Loving You Better

Chapter 67

Layla

They had been driving in comfortable silence for almost five minutes before she decided to speak to him. She didn't want to go anywhere with him neither did she want to talk to him at her home. She was so embarrassed of their minute flat with nothing inside and nothing would have made her step in there with him.

Not after all the shit she gave him about money when they were married.

"Do you remember when my Mum bought that Jo Borkett dress for me even after you told me you couldn't afford it?"

Yaaseen laughed, recalling all the shitty names they called each other that day. "Yeah, I was so pissed off. Then I started screaming at you about how your hair kept on clogging the showers."

"We were stupid, weren't we?" she smiled, looking out the window as they drove through the main road. "It was a really nice dress though." She still had it in her cupboard. As old as it was, she still tried it on and posed for herself in the mirror... not that she would ever admit it to anyone.

"Yeah, it was something else." He needed her to stop talking about that dress. Thinking about the dress only led him to thinking about kissing her in that dress and he should not have been thinking about that... or taking off-

No.

"When I was married to..." her throat tightened at the idea of saying his name, "We saw this table in the window of Bakos Brothers. It was the most beautiful glass coffee table I had ever seen. I swear it was just..." she smiled, remembering how awed she felt. "We loved it and every month we both put away three hundred bucks from our salaries."

She didn't notice the way his knuckles whitened on his steering wheel as she spoke about Ameer.

"It took us a year to save up for that table." She had been running her fingers over the wrist of her right arm, the tell-tale bumps acting as the only reminder of that table. "It was in our lounge and I think I must have cleaned it every second day. I didn't even let the domestic near it. It was my table."

He didn't speak. He didn't need to speak.

He just needed to listen.

"I was wiping down the kitchen table one night and when I turned to switch off the lights, I saw this man in front of me. He was wearing a black balaclava, but I can still remember that he had a pimple beneath his right eye." She hadn't realised that she had tightened her grip around her seatbelt as she spoke, but he noticed it. "I still remember the way he smells."

He wanted to take her hand in his.

Instead, he moved his hand to the gear shift as he moved to fourth gear.

"They shot me that night and I fell backwards into that table." Her fingers grazed over her stomach, over the jagged lines that would always tattoo her skin. "And when I fell, the entire thing shattered, and the glass ripped up my entire back."

"Why are you telling me this?" he asked, his voice tight as his heart beat faster and faster.

"I'm not the same Layla you used to know. I hate looking at myself if I'm not..." she rubbed her hands over her face, struggling to find the right words. "I lost that part of me, Yaaseen and I'll never get it back."

She looked out the window, determined not to look at him. Not to see the sadness and pity she knew would haunt his face.

"The girl you loved isn't here anymore."

He drove in silence, past houses that had become so familiar to Layla. They were not the neighbours she had grown up knowing. They didn't have mansions and manicured gardens. They didn't have two pools and a movie theatre on their top floors and they sure as hell didn't have a show-kitchen worth more than the rest of the house on to never actually use it.

They were just normal houses leading up to her normal, ordinary, run-down flat.

He didn't say a word as he coasted to a stop nor when she got out of the car and neither did he say anything as she walked away.

Not a single thing.

She walked into her flat, her shoulders sagging beneath the weight of her bag. She was happy he was frightened off. It made her life easier if he decided not to go through with it. She wouldn't need to tell him no. She wouldn't need to break his heart a second time.

It was better this-

Her phone vibrated in her pocket and she knew, in the deepest part of her heart, that it was him.

She's still there, Layla. You just don't see her.