Rubber Ball

The sun shining into the classroom makes the dark hair glow a kind of red, playing with the tones underneath the raven color. The skin of the neck under the black hair has a bronze quality to it because the boy is from the former colony, at least, his looks make people think so.

The leather jacket he’s wearing that covers his narrow shoulders makes noise whenever he moves his arm to play with the fag in his hand – which he does so often that is almost all of the time. The crackling of the jacket is a pleasant sound to the ear for some reason.

Christine has been watching Zayn, who’s sitting two rows in front of her, for the past ten minutes when he sat down behind his desk. There’s no Louis to nudge her or to tell her she’s being inappropriate, which most surely would have helped her resist the pull that glued her eyes to the dark boy.

The pull she wants to resist because what if what Niall heard about Zayn is true? What if he indeed tricks girls to fall for him and when they’ve slept with him, he dumps them? If it is, she doesn’t want people to see her staring and tell him she’s interested in him.

Suddenly, Christine registers the teacher has started talking and with a lot of effort, she tears her eyes away from Zayn’s strong back and turns them to the man standing in front of the class. Ever second he’s talking, she fights the urge to let her eyes wander back again.

“We’ll be drawing hands today,” the blonde teacher tells his class. “But instead of using our head, we’re going to use our eyes. We’ll be pairing off into groups of two and draw each other’s hands. At the end of the class, we’ll hang the drawings in front of the class and guess which hand belongs to who.”

There isn’t a rush of girls trying to be the first to ask Zayn to work with them because Christine is the only female in the class. If it had been a day ago, she would had been happy about this but now she feels a sense of dread when she imagines him choosing her. What if he charms his way into her heart the way he does with all the other girls?

Her heart stops beating when she sees the boy stand up, the fag tugged away behind his ears. He’s wearing glasses, which would have earned him jabs from his fellow students if it didn’t look so good on him.

Zayn saunters towards Christine with a bored look on his face and because she believes he is going to walk by her, she stops breathing and her heart kick starts when he grabs a chair and sits down in front of Christine’s desk.

“You don’t mind working with me, do you?” the boy asks with a smirk – at least Christine believes it’s a smirk, a boy has never smirked at her before.

“No, I don’t mind,” Christine lies – at least, she thinks she’s lying because she isn’t really sure. Zayn confusing her already, his proximity alone is enough.

“Good.” Zayn smirk changes into a smile but his eyes stay the same, the look on them friendly but a bit closed-off. “Let’s start with my hand first.”

A tanned hand is laid on the desk , the palm narrow and the fingers long and thin. There are rings on two fingers, both of them silver. It would probably hurt really bad if these rings connected with your face, Christine wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of Zayn punches.

“What do you want to do, after the Academy?” she asks as she picks up her pencil. She starts to draw the first lines on the paper in front of her as she waits for the answer. Maybe if she gets to know Zayn better, she can find out if the rumors about him are true.

“I don’t know yet.” Zayn’s voice sound distant like he has answered the question often enough to be able to do it on auto pilot. Christine wonders if it is his parents who’ve asked it him multiple times, which could be the case if they were like Louis’s – Christine’s are too busy to ask about her future for which she’s grateful. “All I know is that I don’t want to become a teacher.”

Christine starts on the details of Zayn’s thumb as he asks her a question. “What do you want to do when you finish?”

Her cheeks flush red with embarrassment as she answers, “I want to be an art teacher.” She has never been ashamed of her wish to be a teacher nor is she now but it’s what Zayn doesn’t want to be. It’s a bit awkward.

“You’re the opposite of me, then,” the dark-haired boy observes and when Christine looks up from her drawing for a second, she sees he’s smiling at her again. She quickly returns her eyes to the paper in front of her.

“I just like sharing my passion for art with other people,” she explains, her voice a little bit unsteady, even though she knows she doesn’t have to.
How has she not seen before how gorgeous his eyes are?

“But you can do that in a gallery as well,” Zayn counters. “When you’re a painter you don’t have to wake up early and you earn more than if you would be a teacher.”

“That’s true if you’re good enough for people to think you should earn more than a teacher. If your art sucks, you live in the gutter with no penny to your name.”

“I didn’t know your mind was in the gutter.”

Christine’s head snaps up, causing a stab of pain to shot through her neck at the sudden movement. She looks at Zayn with eyes wide open in surprise because she can’t believe he just said that. Why has he made her comment into something dirty? Is he trying to flirt with her?

“What?!” Zayn laughs, apparently amused at her shock. “Hasn’t your boyfriend ever made a dirty joke or something?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Christine protests, her eyebrows scrunched up in confusion because she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

“Yes, you have,” Zayn shoots back. He now looks confused as well as amused. “That Louis boy and you are together. Everyone knows that.”

“Well, then everyone is wrong. Louis and I are just friends.”

“Boys and girls can’t be friends, you know that right?” Zayn leans forward, making Christine all flustered as his face comes closer. “If you’re not together, you will be eventually.”

