Hidden Beneath Brown Eyes (A Zayn Malik Fanfiction)

Chapter 59 - Freedom

Silence. It's a word, a feeling, a state of being, that I had grown so used to. It was so subtle, yet at the same time demanded all the attention in the room. It was something that needed to be felt, to be acknowledged, to be experienced. It would not allow itself to be ignored, and I've learned that the harder you try, the more aggressive it becomes with making it's presence known.

But within the silence, I found a sliver of comfort. My confession still lingered in the air. It was still fresh in everyone's minds. It had been said, and there was no going back, and while I couldn't speak for Jack or Zayn, I could speak for myself. I could say in all honesty that I felt emotionally lighter than I had in years. I felt like a tremendous weight, the weight of the world, had been lifted from my shoulders. I could feel it within every cell in my body; I was free.

I was free from this horrendous burden that I'd been carrying for the last four years, from the moment I saw that positive pregnancy test. It was like the feeling of seeing the sun break through the clouds after the storm passes. I felt like I could finally breathe, so I did. I took a sharp, long, drawn out breath, and for the first time in four years, I didn't feel a weight sitting on my chest.

I wanted to smile. I wanted to sing. I wanted to skip around the room chanting "I'm free! I'm free!". But as I watched the scene before me, it was obvious how inappropriate that would be. Jack was clinging to the fabric of my jeans, so tightly in fact that his nails had broken through and were digging into the flesh of my leg. His feet were crossed over one another, pressing his legs together so closely that it disrupted his balance and nearly caused him to fall a couple of times. His shoulders rose and fell in rapid movements as his breathing sped up and his heart started to race.

I watched him with anticipation, waiting for him to look at me so I could comfort him, but his gaze was fixed on one person and one person only; and that was Zayn. He was studying Zayn's every movement, from the flutter of his rapidly blinking eyelashes, to the pulsating veins protruding from his hands that gripped each other fiercely. I could tell that he was still in utter shock, and he was searching Zayn for any indication that what I had just told him was true.

For the first time in his life, I couldn't read my son. His expression was so flat that I honestly could not even guess at how he felt about this. He looked more like Zayn now than he ever had, meanwhile Zayn didn't look like himself at all.

While our son now held Zayn's cold demeanor, Zayn himself was at a breaking point. His eyes held a myriad of emotions within the depths of them. They were their usual chocolate brown, but something about them made them exceptionally lighter today. Maybe it was that the whites of his eyes were now a light shade of red, and the edges of his sockets were swollen from the pain of holding back his tears, or maybe it was because he felt as light as I did. His thick bottom lip quivered, noticeably, as if he wasn't even trying to hide it. It wasn't even so much of a quiver as it was a twitch. I was shocked by how easy it was to read him, and by how easily he was giving it all up.

I didn't want to be the first one to speak up, to have all of the anger and confusion felt for the situation to be directed at me, but I could tell by the way that Zayn and Jack continued to look at each other, that hearing a word from either of them would be like waiting for the second coming of Christ.

I reluctantly shifted position, removing my hand from the place it rested across Jack's shoulders, and cleared my throat. I was intentionally creating a distraction so my words wouldn't be the first to disrupt this scene. It was strange, because neither one of them seemed to notice my movement, and I was beginning to wonder if me speaking would even make a difference at all.

"Jack? Sweetie?" I uttered his name softly and sweetly, trying to coax him from his trance-like state, but my voice seemed to carry no weight with him now.