Hidden Beneath Brown Eyes (A Zayn Malik Fanfiction)

Chapter 49 - The Airport

The silence in the car was absolutely defeaning as we sped down the highway towards the airport. None of us had spoken in the thirty minutes since we left my apartment, and it was starting to become too much for me. Not even Jack had made so much as a noise. He'd been sitting in his car seat, staring out the window with a blank expression on his face, only showing any kind of life every once in awhile when we would pass by a cow pasture.

The situation was only made more uncomfortable by the fact that I was sitting, crushed, between Jack's car seat and Paola's luggage. I couldn't believe how prepared this woman was. She was too prepared. She had packed two obnoxiously large suitcases and three oversized carry-on bags, that I was sure Zayn would have to bribe someone to let her take on board.

I was slightly suspicious of Zayn's story. Granted, Zayn was extremely late today and he could argue that it was because Paola decided on a whim to come with us and took time to pack, but she was a little too prepared for this trip. I'm a woman, so I know for a fact that if she had only made the decision to come this morning, we would have missed our flight today.

I didn't want to consider the fact that Zayn had planned on bringing her all along, because things were going so smoothly between he and I, and I didn't want another reason to be angry with him, but the possibility was too strong to ignore.

And as much as I wanted to place all the blame on Paloa, I couldn't, because she might have pushed to come but Zayn was the one who allowed her to. He could have explained to her why she couldn't come, or just simply said no and left it at that, but instead he let her tag along as if this were some kind of luxurious vacation.

It infuriated to me to know that Zayn looked at this trip as an opportunity to spend some "quality time" with his girlfriend instead of looking at it as the huge life change that it was.

Not only were we going to reveal Zayn's identity to Jack, but we were going to be spending the majority of this trip at Zayn's family home in Bradford. Zayn and I had discussed a thousand times the plans for the trip, and had imagined dozens of scenarios that could play out when we dropped all of this information on our four year old son, but I had never even dared to think about how I would react.

I had never met Zayn's family, hadn't seen more than two pictures - hell, I didn't even know their names, any of them! He'd talked about them on occasion, and had thrown a couple of names out there, but I didn't remember them, and even if I did, it's not like I'd be able to match them to any faces.

The extent of my knowledge of Zayn's family was that he had three sisters and two parents that were still married.

Honestly, the fact that I didn't know their names wasn't the heaviest thought in my mind. They would tell me anyway once I met them. No, the most stressful part was the uncertainty - not knowing what exactly Zayn had told them about me, if he had told them anything at all.

Obviously they knew that Zayn had a son, but how much of the story did they know? Had Zayn told them that Jack was the result of an affair? Had he ever told them, or anyone for that matter, that he had cheated on Perrie? If so, had he told them that I had been cheating too, and who I was cheating on?

I was absolutely terrified that they were already judging me before we'd even met, and that I would be greeted by a room full of disapproving stares.That as soon as Zayn and I walked through that door, they would be shaking their heads and wagging their fingers and shooting daggers at me with their eyes.

I was afraid of how I would react to them. I was socially awkward, something that no amount of years could change. I didn't know how to talk to people, especially not people that I would be trying to impress.