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~ Chapter 5 ~
“Louis!” Harry yelled and I cringed. The four of us were now sitting on the floor watching TV together, but this yell Harry threw at Louis made our surrounding become awkward in such any second. Louis got yelled by Harry because he accidentally brushed Harry’s chest by his arm, eventhough actually Louis just intended to reach the cookies which were located next to Harry. It was ironic how things turned out now… They used to be the closest best friends than any of us. They used to act freely towards each other. Louis used to absentmindedly play with Harry’s hair, and Harry used to hug Louis out of the blue… but now… they wouldn’t even call each other ‘Hazza’ or ‘Boobear’ anymore.
“Harry,” Louis asked in calm tone, then he got up. I sensed something here… “Can you not YELL AT ME? I DIDN’T MEAN TO TOUCH YOU, GOT IT?!”
Uh oh. “Guys…” I tried to get their attentions, and glanced at Niall on my side. His face looked sad. Of course, he hated fight.
Harry snorted and stood as well. “YOU DON’T HAVE TO YELL AT ME EITHER! YOU CAN JUST SAY IT SLOWLY!”
“Guys, stop!” I ordered, standing as well. This were going to be worse if I couldn’t do something to stop this fight-
“Don’t you dare ‘Guys, stop!’-ing on us, Payne! You are the one who always putting hell to Zayn and arguing with him, aren’t you?!” Harry snapped.
And it felt like a slap across my face. They thought it was me who put hell to Zayn? They thought it was him, suffering from all my torment? “Me, Harry? ME?”
“Guys, what’s going on?” suddenly his voice aired. The four of us turned our heads around to see him, already closed my room’s door and walked toward us.
“Why the hell were you lying?” I shouted, glaring at him.
“Why the hell are you so mean to him?” Harry pulled my hand and made me face his glare.
“Why do you come out from Liam’s room?” Niall and Louis asked in the same time. I pulled my hand away from Harry’s grasp and darted my eyes to him.
His face went pale as his eyes met mine. “I… I don’t know what you’re talking…” he stammered.
I took a step toward him. “Why did you lie to me?” I hissed, as I took a step again.
And again.
“Liam, stop!” Niall’s voice sound so desperate. He almost begged me, but I didn’t care about anything right now.
“I don’t know what you’re saying!” his nervous eyes looked away from me.
“Okay. Then why did you come to me?” I stopped walking when I already stood in front of him. My eyes were still darting at him eventhough he was still not looking.
“I… I was… high…” he said.
“I didn’t ask about your condition! I asked you Why Did You Come To My Room?”
“I was high! If I were sober enough, there was no way I would want to come to a boring person like you!” he said in high pitch.
His words came through my ears and stabbed my heart, making me stuck there. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t move. His eyes dilated right after he said that words, and looked up to me. A shocked expression was there on his face, like he couldn’t believe he just said that. And there was something more in his eyes that I couldn’t decipher. I didn’t care, anyway… because maybe it was just another act… or it was the shock because he didn’t mean to give away the real him to the others, by saying that word he had used to throw at me.
His eyes were at pleading state, as if they were begging my apology. I just watched them with my own, and smiled, the bitterest smile I’d ever done.
“You don’t have to remind me… I’ve always known that,” I whispered, couldn’t bring my voice to any stronger level. Pain flickered in his eyes and his eyes started to look glassy. And by that, I left.
“Liam! You don’t know- Liam! Wait! I’m going to explain, everything! Liam!!” he shouted after me but I just answered that by banging the front door. Timidly, I heard a thud on the floor and Harry asking, “What’s going on actually?” but I didn’t care. I didn’t care if the boys revealed now the mask Zayn put on, -and I covered too-. I didn’t care the dark sky was getting darker as each step I took. I just ran. And ran. And ran. And ran away.
Everything that happened seven years ago came back, flooding my mind. All what he said to me… in front of our friends in Bradford Middle School. I couldn’t ever forget that.
“Hey, Weak.”
“Weird Freak!”
“You know what, Payne? You’re too beautiful for a guy.”
“Pathetic.”
“Hey party pooper! Can you at least try not to be a boring person?”
“If I were sober enough, there was no way I would want to come to a boring person like you!”
