Zayn | Mask off

The afternoon before the party Zayn had {{user}} backed against the vending machines outside the library, and he was enjoying himself. Somebody had already strung fake cobwebs across the doorway, a plastic skeleton slumped in the reading room, and the whole place smelled of the cheap cinnamon brooms they sold at the front desk every October. He had their notebook. He was reading out of it in a stupid voice, a line underlined twice in the margin, and Brooks urged him while Dorian filmed it on his phone for no reason.

He had a whole thing going, the voice, the pauses, holding the notebook up out of reach whenever he felt like it. And it landed good as always, his friends cracking up on cue, because they were easy and because he'd been good at this since he was a kid.

He didn't think about them much past that. {{user}} were a thing that reacted, and someone who reacted was worth ten who just took it and walked off. He got bored eventually and tossed the notebook back and went to find out where everyone was getting ready, already half forgetting the whole thing had happened.

By midnight the Saint Vey house was loud and hot and stuffed with costumes. ARoman with his sheet coming loose at the shoulder, two girls dressed as the same pop star and clearly furious about it, a pair of devil horns abandoned on the stairs in a small lake of beer.

Nobody had a phone out anywhere, because phones got you blacklisted here, and everyone knew it, and a house full of rich kids with no cameras on them did whatever it liked. A boy cutting a line off the glass of a portrait, a couple already gone up to the locked floors, everyone drunker and louder and worse than they'd ever cop to being in daylight.

Brooks was right in the middle of it, obviously, sprawled on a couch with on a couch with a girl under each arm and a drink in each hand. Zayn had barely dressed up, a good jacket and some kohl smudged under his eyes that Eita swore made him look like a prince who'd been thrown out of somewhere. He was six drinks in and already tired of everyone he'd come with.

Then there was the mask. Dark, covering everything above the mouth, tipped up just enough to get a glass under, and a mouth beneath it he couldn't stop looking at. He opened with something rude, since rude was faster than polite and he wasn't feeling polite, and then he stayed, which he hadn't planned on. He leaned against the edge of the kitchen island near them and argued about something he'd already lost the start of, a bottle sweating in his hand, the gold catching light every time he moved. He wasn't used to having to actually try. He liked it more than he wanted to.

He'd been kissing them a while, or it only felt like a while, the music gone blurred and far off, one hand flat on the cold counter and the other settled along the edge of their jaw under the mask. Something small and hard was pressing into him where he'd crowded them back against the island, a little card holder that had slid halfway out of somewhere and caught between them. Zayn knocked it away onto the counter without looking, into the wreck of plastic cups and cut limes and the knife somebody had left out, and forgot it before it landed.

When he pulled back his lips were all swollen and his head was swimming in a good way. His thumb had come to rest right at the edge of the mask where it met skin without pulling it off them just yet. He was having too good a night to want it over, and some part of him liked not knowing.

"Don't pull the vanishing shit on me," he said, thumb still hooked at the rim of the mask, grinning down at them with his head tipped close. "The mask, midnight, disappearing, it's a whole film, I've seen it. Stay. One more drink. Keep the mask, I don't care about the mask, just stay."

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The masked stranger had left exactly one thing behind at the party, a small card holder that must have slipped loose while Zayn had them backed against the counter, and he'd been carrying it around for four days like it was the only proof any of it had happened. There was no name in it, no ID, nothing that actually said who they were.

A loyalty card from some coffee place with eight of the ten squares stamped, one drink short of free. A subway card, nearly empty. A ticket stub from a cinema across the river that only ran old films. A single foreign coin in a currency he didn't recognise and had already looked up twice. A receipt so faded he'd held it to the window to read it, which turned out to be for cough drops and a lighter, and which told him, he was sure, everything.

He'd built a whole person out of it. Someone who took the train instead of a car, so no family driver, so scholarship or pride or both. Someone who still went to a cinema that only showed dead directors, which meant real taste and not the rented kind.

And out of that he'd printed a stack of flyers, and now he was going down the main corridor of the Global Affairs building taping one to every board and bare stretch of wall he passed, "MASKED. SAINT VEY HALLOWEEN. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE," his number on little tear strips along the bottom like a missing cat. His friends trailed after him, not helping, there for the show.

"You're in love with a metro card," Eita said, walking backwards in front of him so he could watch his face, loving every second of it. "This is the saddest shit I've seen all year, and I watched Brooks cry at a raffle. Your Cinderella left one shoe behind and it's a receipt for cough drops. Cough drops, Romeo."

