Page 13 of Written By a Woman

Who is THAT, Signe!?

That is the hottest man I have ever seen.

Is he really that tall or is that the camera angle?

How do I get him to narrate audiobooks? That VOICE!

Zayne!!

OMG IT’S ZAYNE!

HOLD UP are you at work? Do you WORK with ZAYNE??!

No.

No, no, no.

My face was beet red.

“Oh no,” I mumbled out loud, my hand coming up to cover my mouth. I was frozen as I read the hundreds of comments people had left. What had I done?Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I quickly ended the livestream.

I almost had two thousand people tuning in, but it didn’t matter. Everyone had clearly seen Zaid and noticed. They knew. The internetknew. The internet wasn’t stupid. Everyone had seen the cartoonish fanart that people had created for Zayne and Sydney’s story, so it was easy to see the living breathing Zaid and notice the similarities. I mean, based on their personalities I was pretty sure Zayne was wildly different than Zaid. Almost a completely different person, even. But in appearance?

They were the spitting image of each other.

Because I was a creepy, weird, pathetic person who wouldn’t accept that I had crossed a boundary until it came back to bite me in the ass like this.

“Shit!” I ground the heels of my palms against my head, making me groan as I struggled not to panic.

Only about two thousand people tuned into the stream.

Not everyone who tunes into a stream actively watches it, which was good.

That was also not as much as my followers, so hopefully, it would blow over.

Also, nobody knew Zaid’s name. I hadn’t said it in the livestream, so his privacy was still pretty much protected. As far as I knew, he had no social media accounts. I knew because when I looked him up to see if he had a side-gig as a model or influencer, nothing came up.

I inhaled through my nose and exhaled through my mouth.

It was just a fluke, nothing serious.

I ended the stream before people speculated more.

People were probably already forgetting about Zaid appearing in my livestream.

I chanted these reassurances to myself as I finally packed up my things and rushed out of the building, desperate to curl up on my couch and eat my stress in potato chips.

ChapterThree

ZAID

The smellof allspice and coriander filled the air of my parent’s suburban Irvine home, as well as the sound of laughing women. I winced, reminding myself that my mother’s kibba was waiting and would be worth the noise level before closing the door behind me. I bent over to untie and remove my shoes before I set my laptop bag down and entered the kitchen. Following the noise and smell, I found my family gathered around the island that was, as expected, already covered with food.

Food that I had missed out on helping prepare because eight-hour workdays were a distant dream at this point in my life.

“Bisbous!” my mother greeted me when she saw me enter the room.