Anonymous

I realized that I probably opened a lot of doors and started a lot of trouble by mentioning the story so specifically like that. But I figured that I wasn’t the first one to do start calling out stories specifically, so I couldn’t really get any kind of punishment for it.

When we got back to the hotel, I plopped myself on my bed and got on my laptop, going straight to Like_A_Sunburn’s story, just like I said I would.

The chapter started off brilliantly. I read intently, feeling my eyes scan over the page slowly as to savor every word.

“Tell me the truth,” Zayn interrupted me as he threw himself across my bed, his sneakered feet hanging off the edge to make sure he didn’t get any dirt on the bedspread, “have you been following that story since I showed it to you?”

“Yeah,” I replied, not even thinking about lying to him.

“You made an account, didn’t you?”

At that, I hesitated. Zayn was going to laugh at me so hard if he found out that I was posing as a twenty-year-old British girl.

But the secret was starting to nag at me. I hadn’t realized until that moment, really, that it bothered me that I was keeping this massive secret from all my band mates. That I had, essentially, taken on a new identity and was posing as someone I wasn’t on the internet.

Holy shit, could I get picked up for identity fraud?

“Yeah, I did,” I admitted.

Zayn chuckled, shaking his head. “You’re mad, mate.”

“Yeah, well,” was all I could think to say.

“What’s your name?” I raised an eyebrow at him. “I mean, I’m assuming that you’re not Louis Tomlinson on there. Are you?”

“No,” I responded. “Laura.”

“Oh, like the woman that Petrarch wrote his sonnets to? Is that where you got it?”

I turned to blink at him a couple of times. “I don’t even know what a Petrarch is. So no. Laura starts with L. Louis starts with L. It was the first girl’s name I could think of.”

“So the connection was just a coincidence?”

“One only you’d make or get,” I confirmed, rolling my eyes.

“What do you do?” Zayn asked, finally sitting up so he was sitting face-to-face with me. “On the website, I mean. Do you just comment on the story?”

“That’s what I planned on,” I chuckled. “But the girl whose story I commented on definitely has the gift of gab. So she just keeps chatting me up and keeps asking me questions, so I have to make up answers, and I’m just going to dig myself into this hole so massive that I won’t be able to see a way out.”

Zayn clucked his tongue a couple of times sympathetically. “Who’s saying that you can’t just stop talking to her?”

Hm. I’d never considered that. “I dunno. I guess I’d just feel rude. She seems really nice.”

“Nice or not, she’s still just a girl on the internet. And, to her, you’re just another fan of hers. It’s not like you’re special to her.”

I stared at the screen. Why had that never crossed my mind? It wasn’t like she and I had any kind of connection or anything. We were two complete strangers. She had no idea who I even really was. So she was taking all that time out of her day to respond to me, but she didn’t know anything about me.

Zayn watched me carefully for a while before breaking through my train of thought. “Oh my God, do you have a soft spot for her?”

“What?” I questioned. “I don’t even know what she looks like.”

“But you like the idea of her,” Zayn prompted. “You like that there’s this girl that’s friendly with you, that wants to get to know you, wants to be your friend, even though she has no freaking clue who you are. She thinks you’re a random bird in England, just another face in the crowd.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled, though the feeling in my stomach prompted otherwise.

“Yes, you do. I can see in your eyes that you do.” Zayn sighed loudly, running a hand through his hair like ‘Ohhh, boy.’ “Mate, you can’t get attached to a girl on the internet. You don’t even know what she’s like.”

“I’m not getting attached!” I argued. “I’m actually irritated that she keeps talking to me. It’s frustrating, having to make up all this bullshit to make her think I’m real.”

“Then stop talking to her.”

“No.”

Zayn’s mouth quirked up into a smile. “Why not?”

I searched my mind for the right words to say, but I came up blank. “Because…I don’t know.”

“That’s what I thought.” He got to his feet, smirking at me like a smug little bastard. “Just face it. You like her.”

“I don’t know her.”

“You say it, but you don’t mean it.”

And before I could defend myself, he disappeared into the living room, shutting the bedroom door behind him.

I stared down at the story page again and groaned. God, now Zayn had me questioning my motives about everything. What if he was right? What if I was starting to fall for the idea of this girl?

I couldn’t lie about one thing: I definitely loved the way she saw me. The way she characterized me in the story was absolutely brilliant. She made me out to be so caring and funny and loving and witty. All things that I knew I was to an extent, but definitely not as much as she seemed to think.

Yet I loved that she made me out to be that beautiful person. It was so much better than reality, and I loved that I could escape into that world for a little bit, pretend I was that person.

God, I sounded daft.

I took a deep breath and stopped reading so I could click on her profile. I figured that I could get rid of all the feelings I was starting to develop by looking at her picture. She was probably going to be ugly, I told myself. After all, no pretty girls locked themselves into their rooms to write all those stories every second of every day, right? Pretty girls had friends and plans and lives.

I just about calmed myself down as I clicked on the link that brought me to her pictures and, without looking much, brought up the first picture there.

My computer took its sweet time loading, since the hotel internet was about shitty as it comes. I spent my time tapping my nails against the edge of my computer, the hollow metallic sound echoing through my head.

Finally, the thing came up, the image of her face filling my screen. Her olive-toned, oval-shaped face. A faint scattering of freckles across her nose. Eyes as dark brown as I’ve ever seen them, framed by incredibly long, black eyelashes. Hair that was almost the same color as her eyes. Full lips in a sort of mischievous smile, a hint of her white teeth showing through the part in her mouth.

Aw, fuck. She was incredibly gorgeous.

Well, that didn’t help anything.