Double Standards // ziam

Chapter 15

Without Liam's electric vitality, the executive suite seemed hauntingly empty the next morning. Zayn told himself it was blissfully peaceful and that he liked it this way, but he really didn't.

At noon he and Mary drove to Tony's, where Zayn had phoned for a reservation. A headwaiter wearing the usual formal black was stationed at the entrance to the dining rooms, but Tony saw them and hurried over. Zayn stepped back in surprise as he caught Mary in a bear hug that nearly swept her off her sensibly shod feet. "I liked it better when you worked for Liam's grandpapa in the garage behind us," he was saying. "In the old days, I at least got to see you and Liam."

He turned to Zayn with a beaming smile. "So...my little Zaynie, now you know Liam and Mary and me. You are becoming one of the family."

He showed them to their table then grinned at Zayn. "Dom will take care of you," he said. "Dom thinks you are beautiful-he blushes when your name is mentioned."

Dom took their order and blushed when he put a glass of wine in front of Zayn. Mary's eyes twinkled, but when he left she looked directly at Zayn and said without preamble, "Would you like to talk about Liam?"

Zayn choked on his wine. "Please, let's not ruin a lovely lunch. I already know more than enough about him."

"What, for example?" Mary persisted gently.

"I know that he's an egotistical, arrogant, bad-tempered, dictatorial tyrant!"

"And you love him." It wasn't a question, it was a statement.

"Yes," Zayn said angrily.

Mary was struggling obviously to hide her amusement at Zayn's tone. "I was certain that you did. I also suspect that he loves you."

Trying to suppress the anguished hope that flared in his heart, Zayn turned his face to the stained-glass window near their table. "What makes you think so?"

"To begin with, he isn't treating you the way he normally treats the people of interest in his life."

"I know that. He's nice to the others," Zayn said bitterly.

"Exactly!" Mary agreed. "He's always treated his lovers with an attitude of amused indulgence... of tolerant indifference. While an affair lasts he's attentive and charming. When the person begins to bore him he courteously but firmly dismisses them from his life. Not once to my knowledge has any person touched an emotion in him deeper than affection or desire. I've seen them try in the most inventive ways to make him jealous, yet he has reacted with nothing stronger than amusement, or occasionally exasperation. Which brings us to you."

Zayn blushed at being correctly categorized with the other conquests Liam had taken to bed, but he knew it was useless to deny it.

"You," Mary continued quietly, "have evoked genuine anger in him. He is furious with you and with himself. Yet he doesn't dismiss you from his life; he doesn't even send you downstairs. Doesn't it seem odd to you that he won't let you work for Harry, and simply have you come upstairs to act as translator when Rossi's call finally comes through?"

"I think he's keeping me up there for revenge," Zayn said grimly.

"I think he is too. Perhaps he's trying to get back at you for what you're making him feel. Or possibly he's trying to find fault with you, so that he won't feel the way he does any longer. I don't know. Liam is a complex man. Harry, Niall and I are all very close to him, and yet he keeps each one of us at a slight distance. There's a part of himself that he will not share with others, not even us... Why do you look so strange?" Mary interrupted herself to ask.