My cheeks flame with anger. “Am I wrong? How else would you have found my advertisement if you weren’t looking for an escort?” I snap, tucking my frozen fingers into my jacket as my ponytail whips around my face, sending tendrils free in all directions. “And tell me,Zayn,what would you have done if Ididrecognise you that night?”
This time I step forward until the toes of my white sneakers touch his and my neck is craning to look up into his narrowed eyes.
The heavens choose that moment to open, and rainpounds the roof, concrete and grass setting off a cacophony of loud noises around us.
“I wanted you to recognise me,” he grits out between clenched teeth. “I found youradvertisementby accident, Gianna. A colleague planning a bachelor party sent it to me,that’show I found you. I’ve never paid for sex in my life, and have no fucking intention of starting now.”
Jealously roars through my veins at even the suggestion of him having sex with other women, even though I know he obviously has been. It throws me, and for a moment I can’t think straight as I blink through the green haze that’s swept over me and left a bitter taste in my mouth.
“And then what? What was the plan once I realised it was you? A slumber party to catch up?” I scream over the noise, balling my hands into fists inside my jacket. “How could you let it go that far knowing I didn’t recognise you?”
He runs a hand through his black strands. Another chink in that armour.
“I was fucking angry, Gianna!” He seethes, stuffing his hands back into his pockets. “You didn’t even recognise me, when your face is the only fucking face I’ve seen for the last ten years.”
He turns his head away from me to look through the sheets of rain falling over the green field.
I ignore the way his words work their way under my chest bone and sink into my heart. He left and didn’t come back. His words mean nothing to me.
“Then you fucking snuck out of the hotel room before I could to explain,” he continues slowly, his shoulders tense as he runs his tongue over his teeth. “The woman wouldn’t give me your number, no matter how much money I offered her, and I knew I couldn’t find you anywhere else online because I’ve been trying forten fucking years.”
He slides his dark gaze back toward me, and there’s so much heat behind his eyes it makes me flinch away. He tried to find me? Thenandnow? I look to the ground, to the dark blue ink stain that still hasn’t lifted since the day we accidentally created it, but a memory of us making out under this very gazebo is the last one I want to be conjuring up in this moment.
“Then let me guess. I happened to walk into your law firm. Your colleague is called David, the one who burst into your office that day, and he wassupposedto be my lawyer until you realised and intercepted my case.” I had put that little piece of information together myself over the last few days. Something about the phone call the secretary received while I was waiting in the reception of Zayn’s law firm.
I may have also googled David O’Leary and recognised the LinkedIn photo.
It also explains why Zayn was so adamant about taking on my case. He hates Daniel, and I’m sure this is a nice little way to serve some revenge for the way Daniel treated him in high school.
“I was planning on telling you. I was just waiting for the right time.”
“Sure,” I say, glad for the first time my voice has some semblance of control. Sometimes in my darkest moments I would let the box that contained my memories of Zayn open a fraction, and I would ponder what he had been doing since he left. What kind of life he lived, if things got better for him. And on the blackest of days, I’d wonder if he had moved on with someone else. I’m not naive, I knew he wouldn’t have been celibate since he left, but knowing he was touching another woman the way he used to touch me would cause such a visceral pain in my chest that I didn’t let my mind wander down that path often. Now, envisioningZayn, more beautiful than I could have ever imagined, touching other women is the only thing that helps me cling on to my control. It helps me to separatemyZayn from the Zayn standing before me.
I don’t know what Zayn reads on my face, but his anger recedes slightly as his jaw works back and forth.
“Gianna, let me expla-”
I cut him off.
“I don’t need the excuses Zayn. It’s been ten years and we’ve both moved on.”
My voice cracks, but I push through. “Please don’t reopen old wounds when it changes nothing of the past.”It might shape the future, and I won’t survive you twice, I want to say, but I can’t. The rain chooses that moment to ease into a drizzle, and I take the opportunity to move past Zayn towards the path I’d walked a thousand times as a kid. As I hurry back up the dirt track and then onto familiar streets, I can’t help feel like I’m leaving Zayn in my past once again.
At least this time it’s on my terms.
13
There’s something to be said about finding yourself in the exact same position you were in eight years ago. I don’t just mean figuratively, but literally, as I sit in the second row, second seat across in the old Susan Hall Lecture Theatre at Melbourne University. Always my preferred seat when I started my marketing degree all that time ago.
Figuratively too, as I admit that so much has changed in that time, but really, nothing at all. If you told me back then that years from now I would be sitting in the same seat, separated from my husband, no job, no money and starting my degree from scratch, I would have laughed in your face. Now I don’t find anything particularly funny about my situation at all. But still, underneath all the disappointment, there’s a flutter of excitement at the fact that I’m at least making progress. Deciding to come back to uni and start my life again has evoked an overwhelmingly freeing sensation within me, and I’ll be riding on the coattails of that feeling for as long as I can. That also includes stuffing away and ignoring anything that tries to ruin my newly found high,including certain ex-boyfriends that choose to reappear in people’s lives and hack open old wounds.
The lecture hall slowly fills around me as I unpack my notepad and pen, and it hits me howyoungeveryone looks. I’ve become the dreaded mature-aged student.
As the seconds tick down to 9 a.m., I pull out my compact concealer and check my face in the tiny mirror, making sure my bruising is still completely covered by makeup. Check. It should hold fast for at least a couple of hours, like it did yesterday for family lunch. My family is completely unaware of my volunteer work at Hope House. Telling them would raise way too many questions about my motives.
Regardless, I still had to awkwardly explain why I ran from lunch a week earlier, which I lamely blamed on a hangover. A lecture from my parents about how I’ve been drinking way too much alcohol lately beats admitting to them that Zayn was my first love. The one I snuck around dating for six months right under their noses without ever breathing a word of his existence to them. Yeah, that would have gone down as smoothly as swallowing a cactus.
The lights dim just as I snap my compact closed and pop it back into my tote. The professor now stands before the projector, and my mouth falls open.
