Burn Me Like the Sun

I practically had to fight off Fran and her probing hands on the way back home on the tube. She wanted so badly to not only find out whose mobile it was, if it even belonged to a member of One Direction, but to also hold it. I kept it tucked safe in my jeans, but the fact that I had it clutched in my hand inside my pocket didn’t stop Fran from begging. But when she finally got the clue that I wasn’t going to let her reek havoc on someone’s lost iPhone, she started pleading with me to just look through it myself. I didn’t get annoyed easily, but with the same words grinding my ears, I started to get fed up, no matter how much I loved my best friend. Then again, my stomach was still doing somersaults ever since we left the dentist. I was starving and it didn’t help my mood at all.

“Please, just open it.”

“No.”

“Please,” Fran begged, squeezing my wrist. A few people gave us curious looks, which kind of worried me considering the kinds of people that usually garnered attention on the underground.

“We’ll look at it when we get back to the flat. ‘S no use looking at it here,” I told her, my voice muted.

“I just want to know whose it is.”

I gave her a look. “But I thought you saw him in the office? That’s what you said, right?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell. Could’ve been Liam or Louis. I can’t remember.” She sighed, eyeing the bulge in my pocket. “I only know it’s one of them.”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll make a lineup. Like in cop shows.”

Fran snorted, wrapping her scarf back around her neck. “I think you’d get a faster answer by just looking through his contacts.”

“Or even Twitter... No! No, I am not letting you drag me into this,” I recanted, pointing a finger at her.

She smiled. “You dragged yourself into this, Blake.”

I ignored her, even though she was right. “He’ll just have to call his mobile himself. I’m not going to stick my nose into his private s—em, private information.”

Fran snorted again, looking amused with herself. “I’ll say.”

“Sod off. ‘Sides, it’s not like I know who any of these people are.”

“Niall, Louis, Zayn, Liam, and, of course, Harry.” She quickly counted them off on her fingers, looking dreamy-eyed for a second. I snapped my fingers in front of her face after a moment, and she finally broke from her trance with a smirk. “You’d think with how famous they are that their mobiles would be blowing up with texts, yeah?”

I shrugged, shoving the boy’s phone deeper into my pocket. Fran’s voice tended to carry.

“What, haven’t you checked?” I shook my head and Fran groaned, leaning into my side. “For Christ’s sake, babe, just look at it,” she said, shoving her hands in front of us, her palms facing the ceiling.

“Oi, you’d think with your upbringing, you’d know by now that patience is a virtue.”

Fran bit her lip playfully, probably recalling one of the handful of Catholic schools she was kicked out of. “Not all of us are blessed with a level head when it comes to meeting a fucking celebrity, Newcastle.” I rolled my eyes. “Just promise you’ll be quick about it. The suspense is absolutely killing me.”

“After breakfast.” She reached for the bloke’s phone in my pocket, but I smacked her hand away. Her lips were poised to say something else, but I cut her off. “I’m starving.”

The ride back to our flat was short. We lived only a few blocks away from the North campus of London Metropolitan, our university, so our trips on the tube were usually rare. By the time we came back up from the underground entrance, another pang of hunger shot through me and I practically ran to our building, Fran following close behind at a speedy walk thanks to those toned legs of hers.

Fran was my only friend I had outside of school. It’s not saying much, as we had met in a shared ethics class our first year of uni, but we were quick to pair up for study groups and our friendship only grew from there. We moved in together a year later, after she was able to score me a job at Veal on Wheels, a small catering company that a friend of her mum’s owned. We were both three years into uni, or rather, at the end of the next trimester we would be. Fran was studying some sort of engineering (though I could never for the life of me remember what kind, as any sort of math always made me want to rip out my eyes). I was going for a double first in both Film and Television and Media and Communications, and most likely doomed to a life of boring consult jobs that would have nowt to do with what I really wanted to do for a living: film reviews.

