him, it hits him like a fucking truck, so hard he doesn’t care how shitty that simile is. T.S Eliot and Walt Whitman and even fucking Carl Sandburg suddenly make sense because he’s so overwhelmed by the need to write about Liam in fractured, pulsing lines, with no rhythm or order.
(that’s how Liam makes him feel - like there’s something between them bigger than the rest of the world)
(like time spent apart isn’t time worthwhile)
He scribbles out be gentle,
be rough with my body, but be
gentle
with me.
and a dozen other non-sequitur lines until the buzz in his fingertips subdues.
The sun is heavy in the sky when he glances up. Liam looks a little helpless and smiles with sugar on his tongue. “I was wrong,” he says, scraping nails against the inside of Zayn’s thigh, just under the hem of his shorts. He squirms at the touch. “You don’t need the glasses to be a distraction.”
He groans and Liam uses the distraction to palm at his crotch. “Horrible,” Zayn laughs. “Tragic. Monstrous-”
Liam huffs out a laugh and their textbooks are shoved to the floor as he wriggles up to bite at his jaw. “That last one was just a reference to my cock,” he teases between kisses, nipping at his jaw.
He whispers a ‘caught me’ and loses himself in the sugary brush of lips and the spicy hints of Cambodian coffee on Liam’s tongue. They’re desperate and grinding when Harry thumps on the door, and the shameless noise Liam makes at the interruption sets his skin on fire.
“We can hear you,” Harry scowls, but Liam’s lips are bruised and his eyes are bright and Zayn doesn’t want to stop kissing him if it means that smile will disappear.
It’s a tangle of limbs as Liam tries to hide his blush in the pillows and Zayn crawls on top to straddle his hips. “Then leave,” he yells back, but he’s too distracted by the slight hitch of Liam’s hips to listen to the reply. Instead, he grinds down and whispers, “hey, remember this morning-”
“When I thanked you for breakfast,” Liam says, all cocky, like this is more familiar than sweet kisses, “with three fingers in your arse and my tongue against your lips?”
He flushes at the memory and clumsily shoves down their pants until he can flicker a thumb over Liam’s foreskin. “And what I said afterwards?”
(“please please please Liam I’m gaping for you don’t you want to fuck me don’t you want to slide in all easy?”)
Liam’s lips twist in affection as he curls an arm around his waist. “Is that on offer?” he asks. He kisses along Zayn’s stubble-stained jaw as they lazily kick off their jeans, tensing like he’s preparing to ambush Zayn’s defences. “Because there’s no way I’m refusing you.”
They wrestle for the lube and Zayn finds it first with his thighs around Liam’s shoulders, but the flicker of tongue over his balls forces a shock up his spine. He drops the bottle and, an obscene lick later, slick fingers circle his hole. One slides in easily while Liam’s busy distracting him with soft kisses against his shaft and another joins to curl against his prostate and Zayn begs for more, for a crooked smile pressed against his thigh.
He wriggles backwards and reaches for Liam, rolling on the condom and spilling lube all over his thighs in his eagerness. Zayn sinks onto his cock in one movement, pausing to kiss the smug grin off Liam’s face.
The first rock of his hips is too slow and too cautious, with sighs instead of moans and hands fluttering over Zayn’s ribs. Somewhere in the middle, they grin at each other and lose the goosebumps and find a rhythm that leaves them breathless.
Liam’s hips tilt and yes, that’s the perfect angle, the one where his cock grazes over his prostate in these teasing, slow thrusts. Zayn gasps and flexes his head back and starts riding him in earnest, Liam’s fingers burning into his thighs.
Strong fingers circle tight around his cock at every noise, so his lips are understandably shameless for reward. Moans and stutters of ‘Li, please’ become his language as Liam jerks him off, rocks his hips, breathes words to drive him insane.
Liam whispers ‘just like that baby, c’mon, get nice and loud for me’ and it’s filthy and cheap but the smile on his face is so sweet that Zayn’s orgasm blindsides him, curls somewhere deep in his spine and heats his blood so quickly it hurts.
He’s still shaking when Liam gets restless, squirming and circling his hips and gasping in syllables.
(the needy ‘oh’ and halves of his name are Zayn’s favourite, he thinks)
Automatically, he grasps Liam’s hands and presses them back into the mattress, fingers twining together. His hips roll, just a slow grind onto Liam’s cock in a way that doesn’t allow him any freedom of movement. Liam looks overwhelmed and Zayn’s never seen anyone so beautiful.
“Zayn,” he gasps, and yes, that’s definitely his favourite. Liam’s fingers curl against his knuckles like he wants to fight back. “Please - just-”
Zayn laughs and he’s mortified at how affectionate he sounds as he stretches down to bite at his jaw. He clenches around his cock and uses his thighs to kneel up until just the head is rubbing against his hole.
Liam arches off the mattress, straining against Zayn’s grip, and every breath is a moan as he comes hot inside him. There’s no real sensation - aside from the jackhammer movement of Liam’s hips and the slow, needy rocks in the aftermath - and Zayn wishes for the feeling of come and lube leaking out his arse.
It’s midafternoon when they finally separate and Liam takes such good care of him. He tucks him under the sheets and makes him another coffee - ‘no milk?’ he teases, and Liam produces one of those little capsules from hotel rooms like a fucking magician - and feeds him a blueberry muffin between kisses.
||
Louis survives his very first week of student teaching in early October and Zayn’s running late for drinks at a bar, distracted by a lazy sketch of the skyline and the increasingly sloppy texts from Liam. His favourites include ‘baaabbbbyyyy i want to kiss ur stupid face’ and ‘maybs we could fcuk by the speakerss??’, both of which he automatically saves for later mockery.
The Dog and Duck is upstairs of some restaurant in the heart of London, characterised by big lounge chairs, shoji screens and floorboard lighting. It reeks of cologne and tastes acidic and would be unbearable if he didn’t receive a lapful of Liam within moments of entering.
“You’re here,” Liam says, sounding so damn affectionate. He’s wearing grey slim-fit trousers and a champagne dress shirt (though that might be stained from alcohol) with most of the buttons undone and the cuffs rolled up to his elbows. He innocently puckers his lips and giggles drunkenly into Zayn’s mouth when he obliges.
He wraps his arms around Liam’s waist and ignores the warm coil of possessiveness when the bartender winks at them. “I promised, didn’t I?” he teases, “in reply to all twenty-seven text messages you sent me.”
Liam looks a little abashed, but still flexes his neck wantonly to expose the collarbone soaked in salt and nudges over a shot.
An eyebrow raises without his permission. “I thought you didn’t drink,” he says as his lips brush over the salt in a kiss. He sticks out his tongue and Liam coats it with tequila, a trail escaping down to his chin.
Smiling lips press to his jaw. “I don’t usually grind, either,” Liam laughs, “so it would appear Louis is a bad influence, because I’m still really into your hips.”
He laughs and obediently follows Liam to the heart of the crowd. In the corner of his eye, he can see Niall and Harry whispering to a leggy blonde by the bar with that one Justin Timberlake song from high school echoing through the open rafters.
There are many things Zayn expects, but Liam pressing his back against his chest and arching to grind against his half-hard cock definitely isn’t one of them. He kisses Zayn lazily between verses and tugs at his v-neck and whispers ‘so don’t give away my love’ against his swollen lips.
And it’s hot, it makes his hands slip from Liam’s tight waist to the very edge of his trousers, but it’s nowhere near as disarming as the sight of pink cheeks and edge of strong shoulders.
