One Division

Chapter Seven - Turn Around

Chapter Seven – Turn Around

***

I’m praying that your heart will just turn around

***

Zayn had left the room yet again, and Happy sighed a little sadly to herself. She didn’t understand his problem. He’d be sitting there comfortably, doing something with the other lads or doing something on his phone and studiously ignoring Happy. Then, after a few minutes, Happy would laugh a little too loudly or scream at one of Lo’s antics or debate something with Vic a little too passionately, and Zayn would be gone.

She had no idea what it was taking Zayn to stay away. He may have seemed to be absorbed in his emails and texts, but every moment, he was hyperaware of her. It was only a few weeks ago when he could hear her laugh and sneak up behind her, grab her in a hug, press her lips and stubble against her neck, and draw the sound from her again and again. Her presence was beginning to wear on him, and everyone could see it, except for the girl in question because she made sure she looked at every person but him. The worst bit was that her job required her to be around them 24/7, so Zayn didn’t get a single break. How ironic that her one job was to get him what he needed, and all he needed was her – but that was the one thing he could never get.

Victoria heard the sigh and shot Liam a pointed look. A whole conversation was exchanged during the slight furrowing of the brows and shifts in the intensities of their gazes, but in the end, Liam was standing up and chasing after Zayn.

Zayn felt a hand on his shoulder and was ready to brush off whoever had come after him, but felt a strange modicum of relief seeing it was Liam.

“How’d you do it?” Zayn whispered a little brokenly.

Liam’s eyebrows shot upwards, and his hand dropped lamely. “Do what?”

Zayn’s bloodshot eyes from sleepless nights sought Liam’s own brown tones, and his cracked lips released a sad laugh. “Pretend to hate Vic when really it was so far to the opposite.”

The taller boy scrubbed the back of his neck, grimacing slightly at the reminder of what had been his life just a few months before. “To be fair, I was in denial… It took morphine for me to figure it out…”

Zayn’s face turned away at the joke, “So you can’t even tell me.”

“I lied to myself!” Liam blurted out, turning Zayn back around with the urgency in his tone.

“Wh-what?”

Liam scrubbed his face, sighing. He’d done a lot to try to forget and amend what he’d done over the course of knowing Vic. “I lied to myself about how I felt for her. I told her all the parts of me that desperately wanted to get to know her, to hold her, to protect her were really instincts that spoke of hatred. When my gut twisted when I saw her, it wasn’t attraction, but disgust… The lines between love and hatred are surprisingly thin.”

Zayn mulled it over, the tempestuous expression on his face smoothing over as he made sense of it. “Love, huh?” He said knowingly.

Liam’s face furrowed, his cheeks slightly pink. “I mean for you. I know you love her.”

Zayn stood with a slightly wider smile, clapping Liam’s shoulder. “I know what you meant… You really ought to work on that denial thing.”

He reentered the room, Liam in a huff on his heels, just in time to hear Shawn and Happy’s synchronized voices.

***

Happy’s frown caused a worry line to dip between her brows, her normally sparkling brown eyes cloud and Shawn reaches over with a calloused hand to gently sock her shoulder.