When my mother left my step father when I was ten, it was at the beginning of the summer. She had been distant for so long. Even from me. My friends were all on holiday when she left at the start of June, just a couple of weeks after school let out. I remember her hair was piled messily in a bun at the nape of her neck and the heat was so palpable and annoying that I couldn’t stand to sit outside and play with my half-brother Cooper. So when she moved out to somewhere in West Yorkshire, leaving me in my step-father’s custody, I was virtually alone. My dad worked and my brother was annoying enough as it was, as he had just turned five. My grandpop, my step-father’s father, watched over us, but he was prone to an Irish coffee or two or five in the mornings, and like me, he was horrible with kids. So I would keep to myself in the living room and go through the stack of VHS tapes behind the cupboard doors under our TV.

I’d like to think that’s when my love for film started.

It sounds proper poetic, right? Girl loses second parent to divorce, has no mates to speak of, and turns to the films her parents had stashed away to console her. But it wasn’t like that. I had friends. I had my step-father, who, honestly, was pretty much my father in almost every sense of the word. Cooper was Cooper, even though we’d grow further apart in the next eleven years. And the films in the cupboard? Well, they weren’t classics. They were mostly just animated Disney films and a copy of Thomas and the Magic Railroad and the like. But they were there. And I learned to love them. And that was all that mattered.

Before I even raided the fridge for the stuff to make a full breakfast, I turned on the telly, hoping there’d be a decent movie playing this late in the morning on a Sunday. I gave up searching after a few channels and turned the TV on mute, leaving it on the news.

Fran was already in the kitchen, downing orange juice straight from the carton. I nudged her from the fridge and pulled out some stuff for a fry-up, pointedly closing the door behind me. Fran opened it back up when she was done contaminating our juice, tossing me an annoyed look before depositing the carton back inside.

“Where’d you put his mobile?”

“We’re here not one minute and you already want to snoop through his personal things?” I clicked my tongue at her. “And what about breakfast? Thought you said you were starving.”

“Forget breakfast. The fact that you have some bloke’s mobile from fucking One Direction is enough to make my stomach clench up.”

“‘S not the only thing of yours clenching up,” I mumbled under my breath. It wasn’t quiet enough, though, and Fran reached over from her spot by the fridge and smacked my arm.

“Cheeky.”

“Ha!”

Fran rolled her eyes and circled around me as I pulled out a tomato from the pile of ingredients in front of me and rolled it across the cutting board.

“You want me to pull up their photos while you’re playing chef?” Fran suggested. “See if it’s actually one of them and not just a collective hallucination? I mean, you did make rye bread last week.”

I reached for a knife for the tomato from the block in the middle of the island. Really though, it was more like a mound of sand than a proper island in our lack of kitchen. “Don’t insult my cooking,” I told her, waving the knife at her with every word as I smiled. “Alreet, show me the lads.”

I wasn’t even done slicing a second tomato when she barged in, shoving her iPad under my nose.

“I just pulled up a group photo. Are any of these delicious blokes your laughing gas guy?”

I glanced at Fran, letting her sit for a moment, just to torture her. Her lower lip was pulled between her teeth, her cheeks pink. I finally smiled and nodded, focusing back on the tomato in my hands.

“Well!”

“Patience,” I reminded her, reaching for the carton of eggs in front of me.

“Blake!” Her voice hitched in her throat, and I laughed at the sound.

I nodded to her glorified laptop. “The one in the braces. That’s him.”

She groaned, her eyes rolling to the back of her head. “Louis.”

Finally, a name to put with the face. “Louis,” I repeated, not even fighting the smile that crept up. “He part French, by any chance?” I asked, licking the juice from my fingers.

“Ugh. I wish.” She smacked my hand from my face, chiding me with just a look. I only giggled. “I didn’t think it was possible for any of those boys to get any hotter, but if only.” She took back her iPad, shutting it off before walking back to her room.