The song changes a half dozen times before Zayn realises, and he only notices because of the brilliant smile pressed against his neck. It’s like all the tendons holding this crafted boy together are snapped with chords and a tempo, as the sharp edges of Liam’s spine melt into something malleable and those smile lines around his eyes twist into focus.
He hitches his hips up against Zayn for a moment longer before spinning around and kissing him properly. Liam twines his arms around his neck and dances in that melodic, carefree way Zayn has never quite accomplished and sings along, just under the music. It’s contagious and Zayn’s so damn captivated with the way he giggles, bites Zayn’s lower lip, sings ‘hey sugar, show me all your love’ and smiles so wide when Zayn whispers ‘take me to your love shack’ once he recovers.
They kiss until the song finishes and stumble out the crowd with their lips pressed together.
Louis literally cockblocks them on their way out of the bar, with a palm wriggled between their grinding hips. “No,” he says, pouting into Liam’s shoulder with glitter staining his cheekbones. “Niall and Harry have been coercing a gang bang for me all night and I’m not having your dirty drunk sex disrupting my nirvana.”
They share a grin and sloppily kiss Louis’ fluffy hair in perfect unison, and push together from shoulder to thigh when the frigid air hits their flushed cheeks.
||
They wander around in the darkness for twenty minutes before stumbling into the only restaurant serving at two in the morning - a Mongolian open-grill with no translation in the menu and a group of drunk girls in the opposite corner. Neither of them have ever tried the food, so they steal a menu and a waiter’s pen and circle the dishes which spell out their names.
Zayn’s absolutely horrible with chopsticks, much to Liam’s amusement. His fingers aren’t quite accustomed to the awkward grip and Liam wriggles into the booth beside him, teaches him how to hold and twist and grasp.
“So,” Zayn says, prodding at a soup with pork and dumplings, “are you going to explain your affinity for formalwear?”
Liam grins and feeds him a piece of bok choy. “Depends,” he says, “are you ever going to tell me why your fingers are always stained with charcoal?”
A breath catches in his throat and Liam cuts him off before he can reply. “My lecturer is holding a competition,” he explains, cuddling against Zayn’s frame. “The person who dresses well all year gets a guaranteed ninety on the final assessment. And I like looking sharp. And I love the way you stare at me when I wear a suit.”
An hour later, when Zayn’s forgotten all about it, Liam ducks close and whispers, “I want to know all your secrets” like it’s a promise.
||
The bed is empty when he wakes up late for class, but Liam’s side is warm and there’s a Styrofoam cup with his name, an anatomically correct heart, and an ‘- enjoy your coffee black, I require cuddles and a foot rub when I get home, your Liam xx’, which makes up for it three times over.
||
“What are you reading?” Liam asks one night, when they’re curled in bed with the lights on low and a salty blow heater on their bare feet.
“Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” he says absently, “a caustic social commentary on betrayal. It’s our theme of the week.”
Liam grins, shoves his phone under his pillow like he always does and peppers kisses at the nape of his neck. “Angst seems to be your taste,” he teases. Then, softly, like he’s sharing a secret- “we read Hamlet in school and spent all month talking about betrayal. I think I still have my annotated copy.”
“I don’t read Shakespeare,” he says quickly, and it feels like he’s stretching in his armour, “not since-”
“Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet,” he finishes. He sounds so damn amused and a smile presses to his bare back. “I do listen, sweetheart.”
||
(He breaks his second rule and steals one of the tattered copies of Hamlet from the university stage production the very next day. At home, between the sheets, with Liam typing up a report on his laptop using two determined fingers, he hides the play behind an abridged edition of Anna Karenina and reads with his feet in Liam’s lap.
His absolutely excellent job at playing stealth is shattered when he yelps at ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, and Liam looks up and shoots him this fond smile and Zayn can’t be embarrassed when subject to that look.)
||
That weekend and they’re all stretched across the floor of the lounge room with mountains of textbooks, studying for the exam week from complete hell. Zayn’s editing his essay on contrasts in Russian literature - he prefers Dostoevsky to Tolstoy - and resting his feet in the dip of Louis’ back, stealing glances at Liam when he thinks he can get away with it.
He’s halfway through a paragraph when Liam wriggles close and steals a kiss. “My tombstone will read ‘death by projected revenue’,” he sighs as his stubble rasps against Zayn’s neck. “Remind me again why I chose business?”
“An in-between?” he suggests, and receives a playful nip at his jaw in response, “you could always transfer.”
“To what?” he whispers, wrapping an arm around Zayn’s waist, just under his woolly jumper.
Fingers press into the knobs of his spine and he arches into the touch. “Teaching?”
Liam wrinkles his nose. “Boring,” he says, ignoring Louis’ noise of protest, “and it requires more commitment than I could handle on call.”
“Architecture?”
Liam kisses the words off his lips. “Can’t draw.”
“Massage therapy?” he says, soft, into Liam’s mouth, “because fuck knows I love your-”
“No dirty talk during revision,” Harry scowls from his cacoon of blankets and notes on the Monarchy of Spain.
Liam pauses with his tongue brushing against Zayn’s swollen lips and sighs, wriggling comfortably under his free arm. “Let me help you?” he asks, peppering kisses all over.
He tangles their legs together and passes over a red pen. “We’re looking for awkward structuring. Lebensham said it was the only difference between me and Scott Tolksen.”
Liam’s thigh presses a little harder against his own. “Who’s Scott Tolksen?”
“My arch-nemesis,” he says, “the Bane to my Batman.”
Louis grumbles something that sounds a lot like ‘you’re my Bane, arsehole,’ but they ignore him, knocking their feet together playfully while they read through.
He’s halfway through his second paragraph when Liam whispers, “I have no idea what half these words mean, so you’re definitely going to beat Tolksen.”
He raises an eyebrow and preens when he catches sight of a secret smile. “Which don’t you understand?”
“I could tell you the words I do understand,” he teases, tucked up against his body, circling Zayn’s name and every ‘novel’ and ‘author’ in the opening lines, “it might be quicker.”
Liam pauses over an adjective and Zayn gasps in mock horror at his confused expression. “Eccentric?” he says, and Liam looks embarrassed and mischievous and happy all at once, “as in, synonym of unusual?”
There are three matching snorts of laughter from the other side of the rug and Zayn kicks Louis in retaliation. “Only heard that in reference to Tim Burton,” Liam laughs. “How about ‘discernible’?”
He bites back a noise of protest and nips at his jaw, instead. “It means distinct - obvious - as in, it’s discernible your future isn’t in literature.”
Liam wrinkles his nose like he’s processing the insult and bucks up against Zayn when he realises the implications. He’s been wriggling under Zayn for the past fifteen minutes and he can’t stop thinking of a very different situation with less clothes and heavier breaths, just like this, with his limbs caging Liam in.
“Well it’s discernible,” Liam says slowly, exaggerating his lips and tongue in this obscene way to shape the syllables, grinning filthily, “how much you want to fuck right now.”
There’s a witty retort on the very tip of his tongue but Liam strokes his jaw, whispers ‘I can’t wait to take you apart’, and he can’t trust himself not to groan if he opens his mouth.
||
Niall finds him on the emergency stairwell an hour later, ploughing through his pack of Marlboros. They watch each other, for a moment, before Niall grins and slides beside him with his legs dangling over the street and a Sterling between his lips.
A sunset later and he presses forward to light his cigarette on the end of Zayn’s. “Alright?” he asks through a cloud of smoke. “You look spooked.”
He shrugs and flicks ash over the rail. Niall doesn’t push - which is maybe his favourite thing about him - just sits and smokes and slumps against the railing. When he’s ready, he asks, “do you ever look up and realise you’re gone for someone?”
