Brenda wanted a normal school year. Instead her mom died.
Salma needed space from her sister and terrible ex. Or else she'd lose her mind.
Delilah didn't think she'd have any more problems after moving far from her hometown. That was until she becam...
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❝Truth without love is brutality, and love without truth is hypocrisy.❞
—Warren Wiersbe
💔 BRENDA 💔
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"It's not real," Ziyan explained for a second time, but this didn't sink in differently than when he first explained that none of his tattoos were actually tattoos. "None of them are."
Tomorrow was the start of the weekend, and like clockwork, I was back in his room. We'd spent the last week and a half hanging out in each other's room, watching videos and talking about the hectic nature of midterms. I was sprawled on to my belly, lying on the carpet while propped up on my elbows.
Ziyan was close enough that I could comfortably rest my hand on his cheek, if I wanted to that is. But there wasn't a single part of our bodies that were touching, yet the anxiousness between us would've argued otherwise. Since that night in his room when we found out about Jaxon's accident, we hadn't gotten to that point of contact. I blamed it on my lack of conviction and Ziyan's inability to make that first move that would forever change the foundation of this house. For the best, we floated in a realm of friendship that didn't push the envelope.
"I'm going to need you to backtrack," I breathed, briskly swiping my hair out of my face to get a better look at the markings on his skin. The depth of the black on his skin was too rich in color to be fabricated. "I don't believe you."
"I had one tattoo, two years ago, right above my left hip," he said, lifting up his shirt to reveal a scar the size of his index finger. "I got it surgically removed from my skin."
"What?!" I yelled. "Why would you do something like that?"
"It's a long story that I think would leave a bad impression on my father."
"I want to know." I inched in closer to him, batting my lashes, "Please, you can't show me a scar like that and shrug it off. What happened?"
"In order for you to understand, you have to know the rules of Islam. For you to pray, you have to do a process of purification that's called wudu. You wash parts of your body from your head to your feet. For women, if you're menstruating or even have nail polish, you can't pray. Wudu would be counted as invalid. With tattoos, it's seen in the same vein. In my religion, it's considered self-harm and unclean to the body. That isn't to say there aren't people who still pray with tattoos, though. They exist as well."
"But you call these tattoos," I hummed, touching the marking on his forearm, nervously snatching it away when the intensity harbored behind his looming gaze grew to an unbearable temperature. "They aren't."
