Z.A.Y.N.

TRACK 11

You speak in dictionaries while fearing less than all will understand

Virgo moon, I'm so used to your dance

Tongue too swole to comprehend
I see you duck and dodge at every bend

Afraid to play your card, be forced to show your hand

I hope you take from this that it'll make you no less of a man

To break your walls and simply grab my hand

Love shouldn't be contraband

It shouldn't trample on your confidence

Shouldn't be seen as less than compliments

Liam turns down the music as he pulls up to the curb. The lights of London's Chinatown entrance gate bathes his truck in red from behind, and for 11:30PM on a Thursday, the surrounding area's busier than Liam would've thought it to be.

Your Uber has arrived. You'll be charged extra if your driver has to wait longer than five minutes

He's about to add the last few digits of his reg plate to the text, but Zain's seen his truck plenty of times, so while it'd go along with the game he's playing, Liam leaves it at that.

✔️Seen

Great, Liam thinks to himself when it's clear Zain doesn't plan on responding. Rolling his eyes in frustration at the man's stubbornness, he sets his phone in one of the cup holders to his left.

"Even better," he mutters when it starts to rain.

The sound that the wiper blades make starts to annoy Liam, especially since it's difficult to find a setting that fits the amount of rainfall. To drown out the dragging rubber noise, he turns the music back up again.

Driving into the city that night was a long drive. Normally this close to solidifying the track list of an album, he'd be listening to the temporary lineup nonstop to make sure he was positive he liked what he'd chosen and that the order he'd placed them in flowed well. Usually the hour drive would consist of that, but tonight he'd opted to pick out songs of Zain's that he personally categorized as above average in complexity, which he can now attribute to their writer getting stuck in poet mode.

Quickly, Liam checks his mirrors to see if anyone's waiting behind him, or better yet, if Zain's jogging from the front door of his restaurant to the truck with his hat catching the falling water. He doesn't see either.

Life for the past forty eight hours has been more reflective for Liam than normal. Ever since Zain forced him to delve into himself and explain what it is about love that gets him to fall so deeply - and stay that way - he found himself constantly trying to come up with different answers.

His last relationship ended almost six months ago and it took the betterment of that to get over it; it wasn't the easiest (it never was), but Liam had gone through worse. See: the break up of 2014 when he drank himself into oblivion for about a month straight after hearing the ever so graceful, 'it's not you, it's me', which really translated to: 'you're getting way too serious for me and we're only twenty one'. Liam understood that; he wasn't blind to his attachment problems, as Zain now knew, but when he was starting to talk to his parents as if she was it for him, having a pair of dry eyes let him down easy was a hell of a lot to handle when his were blurred - then from tears, later from the over consumption of Patron.

The mourning of that two year relationship was much, much harder than this last one, whose ending also involved copious amounts of alcohol, just not on his behalf, and not to cope with the heartbreak. His boyfriend had gone out one night on a stag do for a mate from school and didn't come home until the next morning. Wearing the wrong sized Calvin Kleins. And while cheating under the influence was bad, subtly being told that the way you loved is too much, was a lot harder to stomach.