Niall grins and tangles calloused fingers in his messy hair. “Yeah,” he says, all helpless and hopeful, “terrifying, isn’t it?”
||
It’s the week of Halloween and Zayn’s not quite certain how the five of them stumbled upon his choice tattoo studio, but he’s pretty sure it involved the promise of pizza and walking the long way to avoid cleaning the apartment. They’re browsing through the wall of art and he’s whispering to Harry about starting his left sleeve when Liam curls an arm around his waist.
“I’ve wanted a tattoo for forever,” he says, soft, like a secret. Lips fumble over his pulse and Zayn wants a kiss, a touch, the sight of ink - something so his - on Liam’s skin.
Somehow - not somehow, Louis-how, as he will take credit for years to come - ‘I’ is taken as a collective ‘we’ and they end up in a neat row of leather chairs, a needle to the skin and an ‘animal, boys, it’s going to be majestically symbolic’ in mind.
With a sleeve rolled all the way to his shoulders and his spare hand laced tight in Liam’s, he explains the surrealist macaw he wants on his tricep, influenced by Van Gogh’s Starry Night, to his artist - this guy with untainted skin and agile fingers. In a softer voice, he explains that it’s not about him, really, it’s about the boy with a big smile and a laugh like May, who redefines vibrancy with every breath.
He watches it knit together, making these appreciative noises when the artist wipes away the ink to show him what’s there.
Liam’s secretive, twisting away and laughing whenever Zayn tries to look. Hours later, while Niall’s busy explaining the polar bear on his thigh, Liam pulls him aside, shoves up his sleeves, showing him the kingfisher bird staining his forearm.
He’s lost on what to say when Liam sees his macaw and-
Oh.
Liam kisses him in this way that makes Zayn feel devoured, his fingers dawdling over the details like he’s memorising the foreign skin.
Louis is manic with glee as he says ‘if you’re a bird, I’m a bird’ like he didn’t make them watch ‘The Notebook’ three times last weekend, but that doesn’t matter when Liam’s pressing his lips to the cling-wrap to kiss it better.
||
The sun is streaming through an open window on a Wednesday in the middle of November. Zayn’s reading the latest issue of Batwing and sketching all over his draft essay on Jane Eyre, and maybe this is where he feels most comfortable, surrounded by all his favourite things.
(literature and comic books and coffee and sunshine)
(and Liam)
He feels Liam before he sees him, a taut stretch of muscle pressed against his back as a hand sneaks under his shirt and another adds milk to his espresso shot on the floor. The noise of discontent that escapes his lips is lost when Liam bites his neck.
Zayn’s breathing heavy by the time they kiss properly and he loses himself in the fingers buried in his hair, hips grinding him into the mattress, the smiles between kisses.
Liam stills against him and laughs softly into his mouth at Zayn’s noise of protest, pulling away to tongue at his neck. “Is there a chance you drew that?” he asks, fingering at the page, and Zayn loses all his dignity in a heartbeat. He twists and wrestles and fights dirty for the drawing, sneaking kisses and tangling their legs together and marking him up the way Liam loves best.
When they pause, he’s straddling Liam’s hips with his glasses askew and jeans shoved down to his crotch. Liam’s cock is hard against the back of his thighs and the sketch is in his hands and when Zayn holds him down, his hips pulse.
“This is incredible,” Liam says, almost like a prayer, and kisses him hard, “you’re so fucking sexy like this.”
He bites Liam’s lower lip and tightens his grip in response and uses too much lube, later, in eagerness, when he holds Liam down and rides him in slow rocks of his hips which have them both writhing.
||
Afterwards, when Zayn’s milky coffee has gone cold and they’ve taken to kissing words in Morse code against each other’s lips, Liam asks, “so drawing, hey?”
Zayn blushes and squirms against his sweaty chest. “Kind of.”
The next string of kisses along Zayn’s collarbones feel a lot like an S.O.S. “You never told me. What’s the story, morning glory?”
“No story, really,” he says, quiet, into the hollow of his neck, “I’m doing a double degree. The graphic design term is over the summer.”
Liam hums a chorus by Oasis - don’t look back in anger, Zayn thinks - and tightens his grip around his shoulder. “So damn talented,” he laughs, sounding a little awed, “you’re so wasted on me, Zayn Malik.”
Something sweet curls around his spine as they press their lips together. It’s boiling him from the inside out, and Zayn’s grinding into his hip and moaning into his chest when Liam whispers ‘draw me like one of your French girls’ in this silly falsetto designed to ruin the mood and break his heart.
||
(“What’s with the coffee ?” he asks that night at dinner, with Niall perched on the counter and Louis between his thighs, tanned fingers sliding up pale legs when he thinks they won’t notice. “The milk, I mean.”
Liam’s unfathomable in that moment, this blur of embarrassment and affection and a hint Zayn can’t name yet. “Maybe I’ll tell you, one day,” he laughs, with this shy smile that warms his cheeks. Then, to distract him, “if you two are getting off, please wait for Harry to get home or he’ll sulk all weekend.”)
||
In retrospect, Zayn should have expected this. He feels too happy walking through the campus with Liam holding his hand, too much like himself, so it’s fucking obvious that it’s this moment (with visible breaths and dew under their feet and a smile like sunshine on Liam’s lips) when it all shatters.
“Zayn Malik!” he hears, and Indi, this girl with big lips and bigger hair and who finds every opportunity in tutorials to talk about Shakespearean sonnets, stumbles out of the tech centre. “Who is this and should I bother learning his name?”
He glances at Liam with a ‘this is’ on his tongue and realises how absolutely inadequate all the adjectives formed with tongue and teeth are, where la petit mort no longer feels like a reference to sex but to the way his heart skips at the sound of Liam’s voice.
“It’s just Liam,” he says, thinking of that one Spanish author who wrote that a lack of definition is the sincerest form of identity, and at that raw hour of the morning he can’t help but think that maybe (just maybe) Liam is too pure to be attached to his reputation.
(the studiously blank look on Liam’s face suggests it’s all lost in translation, though)
The conversation ends rather abruptly and Indi walks away first, leaving Liam and Zayn and the galaxies between them.
Liam uses his long legs to his advantage to walk away and something in Zayn just collapses. “I think I’m going to go study,” he says as he jogs across the frosty lawn, so far away for maybe the first time.
Zayn follows and can’t help but think that maybe the whole world is right about him and his calloused touch and hard eyes and harsh words. The thought leaves him trembling and so damn defenceless when he asks, “Weren’t we going to that gallery, the one on surrealism, before lunch?”
There’s a long moment, loaded with ‘not anymore’ and ‘not ever again’ and ‘fuck you, Zayn Malik’, but all of that goes unsaid. “I don’t want to be with you, right now,” Liam says, and the sunshine and clear sky and macaw staining his skin feel like a taunt. “It would really be best if-”
Zayn swallows the bile at the very back of his throat and reaches for his wrist. “Can we talk about this?” he asks, too calm, and he’s desperate for an ‘I understand’ or even just an ‘only if you want to’. “God-”
“No,” Liam shouts, spinning around and letting Zayn see his flushed cheeks, bitten raw lower lip, wide eyes that say you took what was ours and you made it theirs. “It’s ‘just Liam’, remember?”
And he deflates in front of Zayn, just out of his reach, and walks into the library before he can fight back.
||
(Liam crawls into bed at half three and Zayn cuddles up, wriggling into his arms before he can protest or roll away or whisper ‘not tonight, Zayn’.
