Chapter 14

ZAINAB

I set my alarm super early. Honestly, it should be against my human rights getting up at this hour. It’s five-thirty a.m.

I need to be up before Griff, and that man rises at seven without fail.

I want to surprise him. I bought all the ingredients I’d need last night in bed and had them delivered at the crack of dawn this morning.

Griff won’t be happy that I went down and collected the groceries myself, but he’ll get over it.

I want to do something special for him, so I googled foods from Baltimore. From my research, I found out that Maryland has a state dessert, the Smith Island Cake.

I have no idea if Griffith has tried it or even heard of it before, but I couldn’t see a better option.

It takes me ten minutes to make the icing. I set it aside to cool while I make the sponge. For almost an hour, I cook eight lots of sponge in the oven and leave it to cool.

I try to do the washing up as I go along so that the kitchen doesn’t look like a bomb site when I’m finished.

Once the sponge is cool, I cut it into slices and fetch the icing from the fridge where I’ve been chilling it. I generously spread the chocolate icing between the layers. Then I pour the leftover icing on top and make a “G” on the cake with little edible gold stars.

When it’s done, I step back to admire my work.

I hear the bathroom door open and close. Griff is up. It’s seven o’clock, right on time.

I finish cleaning up the kitchen while I wait for him to come and find me.

He wanders in ten minutes later, freshly showered and looking perfect in only a pair of sweatpants and a hoodie.

“What’s this?” he asks curiously.

I stand next to the cake on the island, grinning widely.

“I made you a cake.”

He stops short, his face contorting into surprise and then confusion.

“Why?”

“Happy one month of living together,” I tell him.

His eyes widen. He looks back and forth between me and the cake. His mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out.

I eye the cake, trying to determine if it looks like shit and I just have my rose-tinted glasses on. It looks okay. Homemade and a little lacking finesse maybe, but tasty.

I glance back at Griff again, feeling nervous about how quiet he’s being.

“Zee, I… I don’t know what to say,” he says eventually.

He walks up and places his hands on the counter. He looks down at the cake and shakes his head.

“No one has made me a cake since… I don’t even know. A very long time.”

He raises his head to look at me, and I nearly choke up at the sight of his ice-blue eyes shining with tears.

“Thank you, Zee.”

“Oh, Griff.”

I can’t stop myself. I throw my arms around him and bury my face in his neck. He stumbles back and becomes rigid.

Then, he slowly relaxes and his big arms engulf me. His huge hands spread over my back and rub it.

I close my eyes and breathe him in. He smells so good.

Griffith’s sheer size and bulging muscles might con you into thinking that he’s too bulky to be a good hugger, but that would be wildly inaccurate.

I feel so swept up, so safe in his arms that I don’t want him to let go.

He seems to feel the same way because we stand like this for the longest time, holding onto one another.

After a few minutes, I realize that I should probably let go of him.

The minute I start to pull away, he drops his arms. He steps back from me and clears his throat.

I watch the mask fall back into place. He blinks away the emotion in his eyes and clenches his jaw.

“It’s Smith Island Cake,” I tell him quickly, trying to fill the suddenly awkward silence.

“I googled it, and apparently it’s the official state dessert of Maryland.”

I look to him for confirmation. Griff raises his eyebrows.

“Really? I didn’t know that. To be fair, I’ve never been to Smith Island, so I wouldn’t know. I’ve heard of the island, not the cake.”

“It’s a normal vanilla sponge but with lots of layers. There are eight layers with chocolate icing,” I tell him proudly.

The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile.

“Is this breakfast?”

I smile bashfully and shrug.

“It can be. If it’s going to be too sweet, you can leave it until later.”

“I actually was looking up some recipes myself. I found one that I thought we could try out. Now that you’ve made cake, I think it would be a shame not to try it, especially when it’s still so fresh.”

“You’ve been looking up recipes for us to try?”

He tries to shrug it off like it’s no big deal, but I can spot the pink tinge to his cheekbones as he pretends to be busy searching for a knife to cut the cake.

“You do the honors; it’s your cake,” I insist when he tries to hand me the knife.

It’s adorable how much he looks like an excited kid as he carefully cuts the cake. He carves out two pieces and plates them up. We sit down at our usual spaces at the dining table.

I’m relieved that the cake tastes good. The sponge isn’t dry.

“This is really good, Zee. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Happy one month!”

He shakes his head in disbelief.

“Time has gone so quickly.”

“It really has. Do you miss the US?”

He shrugs.

“Sometimes, yeah. There are little things I miss, but being here is so different. I feel too caught up in what’s happening to sit around missing stuff from the States.”

“What about your friends?”

His face darkens, and I feel bad for asking.

“I only had a few friends back home, and they were ex-military too. They had their demons. A couple of them I haven’t seen in a long time. But I’ve shared a few messages with Roy, the guy I was closest to. We served together for three tours.”

“What does Roy do now?”

“He runs a veterans facility in Baltimore. He would have loved this cake; he has a sweet tooth.”

The twang in his Baltimore accent makes me smile. We talk so often, sometimes it’s easy not to hear it.

“I only realized that it has been a month of you living here when my dad mentioned it last night.”

“He spoke about me?”

He looks a little nervous to hear what I’m going to say.

“He wanted to see how you were fitting into your role and how I felt about you being with me full time. I told him you were great, that I feel safer than ever.”

He blinks a few times, taken aback.

“Is that true?”

“Of course it’s true!” I insist, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t lie.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you would,” he responds sheepishly.

We eat our cake in silence for a couple of minutes.

“If you’re wanting to make foods from Baltimore, I’ll show you how to make Berger cookies.”

“Burger cookies?” I repeat, raising an eyebrow. “They don’t contain any meat, do they?”

“No, not burger, ~Berger~ with an ~e~. They’re just plain shortbread cookies, but they have a thick chocolate ganache on top.”

“Ooo, they sound sickly.”

“They are,” he chuckles. “But they’re really good.”

“Okay, we’ll have to make them then. And you can show me what you found for breakfast as well.”

***

Later in the afternoon, I have an online therapy appointment with Dr. Churchill.

I’ve been seeing my therapist for nearly four years now. He’s great and completely honest with me; I appreciate his bluntness.

We catch up for the first five minutes. I fill him in on everything that has happened the last few weeks.

The thing he is keen to speak about most is how much I’ve been drinking.

Before Faisal left, I told him that I was going to use the three months of my brother being gone to massively cut back on my alcohol intake, and I’ve been so good.

But the two nights I’ve been out with Faisal, I’ve gotten hammered.

“Why do you think that is?”

I glance anxiously at my office door. I know the room is soundproof, and I trust that Griff is discreet enough that he would move or put headphones in if he could hear me, but my mind goes straight to him.

“The new bodyguard I told you about? He’s gorgeous. I’m not blaming him; I know it is completely my responsibility how much I drink, but I feel like on those two nights, I drank more because he was there.”

“Why is that, do you think?”

“Because then I have an excuse to flirt with him and behave inappropriately,” I admit. “I can fall back on ‘I was drunk.’”

My confession leads us down a rabbit hole of what I want and how I can’t manipulate my behavior to either go after it or avoid it.

Bottom line, I can’t drink myself out of my crush.

By the time the session is over, my cheeks are burning with embarrassment, but I feel like I’ve had the dressing down that I need.

Basically, I have to get my shit together.