The Makeup | Five Hargreeves x Reader Story

PROLOGUE

                                Y/N POV

Love. Such a strange, funny thing. It's something people think they can control, but no matter how badly they want to, they simply can't. It's something that happens to them, comes to them... unexpectedly and without any warnings. It's something that chooses them. Hits them like a wreaking ball. Something that changes everything they thought they knew, altering their world into a new, unknown reality. Something that will either make them blossom as a beautiful rose struck by sunbeams on a moist summer day or something that will destroy them like a lethal storm engulfing everything that crosses its path.

I'd tasted both. I flourished like a rose thanks to Five, who was my sun, my moisture, my air... only for him to damage and mayhem into my life, crumbling my word down. I was left with nothing but heartbreak, battling the darkness and pain he brought me. I battled the war between my love and hate. All on my own.

Oh, how I wished I could turn back the clock and go back in time to the day I met him. Five. The day our paths collided on an empty street. The day he nearly hit me with his shiny, black Bugatti, exceeding the speed limit by at least thirty miles per hour. The day when I caught Ben, my then boyfriend, cheating on me with so random girl I still to-this day don't know. I ran bare foot down the street, heels in hand, in a tight black dress with my mascara streaked across my teary face. The day our eyes met for the very first time sent an electrifying jolt through my system. Like nothing I'd ever felt before. If I had known then, I would've run the other way. I would've spared myself the pain he embedded deep in my heart. A heart that was bleeding now. I wouldn't have let myself fall in love with Five , the man I was hiding from now... A man who, despite all the suffering he caused me, still owned my heart.

Love is the biggest paradox. Love is blind to all the red flags, all the warning signs people choose to ignore, blindly believing they can overcome any obstacle to their way to the so-called happy ending together. It makes them long for that person despite all the wrongdoings... because only with them they can feel complete. Without Five, I felt like half the woman I was, incomplete, lacking a piece of me—a piece I gave to him the day my heart beat stronger for him. A piece he now carries and that I have irreversibly lost.

Love... the biggest, strangest paradox of them all.

I sat on the ferry crossing from Sliema to Gozo Island in Malta, where I made myself a new home after... after I lost a piece of myself. After all that happened in New York. Probably, it would start snowing there soon. The trees would be covered in snow, and in a couple of more weeks, the city would glimmer with the Christmas decorations. In contrast, it was still quite warm here, around seventy degrees. But the sun rays sweeping across my cheeks didn't do much to warm up the chilled feeling inside my chest—the feeling that persisted, constantly. As if someone ripped my chest apart and tore my heart out. I felt like I was falling down a black pit, with no hope for the serenity I longed for, no hope for the love I'd had and lost—love that he had once given me. Or so I thought. I felt empty. Numb. Wishing I could stop loving the man I hated with every fiber in me. The very same man who was the father to the unborn baby growing inside of me.

A single tear dripped down my cheek, my eyes glued to a turquoise sea, the sound of its soothing waves echoing in my ears. I placed my hand on my belly which had just started showing, hidden underneath a loose cream shirt with decorative sleeves. A spark of hope ignited within me.

There is hope... growing inside of me.

This baby was my only hope for a better tomorrow. My hope that one day I could smile again.