Under Summer Sky • Zarry

34. Eleven

11 years later

Time moves so fast, doesn't it?

Sometimes you don't even realize just how fast it moves until you wake up one day years later and open your eyes, slowly roll over in bed, and realize then that your back really fucking hurts, and that bottle of wine you drank last night? Yeah, it hit harder than you remember it ever hitting you in your youth. And that man you've been married to for the last decade? Well, he is still right there sleeping soundly beside you, but now he's in his mid thirties and you have two kids, two dogs, three cats and a horse.

Plus a constant headache.

But God damn Zayn was aging like he's the human equivalent of wine itself. I mean, he looked better with every year that passed and he did it effortlessly, much better than me, I'd say. I guess maybe a trickle of my former insecurities still lingered inside of me after all this time, but I could never say this out loud or else Zayn would yell at me for putting myself down.

I kept him on a pedestal.

But to be frank I needed a good moisturizer and routine facials from Lynae, my Esthetician, to keep my glow up but not Zayn. Not ever. All he did was drink some water and wash his face with a generic soap he could get for 20 pounds and didn't look a day over 25 most of the time.

How did I ever get so lucky to be able to wake up next to him?

I brushed a strand of dark brown hair from his closed, sleeping eye and moved it back with the rest of his hair on top of his head, which was now growing out longer than it had ever been before.

Our three year daughter Daisy thought Zayn looked like Aladdin and she was right.

And just like clockwork, there she was. She came barreling right into our room that morning with a thunderous run down the hall from where she had woken up. Daisy had on her Marvel superhero onesie pajamas that Zayn got her, with her wild brown hair sticking up everywhere and her round, milk chocolate colored eyes shining with glee, with the slightest eye freckle on the right one.

The spitting image of Zayn.

"Baba!" she exclaimed, hopping onto our king sized bed and crawling up to him as he slumbered on seconds away from inevitable disturbance.

"Baba wake up!" she went on, jumping on top of Zayn now until he groaned, Daisy flashing a bright grin in my direction while I leaned in and the two of us hugged him tight, nearly suffocating him under the covers.

"Go away...I'm a vampire," he croaked, making Daisy laugh.

"Nope, it's Mickey pancake day Baba," Daisy protested, ripping the covers off of him while he slowly opened his tired eyes, a thin smile spreading to his lips.

Zayn always made Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes on Friday mornings. It was his thing and Daisy always knew when it was Friday because she was obsessed with calendars.

The sound of Daisy's voice ringing through the air had woken up the dogs next as their clunky footsteps ushered up the hardwood stairs and now Marley and our newest puppy, Rhino, both pit-bull mixes, had jumped onto the bed in a dog pile encouraged by Daisy and the morning was already starting to get chaotic.

"Okay, okay I'm up!" Zayn shouted.

He began peeling himself out of our comfortable bed as I snuggled up into the pillows with the dogs for a second longer. He glanced over at me with a quiet, fond look, which I returned. God damnit, I still froze whenever I really, truly looked at him.

What a beautiful fucking man. I would never get over it.

I sighed to myself, remembering all the love we made some nights before, but we were too tired to stay up and have sex as of late, and I missed that feeling but life was so hectic these days. I then began eying Daisy, who had jumped off the side of the bed, and was now pushing up on Zayn's lower back, moving him out of the room and into the hallway, trying to get him closer to the kitchen.