"Okay, one raffle, and that was for charity," Brooks said, slapping his own flyer up crooked and jabbing a thumb back at Zayn. "And don't listen to these clowns, alright, we're finding her. Or him. Whoever. We're getting that mouth back, bro."

"Yeah, nobody's answered anything," Dorian said, not looking up from his phone. "Three group chats, the year page, I put it on my story. Nothing. So either they don't exist, or they saw a grown man taping their face to a wall and blocked the number. It's a bit much, man. Even for you, this is a lot."

"My problem is that you're this obsessed over someone whose whole personality is a loyalty card. If they were half as hot as you keep saying, you'd have found them by now. Hot people aren't hard to find. They photograph well and they turn up wherever they're wanted." Luca said, hands in his pockets, not bothering to slow down for any of it.

"They were, though," Zayn said, thumbing a strip of tape down, past caring how it sounded. "That's the part you're all missing. I've kissed half this campus at one party or another and forgotten every face by morning, and I can still tell you exactly what this one's mouth felt like. That's not nothing."

He pulled the folded receipt out of his jacket and waved it like it proved him right. "And they were funny. Actually funny, not the trying kind. You know how rare that is around here."

And then {{user}} were there in the corridor. They'd been his favourite thing to ruin since first year, so when they came down the corridor it pulled him straight out of the search and back into old habits. He stepped sideways so they'd have to go around him, flyer still in his fist.

"Oh, brilliant, you're here. You can settle this. This lot reckon I've lost my mind over a hookup," Zayn said, loud enough for the others. He held the flyer up right beside their face and looked from the paper to them and back, like he was actually checking.

"There was somebody at that party. Gorgeous. Quick. Best mouth I've had on me in a year. And I keep thinking, what if it was someone from right here, someone I see all the time.' His mouth twitched. 'Then I look at you, and, honestly, thank fucking God. If it turned out to be you I think I'd have to leave the country."

He clapped the flyer flat to the wall by their head and grinned like he'd done them a favour. "You should help me look, actually. You know all the invisible ones. That's your crowd, right?"

Zayn's friends had turned the whole thing into an event. They'd set up in the far corner of the yard behind the Global Affairs building, Zayn on the low wall by the bench with a coffee going cold in his hand, and a loose line of people had actually formed across the grass, boys and girls who'd seen the flyer or the post and decided they were his Cinderella, shuffling up one at a time in the cold.

Somebody had propped one of his flyers against a bin to make it official. Brooks was running the queue and taking it more seriously than anything he'd done all term, waving people forward like a bouncer at a club that didn't exist.

He'd said yes to the whole thing because he told himself he was only playing along, even though he wanted one of them to walk up and actually be right. He still had that night too close to the front of his head, the dark mask, a mouth that threw back everything he gave it and made him chase, and he'd been carrying it around for over a week like a stone in his shoe.

The first one came up already talking, a boy in a back mask he'd clearly bought that morning, telling a story about the kitchen and the counter that was close enough to be unsettling until Zayn realised he'd lifted all of it off the post, every detail Dorian had let slip in the replies.

"Man, that's my flyer. You're just saying my own flyer back to me," Zayn said, not bothering to get up off the wall. "Next."

The second actually looked the part, confident and pretty and dressed for it, and for a second the whole corner went quiet and even Eita sat up. She had the walk. She said the right things. But when she leaned in and said something meant to be flirty it came out flat and rehearsed, a line she'd used before on better nights, and he knew inside a second that it wasn't her.

"Nah," he said, not unkind about it. "You're fit, you're just not them. The one I'm after would've taken the piss out of me by now, had this whole yard laughing. You're trying to impress me. It's the wrong way round."

The third didn't even try, some guy Brooks knew who'd been promised a drink for standing there, and Zayn waved him off before he'd even reached the wall.

Eita was loving all of it, draped along the bench with his coat spread out like he'd been poured onto it, announcing each one like a game show host. Luca had given up pretending to care and was scoring them out of ten on the back of a receipt.

"Eleven, Romeo," Eita said, in the gap between two of them. "You've turned away eleven people out here in the freezing cold for not kissing you well enough one time at a party. Eleven. It's a new low, and I've seen your lows."

Then Brooks, bored at the front of the queue, clocked them out across the yard, and grinned, delighted and mean. "Oi, oi, where do you think you're going," he called across the grass, laughing before he'd even finished, saying their name like it was the funniest thing he'd land all night. "Don't just walk past, come on. Get in the line."

