Chapter 16 #2
I grip the back of the couch to steady myself as he continues.
“Zali’s mum is a lot like mine. Absent. Neglectful.
A junkie. It fell on my shoulders to look after my little sister.
” He puts the kindle down on the side table and leans forward, his gaze never leaving mine.
“I loved Zali the second I met her. Even though she was only nine I suddenly didn’t feel so alone.
I had been ripped away from you, sent to the opposite side of the country and placed in the care of a man who could barely even care for himself, let alone me.
I was so fucking angry at the world. And then there was Zali, and we had something that connected us, even if it was the shitty DNA we shared.
” He runs a hand across his jaw, and when he speaks there’s an edge to his voice: “I wanted to come back to you, Gianna. Every second of every day. But I couldn’t leave my little sister to the same fucking fate as me.
In the end, I wasn’t waiting for my eighteenth birthday to find my way back to you.
I had to wait for hers.” He looks at me earnestly. “Can you understand that?”
I feel like I’ve taken a knife to the chest, and my knuckles turn white as I grip the back of the couch for dear life. Zayn watches on, his jaw tight as he waits for me to say something.
All this time I thought the worst possible outcome was that Zayn moved on to his new life and didn’t want me anymore.
Never in a million years could I have guessed how wrong I was.
I almost wish that was the case now. I should have been much more afraid of this.
To find out Zayn did want to come back to me, but couldn’t.
Of course my sweet, damaged boy would never have left his own sister to endure the fucked up childhood he had suffered himself.
A sister? I was still trying to wrap my head around it.
I never in my wildest dreams could have guessed that this is what kept him away.
And yet in my heart I knew what we had was real.
The realest, most raw love I would ever experience, but still after he left, I was so quick to convince myself that I meant so little to him.
And what did I do in his absence? I did something unforgivable.
I gave myself to Daniel Sanders.
I’ve been explaining, defending, rationalising my relationship with Daniel since the minute I stopped rejecting his advances. To myself, to Anna, to our friends that I left behind once I let Daniel in. But now that Zayn said it, it’s planted a seed in my mind that I can no longer overlook.
Was I angry at Zayn when he didn’t keep his promise and come back?
Did I turn that anger into something else?
Did I subconsciously harbour that anger and twist it and use Daniel to get back at him?
Was Daniel my secret revenge? I knew if word ever got back to Zayn that I married Daniel, it would destroy him, whether he still loved me or not.
He hated Daniel. It was a clear betrayal, and in my darkest moments, maybe I relished in knowing that in some way I still had the last word.
The last laugh? Not so much.
As my reality comes crashing down around me, Zayn sits and watches as tears fall silently down my cheeks. He might be the cool, calm collected mogul that he is now, but I knew him when he wasn’t so perfect to the world, only to me.
“You could have fucking called, you know,” I say, relishing in the anger that takes root and spreads through my chest. Anger I can work with. “Did you think I would wait ten years without a single word from you?”
I swipe the tears from my face, but Zayn doesn’t even flinch, as if he was expecting my outburst. This somehow makes me angrier.
“Call?” He says with a dark laugh. “With what phone? By the time I got one, I didn’t have your number.
” He stands, tucks his hands into his pockets and stalks slowly towards me.
“I only ever went to your house that one time,” he emphasises the last words, as if I would ever forget, “and we walked there in the dark. I didn’t even know your address to write you a fucking letter. ”
He stops when his shins graze the couch, so it’s the only thing separating us now. I have to tilt my head back to look up into his devastatingly beautiful face. Finally within reach, but still so achingly far away.
“Then years later I got social media. And do you think I could find you online?”
No. Daniel didn’t like me having Facebook or Instagram, so I didn’t.
“Not a fucking trace of you. I was starting to think you were a figment of my imagination. Except I knew you weren’t, because every time I closed my eyes, I could still feel where you had touched me, like you were branded onto my skin.”
There’s fury in his words now. His indifferent mask is slipping.
“Then Zali turned eighteen and I finally moved back to Melbourne and after a year, what are the chances? The stars align and I stumble across your picture on a fucking escort site,” he continues, and now his anger is palpable, like something between us I could reach out and squeeze.
