15
ELEVEN YEARS EARLIER
Igo to meet Zayn back under the gazebo the following Tuesday.
“You’ve read it?” I ask when I arrive, dumping my bag next to his and picking up the heavy tome from beside him. Anticipation at seeing Zayn again had danced deliciously in my tummy all weekend. We hadn’t discussed it, but for some reason Iknewhe would meet me back here today.
“Twice,” he shrugs casually, leaning back against the concrete steps. “I liked your little notes.”
My cheeks flush as I sit and rest the book on my lap, flipping through the pages absently. I stop on a page and notice the clear, neat scrawl of a black pen. “You added to them?”
“Do you mind?” Doubt shadows his words as he shuffles slightly in his seat. “Kind of felt like we were reading it together.”
My heart expands inside my chest, and I have a suddenurge to devour the book again and all of Zayn’s thoughts along with it. “I don’t mind at all.”
They were the first of many marks he would leave on my heart.
I open to a random page, seeing instantly it’s when the golden trio is captured and taken to Malfoy Manor. Next to where I’d noted ‘Hermione saves the day again’ Zayn had written, ‘The real hero?’”
A smile spreads across my face. “Hermione is the ultimate hero though, right?” I laugh, watching as Zayn’s shoulders relax. “Harry and Ron would have had their asses smoked by Voldemort at every turn if not for her brilliance.”
Zayn pretends to flinch. “Do not speak his name.”
I burst into laughter as Zayn works hard to keep a straight face, but the ghost of a smile plays around his lips as he watches me struggle to regain composure, my heart soaring up in the clouds that not only is Zayn the most gorgeous boy I’ve ever met, but he understands my love of Harry Potter.
Just like that, without even realising, I had taken the first steps toward the edge of a cliff. I was about to fall head over heels over it.
Zayn meetsme at the gazebo every Tuesday and Thursday for the next few weeks, where we spend the time together studying, reading or talking about life in general. We cover topics as trivial as food and the books we’ve read, to things more deep and meaningful, like religion and what we think happens after death.
I tell Zayn my family is Italian so we’re Catholic.
He tells me his mum is Middle Eastern; hethinkshis dad is Spanish (he’s never met him), and the only higher power his mum believes in is the God she hallucinated once when she was high on methamphetamines.
He means it as a joke, but the hostility in the set of his jaw when he says it dumps a tonne of lead in my stomach. He often drops little snippets of his home life into our conversations, then changes the topic before I can enquire further. I want to ask him about it, but I’m scared I’ll frighten him away if I start probing into something he clearly doesn’t want to talk about, so I don’t.
Not only is Zayn cute, but he’s smart. Like, really smart. I guess he spends most of his time with his head in a book, and not the kind of books I read. I’m talking books about science, engineering and history. The kind I only ever pick up if I have to for school. Sometimes I read pages over his shoulder but give up after a few minutes because I have no idea what the heck I’m reading. I can sit for hours and listen to him tell me about things I would otherwise find boring. He has a way of making everything that comes out of his mouth sound like the most interesting thing in the world.
It doesn’t take long for our extra-curricular activities to bleed into school hours. I sit next to Zayn in every physics class. Then, we start making plans to meet in the library during study period, and sometimes even before school. He doesn’t have a phone, which throws me when he first tells me.
How could a seventeen-year-oldnothave a phone?
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out his mum can’t afford to buy him one, so I am quick to shrug it off like it isn’t a big deal. Before long, I start to bask in the romance of it all. Zayn is inaccessible when I’m not with him, and it makes me crave him even more. I can’t text him random thoughtswhen they pop into my head, I have to remember them all until I see him. We can’t text to make plans to see each other, we have to pre-arrange a time and place and keep it. His essence sinks under my skin, and in the years to come when I’d look back at this time in my life, I would think how falling in love with Zayn smelt like jasmine blooming along the school walls in spring, it felt like the kiss of sunshine on my cheeks as we walked together between classes, it tasted like the cookies we’d share from the school cafeteria.
An explosion of senses, Zayn wakes me up to them all. He’s different. There is something about him that sings to my very being. My mind, my body, my soul is drawn to him like he is gravity and I am a thousand tonnes of lead. Nothing else in the world exists when his eyes are focused on me. His dark gaze, so full of mystery I am afraid I will never fully uncover, makes my heart physically hurt like someone has plunged their hand straight into my chest and squeezed. It’s overwhelming, like a tsunami has swept over me and I’m left swirling around in the swell for days, weeks, months with no way to plant my feet back on solid ground. But I relish in it. Give in to it. Recklessly, I let the current take me, and I don’t even care if I drown.
Most dayswe eat lunch together with our friends on the grass under the leafy green canopies of the Weeping Peppermint trees. Anna and Zayn, both exceptionally intelligent and fluent in their preferred language of sarcasm, spend countless hours playfully bickering over, well, anything and everything. Then once Percy, now known amongst us affectionately asWeasley,gets over his initial awe that someone as gorgeous and popular as Anna wantsto sit and eat lunch with him, we become a little foursome. I am content in those hours to sit on the grass with my back resting against Zayn’s chest and his fingers in my hair. Those happy, carefree days have become some of the best memories of my life.
Occasionally there aredays where Zayn comes to school with dark bruising adorning his face. His mood darkens, a grey storm cloud swirling around him like an aura, and there is an unspoken agreement between us all that Zayn and I spend lunchtime together, just us two, in whatever vacant classroom we can find. He isn’t good company those days, not that I ever expect or push him to be. He never wants to talk about his bruises, but there reaches a point where I can’t stay silent any longer.
“Who does this to you?” I ask on one of those days, when we are sitting alone in a classroom. The room looks like it was abandoned quickly once the lunch bell rang with chairs untucked, pens strewn haphazardly across desks and an unsolved algebraic equation still scrawled across the white board in red pen. My throat is dry and hoarse from earlier when I’d seen Zayn’s black eye and cut lip, had run straight to the girls’ bathrooms and screamed as hard as I could into my balled up school jumper. It’s becoming harder and harder to contain my grief and fury that someone hurts him in this way.
Zayn rubs his finger over a little stick figure that has been graffitied onto the desk in front of him with permanent marker, his jaw clenched so hard I am sure he is wearing down his back teeth like chalk.
“My mum’s boyfriend,” he replies darkly, refusing to lift his gaze from the desk. “He would rather I wasn’t around.”
I hold back a sob like my life depends on it. I know the last thing he wants is my pity, but I don’t know what to do with all this grief building inside me.
The way Zayn speaks about his abuse, so calm yet resigned to his situation, makes me reach out and take his hand. It’s warm and huge against my own as I curl my fingers around his palm. The only contact we’ve had so far is holding hands, and even through the sorrow that drenches my heart, I feel the usual spark of electricity that lances up my arm every time we touch. It works its way up, hitting my chest like a taser before shockwaves echo throughout my body. It doesn’t matter what I’m thinking or feeling, my body responds to his touch like it has a mind of it’s own.
