. . .
❝Once upon a time, a girl fell in love with her husband and made the stars realise that they'd gotten her soulmate wrong.❞
. . .
It's a daunting thing, your first love. It's new, making you unsure and doubt whether it's love or just a mere...
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THE DOOR SHUT WITH a bang and I stood there awkwardly with both my hands tightly clenched by my side. What happened now?
Zayaan turned towards me and raised an eyebrow at my rigid state. "I'm not going to bite your head off. Relax."
"Right." I nodded. "So, what happens now?"
He laughed. "Yeah? What does happen now, Faithe? You tell me."
I spluttered. "I— We— You... I don't know."
"Look, I know you're not ready. But I also know about the Turkish tradition of the bloody sheets in the morning." He paused. "I'm not going to force you to do something you don't want to. And truth be told, I'm not ready to do... that with you, either. Not that there's actually any point."
I frowned, clearly offended and hurt for some unfathomable reason. "What's that supposed to mean? I don't have some sort of disease, you know."
He sighed. "Look, Faithe, I'm not trying to offend or insult you. I'm just saying it how I see it. And neither of us are ready to cross that bridge with each other. Plus, the entire point is moot, anyway. So there's really only one thing we can do."
I looked at him sceptically. "Oh, yeah? And what's that?"
"Bleed," he said cryptically, taking a pocket-knife out of his pocket and walked over to the bedside table where he grabbed a pomegranate from the bowl. He cut the fruit in half and let some of the dark red juice drip onto the middle of the sheet, creating a tiny puddle of bright red on the otherwise stark-white bedsheet.
"Perfect." He smiled in satisfaction as he admired — okay maybe not admired, but looked over — his handiwork.
"How did you what the perfect amount is? Made any virgins bleed before?" I asked, only half-joking.
"No. It's not rocket science. And you'd actually see that if you spent less time mooning over your brother's best friend."
I gasped. "What? That is not true." Dangerous territory. Divert. Divert.
"Really? Anyone with a pair of eyes can see the stars in your eyes when you look at him."
I then watched in both awe and in shock as he strode over to the bathroom, rinsed off his knife and placed it back into his pocket after drying. He'd come unusually prepared, which raised a few hackles. He'd planned not to have sex with me; was it perhaps because he was involved with another girl who'd asked him not to do anything with me or was it just because he held zero interest in me?
"Fatimah."
"What?" I looked up. "Sorry, were you saying something?"
"Ya Allah." He sighed and scrubbed his face. "Can you please just listen? I don't have the patience to deal with this today."
