Storms {z.m.}

Chapter 5

 Chapter 5 – Christine

I felt like my head was spinning but I knew my body was perfectly still. I was tempted to put my hand against the door frame but I was afraid it would make me look nervous. As if the petrification and intense staring didn't give it away enough.

I excused myself using a lame excuse I can't recall muttering and before I knew it I was leaning against the inside of my front door. I let my feet drag until my butt touched the hard wooden floor and I put my hands up to my head.

How can he be here? After all this time, how can he just decide to come back? After I finally rebuilt my life, how can he have the audacity to come back to Bradford?

Memories begin to run through my line of vision; bits and clips of our time together as teenagers. Walking home from school, eating ice cream while watching Leona Lewis win the X Factor, falling asleep on his couch because I was too lazy to walk back home. All the memories were quick, but they felt so close and real.

I didn't just picture his squinty-eyed smile, I saw it as if he were standing in front of me in the foyer of my tiny house. I could hear the sound of his giggle, the one I used to always tease him about growing up. I could feel the prickles of his freshly-buzzed hair as I ran my hand up the back of his head as I did every time he showed up at my house with a new hair cut. I could smell the scent of his cologne mixed with a certain sweetness that was characteristic of Zayn, something I could only imagine came from how sweet of a guy he was.

Zain Malik, my best friend. The guy I told everything to, the guy in who's arms I cried when my first boyfriend dumped me, the guy who went out and bought me tampons when my family was out of town and I couldn't get them myself. He was my everything. I know he loved me as a friend, but I loved him as more than that.

It must have happened sometime when I was15. All of a sudden everything he did became magic. It was as if I had been seeing him with my eyes and all of a sudden somebody put rose-colored glasses on me and everything he did made me love him more.

Our bedroom windows pointed at each other. There was only about ten feet between our windows so sometimes we would open them and scream across the empty space. The next morning we would be hoarse from shouting so much. Whenever I prayed, which wasn't often, I thanked God for the fact that our windows faced each other.

I remember the day Yaser, Zayn's father, died. I was sitting at my desk studying for a maths test I had the next morning and I had my window wide open. The light from Zayn's bedroom turned on and I looked up. Sitting at my desk I could see most of Zayn's bedroom without having to stand up. When I saw him enter the room I instantly smiled and my stomach began to do that butterfly thing I knew all too well by now.

The butterflies instantly went away when I saw Zayn knock over the lamp on the corner of his room. Then he let out a loud scream and tore the giant union jack off of his wall and balled it up and threw it at the ground. He began stomping on it. I stood up with the intention of shouting at him through the window, but nothing came out. I'd never seen Zayn this angry before. I'd never seen Zayn angry at all. He was always so mellow and serene. But now here he was, throwing things across the room and ripping posters off the wall.

I ran to his house and came inside without knocking. I saw his mom, Trisha, with her head in her hands. She was sobbing uncontrollably on the floor, her brown hair covered her face as it bobbed up and down. In hindsight I wish I would have comforted her, but I just ran upstairs and into Zayn's bedroom.

“Zen,” I said as I stood in his doorway. It was a nickname I gave him because he pronounced his name funny. He wasn't wearing a shirt and he was lying face down on the floor. His head came up as he looked at me. His big brown eyes were drained of the anger I had seen a minute earlier and instead there was sadness. Sorrow.

I laid next to him, face down. We looked into each other's eyes and said so much without saying a thing.

Thank you, his bloodshot eyes told me.

I'm here for you, mine replied.

I looked as his lips as he tried to look for words to say. His thin red lips opened and closed several times. He didn't have to say it. A tear ran down my face, then many more came. His brown eyes brimmed with tears once again, but he turned his head away from me so I wouldn't see him cry.

 We both slept on the floor that night. The morning after I stood up to leave, but I took one last look at Zayn's face before I walked out the door. Even though he was asleep, his face was twisted into a frown. I knelt down next to him and kissed him softly on the cheek. My lips were numb for the rest of the day and every time I thought about it my insides turned to mush. I don't know why I did that, but I was glad that I did.