My Summer Love~ A Niall Horan Love Story

Chapter 10~ Hitting Home

"Drunk"- Ed Sheeran

"Should I? Maybe I'll get drunk again. I'll be drunk again to feel a little love."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The door slammed shut behind the two of us and Zayn started making his way up the stairs. “Are you really okay, Anna?” he asked me after a moments silence.

“Oh yeah, I’m not hurt or anything like that,” I replied, but Zayn shook his head.

“I don’t really mean ‘okay on the outside’,” he told me and opened the door to the roof. I took a deep breath.

“I-… I don’t really know,” I said as the cool, London, mid-night air hit my face. Zayn then changed his course and sat me down on one of the chairs beside the pool.

“You can tell me anything,” he said and knelt down in front of me so that we were level with each other.

I slowly shook my head. “I can’t,” I told him. “If I tell you, you’ll go tell Niall, and he cannot find out about it.”

“Anna-“ Zayn started.

“No,” I interrupted.

There was another pause between the two of us and I stared at the lights in the bottom of the pool reflecting the blue light of the water on Zayn and I. “I was bullied in school,” Zayn told me. I looked up at him with a bewildered look on my face.

“What?” I asked in a whisper.

“I was bullied in school because of my religion,” Zayn said and paused. “I did get suspended for starting a fight, but only because they had been teasing me for years before… I didn’t want to tell you this earlier because I was guessing you were Catholic since you have the purity ring and everything, but… I’m a Muslim,” he confessed. Zayn looked up at me when I didn’t say anything. “What? Are you not gonna tease me?”

I shook my head. “No, of course not!” I exclaimed.

He sighed and continued. “Anyway, people always teased me because I was different from everyone else. I had a different skin tone, a different religion…”

“I’m so sorry, Zayn,” I whispered and put my hand on his shoulder when he looked down at the ground.

I all of a sudden heard him sniffle. He was crying. Only a little, but yes, he was crying. “I’ve never told any of the boys that I was bullied as a kid, Anna… I can keep a secret,” Zayn told me and looked up to meet my eyes.

I sighed shakily and looked down at my hands. “I do know the reason I moved out of Mullingar when I was little,” I told Zayn.

“What’s the reason?” Zayn prompted me after I didn’t say anything for a while. There was another pause as the summer air picked up and blew my long, brown hair back out of my face.

“My mum was a drunk,” I stated promptly. Zayn stayed silent, obviously wanting me to continue. “She used to beat me all the time when I was a kid… Today isn’t the first day I haven’t been able to stand up without getting dizzy. It happens every time I ever hit my head too hard after my mum cracked a vodka bottle over my head when I was seven…

“But anyway we didn’t live in the best of conditions in the first place. My mum wasted all of her money on alcohol instead of paying the electric bill or the water bill. Niall almost never came into my house, either because it was a complete mess, or my mum was drunk as bloody hell. We always hung out in my treehouse that the two of us built with Niall’s dad, Bobby one summer.” I paused and smiled as the good memories came flooding back to me.