It sends a shiver down my spine as I stand frozen, entranced by his tale.
“I thought I could handle it,” he grits out, eyes darker than sin as they bore into mine.
“It had been ten years, I thought I was over it. I just wanted to see you. I was prepared to pay fifty thousand dollars for the closure. Turns out, nothing could have prepared me for when you didn’t even recognise me. ”
Dread settles like lead in my stomach the more Zayn talks. Our whole twisted history splayed out for me to witness from his point of view is almost unbearable. My fingers twist further into the couch cushions as he removes a hand from his pocket and runs a thumb across his jaw.
“I didn’t plan what happened that night.
I let my emotions get the better of me, I admit,” he drawls.
“You didn’t recognise me. I thought you let men touch what I had considered mine for the last ten years for money.
I wasn’t in a good headspace.” His tone suggests that’s a gross understatement.
“I don’t regret what happened but I regret what I said afterwards.
I didn’t want to hurt you. I came out of the bathroom ready to apologise to discover you gone. ”
He’s glowering at me now, and my pulse thuds through the thick vein in my neck. “You had slipped through my fingers yet again.”
I swallow around my dry throat because I know the next part of the story. I landed in his office and he discovered I was married to Daniel. I think back to that day and the unrestrained fury that was pouring off him in waves. I didn’t understand then. Now, it makes perfect sense.
Zayn clocks me taking a tentative step backwards and lifts an accusing brow. “Daniel, Gianna?”
I take another step, and Zayn slowly rounds the couch.
“You were really trying to fucking punish me, weren’t you?
” His voice is soft, and I note his indifferent mask has slipped perfectly back into place.
How did he learn to control his emotions like that?
I’m sure every single one of mine is displayed on my face for him to see.
I back up until my ass hits the small dining table behind me.
“I wasn’t,” I say weakly, remembering the seed of doubt he planted earlier. “Well, maybe I was, but I didn’t realise it at the time.”
“Really? Because it seems pretty obvious to me.” Zayn doesn’t stop his approach until he’s standing so close I have to sit on the table to put some distance between us. I lean back onto my palms and look up at him standing over me.
“He was different after you left,” I say, and even though my blood catches a light at Zayn’s proximity and the understanding between us now that Zayn never wanted to stay away from me, there’s a plead in my voice for him to understand why I did what I did without me having to say the words.
I was broken, and Daniel had promised to put me back together.
“He was there for me after you left. I thought you weren’t coming back,” I choke, and Zayn’s face warps through the tears welling up in my eyes.
“I thought he’d changed. He convinced me that he had, and he was different at the start. ”
Zayn’s jaw clenches as he lifts a hand and runs his knuckle softly down my cheek, then traces it along my jaw line. “At the start?” He reaches my ear then runs his fingers through my hair from root to ends, his gaze tracking the movement of his hand as if he was mesmerised.
I gasp at my slip up. Of course it didn’t go over Zayn’s head.
“You’re hiding something from me, Gianna. If I find out he hurt a single hair on your head-” there’s a cold promise in his words as his gaze slides back to mine, “I’ll fucking kill him.”
My skin is ablaze where his touch still lingers.
The Zayn I knew before wasn’t violent. Apart from that one time he returned blows to his mum’s psychotic boyfriend, he always kept his stormy temper in check.
But the Zayn who stands before me is different.
On the outside, he looks so deathly calm and collected, completely unfazed.
But behind his depthless eyes, behind his cold words, I can tell the threat of violence is one hundred percent real.
“Ask me why I came back, Gianna.”
A shiver cascades down my spine. This is the crowning moment, the moment we’ve been building up to since he revealed who he is.
As he stares down at me with his dark, penetrating gaze, all of a sudden it’s too much.
His return. The truth about his sister and why he stayed away.
Him being here after all these years of me thinking he had moved on.
It’s too much to process, and I know in this moment I can’t have his truth.
I’m not ready for it. My thoughts must be written plain as day on my face, as there’s the subtlest shift of disappointment across his as he reads them.
“No,” is all I manage to get out. I place my hands on his chest and gently push him away.
And after everything we’ve been through, he lets me.