Storms {z.m.}

Chapter 2

Zayn

“Do you want to talk about it?” my mum asks me while looking into her cup of tea.

We're sitting in our dining room table across from each other. She's wearing her work attire and she looks exhausted after a long day of work. It's quarter past six in the evening and I'm sitting in the creaking wooden dining room chair in a pair of old pajama bottoms. I focus on my henna-style tattoo on my left hand to avoid catching a glimpse of the tattoo of Perrie I have on my right upper arm. It would just hurt too much. I suddenly wish I would have listened to Niall when he said “what if it doesn't work out?”

“No. But I will,” I respond, my voice hoarse. It's the first time I've talked all day.

Concern and curiosity battle on my mother's face, but curiosity wins, “Has she called?”

I pull my phone out and check the screen even though I already know the outcome. “No.”

“Have you called?” she asks.

“One hundred and thirty times since Saturday, mum,” I respond with my eyes closed. I don't have to check my phone to know how many times I've called her. The first day I got her voicemail, but I didn't leave a message. What was I to say? The second day the line didn't even ring, it went directly to voicemail. She'd shut her phone off. Today I mostly just called to hear her voice. “Hi, this is Perrie. I'm either not at my phone right now, or I'm ignoring you. Ha! Leave a message and I'll call you back!” The recording ended with a chuckle. The beautiful sound of her voice reverberated in my ears even after I hung up the phone.

“Oh, darling she'll call and explain this all. It will all have been a huge misunderstanding,” she tells me. She grabs my hands in hers and kisses them like she used to when I was a little kid.

Saturday night our management recommended I avoid returning to my apartment in London, and to go back to Bradford instead. They promised to give the paparazzi false whereabouts so that I could have some privacy to cope with...whatever it is this was. When I arrived at my mum's home on Sunday afternoon I went straight upstairs and didn't come out til an hour ago.

“Mum, she kissed another man. Or more, for all I know. I haven't even heard it from her...” I say but trail off when my voice starts to betray me. All of a sudden the numbness I experienced from three days ago disappeared and the pain hit me like an American-make pick-up truck. The air in my lungs was pushed out my some sort of force that made my abdomen contract. I felt the unfamiliar stinging behind my eyes that meant that tears were about to roll down, something that hadn't happened since I was thirteen. The stinging spread throughout my body and it felt as if every piece of my body was being ripped in half many times over. The ink in my tattoos felt like boiling water in my skin and my head began to pound. I put my hands up to my eyes as if that would somehow stop the tears from coming.

My mum must be staring at me like I grew a second head. I am very emotional, but I'm not one to show emotion. I'm still not. Whatever this feeling is, it's not an emotion. It's much, much stronger. It's an absence of emotion. All of the love that filled me when I thought of Perrie exploded inside of me. Then a black hole replaced it and left me feeling empty in a way I had never experienced before.

I felt my mum's warm hand on my shoulder but I shook her off quickly. She said something to me but I couldn't hear her through the pounding in my head. I could hear my blood coursing through every vein in my body and it was driving me mad. I could hear my mother leaving the room slowly. As soon as I heard her bedroom door shut, I began sobbing. I put my head to the wooden table and began to sob so hard it hurt my throat and my eyes. I pinched myself hard under the table in order to keep myself from shouting everything I wanted to shout.

HOW COULD YOU? I GAVE YOU EVERYTHING! I BECAME ANYTHING YOU COULD EVER NEED FROM ME! I LOVED YOU! I LOVED YOU AND YOU DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN.