Zayne was an asshole to be frank—the type that made people tense the second he walked into a room.
He had that permanently irritated expression carved into his face like somebody had stitched his features together wrong—sharp eyes always narrowed, mouth twisted like he tasted something sour every time another human being opened their mouth.
He called everyone posers, called teachers government puppets, called football players meatheads and girls with dyed hair “factory made alternatives.”
He got into fights so often the vice principal stopped sounding surprised whenever his name echoed through the office speakers.
Half the time he came back to class with split knuckles and dried blood smeared beneath the silver rings on his fingers, slumping into his chair while blasting Pierce the Veil through one earbud loud enough for everyone around him to hear the static leaking out.
He was weird, not cute weird either. Just disturbing weird.
He bit his nails until the skin around them stayed raw and angry red, constantly pushed his side bangs back into place every few minutes because he hated when they separated wrong over his eye.
He smelled faintly like cigarette smoke even though nobody had ever actually seen him smoke. And he looked at people like he wanted them dead for inconveniencing him with their existence.
Nobody liked sitting next to him because he stared too hard. Nobody liked talking to him because he always had something cruel waiting on his tongue.
Yet somehow, with you, it got stranger because Zayne didn’t just look annoyed around you, he looked furious like your existence was a personal sin.
You’d catch him glaring from across the hallway with his jaw tight enough to crack teeth. During class he’d stare at the side of your head with this ugly intensity, fingers twitching against his desk like he was physically restraining himself from saying something awful.
Sometimes you’d turn around suddenly and catch him already looking—already studying you—and instead of glancing away like a normal person, he’d sneer like you were the one bothering him.
“You breathe too fuckin' loud,” he snapped at you once during chemistry when you leaned past him for a pencil.
Another time he scoffed because of the way you stood, literally just stood.
“Why do you stand like that?” he muttered darkly. “You look like a lost dog.”
You blinked at him. “What does that even mean?"
Everybody thought he hated you. Honestly, you did too. It was hard not to when he acted like every little thing you did crawled beneath his skin.
And maybe part of him did hate you.
Zayne couldn’t even tell anymore.
Whatever this thing inside him was, it felt more terrible than hatred. It sat inside his ribs like rusted nails because the same boy insulting you at school went home and carved your name into the wood beneath his bedframe with a pocketknife like a pretty altar he could come home and pray to.
The letters were uneven from how badly his hands shook.
He stared at them afterward for nearly twenty minutes in the dark, thumb brushing over your name over and over until the grooves dug splinters into his skin.
His room looked like a corpse of teenage boyhood. Black walls covered in band posters curling at the edges, clothes scattered everywhere, and empty energy drink cans littering his floor.
Lyrics and scribbled notes were also pinned to the ceiling above his bed because sometimes he liked reading them while he couldn’t sleep—but nowadays when he cant fall asleep he looks under his bedframe, sees your name, and his breath shakes.
His desk lamp barely worked, flickering weak yellow light over notebooks stuffed full of thoughts nobody else would ever read, thoughts and paragraphs about you.
You had ruined music for him, that was the worst part.
Music used to be the only thing that made him feel human. Before you, songs were escape routes, places to crawl into when home got too loud.
When his father started screaming downstairs again, when another plate shattered against a wall, when his mother cried behind locked bathroom doors—music filled the spaces where affection should’ve been. It swallowed him whole and let him disappear for a little while.
But now every song sounded like you somehow.
Every lyric twisted itself into your shape.
His headphones became torture devices.
He’d lay there at three in the morning with music crackling into his skull while thinking about the way your fingers curled around pens during class.
He remembered the way your voice dipped lower when you got tired and the way your shoes squeaked against polished school floors. They were tiny useless details that infected his brain like parasites.
He hated how badly he wanted you because Zayne had never been soft for anyone before. He never cared enough to memorize somebody’s schedule, neither did he ever stared at a phone screen for an hour debating whether or not to send a text. And he for sure never switched jewelry because of another person.
But now the ring on his finger wasn’t his initial anymore, it was yours.
He’d bought cheap metal letter charms online at two in the morning after spiraling for six straight hours thinking about you laughing with somebody else in the cafeteria. When it arrived he locked himself in his room and replaced the old charm immediately, fingers trembling the entire time. He told himself it was just something he could laugh at later when he regulates his system again.
But afterward he sat there staring at it with burning ears and a racing heart like he’d just gotten married in secret.
He memorized your schedule and learned which hallways you preferred, which friends annoyed you, what flavor energy drinks you bought from the vending machine. Sometimes he lingered near classrooms just to hear your voice for five more seconds before going home.
And he still acted like he hated you because if he didn’t, he thought he might actually lose his mind.
One rainy afternoon he followed you home from three blocks away, hood pulled over his head while his heartbeat pounded violently against his ribs.
He told himself he was only making sure you got home safe. But even he knew that was bullshit. He knew it when he watched you through rain-soaked streets like something starving, and he knew it when he stood outside your neighborhood for ten whole minutes after you disappeared indoors.
He could’ve left, but istead he stared at your bedroom window until the lights turned on.
Then he went home and wrote six pages about you.
His poems weren’t romantic in the normal sense. They read more like confessions somebody would find beside a dead body, messy black ink pressed hard enough to tear paper apart.
He wrote about your throat constantly, about how pretty your pulse looked beneath skin, about how your hand would look wrapped around his neck “like a chain he’d gladly choke on.”
He wrote about wanting to unzip his ribs and crawl inside your bloodstream just so he’d never have to be away from you again. About how your voice made his insides feel “gooey and rotten sweet.” About how every time you smiled at someone else he imagined peeling his own skin off because jealousy physically hurt"
He hated everyone around you.
Especially guys, guys zayne knew he could never compete with.
Whenever somebody flirted with you, Zayne spiraled for hours afterward. His chest got tight, and his vision got all blurry. He'd bite his nails bloody trying to calm down while imagining their hands touching yours. Sometimes he got so angry he punched walls until his knuckles split open again.
Then he’d feel ashamed, then angry for feeling ashamed, then obsessed all over again.
It became this endless cycle of self-destruction.
At school he only grew meaner because kindness felt too vulnerable now. If he spoke softly to you even once, he thought the entire terrifying truth might spill out of him all at once. So instead he glared harder, mocked you more, hovered around you with this nasty tension simmering beneath his skin.
But there were cracks sometimes, tiny ones.
Like the day somebody shoved you in the hallway accidentally and Zayne snapped so fast it looked almost animalistic. One second he was leaning against a locker half asleep, next he had the guy slammed against the wall by his collar.
“Watch where you’re fucking going,” he hissed.
The guy blinked in shock. “It was an accident—”
You remember how strange his face looked afterward. Angry, yes. But scared too. Like seeing you get hurt triggered something unstable inside him. He released the guy abruptly and stormed off before you could even thank him.
That night he replayed the moment obsessively, you touched his wrist for half a second trying to calm him down—just half a second and he thought about it for three weeks.
Sometimes Zayne scared himself. Especially late at night when everything got quiet and the obsession stopped feeling romantic and started feeling diseased. He’d stare at his ceiling with hollow eyes while your favorite songs played softly through his headphones, wondering why his chest physically ached whenever he imagined you leaving someday.
That was the insane part.
You barely tolerated him yet his entire existence had started orbiting around you anyway.
One night he sat cross-legged on his bedroom floor surrounded by crumpled notebook pages, exhausted eyes fixed on your initial hanging from his ring.
His house downstairs was loud again—his father yelling, something crashing, his mother crying quietly afterward—but he barely heard it anymore. He only heard your laugh trapped inside his skull.
He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until colors burst behind them. He wanted relief, wanted one single moment where you weren’t tangled around every thought he had. But even now his fingers moved automatically toward another notebook.
Another pathetic confession nobody would ever read.
He wrote about your eyelashes this time, about wanting to pin every expression you ever made against the inside of his skull forever, about how terrifying it was that somebody as ordinary as you somehow became the center of his entire miserable life.
Then he stopped writing halfway through because his hands were shaking too hard.
Zayne tilted his head back against the wall and stared blankly upward. The ceiling above him was covered in taped-up lyrics and scribbled thoughts and pieces of you. Your name appeared so many times it looked ritualistic like worship.
Maybe that’s what this was.
It was just something consuming waiting for him to finally let his guard down and kill him for good.
And still—if you asked him for anything, he’d give it to you, if you smiled at him gently even once, he’d probably spend the rest of the night trembling over it like a wounded animal finally being touched kindly.
Because despite the snarling and insults and dirty looks, despite the bitterness dripping from every word he threw at you—zayne was hopelessly, violently in love with you.
And it was killing him alive.
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