She was back in the kitchen before the pan on the cooker properly warmed up and settled in the corner between the oven and the fridge, her iPhone nearly pressed against her nose. Though on second thought, her mobile wasn’t actually white...

“Fran!”

She shot her hand up, lifting Louis’s phone up into the air before I even reached her. But it was no use, as we were the same height at a slightly taller than average 170 centimeters. I plucked it from her fingers and shoved it into my pocket, making sure she saw the stink eye I tossed her over my shoulder.

“I mean, your cardigan was just... laying there. I had to look.” Her voice was pleading enough, easily matching the guilty look on her round face.

“I knew I should have kept it in my pocket,” I muttered, turning my attention back to the stove. I tossed some bacon on, snapping my hands back before I could get burned by the popping balls of fat.

“He’s still logged into Twitter, you know.” Her voice was quiet, just barely rising over the grinding noise our electric cooker made. I tended to stick with decaf coffee when Fran was asleep, always hyperaware of any noises that might wake her up. That meant no tea, thanks to our rackety stovetop. But to be fair, most of our kitchen was on its last legs.

I licked my lips, keeping my eyes trained on the bacon. “Really, now.”

“Over ten million followers.”

I whistled, weary where this conversation was heading. If you went to the market in search of crisps, you’d come home with a bottle of wine, The Notebook, and Fran on your arm. She could convince almost anyone to do anything, including me. In contrast, however, I was a bit different. Within the first minute of meeting someone new, my confrontational nature and freely-offered honesty, often unsolicited, usually had them backing away slowly – or running away at breakneck speed. And I was especially frank with strangers. Though once I was used to someone, I tended to back off. I wanted to say it was because I felt like easing off of those I cared about, but sometimes it felt like I was afraid of being abandoned.

“Bound to be an insane axe murderer somewhere in the mix, but with the way his feed looked, psychopaths seem to congregate around the rich and musically talented.”

I bit my lip, but ended up laughing anyway. I couldn’t really stay angry at Fran for long. She was just one of those people that made you forget what you were even arguing about by just changing the subject. And I loved her for it.

“Did you check out his contacts while you were busy being impatient, by any chance?”

She shook her head. One step brought her to the lip of the island and she reached over and plucked a slice of tomato off a plate. “Fuck, no. I went straight to his photo album. Lots of interesting shots, if you get my drift.”

“What, dick pics?” Fran snorted, and my cheeks instantly heated up. “Oh, you know what I meant,” I said, waving a cooked slice of bacon at her. It broke in half, and I picked up the piece that fell to the floor and ate it. Fran eyed me, disgusted, and made a face. I only shrugged. After all, it was bacon. Hygiene be damned.

“No. Surprisingly, it was pretty tame. Lots of family photos, though. Especially a bunch of little girls. I think he’s the one with the personal army of pre-teen sisters.”

I hummed. “Sounds scary.”

Children were never my forte. The only time I ever held a child and didn’t practically scream along with it was when my aunt Cordelia shoved my baby cousin Brandt into my lap at my father’s funeral reception. But then again, I was only four. And crying still kind of freaked me out back then, particularly with the way my mother had clung to silent sobs that entire, and otherwise quiet, week.

Fran understood what I was getting at, though. My hesitation towards children was not a new thing to her. When I said I was a lightweight, I wasn’t joking. Within the first week of moving in together, I had gotten drunk off cheap white wine and some utterly horrific American rom-com, and one thing led to another, and by the time the sunlight was sifting through the blinds and making me wish I was allergic to alcohol so I’d never be tempted, I had spilled nearly my entire life story to Fran. I told her everything she hadn’t known, and probably didn’t want to know, from my confusing childhood right down to how I lost my virginity to Chad Boonswick during Upper Sixth in the janitor’s surprisingly roomy utility closet.

Okay, so being honest never didn’t get me anywhere, because Chad Boonswick was fit as hell.

“What exactly are you making?”

