Storms {z.m.}

Chapter 32

Chapter 32 – Christine

(Thanks so much for 15 votes guys OMG! Just remember the faster you vote the faster I update! I would love if for every chapter I posted, you guys could share this story with 1 friend. That’s all I need! If for every chapter from this point forward you guys shared with one friend then I would be able to get much more traffic and votes to this story, and it just snowballs from there. So please try this for me! Also, I made a short little vine trailer for storms that you should be able to watch above if i did this correctly so please let me know your thoughts on that! I'm working on a longer more elaborate one as well :3)

Seeing Zayn cry makes me want to cry even more. If I wasn’t drowning in my own self-pity I’d drop everything and run to him and find out what’s wrong, but right now I don’t have the energy to do that. My phone call with Poppy has left me completely drained of all happiness and joy I felt only moments earlier. Now all I have is hope, and little at that.

A part of me wants to rendezvous with Zayn at the spot where the fence between our homes is missing a plank, just like we used to since we were kids. When we were little we would sit cross-legged and look at each other, but when we got older we just started leaning our backs against the fence. The missing plank made it so that the back of our heads touched. We would sit there for hours sometimes, just talking about everything and nothing at all. I can’t remember all of our conversations but I do remember how I felt when he said my name and I felt the slight vibration of the words leaving his mouth...

“Have you ever wondered how many stars there are out there?” I heard Zayn say from the other side of the fence. I could hear him ripping grass out of the lawn as he did every time we sat here.

Zayn always talked about the most random things. At least they seemed random to me. I’m sure they made sense to him. It was as if he was trying to find the answer to a big question by asking all the little ones. Sometimes I tried to piece together what he was trying to find out, but I never got very far. It didn’t bother me, though, I’m just glad he was talking at all. After his father died he became more introverted. He still smiled brighter than the sun, it was just harder for that sun to shine through all the clouds of grey that seemed to hang over his head nowadays.

“Nineteen, I think,” I say tilting my head back even though he can’t see me. The short hair on the back of his head tickled the area on the back of my neck and I felt my nerves light on fire at the slight contact.

“Oh my god. I remember that. I wish things could go back to how they were back then…” I hear him trail off.

When we were 7 or 8, Zayn and I were laying down on either side of the fence and we attempted counting the stars in the night sky. Zayn got to 19 before I made him stop because I had already grown bored. From that day, we decided that for as much as concerns us, there are only 19 stars in the universe that are visible from Bradford. Whenever things got bad, Zayn and I would make a wish to our nineteen stars. It was like having a falling star that was available at any time of the night. It was foolish, but it was something we believed in so strongly. Somehow our tradition gradually faded out, but it was never too late to bring it back.

“Well you could wish upon our nineteen stars, Zen,” I said in a slightly comedic tone, even though I was hoping he would. His father’s death has been so hard on him, and I know that no one ever really gets over the loss of a parent, but I just wanted him to go back to normal. I wanted my Zayn back.

“It doesn’t work that way, Crissy. We’re not 7 anymore. It’s more complicated than that,” his voice sounded so sad. Defeated almost.