Red vs. Black

Chapter 11

"You're supposed to get it in my mouth."

"I'm trying, but you keep moving."

"What a liar! Here, I'll hold my breath."

A yellow M&M sails across Liam's couch and straight into Zayn's right eye. Luckily, he anticipated the rubbish toss and shut both eyelids in protection, leaving him to only feel a light tap. As the chocolate trails down his cheek and into the blanket covering their tangled legs, Zayn lets out a huge roar of laughter.

He missed this - the serenity that comes with dating someone new and being able to find the fun in something as stupid as tossing candies back and forth on a Saturday night with cartoons on in the background.

It's been a couple weeks since they officially became boyfriends, and if Zayn was to be honest with himself, the time since then has been like living on cloud nine. He's got a new partner, no more deadlines to look out for until the end of the fourth quarter in June when the publishing house would start putting together Fall lineups, and a new villain crew that he's been helping cause mischief in his downtime. Life's been fucking great.

"Come on," Liam whines, another coloured pebble already in his hand. "Let me give it another go."

Because it's Liam, Zayn doesn't allow himself to get annoyed at the fact that the same words have come out of the man's mouth about twenty times now with no improvement in sight. He merely opens wide and waits for the chocolate to ricochet off some other part of his face that's nowhere near his mouth. His chin, it turns out to be.

Instead of eating it, Zayn motions for Liam to get ready and sinks it perfectly into the other's mouth.

Like the insolent asshole he is, Zayn raises eyebrows in hubris then looks down at the pouch of sweets in his lap so as to not witness the self-loathing puppy dog pout that Liam's surely sending him.

At random, an orange M&M gets pulled out of the bag. He stares at it in between his thumb and pointer finger, rolling it around so he can find the imprinted "M" on its surface.

"When I was a kid, my favourite sweet was this mango candy called Aamras." The M&M drops into Zayn's palm. "One was about the size of a butterscotch. Hard on the outside, mango pulp on the inside. I wish I could find them here." He picks the candy up with the fingers of his left hand, and then smashes it. "The West doesn't appreciate the mango enough."

Among other things.

"Mangoes are expensive," Liam replies as Zayn licks his fingers clean. "Chocolate did it for me as a kid."

"You don't say?"

Zayn can tell his smirk, gets to Liam a tad by the way the other purses his own lips.

"But I wasn't as lucky back then to have someone like you to buy me the exotic kind," the younger man responds.

"Have we found out where Ecuador is yet?" Zayn leans further back into the decorative throw pillow that's between him and the arm of the sofa. "Is it actually exotic or just one of those countries that sounds like it is and winds up being entirely concrete. Or desert."

"I don't know."

"Well, whatever the fuck their lanscape is, I'm single-handedly keeping their economy afloat buying you all those chocolate bars," Zayn sneers while picking out more M&M's from the bag. "Shit isn't cheap."

"You don't have to buy them you know," Liam says earnestly. "You already insist on paying for everything else. If you-"

"Do you like them?" Zayn asks, abandoning the sweets in his palm to stare at Liam pointedly.