Christine is struck by how long Zayn’s lashes are, now that he’s so close and that his caramel colored eyes have golden specks in them. It makes them even more tantalizing.

A funny feeling starts in her stomach as she sees the dark shade of stubble on his cheeks. It makes his face look sharp and really attractive.
Black eyebrows descent as Zayn narrows his eyes when Christine doesn’t react to his statement, making her feel like all of his focus is on her. For a moment it’s hard to breathe.

Can’t Zayn see if he wants her to say something, anything, he needs to create more distance between their faces? He must know what kind of effect he has on women, he uses his looks to get girls all the time. It was the reason why Christine started this conversation in the first place.

Zayn doesn’t lean back, he just tilts his head to the side and smiles at her, making Christine’s stomach drop because he really needs to stop getting more attractive with every moment.

“Cat’s got your tongue? ” he teases, his eyes lighting up for the first time. He seems to enjoy her flustered state. “Or do you realize it’s true what I’m saying?”

“Louis isn’t even interested in me.” The blonde girl hates how breathless she sounds but at least she’s capable of speech. “And neither am I, interested in him that is.”

“I don’t believe that. He can’t be friends with a pretty girl like you and not be interested in becoming more. That’s impossible unless he’s of a certain persuasion…”

Zayn leans back and Christine is finally able to breath normal again.

“Louis is not like that!” Christine all but yells at the dark boy, eyes narrowed at him in anger. “Louis is normal.”

How dare Zayn accuse Louis of something like that! What makes it okay for him to say something like that about her best friend? He would never do something that’s illegal and homosexuality is illegal.

“No need to get your nickers in a twist.” Zayn shakes his head, the smile still on his face. He doesn’t seem faced by her outburst. “All I’m saying, he must be interested in a pretty girl like you or there must be something wrong with him.”

Christine doesn’t register the compliment, much the same way she hadn’t the first time, she just turns back to her drawing and drags the pencil over the paper without saying anything. She’s mad at him and doesn’t want to talk anymore. For all she’s concerned, everything Niall told about him is true.

She tries to forget what Zayn accused Louis of all day but every time she looks at her friend that day, she can’t help but hear the dark boy’s voice in her head, his words hunting her.

What if Zayn was right about Louis? The older boy had never shown any real interested in girls, what if the reason for this was that he liked boys?

But then again, he hadn’t really looked at boys either, as far as Christine knows. But could it be, she didn’t see it because she hadn’t paid attention to it? Who knows, he might have been giving boys and men the eye for years without her knowledge.

Her thoughts are slowly driving her mad because it’s not as if she could ask Louis about it. He would ask her where her suspicions come from and if she told him it was because he hasn’t shown interest in her, she would sound conceited and if she admitted it came from Zayn, he would get mad at her for even talking to him, even when it hadn’t really been her fault as they had to work together on an assignment.
So, she doesn’t ask him anything as they walk home, Niall not with them because he has another two hours to go at the Academy. They had offered to wait for him but he had told them it wasn’t necessary. Instead, they talk about the classes they had that day.

However, their conversation comes to a sudden end when Louis spots two figures at the end of the street they’re walking on, one of them according to him looks like Zayn. The other is a girl. Christine can’t really see them, so she doesn’t know who they are. She can only see that the girl has black skin and the boy black hair.

“I tell you, it is Zayn,” Louis hisses, angry eyes on the two figures standing a few meters away from them and his strong grip on Christine’s arm. “Let’s follow them.”

“Why?” his blonde friend asks, doing her best not to sound too much like a whining toddler. “I thought you said I should stay away from Zayn or does it only count when you’re not there?”

“I did say that and I did mean that.” Louis turns his head away for only a second so he can glare at Christine. He doesn’t look menacing, instead, he looks lost. “But if we follow him maybe we’ll discover what Niall heard about him is based on truth or not.”

And of course, Louis wants to find out if a rumor is true or not because he’s levelheaded and even if a story works to his advantage, he still wants proof before believing it.

“Alright, just don’t let us get caught,” Christine folds, letting Louis drag her into the direction of the alleyway the two figures are disappearing into.

When they reach the small alley, the boy, and the girl are already almost at the end. The boy tells the girl to stay put by holding his hand up and after she has nodded her head, signaling she’ll do as she’s told, he walks to the corner and looks left and right. It almost looks like a movie, where the heroes of the story don’t want to be spotted. The boy is looking if the coast is clear.

Then the boy turns around and Christine is able to see his face. It’s indeed Zayn. Louis had been right, there’s no mistaking the dark quiff and sharp face. Does it mean the girl is one of his conquests, one of the girls he has saved from his friends? Is that’s why they look haunted because Zayn pretends they’re still running from her ‘attackers’ ? Or is something else going on?

Notes

I posted the fourth chapter as the third chapter by accident. I fixed it so you guys can now read the real chapter 3.