I was in my seventh grade that time, when he’d decided to pick on me. And bullied me. I remembered the look of his eyes whenever he did “that”, whenever he kicked me. There were always something in them that I couldn’t read, but he’d have kept on kicking me, leaving pain in my legs and my sides. I remembered the smirk he used when he’d pinned me on the school’s metal lockers, leaving the freezing pain in my back. I remembered the fist he’d threw when he punched me, leaving pressured pain in my arms and my stomach. I remembered the moment when he’d smiled evilly, then turned his back on me, leaving me whimpering in sorrow helplessness. I remembered the pain that shot every part of my limb whenever I tried to get up, walking home, alone.
I remembered that everyone stepped away from me whenever I walked near them. I remembered the way the whispered to each other while their eyes were still on me, wearing a disgusted expression. I remembered… that since the day I met him, I started to hate myself…
A year later my parents found out that I was bullied, and we moved back to Wolverhampton. I tried to forget about everything happened in Bradford and lived a new life. I locked those memories away, hiding it from anyone else, hiding it from the world. Until that day in the X Factor… I met him. I met him again. Then we were put in a band together…
And all along with chasing my dream, all I did was covering everything he’d done from everyone.
“You look so pretty with that hair,” once he said with that stupid smirk on his face after we’d performed one aired show. The words slit my heart. That was my trademark hairstyle, I’d already had that since I what seemed like forever. I’d changed my hairstyle, making it a little bit curly. But then he said I’d just copied Harry. Those words felt like a bash. I couldn’t sleep at all that day. Then I’d finally just shaved, letting my hair remained very short. And there, he’d said my cheeks looks evenmore ‘chubby’ and I’d looked like a bad boy. And he added, “Everybody hates bad boy…” before leaving. There, my pride had been ambushed and crushed into dust.
And he shamelessly asked me “Why did what I said to you affect you so much?” last night… how dare he… Now that I remembered all of this, I regretted why I hadn’t screamed everything at him last night. I regretted… why couldn’t I simply torture him, or just pay back revenge? I regretted… why instead of blaming him, did I change all my angriness into hate toward myself? Why… I was so pathetic?
I stopped running after my legs gave up carrying my weight. The sky was so dark, and the wind blew so hard. The trees on this road’s side were moving furiously, like they were signing me of the coming hurricane. I felt wind blew me again, messing my hair, messing my unbuttoned shirt, messing the white t-shirt beneath my shirt… Messing my heart…
The image of him appeared in my head… all these Ziam things… were all fake. All were just huge masks we had to wear everyday. All his smiles, all his mischievous smirks, were pretense. All those hugs, holding hand, everything… they were nothing but acts. His glinting eyes, -which sometimes I caught when he looked at me-, was a put on. Everything… everything about us was a huge lie.
I felt more devastated. I thought I would be angry at him, I thought I would have a burning spite in me toward him. But I didn’t. I kept looking for them; angriness, hate, anything that I could use to make me hate him more. But there was nothing… nothing! I tried to remember again everything he did to me. All the hell he gave to me. I caught a memory when he’d stood hovering over me, who had been lying on my school’s floor… His shoes had landed on my stomach with a very strong pressure, and suddenly air had been flying out of my lung… Then, in a very fast movement, he’d squatted with his fingers had been balled into fist, and I couldn’t do anything but closed my eyes, waiting for a painful impact, but… there was no impact… that was just a thud of his fist against the center of my chest. I’d opened my eyes, and that time… I’d met a pair of brown eyes, very intense ones, which I couldn’t help but staring back. His hand gently had stayed on my chest for a while… until he’d left… Gah! I couldn’t find the hatred. Why, instead of feeling angry, was I so affected by that memory? I kept digging my feeling, walking along with the traces of this undefined feeling toward him. This undefined feeling which I thought was hate, it actually was not. It was disenchant, that I misinterpreted as hate. I tugged my hair in frustration. The image of him smiling under my hug…
I was complicatedly feeling so confused.
Lightning flashed and thunder blasted, and I just realized that I was all alone. In this condition, I just wished that this weren’t going to rain. Because if it rained… I knew I would cry… Cry out the pain I bottled in the bottom of my heart… Cry out every imperfection I had, every one of them which made me hated, bullied… Unloved…
Liam!
Great, in this state of confusion, now I hallucinated that I heard his voice. This was the worst thing could happen to me now: Rain poured, and he found me when I wanted to cry so much.
“Liam!”
One of the worst thing happened. He found me. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run away again, yet this body didn’t want to move. I wanted to turn around, to face him, to yell at him, but I was rooted here.
The sound of his steps got louder, his scent hit my nose. He was here… he was- He crashed me into a hug. His limb tightly embraced my chest, pulling my back closer to his chest.
I didn’t know why- Why did my heart beat faster? Why did this single act create such an effect on me? Liam, wake up! This was him, this was Zayn Jawwad Malik!