“Li,” he mumbles and fingers stutter over his shoulders. “I’m really sorry.”
Then, when he’s feeling braver- “We’re going to get back to where we were. I just want you to know that.”
And it’s a little easier to breathe as Liam presses a kiss to his forehead breathes out a ‘yeah’ into the blanket.)
||
part two
Pairing: Liam Payne / Zayn Malik
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 13 525
Warnings: barebacking. oversensitisation, dirty talk, a little bit of angst, and references to polyamory and pretentious authors.
Summary: "that's how Liam makes him feel - like there's something between them bigger than the rest of the world."
A/N: Pornstar!AU which turned into a Uni!AU. Big love to sarah and cat for listening to me whine about it for forever and a day.
When Zayn was sixteen, he read that ‘the golden rule is that there are no golden rules’, and he thinks of that quote all through high school until he’s eighteen and disillusioned and decides George Bernard Shaw didn’t know anything about the real world.
(later, he’ll find out that Shaw won a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Oscar before he turned fifty, and maybe Zayn should have listened to him instead of the pessimism of adolescence.
But not yet.)
So when he’s accepted into the University College of London, he sets himself Three Rules. With absolutely no exception or asterisk or unless, he (one) is not allowed to pine over some uni boy like a virgin in heat; (two) will never ever read Shakespeare again after he cried for three hours over Mercutio’s death in high school; and (three) will not be reduced to free verse.
Because he’s tattooed and cynical and studying European Literature and three seconds from making the transition from ‘brooding’ to ‘tragic’ and-
- no-
- he is not the Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester of this story.
||
(he is not a footnote in his own fucking happiness)
||
On-campus living is an absolute nightmare which Danny dedicates too many of their last nights together discussing in excruciating detail, all of which end the same way-
(“I will not let you suffer, Z, I did not spend all weekend at a graduation party for you to throw away this phone number.”)
- until he caves and calls Harry Styles, who talks like he’s just deep-throated and says ‘Zayn means beautiful in Arabic, right?’ in this flirtatious voice he’s a little too familiar with.
He meets his four roommates on the first Friday of term in a big, airy loft with windows for walls and bolted steel for doors and a shiny new kitchen. Harry’s decidedly intense and Niall’s all laughter and Louis is this crazy embodiment of summer, he thinks, with tanned skin and eyes like the sky.
The hallway is exposed brick and dark floorboards but Zayn forgets how pretentiously hipster his life’s become when he finds a boy shuffling all the furniture. He’s wearing half a suit (sleeves rolled to his elbows, buttons haphazardly undone) and looks like something out of Zayn’s dreams, with five o’clock stubble and a buzz cut and Usher in the background.
Zayn stares at the tension captured in tanned arms and the gentle twist of foreign lips, reaching for the other end of the table the boy’s lifting. “Hey,” he says, just over the music, “I’m Zayn and we’re sharing a kitchen.”
He smiles brilliantly and wow, he’s almost a traffic hazard. “The literature student?” he says, readjusting his grip to shake Zayn’s hand. His grip is tight and his thumb catches over Zayn’s knuckles. “Liam Payne. I’m studying business and losing years off my life with every passing number.”
“Sounds dreadful,” he teases, and Liam has big brown eyes that crinkle when he laughs. The table is crooked when they set it down. “What is it we’re doing?”
Liam looks a little abashed and grins into his shoulder. “We’re moving all the furniture to the right so the others stub their toes,” he says sheepishly. “It’s payback for dying my shirt pink.”
“You pull it off,” Zayn says - because it’s the truth - and laughs when Liam’s cheeks burn. “Want help?”
The music fades out halfway through, leaving silence and the sounds of the city all around. Zayn doesn’t notice, though, because Liam doesn’t ask about his tattoos and instead talks about worst lectures and horrible nightmares and best memories.
Spring, he thinks. Liam’s like spring. With sunshine behind his eyes and that earthy voice and those strong hands for creating something new.
(it’s a little telling, really, a sign he doesn’t notice yet, because spring’s always been his favourite season)
And that night, between cold sheets which won’t warm up, he thinks he’s a little in love with Niall’s booming laugh and Louis’ frankly alive eyes and the way Harry nuzzles into the crook of his neck over tea.
But that first smile of Liam’s, with the sharp jaw line and loose lips and crinkly eyes, is the only thing on his mind.
||
(later - almost a week later - he learns that Liam is actually all sex. He’s cock and strong arms and a filthy mouth, with blowjob lips and a wicked smile to distract from the press of fingertips along his spine. It’s a total deception and a juxtaposition and it’s incredible, how he’s got everybody fooled.)
||
(belatedly, he’ll realise that Liam’s all warmth, like that ache stinging your skin after lying in the sun too long or the first breath of fresh air after a flight or even the words ‘I’m proud’ in any context.
But not yet.)
||
A fortnight into term and Zayn’s gained a reputation, one that makes him feel dirty and hollow. He’s called all kinds of things like mysterious and exotic and dark, as though he’s forbidden.
(dangerous, even)
It reminds him of high school and that feeling which characterised his senior year, like his skin is too tight around his body, sets an ache in his bones. Acidity coats his lips because it’s not that the rumours are terrible, it’s that they’re so easily believed. Like it’s feasible that he would burn lines of poetry into a hooker’s skin, or get off while some boy is bleeding and crying and humiliated, just because Bret Easton Ellis wrote about it.
He’s a tornado when he comes home, three hours later, after a girl sprawls over his lap and whispers things that turn his blood cold. He accepts the beer Niall offers and the strange threeway cuddle Harry and Louis draw him into before stomping into his bedroom.
Except it’s not his room, it’s Liam’s, with a Liam to match. He’s stretched across his bed with his laptop anchored on hips, wearing chinos and a t-shirt that’s tight all over. The floor is covered by a king mattress on a low, minimalist bedframe with a few dozen throw pillows filling in the spaces between.
It kind of looks - feels - more like home than anything Zayn’s seen in years.
Liam tugs out his headphones when the door’s shoved open and looks at Zayn like he’s staring at his organs, instead. He piles up pillows without hesitation and creates this little nest for Zayn, right beside him.
“So you’re a Marvel boy, right?” he asks, browsing through his tabs while Zayn curls up, knocks against his ankles and slots his hip against Liam’s waist. “Trick question, of course you are. The new trailer for Iron Man 3 leaked today. We’ll start there.”
||
Sharing headphones is as over-romanticised as he remembers from the tenth grade, but there’s something tender about Liam speaking in hushed tones about the cinematography and comic canon with only centimetres between them.
They don’t jump apart when the others come in with pizza covered in every topping (because they don’t know each other’s favourites, yet). Instead, they press close and nudge shoulders whenever it feels right.
“So,” Harry says, a mouthful of pizza with his feet in Niall’s lap and an arm around Louis’ shoulders and no space between the three of them. Zayn considers commenting on it, but then Liam swipes some grease off his cheek with tanned fingers and he decides otherwise. “I’m thinking of psychology.”
Louis laughs, affectionate, and steals all Harry’s pepperoni. “I thought you were in psych already.”
“I’m doing commerce,” he scowls.
“But it was physiotherapy last week,” Liam offers, “and didn’t you apply for engineering on Wednesday?”
Harry jabs him in the ribs and Liam presses into Zayn from the momentum and that pressure is somehow so, so much louder than the laughter of five boys.
They’re drowsy, afterwards, and Zayn’s absolutely incapable of looking away when Liam’s so pliant and happy, so he settles between the sheets and falls asleep when Liam turns out the light.
||
In sixth form, Zayn studied French romanticism while the rest of his class read Robert Frost. Arthur Rimbaud - a libertine who characterised surrealism in imagery for the next century - was his favourite. He described orbits and gravitational pulls and a thousand other things to explain how two people could share a bed and always awake tangled together.
