Icarus | Z.M.

37 | Cigarette

Victoria Tomlinson

Zayn and I were currently in the elevator to the man's room who had just been killed half an hour ago.

He had taken the room key, and now we were going up. I wasn't too sure why exactly or what we were doing. But I was up for it, anything to avoid going home. I wanted another distraction.

Soft elevator music played as we made our way up to the ninth floor of the hotel. We stood quietly, neither of us saying a word. We were beside each other, our shoulders close to brushing but not quite close enough to actually touch.

I didn't know what I had expected when he had asked me to do something stupid, or what we were actually doing here. It was just a room, maybe with some of the man's things laying around. It wasn't like we were going to sit and just have any kind of conversation, he wasn't the type to ever just talk unless he wanted something out of it.

I glanced at him when he moved.

His tattooed hands reached up to his head and began to slowly run though his hair.

I knew in the next two seconds, I would get caught staring at him. So I faced in front of me and instead watched him run his hands through his hair through the wall length mirror in front of us in the elevator.

He shook his hand through his roots, pushing the hair back off his face. It had been styled for dinner tonight, but he never usually did anything to it. His hair was dark, long and thick, I was always pretty jealous of it. He never really did anything to it and just let it sit naturally, but somehow it always looked so good.

From his wrist, he took a thin hair tie and held it between his teeth. Still running his hands through his hair, he gathered it up on the back of his head, smoothing it out so that there would be no bumps. Once he felt it was fine, he removed the hair tie and wrapped it around his hair, tying it into a bun on the back of his head.

As soon as he was finished, he looked back up at the mirror in front of us, and immediately my eyes dropped to the ground. I did not want him to catch me staring and being so captivated by watching him do something as simple as tying up his hair.

My eyes were down at the ground, at my feet. I still had the black stiletto heels on from earlier, there had been no chance for me to change into other shoes, and my legs were beginning to hurt.

"I didn't like that, I couldn't stop it." he murmured, breaking the silence that had hung between us since we had gotten out of the car outside. "I told you I wasn't going to let anyone touch you."

Our eyes met when I looked up at him.

"It wasn't your fault." I sighed, hating when I felt a small shiver after remembering that the man had tried to touch me tonight. "It's not like you could snap his wrist in front of everyone."

"I wanted to." Zayn said flatly.

"I wanted you too." I agreed, stepping up from where I had been leaning against the wall when the elevator door pinged open. "But you did enough."

"What did I do?" He asked when he followed behind me into the hotel corridor, leading to a line of different rooms, one of them in which we had the key for. "I hadn't spoken or moved until it was too late."

The hotel was fancy, I knew that already, but I had never been inside. Gold and red patterned luxury carpets ran the length of the corridor. The walls were white, with gold marble patterns through it, and there were old oil paintings hung along all of the walls, important people I guessed, but I had no idea who any of them were.

We began to make our way towards the end of the corridor, following the room numbers until we found the one we were going for.

"You just calmed me down." I said to him after a few moments, realising I hadn't actually answered when he had asked me what he had done to help. I was glad I was looking away from him when I spoke, I felt my cheeks heat. "I don't know. You touching me, just your hand on my back or my thigh. I focused on that instead of him."