Heartstrings ➳ z.m.

nineteen - zayn

Chapter Nineteen – Zayn

            Zayn wakes up to see Skylar, his girlfriend.

            Skylar is his girlfriend. She’s his and he’s hers.

            That thought itself brings a smile to his face, and almost as if Skylar can feel his happiness, she turns to looks at him.

            “Morning sleepyhead,” she yawns, cuddling deeper into his chest. Zayn grins at her, kissing her forehead.

            “Morning.”

            She blinks at him for a moment, and then chuckles to herself. “I forgot that you talk now.”

            “Yeah?” He asks, but his mind is wandering back to the times when he didn’t talk, and why.

            And he’s ready to tell her now.

            “It was a Friday. Friday night.”

            “What are you talking about?” She asks him, reaching over to grab her phone from her dresser. “Curly texted me again, hold on.”

            “That night. It was a Friday.” And Zayn’s frustrated because he wants Skylar to get it so that he doesn’t have to repeat himself. It’s already painful enough to think of once.

            When Skylar hears those words, she looks up from her phone, text message forgotten, and scans her eyes up his face. “You don’t have to—”

            But he does. Because if he doesn’t, he might not say it ever again, and he knows that that’s not okay. He needs to tell someone.

            So he repeats himself again. “It was a Friday night, and I really should’ve been in bed, you know?”

            And Skylar really doesn’t know, but she nods anyway to get him to continue, because she wants to know. She’s wanted to understand Zayn from the very beginning, and though she fell in love with him along the way, that wasn’t her original mission.

            “It was like, I don’t know, around midnight almost. I was still up, and I was just about to go to bed, but I got a text.” Zayn swallows, scrunching his eyebrows as he continues to relay the story. He’s still not exactly sure what words he wants to use, but he wants to tell it correctly. “She—um, Ali, her name was Alison—she had texted me, asking me if I wanted to go to this party. And I didn’t, Sky, I really didn’t, you know that right?”

            Skylar finds his hand, lacing their fingers together and humming in agreement. She believes every word that he’s telling her right now, but she’s still confused. “Then why did you go?”

            “I loved her.” Zayn stops, his heart constricting, his hands running through his hair because no, that doesn’t sound right. He didn’t love her. “I fancied her, I mean.” He had never felt the way toward Ali that he feels now toward Skylar. She was a good friend, yes, and Zayn cared for her, but he hadn’t loved her.

            Skylar nods, biting her lip. She wishes that her boyfriend would just get on with the story, but she knows how hard this is for him, to open himself up and give her all he has to offer.

            “And I really didn’t want to go, because I wasn’t exactly the party type back then,” Zayn frowns when his girlfriend cracks a smile. “Stop smiling; I wasn’t a nerd.”