There are also twelve dozen movies where sexual tension stems from an absolutely unavoidable night in bed together, and authors who exploit that feeling, and millions of songs about here in your embrace, so, really, society has predisposed Zayn to expect those strong arms around his torso, or maybe a casual press of their ankles together.
Their reality, though, is waking up on opposite sides of the bed with achingly cold skin. Zayn’s spread out on his stomach like he’s eager for it and he’s not sure what he expects when he opens his eyes, but Liam with a sleepy smile and heat flushing his bare chest pink certainly isn’t predictable.
“Morning,” Liam says, and Zayn will never forget the way his voice sounds. Maybe being a literary cliché would be preferable to Liam’s eyes tracing all his tattoos (even the one that disappears beneath his waistband) like a promise.
Zayn shuffles closer and thinks in poetry (Frost, Auden, Yeats) when Liam succumbs to goosebumps at their touching skin. They watch each other and everything is wintry when Liam flutters his eyelashes, like he’s teasing, and kisses him.
It should feel like a hurricane, with shiny lips and a saccharine taste, but Liam’s lovely with him like none of his first kisses have been. He brushes their lips together until Zayn whimpers at the touch and uses his tongue like an anaesthetic instead of a weapon and just kisses him in a way that feels like worship.
They grin when they separate - a little more aware than they were before - and Liam glances at his eyes, wrists, lips, kisses him hard, and crawls out of bed before he can kiss back.
||
They’re sharing a plate of scrambled eggs over the kitchen counter when Liam bumps their hips together and knocks his fork away.
“So,” Liam says, piling eggs and hot sauce and pepper onto a piece of hot toast and folding it up. He looks a little embarrassed but smiles beatifically when Zayn takes a bite. “Are we going to talk about it?”
Zayn shakes his head and feeds him a forkful. Grease stains Liam’s lips a shiny pink. “We don’t need to,” he says, and Liam looks so relieved it makes his heart ache. “Instead you can tell me why you’re wasting away in business.”
He grins and absently adds milk to Zayn’s coffee, even though he’s had two cups black already, just to calm him down. “I want to be a firefighter,” he says. Zayn stutters over the mental image. “I need a degree first, though, and an in-between-”
I could be your in-between, he thinks, but instead peels off the crusts and feeds them to Liam. “Boys or girls?”
Liam’s eyelashes flutter and his tongue darts out to lick his lips. “Boys,” he breathes, pressing a little closer until their bare ankles knock, “London or home?”
“Right here,” he says without thinking, and it’s so worth the rough laugh that echoes through the kitchen.
Liam’s spare hand absently brushes against his sweatpants. “Giving or receiving?” he asks as he outlines Zayn’s cock, smirks at the stain of precome on the cotton.
The catch of metal against Liam’s chapped lips and the brush of thumb over the head of his cock leave Zayn a little dizzy. “Receiving,” he says automatically, imagining being bent over the table, bitten along his spine, pressed against the shelves of the pantry.
Liam grins like it’s the answer he wanted and drops to his knees with lips dragging along Zayn’s bare chest. He mouths at the Chinese symbol on his hip and traces the shaft with his tongue, tugging his sweatpants down with this filthy noise of achievement and happiness.
Liam’s shamefully and shamelessly good at sucking cock. His lips stretch wide and gorgeous around the shaft and his tongue playfully strokes the underside and his teeth graze against the veins whenever he pulls off. He whispers things like ‘you taste like fucking heaven’ and ‘c’mon, be rough, you can fuck me up’, as though Zayn needs it to get off. Really, the way Liam sits back on his heels and slacks his jaw and fucking takes it, even when Zayn stutters his hips and thrusts in too deep, is hot enough to burn him up.
That’s nothing in comparison to the sight of Liam’s hand stuffed down his boxers, or the peaks of a thick and uncut cock between the silk, or the way he moans every time Zayn touches him. That’s what makes him breathless and he’s close, so close it’s curling up his spine, when Liam pulls right off.
“Are you alright?” he asks, a little confused, with swollen lips and flushed cheeks. His fingers are still grazing over his own cock and Zayn whines at the sight and presses him back down a little too rough.
Liam freezes with Zayn’s cock at the back of his throat and comes all over his fist. He’s pliant, afterwards, and it only takes a feeble hollowing of his cheeks for Zayn to arch his spine and shake against the cupboards.
He blacks out, and when he refocuses, Liam’s licking his thighs with his forehead up against his stomach and a sweet smile on his lips. Zayn strokes his cheek and sucks Liam’s messy fingers clean and there’s a heartbeat where everything stills, before footsteps echo in the hall.
They play oblivious until Harry stumbles out with three mugs of coffee and then Liam’s pressing him into the table, curling fingers underneath his thighs, and sharing the taste of their come while their coffee goes cold.
||
They can’t quite keep their hands off each other at dinner that night. Liam’s fingers are heavy and strong on his thigh and Zayn wriggles his toes against the delicate arch of bare feet and every few bites Liam moans like his steak is an orgasm.
And worse, it’s working, and Zayn’s grinding into his palm and Liam’s mumbling shameless words into his neck and he’s about to wriggle beneath the table and swallow him to the root when-
“Hot,” Louis says, lips stretched into a grin around his beer bottle, “you’re better than porn.”
Liam’s eyes widen and he looks like he might interrupt when Harry laughs hard enough to echo. “Unlikely,” he says, “Zayn comes like Charlie Chaplin.”
He buries his blush in the crook of Liam’s neck and nips the skin red until it swears to bruise tomorrow. “Your mouth is a nirvana,” he says, because it’s easier than admitting ‘I wasn’t sure if you wanted to hear’.
The look in Liam’s eyes hints that he knows, anyway. Fingers tangle in his hair and Liam twists his whole body to create a hollow for Zayn to hide in. “I’m going to get you loud,” he whispers, just loud enough for everyone to hear, “you don’t need to hold back with me, I love your pretty mouth, I’m going to make you scream-”
(they make it through dessert but barely, with exaggerated moans from the other side of the table and Liam’s tongue tracing the shell of his ear in a way that gets him impatient between the sheets an hour later)
||
(Liam’s determined, afterwards. It takes all night and by dawn, their lips are chapped and Zayn’s nerves twitch at the slightest breeze and Liam’s careful hands press calculated fingerprints all over his body.
He’s over-sensitised and weak and so desperate for just one last time, Li, please, please, please, as he arches off the mattress and breathes out a loud whine to match.
A smile presses against his bruised neck and, after they come with shuddering breaths and shaking limbs, Liam radiates smugness so thick it diffuses into his cells, too.)
||
Rule three is broken a month into term. He’s on Liam’s bed - their bed, he corrects, since his books are stacked on the dresser and he has a side - writing notes on characterisation in Dickens’ David Copperfield with his feet in Liam’s lap and the radio on low.
Liam alternates between stealing sips of his coffee and highlighting one of his dreadfully heavy textbooks. He’s wearing Zayn’s glasses because if you wear them I’ll get nothing done and yes that is a bad thing, you twat and his thighs tense in time with the music to press against the arch of Zayn’s foot and it hits him, it hits him like a fucking truck, so hard he doesn’t care how shitty that simile is. T.S Eliot and Walt Whitman and even fucking Carl Sandburg suddenly make sense because he’s so overwhelmed by the need to write about Liam in fractured, pulsing lines, with no rhythm or order.
