Storms {z.m.}

Epilogue

Friends like him have been a god-sent this past year. If I didn't have them I don't know how I would be able to handle the pain of losing Perrie, my son, and Christine all within a few days. Christine was my past, Perrie was my present, and our son was my future; without the three of them I didn't even know who I was anymore. I searched and searched within myself for any scraps of the person I used to be, but my hands always came back empty.

That's when I started looking outward instead of inward. After spending all of December with my family, traveling through Europe and taking them any place they wanted to go, I decided to do some traveling alone. I somehow ended up in New York City, which was a blessing in disguise. I had never gotten to experience the city whenever we were touring; it was always go-go-go when we were here. But now, I had all the time in the world. I went to history museums and realized I found them boring, I went to art museums and found them extremely fascinating, I went to concerts and became inspired by bands that didn't even have a name, I had thirty-second encounters on the subway that changed my life, and I breathed filthy air that cleaned my lungs. I had found the place where I felt most like me.

By late June I bought a small loft apartment in Brooklyn and made friends with the couple that lived next door to me. Katy and Alicia introduced me to a couple of their friends, and little by little I went from a lonely Bradford boy in New York to a full-blown New York guy.

"That would be sick, mate," Louis says as he puts some milk into his teacup. As he sets the cup down on the saucer he cautiously turns the handle until it's perfectly facing the window next to us, that's when I know he's getting ready to ask something uncomfortable.

"So...have you heard from Perrie at all?" he asks, pretending to be completely engrossed with the placing of the cup's base inside the saucer.

"No, not since we last spoke," I tell him as I take a drink of my soda.

Perrie called me incessantly the first few days after I left London for the honeymoon. I tried to pack up all her stuff before we left, but I couldn't bear to go through everything myself. Liya and Safaa volunteered to do it for me. A few days later, I couldn't take seeing a picture of her and I hugging on our anniversary dinner every time she called me, so I chucked my phone in a trash can in Disneyland. She tried calling Liya and my mum as well, but they didn't take her calls. I don't know how many other ways she tried to contact me before she finally succeeded.

"Coming," I called out as I put on a pair of gym shorts and a singlet. The heat in Brooklyn during July was unreal. It seemed like no matter how high I cranked up the air-con I still felt hot. Alicia's air-con hadn't been working too well the past week so she'd been coming over most days just to play video games and chill out without sweating off half her weight.

She knocked at the door again. "I said I'm comin', alright!" I called from my bedroom. In all actuality, it wasn't an actual bedroom, it more of a balcony that extended over my entire kitchen and dining room and halfway into my living room. I quickly climbed down the spiral staircase that dropped off a few feet from my front door.

When I finally got to the door and opened it up wide, I was shocked that the woman in front of me didn't have Alicia's choppy black hair and tattooed arms, instead she had platinum blonde hair and piercing blue eyes.

"Perrie," I said out loud.

"Hi, Zayn," she said. Her palms were rubbing up against the hips of her black jeans, something I'd come to know as her go-to nervous habit. "Can I come in?"

My body involuntarily began to make way for her to come inside, but I immediately stopped myself. It had taken me months to finally get her out of my system, and my mouth still went dry at the sight of her. I couldn't let her into my apartment after it took me this long to finally get her out of my life.