Well Played

Monday morning, Zayn’s body revved with excitement. Never before had he been so thrilled to be at school. Part of him was frightened how he would react when he saw Rose, but the anxiety was quickly stifled by the wonder of how she’d look at him.

Would her eyes be full of lust, like he was sure his would be? Would there be any indicator on her face that could let him know that she had been thinking about the encounter all weekend?

There was only way for him to find out.

But when he walked into English, she wasn’t at her desk. And then the first bell rang, alerting students they had one minute left to get to their classes before they were marked tardy.

Zayn kept his eyes on the door, waiting for her to walk in with one of her matching, perfectly coordinated outfits, her straight hair with bouncy ends that he’d deduced was real, her flat white sneakers.

She never came in the classroom.

Right in the middle of one of the teacher’s sentences, Zayn threw up a hand. “Can I go to the bathroom?” he asked.

A couple kids around him snickered, but Zayn just rolled his eyes. He knew well enough that all humans, whether greasers or Socs, peed.

“If you come back smelling like smoke, Mr. Malik…” the teacher trailed off warningly, narrowing her eyes at him.

“Scout’s honor,” he insisted as he got to his feet. “I just have to pee.”

More chuckling throughout the room.

“Thank you for that information. Hurry back. You’re going to want to know this.”

He nodded and hurried out the door, moving with urgency down the hallway. His footsteps echoed throughout corridors, not a single soul acting as company for his journey.

He wasn’t sure exactly why not having Rose in class drove him to the bathroom. He just felt in his gut that it was where he had to go. After all, he’d just peed at home before he went to school. His bladder wasn’t quite that small.

He threw open the door of the bathroom and stepped inside, running a hand through the side of his greased hair to make sure it was still perfect.

As he looked in the mirror, making sure that not a bit had slipped out of place, he heard a moan.

At first, he got concerned, figuring that someone was sick. But then he heard fast-paced breathing that definitely came from more than one person.

Swallowing back his disgust, he started to walk out of the bathroom. God, some people had absolutely no sense of hygiene. It horrified him that people figured a public restroom was a sanitary place to have sex.

His hand clasped around the handle, ready to pull it open, when he heard the one thing that made his heart stop completely.

“John,” a voice gasped before moaning in pleasure. “John…”

Rose’s voice. She used just the same tone that she’d used with Zayn just three days previously. And once the voice had been identified, he could hear the familiar girlish tone of her panting.

A wave of rage passed through him as he stormed out of the bathroom. He was thankful that he’d taken his backpack out of the classroom and brought it with him, just in case he’d needed to fix his hair, because it made his next plan that much easier.

No one stopped him as he lashed his way out of the building, marching harshly over to his car and hopping into the driver’s seat.

As he ripped out of the parking lot, he had no fucking clue where he was going, but there was no way he could stay there, in that building, with that whore that had tricked him so evilly.

Why had she led him on, kissed him like that in his car, made him think that she wanted to go even further, if she was just going to go back to that dickhead John, anyway?

Playing the sound of her moaning inside his head again added fuel to the fire that burned through his body. If she made sounds like that, he wanted to be the cause of them. The thought that some other guy was doing something that made her that passionate made him sick to his stomach.

Why the fuck had he thought that they were going to be any different? He wasn’t like Ponyboy. He knew the barriers between classes existed for a reason, that they had to be that way. But there was something about Rose that had made him forget reality and gave him a beacon of hope in the distance.

A regular Romeo and Juliet scenario.

But instead of dying in the end, his Juliet had run off with the village fool, leaving him all alone, scratching his head and wondering what had happened.

No matter how many times Zayn tried to push the image of Rose’s gorgeous face out of his mind, it was damned near impossible. Even though he was driving, instead of focusing on the road, he found himself trying to count how many freckles she had across her cheeks and nose.

He shook his head and gritted his teeth, reaching for a cigarette, hoping it would calm him down a little bit.

He took a puff and pulled out the ashtray, tapping the tip against it a couple of times, the ashes falling down like the snow that was so incredibly rare in Oklahoma.

After a while, Zayn got sick of driving and pulled up to an empty lot that Ponyboy and Johnny always used to go to late at night to clear their minds. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and his lighter, stuffing them into the pocket of his jacket, knowing that the situation was certainly where chain smoking was going to be the only cure to his ailing thoughts.

As he laid down on the ground, ripping off his jacket and folding it to use as a pillow, he hooked one arm around the back of his head and stared at the clear sky, watching the clouds go by as he brooded.

The situation with Rose should not have bothered him so much. He and Rose were not going steady. They’d known each other for three days before that fateful night when he picked her up on the side of the street and made out with her in his car. Three days.

Really, he should not have had any emotional connection to her at all. There were loads of girls that he used for sex whenever he felt like it, and he had no attachment to any of them at all. They were just convenient. Beautiful, but nothing inside the head. They were only good for one thing.

And then it all clicked: in the scenario, he, metaphorically, had been that “girl” for Rose. She was upset over the fact that her boyfriend was fooling around with someone else, and Zayn just happened to show up at the right time. She used him to try to get over her boyfriend, or maybe to get back at her boyfriend, to tell him that she’d cheated on him too. And with a greaser, no less.

Zayn let out a slow breath, the smoke that he’d inhaled escaping through his nostrils. He was starting to get a headache, since he was on his fourth or fifth cigarette in a row, but he didn’t care. The headache was better than dwelling on thoughts of Rose.

He hated the feeling in his gut, the one that told him, quite obviously, that she’d used him. He had taken her for granted, figuring that she was just like any other girl he’d ever encountered: desperate for a kind of fill in her life, quick to make connections. He liked being the one that could control relationships, the one that turned the passion switch on and off.

He wanted to be the one to dictate whether the couple was going to see each other or if they were going to be on a break. To have a one-night stand one day, then not talk for months, only to have another one-night stand when he was drunk.

But Rose had outplayed him. She had turned the tables so he was the one panting for more, chasing after her, dreaming and fantasizing about her. She was very aware of the spell she cast on guys, and she used it to her advantage.

So, in a nutshell, she was a female version of Zayn himself.

Zayn inhaled his cigarette for a long time, trying to fill his lungs with as much smoke as possible. His head pounded in protest, but he ignored it.

As he let out the breath, he blinked at the sky, the angry fire inside his heart finally extinguishing itself, turning into nothing but sadness and foolishness. “Well played, Rose. Well played.”