(that’s how Liam makes him feel - like there’s something between them bigger than the rest of the world)
(like time spent apart isn’t time worthwhile)
He scribbles out be gentle,
be rough with my body, but be
gentle
with me.
and a dozen other non-sequitur lines until the buzz in his fingertips subdues.
The sun is heavy in the sky when he glances up. Liam looks a little helpless and smiles with sugar on his tongue. “I was wrong,” he says, scraping nails against the inside of Zayn’s thigh, just under the hem of his shorts. He squirms at the touch. “You don’t need the glasses to be a distraction.”
He groans and Liam uses the distraction to palm at his crotch. “Horrible,” Zayn laughs. “Tragic. Monstrous-”
Liam huffs out a laugh and their textbooks are shoved to the floor as he wriggles up to bite at his jaw. “That last one was just a reference to my cock,” he teases between kisses, nipping at his jaw.
He whispers a ‘caught me’ and loses himself in the sugary brush of lips and the spicy hints of Cambodian coffee on Liam’s tongue. They’re desperate and grinding when Harry thumps on the door, and the shameless noise Liam makes at the interruption sets his skin on fire.
“We can hear you,” Harry scowls, but Liam’s lips are bruised and his eyes are bright and Zayn doesn’t want to stop kissing him if it means that smile will disappear.
It’s a tangle of limbs as Liam tries to hide his blush in the pillows and Zayn crawls on top to straddle his hips. “Then leave,” he yells back, but he’s too distracted by the slight hitch of Liam’s hips to listen to the reply. Instead, he grinds down and whispers, “hey, remember this morning-”
“When I thanked you for breakfast,” Liam says, all cocky, like this is more familiar than sweet kisses, “with three fingers in your arse and my tongue against your lips?”
He flushes at the memory and clumsily shoves down their pants until he can flicker a thumb over Liam’s foreskin. “And what I said afterwards?”
(“please please please Liam I’m gaping for you don’t you want to fuck me don’t you want to slide in all easy?”)
Liam’s lips twist in affection as he curls an arm around his waist. “Is that on offer?” he asks. He kisses along Zayn’s stubble-stained jaw as they lazily kick off their jeans, tensing like he’s preparing to ambush Zayn’s defences. “Because there’s no way I’m refusing you.”
They wrestle for the lube and Zayn finds it first with his thighs around Liam’s shoulders, but the flicker of tongue over his balls forces a shock up his spine. He drops the bottle and, an obscene lick later, slick fingers circle his hole. One slides in easily while Liam’s busy distracting him with soft kisses against his shaft and another joins to curl against his prostate and Zayn begs for more, for a crooked smile pressed against his thigh.
He wriggles backwards and reaches for Liam, rolling on the condom and spilling lube all over his thighs in his eagerness. Zayn sinks onto his cock in one movement, pausing to kiss the smug grin off Liam’s face.
The first rock of his hips is too slow and too cautious, with sighs instead of moans and hands fluttering over Zayn’s ribs. Somewhere in the middle, they grin at each other and lose the goosebumps and find a rhythm that leaves them breathless.
Liam’s hips tilt and yes, that’s the perfect angle, the one where his cock grazes over his prostate in these teasing, slow thrusts. Zayn gasps and flexes his head back and starts riding him in earnest, Liam’s fingers burning into his thighs.
Strong fingers circle tight around his cock at every noise, so his lips are understandably shameless for reward. Moans and stutters of ‘Li, please’ become his language as Liam jerks him off, rocks his hips, breathes words to drive him insane.
Liam whispers ‘just like that baby, c’mon, get nice and loud for me’ and it’s filthy and cheap but the smile on his face is so sweet that Zayn’s orgasm blindsides him, curls somewhere deep in his spine and heats his blood so quickly it hurts.
He’s still shaking when Liam gets restless, squirming and circling his hips and gasping in syllables.
(the needy ‘oh’ and halves of his name are Zayn’s favourite, he thinks)
Automatically, he grasps Liam’s hands and presses them back into the mattress, fingers twining together. His hips roll, just a slow grind onto Liam’s cock in a way that doesn’t allow him any freedom of movement. Liam looks overwhelmed and Zayn’s never seen anyone so beautiful.
“Zayn,” he gasps, and yes, that’s definitely his favourite. Liam’s fingers curl against his knuckles like he wants to fight back. “Please - just-”
Zayn laughs and he’s mortified at how affectionate he sounds as he stretches down to bite at his jaw. He clenches around his cock and uses his thighs to kneel up until just the head is rubbing against his hole.
Liam arches off the mattress, straining against Zayn’s grip, and every breath is a moan as he comes hot inside him. There’s no real sensation - aside from the jackhammer movement of Liam’s hips and the slow, needy rocks in the aftermath - and Zayn wishes for the feeling of come and lube leaking out his arse.
It’s midafternoon when they finally separate and Liam takes such good care of him. He tucks him under the sheets and makes him another coffee - ‘no milk?’ he teases, and Liam produces one of those little capsules from hotel rooms like a fucking magician - and feeds him a blueberry muffin between kisses.
||
Louis survives his very first week of student teaching in early October and Zayn’s running late for drinks at a bar, distracted by a lazy sketch of the skyline and the increasingly sloppy texts from Liam. His favourites include ‘baaabbbbyyyy i want to kiss ur stupid face’ and ‘maybs we could fcuk by the speakerss??’, both of which he automatically saves for later mockery.
The Dog and Duck is upstairs of some restaurant in the heart of London, characterised by big lounge chairs, shoji screens and floorboard lighting. It reeks of cologne and tastes acidic and would be unbearable if he didn’t receive a lapful of Liam within moments of entering.
“You’re here,” Liam says, sounding so damn affectionate. He’s wearing grey slim-fit trousers and a champagne dress shirt (though that might be stained from alcohol) with most of the buttons undone and the cuffs rolled up to his elbows. He innocently puckers his lips and giggles drunkenly into Zayn’s mouth when he obliges.
He wraps his arms around Liam’s waist and ignores the warm coil of possessiveness when the bartender winks at them. “I promised, didn’t I?” he teases, “in reply to all twenty-seven text messages you sent me.”
Liam looks a little abashed, but still flexes his neck wantonly to expose the collarbone soaked in salt and nudges over a shot.
An eyebrow raises without his permission. “I thought you didn’t drink,” he says as his lips brush over the salt in a kiss. He sticks out his tongue and Liam coats it with tequila, a trail escaping down to his chin.
Smiling lips press to his jaw. “I don’t usually grind, either,” Liam laughs, “so it would appear Louis is a bad influence, because I’m still really into your hips.”
He laughs and obediently follows Liam to the heart of the crowd. In the corner of his eye, he can see Niall and Harry whispering to a leggy blonde by the bar with that one Justin Timberlake song from high school echoing through the open rafters.
There are many things Zayn expects, but Liam pressing his back against his chest and arching to grind against his half-hard cock definitely isn’t one of them. He kisses Zayn lazily between verses and tugs at his v-neck and whispers ‘so don’t give away my love’ against his swollen lips.
And it’s hot, it makes his hands slip from Liam’s tight waist to the very edge of his trousers, but it’s nowhere near as disarming as the sight of pink cheeks and edge of strong shoulders.
The song changes a half dozen times before Zayn realises, and he only notices because of the brilliant smile pressed against his neck. It’s like all the tendons holding this crafted boy together are snapped with chords and a tempo, as the sharp edges of Liam’s spine melt into something malleable and those smile lines around his eyes twist into focus.