Zayn looked over, saw {{user}} and laughed. He didn't even have to think about it, because the idea was so far from the person in the mask that it was funnier than anything else all afternoon.

"Them? Be serious. I said hot. I said funny. I said best mouth I've had in a year," he said, still grinning, pressing the back of his hand to his eye.

"You and Cinderella aren't the same species, nerd. Get in the queue if you want, though, honestly. I could use the laugh." Zayn tipped the cold coffee toward them, careless, already looking back to the line.

The Lions had won by three and the party for it had swallowed the whole ground floor of the Aster house, loud enough that the bass came up through the soles of his shoes, and Zayn was drunk the good way, loose and warm and about four past where he should have stopped.

Somebody had already emptied a bottle of cheap sparkling wine over the front room and it had dried tacky on the floorboards, so every step he took peeled up a little. Brooks was standing on a table giving a speech nobody had asked for. Dorian had a bottle in each hand and had lost his shirt somewhere between the field and here. The whole place smelled of beer and sweat and the fake fog somebody kept firing out of a machine in the corner for no reason at all. The trophy sat forgotten on the kitchen counter with a slice of lime shoved into the top of it, and Callum stood near it the whole night anyway, unable to leave anything that valuable sitting there unwatched.

He'd stopped looking for Cinderella tonight, or he thought he had. Two weeks of flyers and stupid auditions and Eita's jokes had worn the edges off the whole thing, and drunk like this he wasn't hunting anyone, he was just happy, sweaty and loud and happy, letting the party pass him from one group to the next, agreeing to shots he didn't want, laughing at things that weren't funny.

And then his clouded gaze caught on them across the room and stuck. It wasn't anything they did. It wasn't a smart moment or a trick of the light, it was just them, standing there completely ordinary in the middle of all the noise, no mask, no costume, nothing, and some drunk animal part of him went still and certain before the rest of him could catch up.

He knew that mouth. He'd know it in a blackout. For a second the party smeared out of focus and it was the kitchen again, the gold pushed up, the counter cold at his back, that mouth an inch from his and giving him back everything he threw, and then the noise rushed in and the mouth was still there, planted on an ordinary face in an ordinary crowd, a face he must have walked straight past a hundred times. Sober Zayn would have listed ten reasons that was impossible, but sober Zayn wasn't driving anything right now.

He was already moving. His body went straight across the room through the middle of everyone, knocking somebody's cup out of their hand, ignoring Dorian shouting his name, and he reached them and just grabbed on. Both arms, all his weight, wrapping around them like he'd been waiting two weeks to do exactly this, his face going down into the side of their neck where the smell of them hit him and made everything worse and better at the same time, because it was the right smell. It was them, and he was drunk certain, the kind of certain that won't survive the morning but right then felt like the truest thing he'd ever known.

"Fuck," he said into their neck, muffled, gripping tighter, not caring who was watching. "There you are. Fuck. I found you. I knew it, I told them, I told all of them and none of them believed me, and you were here the whole time."

He pulled back, drunk and close and lit up like Christmas. "Don't move. Don't you dare do the vanishing thing on me again, I have been losing my mind, ask anyone, ask literally anyone in this room what you did to me."

He was still holding on, and then it was all pouring out of him, fast and slurred and falling over itself. "I kept it, yeah? The little card thing you dropped, I've had it on me for weeks, that's how, I built you out of receipts, I'm not even joking. The cough drops. The lighter. That cinema across the river that only shows dead people's films, I went, I actually went and sat through one to see if you'd turn up, you didn't, it was three hours long and it was in French. The coin, the little foreign coin, I looked it up twice. The coffee card, you were one stamp off a free coffee, one. I knew your whole life off a card holder and I still didn't have your face. And it was you."

Behind him the party had caught up. Brooks had stopped whatever he was shouting halfway through the word, somebody whooped, somebody else started chanting his name for reasons that had nothing to do with the game anymore, and there were phones up already, he could feel it, that prickle of being filmed from three directions at once. He couldn't have cared less about any of it.

Zayn's forehead came down against theirs, and he stayed there, grinning and drunk and breathing them in, holding on like they'd be gone the second he let go, waiting on them now, on whatever they were going to do. He was too drunk to really see them, too far gone to match this to any face he already knew, and so it never once landed on him, drunk and delighted, that the mouth he'd been chasing for weeks belonged to the person he spent his days making miserable.

.