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The phone continues vibrating on the table, pulling him out of whatever thoughts claimed him. He picks it up with his left hand and answers, lifting it to his ear.
“Hello,” is all he says, never looking away from me.
Almost as though he’s making sure this is really what I want.
That it’s okay.
That I’m sure.
Maybe hearing about Theo and Thalia’s fake relationship—people I don’t even know—planted the idea in my head when I saw Axel calling again.
I don’t know what more he wants.
At the beginning, he kept his distance. Then he started with a few calls, nothing too aggressive.
Lately though, not a single day passes without messages or phone calls.
Messages I only read when I accidentally open them. Calls I ignore every single time.
I just want him to leave me alone.
“Please,” I whisper, giving a small nod to reassure him I mean it.
Silence hangs on the other end of the line for several seconds before a voice finally comes through. I can’t make out the words.
“It doesn’t matter who I am,” Zayn says, his voice turning cold. “What matters is why you’re calling my woman.”
His words send a shiver racing through me.
And he notices.
Of course he does.
His gaze never leaves me.
“I don’t have time to listen to your bullshit when I’ve got a woman like Selene waiting for me to end this call,” he continues. “So you’d better treat this as your first and only warning. Lose her number. Forget she ever existed in your life. Otherwise, I’ll make sure you understand it another way.”
He ends the call, not giving Axel the chance to say anything, and places my phone face down on the table.
“Did you break up?” he asks immediately.
I barely manage to breathe after hearing what he just said to my ex-fiancé.
“Well… yeah.” I lift my left hand between us.
How did he not notice I wasn’t wearing the ring? We’ve spent so much time together these past few days.
“Selene,” he says with a slow exhale, “you wear gloves most of the time, you wear other rings, and he keeps texting and calling you.”
“He texts and calls, asking me to forgive him…” I pause, trying to sort through my thoughts. “Or not even that. Mostly, he just keeps asking me to stop ‘making a big deal’ out of the fact that he cheated.”
“What?”
The look on Zayn’s face is so genuine it’s almost funny.
“Long story short, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the first time,” I explain, surprised by how little it bothers me to say it aloud. “I always felt it over the years. I knew every breakup he initiated was because of someone else—whether he’d fallen for them or simply wanted to have fun. But he always came back with excuses, reasons that somehow made it my fault… and every single time, we ended up together again.”
I pull my hand back and turn to the window, my thoughts drifting to a time when those moments truly mattered, when every one of them felt like the end of the world.