He hitches his hips up against Zayn for a moment longer before spinning around and kissing him properly. Liam twines his arms around his neck and dances in that melodic, carefree way Zayn has never quite accomplished and sings along, just under the music. It’s contagious and Zayn’s so damn captivated with the way he giggles, bites Zayn’s lower lip, sings ‘hey sugar, show me all your love’ and smiles so wide when Zayn whispers ‘take me to your love shack’ once he recovers.
They kiss until the song finishes and stumble out the crowd with their lips pressed together.
Louis literally cockblocks them on their way out of the bar, with a palm wriggled between their grinding hips. “No,” he says, pouting into Liam’s shoulder with glitter staining his cheekbones. “Niall and Harry have been coercing a gang bang for me all night and I’m not having your dirty drunk sex disrupting my nirvana.”
They share a grin and sloppily kiss Louis’ fluffy hair in perfect unison, and push together from shoulder to thigh when the frigid air hits their flushed cheeks.
||
They wander around in the darkness for twenty minutes before stumbling into the only restaurant serving at two in the morning - a Mongolian open-grill with no translation in the menu and a group of drunk girls in the opposite corner. Neither of them have ever tried the food, so they steal a menu and a waiter’s pen and circle the dishes which spell out their names.
Zayn’s absolutely horrible with chopsticks, much to Liam’s amusement. His fingers aren’t quite accustomed to the awkward grip and Liam wriggles into the booth beside him, teaches him how to hold and twist and grasp.
“So,” Zayn says, prodding at a soup with pork and dumplings, “are you going to explain your affinity for formalwear?”
Liam grins and feeds him a piece of bok choy. “Depends,” he says, “are you ever going to tell me why your fingers are always stained with charcoal?”
A breath catches in his throat and Liam cuts him off before he can reply. “My lecturer is holding a competition,” he explains, cuddling against Zayn’s frame. “The person who dresses well all year gets a guaranteed ninety on the final assessment. And I like looking sharp. And I love the way you stare at me when I wear a suit.”
An hour later, when Zayn’s forgotten all about it, Liam ducks close and whispers, “I want to know all your secrets” like it’s a promise.
||
The bed is empty when he wakes up late for class, but Liam’s side is warm and there’s a Styrofoam cup with his name, an anatomically correct heart, and an ‘- enjoy your coffee black, I require cuddles and a foot rub when I get home, your Liam xx’, which makes up for it three times over.
||
“What are you reading?” Liam asks one night, when they’re curled in bed with the lights on low and a salty blow heater on their bare feet.
“Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” he says absently, “a caustic social commentary on betrayal. It’s our theme of the week.”
Liam grins, shoves his phone under his pillow like he always does and peppers kisses at the nape of his neck. “Angst seems to be your taste,” he teases. Then, softly, like he’s sharing a secret- “we read Hamlet in school and spent all month talking about betrayal. I think I still have my annotated copy.”
“I don’t read Shakespeare,” he says quickly, and it feels like he’s stretching in his armour, “not since-”
“Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet,” he finishes. He sounds so damn amused and a smile presses to his bare back. “I do listen, sweetheart.”
||
(He breaks his second rule and steals one of the tattered copies of Hamlet from the university stage production the very next day. At home, between the sheets, with Liam typing up a report on his laptop using two determined fingers, he hides the play behind an abridged edition of Anna Karenina and reads with his feet in Liam’s lap.
His absolutely excellent job at playing stealth is shattered when he yelps at ‘than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, and Liam looks up and shoots him this fond smile and Zayn can’t be embarrassed when subject to that look.)
||
That weekend and they’re all stretched across the floor of the lounge room with mountains of textbooks, studying for the exam week from complete hell. Zayn’s editing his essay on contrasts in Russian literature - he prefers Dostoevsky to Tolstoy - and resting his feet in the dip of Louis’ back, stealing glances at Liam when he thinks he can get away with it.
He’s halfway through a paragraph when Liam wriggles close and steals a kiss. “My tombstone will read ‘death by projected revenue’,” he sighs as his stubble rasps against Zayn’s neck. “Remind me again why I chose business?”
“An in-between?” he suggests, and receives a playful nip at his jaw in response, “you could always transfer.”
“To what?” he whispers, wrapping an arm around Zayn’s waist, just under his woolly jumper.
Fingers press into the knobs of his spine and he arches into the touch. “Teaching?”
Liam wrinkles his nose. “Boring,” he says, ignoring Louis’ noise of protest, “and it requires more commitment than I could handle on call.”
“Architecture?”
Liam kisses the words off his lips. “Can’t draw.”
“Massage therapy?” he says, soft, into Liam’s mouth, “because fuck knows I love your-”
“No dirty talk during revision,” Harry scowls from his cacoon of blankets and notes on the Monarchy of Spain.
Liam pauses with his tongue brushing against Zayn’s swollen lips and sighs, wriggling comfortably under his free arm. “Let me help you?” he asks, peppering kisses all over.
He tangles their legs together and passes over a red pen. “We’re looking for awkward structuring. Lebensham said it was the only difference between me and Scott Tolksen.”
Liam’s thigh presses a little harder against his own. “Who’s Scott Tolksen?”
“My arch-nemesis,” he says, “the Bane to my Batman.”
Louis grumbles something that sounds a lot like ‘you’re my Bane, arsehole,’ but they ignore him, knocking their feet together playfully while they read through.
He’s halfway through his second paragraph when Liam whispers, “I have no idea what half these words mean, so you’re definitely going to beat Tolksen.”
He raises an eyebrow and preens when he catches sight of a secret smile. “Which don’t you understand?”
“I could tell you the words I do understand,” he teases, tucked up against his body, circling Zayn’s name and every ‘novel’ and ‘author’ in the opening lines, “it might be quicker.”
Liam pauses over an adjective and Zayn gasps in mock horror at his confused expression. “Eccentric?” he says, and Liam looks embarrassed and mischievous and happy all at once, “as in, synonym of unusual?”
There are three matching snorts of laughter from the other side of the rug and Zayn kicks Louis in retaliation. “Only heard that in reference to Tim Burton,” Liam laughs. “How about ‘discernible’?”
He bites back a noise of protest and nips at his jaw, instead. “It means distinct - obvious - as in, it’s discernible your future isn’t in literature.”
Liam wrinkles his nose like he’s processing the insult and bucks up against Zayn when he realises the implications. He’s been wriggling under Zayn for the past fifteen minutes and he can’t stop thinking of a very different situation with less clothes and heavier breaths, just like this, with his limbs caging Liam in.
“Well it’s discernible,” Liam says slowly, exaggerating his lips and tongue in this obscene way to shape the syllables, grinning filthily, “how much you want to fuck right now.”
There’s a witty retort on the very tip of his tongue but Liam strokes his jaw, whispers ‘I can’t wait to take you apart’, and he can’t trust himself not to groan if he opens his mouth.
||
Niall finds him on the emergency stairwell an hour later, ploughing through his pack of Marlboros. They watch each other, for a moment, before Niall grins and slides beside him with his legs dangling over the street and a Sterling between his lips.
A sunset later and he presses forward to light his cigarette on the end of Zayn’s. “Alright?” he asks through a cloud of smoke. “You look spooked.”
He shrugs and flicks ash over the rail. Niall doesn’t push - which is maybe his favourite thing about him - just sits and smokes and slumps against the railing. When he’s ready, he asks, “do you ever look up and realise you’re gone for someone?”
