The Boy Who Felt Like Heaven
POV: Zara Mitchell
I was seventeen the first time I believed that someone could love me like I was the only girl in the world.
His name was Ryan Chase, and he had this way of looking at me steady, unhurried, like he had all the time in existence and had decided to spend every second of it on my face. I did not know then what I know now. I did not know that the most dangerous kind of man is not the one who hurts you immediately. It is the one who makes you feel so completely safe that by the time the hurt arrives, you have already handed him every single part of yourself.
I had nothing to protect myself with when Ryan Chase smiled at me for the first time.
We met at my cousin's birthday party on a Saturday in late March. I remember the date because it rained the entire afternoon, the kind of heavy, warm rain that made everything smell like wet earth and something close to hope. I was standing near the drinks table, bored and counting the minutes until I could leave without being rude, when I felt someone step beside me.
"You look like you'd rather be anywhere else," he said.
I turned. He was tall not dramatically so, but enough that I had to tilt my chin. Dark eyes. A slow, easy smile that suggested he already found the world amusing and was simply waiting for me to catch up. He was wearing a plain white shirt slightly wrinkled at the collar, and something about that single imperfection made him feel real in a way that well-dressed boys never did.
"I would be," I said honestly.
He laughed. Not the polished, performative laugh of someone trying to impress. A real one, surprised out of him. "Me too. I only came because Daniel begged me."
"Daniel is my cousin," I said.
"Then we both got tricked." He held out his hand. "Ryan."
"Zara."
His grip was warm and firm and he held on exactly one second longer than necessary before letting go. That one second, I have thought about it so many times since. That one second was the beginning of everything.
We talked for three hours that night.
Not the shallow, circling conversation of two people trying to seem interesting. We talked the way people do when they are genuinely surprised by each other interrupting, laughing, finishing thoughts, starting new ones. He told me about growing up in Kuje, the small crowded neighbourhood on the edge of the city where he shared a two bedroom flat with his mother and two younger brothers. He spoke about it without shame, which I respected immediately. He told me his mother sold food at a roadside stall before school every morning and that he had been helping her since he was nine years old.
"She is the strongest person I know," he said, and the way his voice changed when he said it made something loosen in my chest.
I told him about my own family comfortable enough, not wealthy, the kind of household where the lights stayed on and there was always food but university fees required careful planning. I told him I wanted to study business. That I wanted to build something of my own one day, something that no one could take from me.
He looked at me for a moment after I said that. "You will," he said simply. Not as flattery. As a statement of fact. As if he had looked at me and already seen the version of me that existed five years from now and found her impressive.
Nobody had ever looked at me that way before.
I was seventeen years old and completely, hopelessly done for.
He asked for my number before I left. I gave it to him without hesitation, which was not like me at all. I was not a girl who gave numbers easily. My mother had raised me careful, careful with trust, careful with affection, careful with the parts of yourself that could not be returned once given.
But something about Ryan Chase made careful feel like a waste of time.
He texted me that same night, long after the party had ended and I was lying in my bed listening to the rain thin out against my window.
Got home. Still thinking about what you said about building something that can't be taken from you. I think that's the most honest thing anyone has said to me in a long time.
I read it three times. Then I put my phone face down on my chest and stared at the ceiling with a feeling I did not have a name for yet.
Looking back now, I would call it the last moment of pure happiness I felt for a very long time.
Because what I did not know, what I could not have known, lying there in the dark with rain fading outside my window and his words warm in my hands, was that Ryan Chase was already seeing someone else.
Had been for six months.
And that was not even close to the worst thing he would do to me.
