Blackbird

Blossoming romance? Tomlinson pictured with the mysterious red again.

What an eventful day for One Direction’s boisterous, and somewhat troubled, Louis Tomlinson, who celebrated his 22nd birthday on Tuesday. Tomlinson spent the morning with his family, he was pictured outside his mother Johannah’s home surrounded by his maternal half-sisters, before attending the illustrious Isle Record Christmas Party with bandmate Harry Styles, 19.

Unfortunately for all those Larry shippers, it wasn’t the cheeky Harry that Tomlinson was pictured on a balcony of the London Hilton on Park Lane but instead with a beautiful red-head. The same red-head that he was pictured with on late Monday night outside of the Central Middlesex Hospital.

A source, who attended the party, has told Sugargoss that the beautiful red is the Australian born Cara Sol, 19, a close family friend of the MacSual family and the roommate of Brenna MacSual, the daughter of Lachlann MacSual, CEO of Isle Records. Miss Sol is the youngest daughter of French born Neurosurgeon Christophe Sol and former Australian Model and Actress Lorelei Sol (nee Anderson).

The source stated that, “Louis and Harry arrived about forty minutes before Cara and Brenna arrived. Cara spent some time talking to the singer James McOwen before having a lengthy conversation with Harry. She disappeared to one of the balconies around the same time as Louis did.”

We at Sugargoss smell romance! While Tomlinson, or One Direction’s management, hasn’t confirmed the relationship it seems to be way more than a coincidence that Sol and Tomlinson have been seen together twice in the past two days. It wouldn’t be the first time that Tomlinson hasn’t confirmed relationship rumors at first, with his previous relationship with longtime girlfriend, Eleanor Calder, not confirmed for two months after they were pictured together.

We hope that Tomlinson has found romance after splitting with Calder in late October and got a little bit of Christmas cheer, you know what we mean, from the beautiful Cara Sol.

Sugargoss out!

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Her picture, and now her name, was in the tabloid again. Cara sighed in frustration and let her head fall heavily on the flour covered bench before her with a loud thud. The article that graced the screen of her phone had been the icing on top of her all-round shitty day.

She’d woken at three in the morning to find that it was sleeting outside like there was no tomorrow and despite the time it had taken her almost forty minutes due to the weather to drive the 20 kilometers from her apartment to the small bakery where she worked. Upon arriving she’d found that the locks were completely frozen so Cara had spent five minutes fiddling with her keys while being covered in the cold slush that was continually falling around her before she finally got inside.

Her father had called her around six am to ask why she didn’t attend their Christmas dinner. Cara hadn’t even contemplated that her mother might not have told her father that she had uninvited Cara to the Christmas festivities. She lied through her teeth and simply told him that she had been caught up in work and was unable to catch her flight and that she would try to visit in the New Year. If she had told her father about his wife’s doings, he wouldn’t have believed a single word that left her mouth and probably would have accused her of seeking attention so lying seemed to be the only way to tackle the situation.

While Cara felt some relief that her father had actually considered her missing presence enough to call her; she was consumed with sadness at the daunting thought that he had forgotten about her very existence until that moment. Throughout Cara’s childhood her father, the renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Christophe Sol, had been exceedingly absent and during the brief periods he was with his family Cara had always seemed to be a second thought. So it didn’t seem that to be too far of a stretch to believe that he had forgotten about Cara attending Christmas as it had passed three days ago. She quite briefly wondered if he was even at the Christmas dinner this year.

The sadness settled in Cara’s chest and had created a certain heaviness around her lungs making it remarkably difficult for her to breathe and concentrate throughout the day. Not that the concentration really mattered for Cara was alone all day as she had been the only one available due to her two coworkers still being on holidays. She’d had a brief encounter with a regular customer; an elderly man, with a protruding belly, receding hairline, crisp grey pants and a bright holiday sweater, who bought a small cake for his wife once a week.

That was the extent of her interaction with the remainder of society until Brenna had sent her the link to the stupidly fatuous article that had led to the building frustration surging through her veins.
She continued to lift and drop her head heavily onto the bench as she thought the last few days over. In the corner of her eye Cara could see her phone screen illuminate as a call came through. Blindly she reached for her phone, shoved it roughly against her ear as she rested her head on the bench and closed her eyes.

“Cara Jean Sol,” the devil herself, Cara’ own mother, screeched. Cara hit her head against the bench once more as punishment for not checking the caller I.D. before answering.

“Hello mother,” Cara sighed.

“Do not ‘hello mother’ me Cara Jean! Why weren’t you at Christmas Dinner?” Her mother continued to screech into the phone.

Cara felt her insides boil with rage. How dare she? How dare her mother yell at her for her own actions? She was the one that had banned Cara from attending after all. All Cara wanted to do was scream at her mother but with every ounce of self-control that she possessed she simply sneered, “You called me and told me not to come because you had ‘a very important guest’.”

“Yes, well,” Her mother seemed slightly startled, “The head of the hospital, Mr. Johns, dined with us on Christmas Eve and he had the nerve to ask where you were, as if it wasn’t obvious that you weren’t there, so I had to tell him that you were celebrating elsewhere during the holiday season. The bumbling idiot didn’t get the hint and he kept asking about you! You, the baker daughter, not Bastien’s residency at the hospital or Jonathan’s engagement. Your sister, Dominique and her modeling work or Remy’s nearing HSC didn’t even get a mention. He didn’t once comment on how lovely my flower arrangements were or how I’d decorated the tree and he didn’t even remark about the stuffing for the chicken that I worked all night on because he kept talking about you!”