What happened to me?
“Go away!” I managed to speak. All the strength I needed to say those words, I gave it away.
“Liam, let me explain! Everything, let me explain everything…” he pleaded, but he was answered by silence. I really didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to do move. I didn’t want to do anything. All I wanted was to forget everything. All I wanted was he going away from me, far away that we didn’t have to meet again, eventhough the back of my head denied me with resurfacing the whole strange feelings I once felt when he kissed my cheek at the night after shooting One Thing video.
Damn unconsciousness.
He pulled away, making me suddenly sense the cold air which enveloped us. But then he rested his hand on my shoulder, giving me warmth at the spot, and he spun me around to face him. I really wasn’t ready to face him, not with this breaking feeling I felt. With my best effort, I put on a blank face and stared straight at the dark scene over his head. Sadness radiated from him, I could sense it. I could sense his plea for me to look at him.
“Liam, look at me…”
Yet I didn’t do anything.
“Liam, please?”
I still didn’t do anything. He sighed. Heavily. That brought me tense. Suddenly the fear came again, rushing into me. I remembered this sigh. This was like the sigh he’d always had when he wanted to punch me. He’d punch me, he’d punch me… His free hand started to rise… he’d punch me till death.
But it never came. What I expected as a punch was turned out as a gent touch on my chin. With a soft force, he tried to make me look down at him. “I cant handle it anymore, Li… I cant keep this secret from you again…”
What?
What he said coerced my eyes to drift to his. “What are you talking about?”
Emotions conflicted in his eyes. Pain, guilt, regret… there were so much than them, but one which stood out was the unreadable emotion again. It was strong, so strong that it was able to transmit itself to me. Now I was feeling so conflicted myself. My feeling, him, everything was extremely confusing.
“I’m talking about you! I cant do this anymore… I don’t want to hurt you again, I don’t- I don’t want you to leave me again…” he said in rush, his eyes leaving mine in the end of his sentence.
If he wanted to explain me anything he wanted to explain, he was doing a terrible job. I became evenmore confused than ever. Let alone my brutally beating heart. “Zayn, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Okay…” he sighed. He inhaled, and exhaled soundly. “I’ll explain… Let’s start from the very beginning, okay?” he looked up to me, as if he were expecting something from me. Looking at my blank expression, he slightly bit his lip, but then he continued. “Do you remember when we first met?”
“Yes, of course. It was just my second day in my new school when your friends decided to call me ‘Pretty Boy’ and you decided to give me a lesson,” I said bitterly.
He winced when I said that, but with a gent push on my chin, he made me look at his eyes again. “Maybe it was to you, but to me, the first time I met you is your first day in our school, when you helped a fallen little girl to stand up.”
A drop of drizzle came down onto his nose, made me stare away to our surrounding that was now ornamented by drizzle drops, as I remembered that I’d helped a little girl. But honestly I didn’t know if anyone saw it, actually, since I’d made no friend that time.
“Since that time, I knew that you’re a good guy. I desperately wanted to know you, so I followed you home.”
What? I thought I was creepy enough to watch moon every night. Now, I found someone who was creepier.
“But do you remember who you walked pass by that time?” he asked seriously. I shook my head, couldn’t remember anything. “You actually walked pass a group of bullies. I wouldn’t know they were there either if they didn’t swear at you. They were mad because you didn’t acknowledge them, they thought you were ‘a new haughty jerk’ and they decided to give you some lesson… so, that was it…”
“That was what? They paid you to beat me up?”
“Noo!” he pleaded. “I wanted to keep you away from them, I couldn’t let you die-“
“Die?!” I yelled in shock. Was this just a made-up story by him or was my life more complicated than what I knew?
Unexpectedly he put his finger on my lips. I couldn’t help but dilating my eyes in shock, my stomach felt like knitted. My lips were tingling and to make it worse, there was something like bugs, -suspiciously butterflies- filling my throat. As I looked at his eyes, something warm flickered from them, and they emitted that unknown glint, unreadable expression which seemed like always radiated whenever they met my eyes. This was… bewildering.
“They were horrible bullies. They once pushed one kid from their school’s staircase, making the kid broke both his legs and arms, and once they tormented another kid who finally killed herself who couldn’t stand their torture. I didn’t want that happen to you too, so, I told them my friends and I had claimed on bullying you… that was the only way to save you from them…” he continued his explanation.
