CHAPTER 4

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بسم لله الرحمن الرحيم
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Lagos, Nigeria.
2012.

The smile on Maliya's face gradually thinned the more the cold dark orbs stared at her icily.

The moment, even though brief, seemed to stretch on for eternity, and the feeling of normalty seemed strange in the next moment.

An ice cold impulse ran down the length of her spine, goosepimples erupting all over her body.

That look.

It depicted an emotion, rather lack thereof.

It was an unreadable look, but at the same time spoke volumes, an oxymoronous look one could call it.

His lips parted as the pearly whites which used to gleam at her peeked out, his lips rounded and flattened, his pink tongue running over the length of his lower lip.

It took a couple of seconds for Maliya to register that he had indeed been saying something while she  deriliously scrutinized his face.

She was pulled back to reality just in time to hear him order them to get on their knees.

The sound of furniture scraping filled the whole class as people made space for themselves in between their desks and chairs.

Maliya's eyes never left Rayyan's throughout the time her knees lowered to the hard concrete ground beneath her.

Once on the ground like everyone else, Maliya closed her eyes, overly conscious of a gaze that threatened to penetrate through her skin.

Her heart clenched painfully beat after beat, and tears met the inside of her eyelids.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to swallow the sob that threatened to escape her mouth.

Even without knowing she realized, Maliya had been hoping to meet him again, anticipating seeing him at least once before he would leave for the university.

She could feel her heart thumping wildly in her chest, painfully palpitating in a way one would assume it wanted to be free of its cage.

Maliya lost track of time soon after her thighs began shaking. The miniscule atoms of the crushed cement had penetrated into her skin.

Trying to balance her weight equally on her two knees (which she later concluded was probably the worst thing to have done), she ended up embedding the stones deeper into her knees.

She squeezed her shut eye tighter trying to get rid of the images that had begun to resurface.

A tap on her shoulder snapped her out from the mental prison she was stuck in, and for the second time that week everyone's gaze was on her.

Everytime she read a book and the characters 'seemed to have disappeared to another world where only they existed ' she would roll her eyes, sighing at their absurdity.

It was no wonder she felt stupid when she fell into the same trance.

She slowly got up from the floor which was now dotted with patches of crimson.

She cleaned her knees while getting up, forcing herself not to look up, the sob that threatened to escape her mouth fought till it eventually did.

And in the next few moments, she was full out crying, the tears she had tried to suppress rolled down her cheeks, and the more she tried to keep them in, the more her heart pained.

She cried not because of the punishment, but because of the person that had inflicted it on her.

She couldn't bring her self to look up into his eyes, but she desperately wanted to confirm that he was the one who caused her pain.

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