“How is that my problem?” The words escaped her mouth before she could even stop them.

“How is it your problem? How is it your problem!? It’s your problem because you had to be pictured with that Thomson… Tomlinson boy in that band. That’s why it’s your problem. Mr. Johns’ daughter saw that picture on the internet and showed him, so he spent dinner asking about it and you! You made me look like a fool because I didn’t know what to say. How dare you do that to me…” Her mother screamed into the phone, the neighbours would have heard her mother by this stage.

In a moment of rage Cara pulled her phone from her ear and threw it onto the tiled floor. The unwanted noise coming from the phone immediately as Cara heard the screen crack and the case fly off in the opposite direction. She sunk into a chair in the corner and dropped her head into her hands. After an impossibly long time a frustrated cry spilled out of her lips.

Of course her mother would only ring to tell Cara how much she was disappointed in her and how angry she was about something that was, although completely out of her control, Cara’s fault.

Everything was Cara’s fault when she was living with her parents. It was always her fault if he mother was running late in the morning because somehow it was always Cara that was holding her up. It was always Cara’s fault that Dominique didn’t get a modelling job because somehow Cara had caused her to stumble in her heels or smear her make up. It was always Cara’s fault that Bastien didn’t get the highest mark in a test because she would have stopped him from studying somehow. It was always Cara’s fault that Jonathan’s relationships didn’t last because she was the one that wasn’t polite enough anytime that he brought a girl home. It was always her fault that Remy wasn’t becoming a doctor like his father and brothers because she apparently had been the one that had riddled his mind by choosing to practice gastronomy and not medicine herself.

Cara felt the tell-tale sting of tears of anger and despair from her family’s ways towards when she heard the shrill ringing of the small, golden bell at the front of the bakery signalling that she might actually have a second customer for the day. Normally the bakery was reasonably busy but it seemed that the people of London didn’t feel the need to buy ornately decorated cakes and pastries so soon after Christmas.

“I’ll be right there,” Cara called out as she pulled her grimy apron over her head, which she found was pounding from being repeatedly hit against a bench.

“How may I help you,” she said politely as she rounded the corner to the front of the store; she wiped her hands rigorously against her pants trying to remove the flour that had settled there. Cara stopped dead in her tracks as she saw tired blue eyes and a bruised hand running through dishevelled brown hair.

“You’ve got flour on your forehead,” Louis declared with a small, nervous chuckle that echoed slightly off the walls and ran through the otherwise still bakery.

Cara lifted her hand to her head and just as Louis had said she could feel the powdery flour that had to have been the result of the head banging against the bench. She ran her hand over her forehead and said with sarcasm dripping from the words, “No greeting for your rumoured girlfriend?”

Louis let out a loud sigh and raked his large hand through his mop of brown hair.

“Yeah, I was wondering if we could… um… discuss that?” Louis said while shifting his gaze to the ground.

Cara wasn’t sure if he’d meant what he’d said to be a question or if it had just come out that way, regardless she walked out from behind the booth, moved towards one of the side booths and motioned for him to sit. He moved slowly and sat gingerly in the plush, red seat across from her.

“Shouldn’t you be in the kitchen or something?” Louis questioned.

“I’m not sure whether that was a sexist joke or not,” Cara laughed then shrugged, “Don’t worry no one’s come in all day.”

Silence fell in the bakery again following Cara’s comment and to her surprise it wasn’t as uncomfortable as she thought it would be.

“Look,” Cara cleared her throat softly, “if you want me to make a statement for the tabloids and tell them that we aren’t together I will happily do it.”

Louis looked at her from across the booth with a mixed look of relief and slight dread.

“About that,” he let out another small nervous laugh, “I told my management that the rumours were fake but, well, they think that a relationship might be what I, well One Direction as well, need right now.”

Cara sat silently and wondered what that had to do with her. Her silence must have prompted Louis because he continued his nervous ramblings.

“Those articles speculating ‘bout you and me have been the first pieces of positive media I’ve had for a couple of months now and the bloody wankers that manage the boys and I want for that to continue. So well, they want me and you to, um well, release a statement to the media about us being in a relationship and they want for us to ‘continue’ a relationship in public. You, like, really don’t have to do anything. I told management that they were absolutely fucking crazy but they seemed to think that it was a fucking great idea. And you know, you really don’t have to do anything I can just release a statement that we just ran into each other and were talking or some bullshit like that.”

Louis continued his ramblings that become more nervous and apologetic as each second passed but Cara wasn’t really listening. A fake relationship? She thought it was incredibly stupid, then again she was probably naïve but she couldn’t really see the harm in being pictured with Louis a few times, if it meant that he wasn’t up shit creek with the media anymore. She’d never really done anything even remotely reckless like that, she was always that kid that would test the water numerous times before slowly getting in and would run, no sprint, away from any sign of danger. So maybe this was fates way of telling her that she needed to do something that she would never even dream about. She’d definitely need to set some solid ground rules and conditions but maybe a fake relationship, for Louis’ sake of course, wasn’t the worst idea. Right?

And, Cara thought, it would really get up her mother’s nose if she was in the media ‘stealing her limelight’ and making her look like ‘a fool’. She scoffed mentally, her mother made herself look like a fool on numerous occasions without her help.

So, probably against her best judgement, Cara cleared her throat, again, immediately stopping Louis ramblings and said, “Okay.”