I wanted to cut him off and scream out, “By bullying me?!” actually… If only his finger’s pressure on my lips hadn’t been stronger, and if only he hadn’t stepped even closer.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry that I had to come up with that idea. It was the only way to show them that you were out of their territory, that they shouldn’t do anything to you. They forced us-“ When he said ‘us’, my mind wandered to his friends. There was no way he was lying to me if he brought his friends in this story, right? “to make a deal, if we wanted them to leave you alone, we should bully you like how they wanted. That was why… we did it verbally and physically to you. I didn’t mean it, I’ve never ever meant it!” he stopped for breathing, and slowly pulled his finger from my lips, but I knew he wasn’t finished. “Once, they met me alone. They wanted me to do something to you but I automatically said ‘No’. That was the time they beat me up, and I ended up being in hospital in a whole week,” he smiled.
I remembered that. That whole week, his friends beat me up worse than ever, and kept cursing, “This is all because of you!” at me. Now I knew what they meant. They’d been angry because their best friend, -Zayn- had been injured because he wanted to protect me.
Wait… he did that for me? Why? I mean, I thought he hated me!
“I’m sorry. What did they do to you?” I asked suddenly worried. I felt a jolting energy that made me moved my hands to his shoulders, as if the injuries were still hurting his body. Now I felt like a complete bipolar, one time I claimed that I hated him but one time I unwillingly worried about him. Crap, was I considered as unstable? But then again, right about several minutes before I just found out that those hate I thought I had toward him was not exist.
The happiness, -and the blush-, that was undisguised on his face, made all my worries about him and myself fade away, though. “It’s not important,” he said. If that were a fake happiness, he acted it very well, but if that were a real one, he hid it terribly. “Why didn’t you ask, ‘What did they want you to do to me?’?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it. Anyway, knowing that he was okay right now, and knowing that maybe he didn’t hate me, was giving me the hugest relief. Like air in my lung was cooler. Like burden on my chest was lifted. Like something was brighter… No, scratch the ‘something’. It was ‘everything’.
He smiled, looking into my eyes so deep, that I was afraid he could read my mind. But then if he could read it, maybe he could tell what I was feeling right now. Maybe he could tell me why I didn’t jerk away from a guy I thought I hated, why I didn’t mind this close distance we had…
The dark cloud was suddenly cracked and sunlight came through, bathing us. The drizzle had stopped, I didn’t know when, but all I saw was his glistening hair, and skin, and cheeks, and nose, and eyes… “They wanted me to punch your face,” his breath tickled my lips and chin, and as he said that, the same shiver I’d felt last night when his breath had brushed me happened again. “And I just cant do that… because you’re…” he cleared his throat. “And those Ziam things…” he went to a totally different topic. “Those are the only chance I get to be close to you. I love to tease you, because I love watching your expressions. I’m always glad that they are because of me, that you’re affected by me. But when you left me earlier… I know I couldn’t hide this from you anymore, because I don’t want you go away from me again, like you did six years ago. And… you have to know I will never ever hurt you again, because you are… you are…” he inhaled. His eyes stared at me, kept staring, and that unreadable expression radiated so strongly, stronger than ever.
He moved an inch closer, an inch closer, an inch closer… until his lips finally met mine. They were soft, and… pure. And this was… slow… and gentle… yet could make my heart beat extremely faster, and extremely louder. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t breathe, literally couldn’t breathe, yet… everything in me felt so alive. Like everything in me shone. His glowing jet black hair, his smooth skin, and his wonderful lips, were taking some distance away from me. But his smile, his sparkling brown orbs… making me couldn’t look away. That unreadable expression… that was the same expression he wore whenever he looked at me, the same expression he showed when he’d shoved me against the school’s locker, the same expression he radiated when he’d lingered his fist against my chest, the same expression he used when he’d talked to me last night. Yet… This was the strongest, strongest radiation the look had ever emitted. And that created the most pleasant, blissful feeling I’d ever felt to me. Was that… was that love?
“Liam, I love you. I’ve always loved you…”
Was this heaven?
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[THE END]
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AN:
Whaaa, finished! I couldn’t believe it! :’)
Thank you soooo much for everyone who support me, voting, commenting, adding this story to your library… Oh, God… I’m so happy! 😀
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!! XD
And I purposefully not creating an end for our Larry, or Niall and Demi, because… I think the end is perfect here. But, do you want me to make sequel, for Larry, or Diall?
Okay, that’s my rant… and once again, thank you for everything, and… Have a nice day!
P.S: For you whose birthday is today… Happy birthday!! 😀 I wish everything the best for you 😀
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