Niall grins and tangles calloused fingers in his messy hair. “Yeah,” he says, all helpless and hopeful, “terrifying, isn’t it?”
||
It’s the week of Halloween and Zayn’s not quite certain how the five of them stumbled upon his choice tattoo studio, but he’s pretty sure it involved the promise of pizza and walking the long way to avoid cleaning the apartment. They’re browsing through the wall of art and he’s whispering to Harry about starting his left sleeve when Liam curls an arm around his waist.
“I’ve wanted a tattoo for forever,” he says, soft, like a secret. Lips fumble over his pulse and Zayn wants a kiss, a touch, the sight of ink - something so his - on Liam’s skin.
Somehow - not somehow, Louis-how, as he will take credit for years to come - ‘I’ is taken as a collective ‘we’ and they end up in a neat row of leather chairs, a needle to the skin and an ‘animal, boys, it’s going to be majestically symbolic’ in mind.
With a sleeve rolled all the way to his shoulders and his spare hand laced tight in Liam’s, he explains the surrealist macaw he wants on his tricep, influenced by Van Gogh’s Starry Night, to his artist - this guy with untainted skin and agile fingers. In a softer voice, he explains that it’s not about him, really, it’s about the boy with a big smile and a laugh like May, who redefines vibrancy with every breath.
He watches it knit together, making these appreciative noises when the artist wipes away the ink to show him what’s there.
Liam’s secretive, twisting away and laughing whenever Zayn tries to look. Hours later, while Niall’s busy explaining the polar bear on his thigh, Liam pulls him aside, shoves up his sleeves, showing him the kingfisher bird staining his forearm.
He’s lost on what to say when Liam sees his macaw and-
Oh.
Liam kisses him in this way that makes Zayn feel devoured, his fingers dawdling over the details like he’s memorising the foreign skin.
Louis is manic with glee as he says ‘if you’re a bird, I’m a bird’ like he didn’t make them watch ‘The Notebook’ three times last weekend, but that doesn’t matter when Liam’s pressing his lips to the cling-wrap to kiss it better.
||
The sun is streaming through an open window on a Wednesday in the middle of November. Zayn’s reading the latest issue of Batwing and sketching all over his draft essay on Jane Eyre, and maybe this is where he feels most comfortable, surrounded by all his favourite things.
(literature and comic books and coffee and sunshine)
(and Liam)
He feels Liam before he sees him, a taut stretch of muscle pressed against his back as a hand sneaks under his shirt and another adds milk to his espresso shot on the floor. The noise of discontent that escapes his lips is lost when Liam bites his neck.
Zayn’s breathing heavy by the time they kiss properly and he loses himself in the fingers buried in his hair, hips grinding him into the mattress, the smiles between kisses.
Liam stills against him and laughs softly into his mouth at Zayn’s noise of protest, pulling away to tongue at his neck. “Is there a chance you drew that?” he asks, fingering at the page, and Zayn loses all his dignity in a heartbeat. He twists and wrestles and fights dirty for the drawing, sneaking kisses and tangling their legs together and marking him up the way Liam loves best.
When they pause, he’s straddling Liam’s hips with his glasses askew and jeans shoved down to his crotch. Liam’s cock is hard against the back of his thighs and the sketch is in his hands and when Zayn holds him down, his hips pulse.
“This is incredible,” Liam says, almost like a prayer, and kisses him hard, “you’re so fucking sexy like this.”
He bites Liam’s lower lip and tightens his grip in response and uses too much lube, later, in eagerness, when he holds Liam down and rides him in slow rocks of his hips which have them both writhing.
||
Afterwards, when Zayn’s milky coffee has gone cold and they’ve taken to kissing words in Morse code against each other’s lips, Liam asks, “so drawing, hey?”
Zayn blushes and squirms against his sweaty chest. “Kind of.”
The next string of kisses along Zayn’s collarbones feel a lot like an S.O.S. “You never told me. What’s the story, morning glory?”
“No story, really,” he says, quiet, into the hollow of his neck, “I’m doing a double degree. The graphic design term is over the summer.”
Liam hums a chorus by Oasis - don’t look back in anger, Zayn thinks - and tightens his grip around his shoulder. “So damn talented,” he laughs, sounding a little awed, “you’re so wasted on me, Zayn Malik.”
Something sweet curls around his spine as they press their lips together. It’s boiling him from the inside out, and Zayn’s grinding into his hip and moaning into his chest when Liam whispers ‘draw me like one of your French girls’ in this silly falsetto designed to ruin the mood and break his heart.
||
(“What’s with the coffee ?” he asks that night at dinner, with Niall perched on the counter and Louis between his thighs, tanned fingers sliding up pale legs when he thinks they won’t notice. “The milk, I mean.”
Liam’s unfathomable in that moment, this blur of embarrassment and affection and a hint Zayn can’t name yet. “Maybe I’ll tell you, one day,” he laughs, with this shy smile that warms his cheeks. Then, to distract him, “if you two are getting off, please wait for Harry to get home or he’ll sulk all weekend.”)
||
In retrospect, Zayn should have expected this. He feels too happy walking through the campus with Liam holding his hand, too much like himself, so it’s fucking obvious that it’s this moment (with visible breaths and dew under their feet and a smile like sunshine on Liam’s lips) when it all shatters.
“Zayn Malik!” he hears, and Indi, this girl with big lips and bigger hair and who finds every opportunity in tutorials to talk about Shakespearean sonnets, stumbles out of the tech centre. “Who is this and should I bother learning his name?”
He glances at Liam with a ‘this is’ on his tongue and realises how absolutely inadequate all the adjectives formed with tongue and teeth are, where la petit mort no longer feels like a reference to sex but to the way his heart skips at the sound of Liam’s voice.
“It’s just Liam,” he says, thinking of that one Spanish author who wrote that a lack of definition is the sincerest form of identity, and at that raw hour of the morning he can’t help but think that maybe (just maybe) Liam is too pure to be attached to his reputation.
(the studiously blank look on Liam’s face suggests it’s all lost in translation, though)
The conversation ends rather abruptly and Indi walks away first, leaving Liam and Zayn and the galaxies between them.
Liam uses his long legs to his advantage to walk away and something in Zayn just collapses. “I think I’m going to go study,” he says as he jogs across the frosty lawn, so far away for maybe the first time.
Zayn follows and can’t help but think that maybe the whole world is right about him and his calloused touch and hard eyes and harsh words. The thought leaves him trembling and so damn defenceless when he asks, “Weren’t we going to that gallery, the one on surrealism, before lunch?”
There’s a long moment, loaded with ‘not anymore’ and ‘not ever again’ and ‘fuck you, Zayn Malik’, but all of that goes unsaid. “I don’t want to be with you, right now,” Liam says, and the sunshine and clear sky and macaw staining his skin feel like a taunt. “It would really be best if-”
Zayn swallows the bile at the very back of his throat and reaches for his wrist. “Can we talk about this?” he asks, too calm, and he’s desperate for an ‘I understand’ or even just an ‘only if you want to’. “God-”
“No,” Liam shouts, spinning around and letting Zayn see his flushed cheeks, bitten raw lower lip, wide eyes that say you took what was ours and you made it theirs. “It’s ‘just Liam’, remember?”
And he deflates in front of Zayn, just out of his reach, and walks into the library before he can fight back.
||
(Liam crawls into bed at half three and Zayn cuddles up, wriggling into his arms before he can protest or roll away or whisper ‘not tonight, Zayn’.
“Li,” he mumbles and fingers stutter over his shoulders. “I’m really sorry.”
Then, when he’s feeling braver- “We’re going to get back to where we were. I just want you to know that.”
And it’s a little easier to breathe as Liam presses a kiss to his forehead breathes out a ‘yeah’ into the blanket.)
||
part two