I looked at Fran over my shoulder, my copper bangs falling into my eyes. “Eggs with tomato, bacon, and toast from that loaf I made a few days ago.”

“Unless you’re deaf,” she said, propping her elbows onto the island, “I hope you heard my stomach growling like a demon just now.”

“And here I just thought it was the stove.”

Fran laughed, reaching over and grabbing a piece of bacon that I left to sift on a paper towel next to the stovetop. “I swear, we need to get that thing checked before it blows up in the middle of the night and burns this godforsaken flat to the ground.”

“Yeah, sure, if you want to go without proper food for a couple of weeks.”

Fran turned up her nose at the idea, her carefully sculpted eyebrows knitting together as she made a noise of protest. “I’d rather this building get a little crispy ‘round the edges.”

Fran put out the dishes and eagerly waited for her breakfast at the table we had stashed in the corner of the living room. It was set up with matching wicker chairs under one the few windows in our flat, which gave us a breathtaking view of the building right next to us. Only seconds after I finished serving her, Fran double-fisted the eggs I pushed onto her plate, not even minding the yolk that dribbled down her chin and stained the collar of her baggy t-shirt.

“Blake, this is brill,” she said, a few crumbs popping from her mouth as she struggled to talk against the ball of egg she was trying to chew.

“For Christ’s sake, Fran. Chew your food.” I shuddered, serving myself some egg on top of my toast. “It’s like I’m watching a horse give birth.”

“I pay you in compliments and you throw me through the grinder. You’re so abusive.” She finally swallowed her food, then took a long pull of her water. “I could leave you, you know.”

“Have fun trying to find a flatmate that cooks like me.” I pointed my fork at her, a piece of bacon hanging off the end.

“Hey, your plate’s kinda thin,” she said, tapping the table with her fork near my cup. I stared at her, one of my eyebrows perking up. “Aren’t you gonna eat more than that?”

I shook my head, tucking my chin to my chest as I chewed on my toast. “Turns out I’m not very hungry, apparently.” My stomach had stopped with the acrobatics by the time I had cracked open the first egg. I was thankful that the twisting sensation in my abdomen had stopped, but I was kind of disappointed that I couldn’t pig out along with Fran on eggs and bacon and fried tomatoes without feeling like a bloated whale. I was pretty good at eating, probably as good as Fran thought I was at cooking. I could get pregnant with a food baby almost on cue.

Probably for the first time in the entire two years we lived together, I finished my meal before Fran did. By the time I gave up breakfast and left the table, she was already shoveling my leftover toast onto her own plate. I went to my room and shrugged the door open, kicking shirts and shoes out of my way as I walked to my desk. I grabbed my towel and flipped it over my shoulder before picking up my toiletries from the foot of my bed and shutting off the light. I leaned against the doorjamb, trying to remember if I forgot something, but I brushed it off when I couldn’t think of anything relevant. Within one step, I had crossed the corridor into our shared bathroom.

|||

“It’s not my fault that bloody idiot didn’t put a passcode on his phone!”

I had to hold up my towel with one hand as I stalked across the middle of the tiny living room, my hair in wet waves bouncing off my forehead and my arms still slick with soap. I had remembered halfway through my relaxing shower that I had left Louis’s phone in my jeans. And I was daft enough to forget that Fran could just as easily skip into my room, find the pants I was wearing that morning strewed somewhere about the floor, flip them back out, and find the mobile that had already become the bane of my existence in the last two hours sticking out of my pocket.

I wiped my other hand on my towel right before I reached Fran, who was huddled in the corner of our off-white couch (we found it that way at a resale shop, though I doubt it was originally only off-white), her legs crossed under her, Louis’s iPhone in the middle of her lap.

She set the phone into my outstretched hand, but as my fingers wrapped around it, it beeped twice with a new text. I looked down automatically, as my five year-old phone used the same tone, finding a new text from someone named “Hazza.”

The one and only Harry Styles was texting his best mate.

At least, that’s what I had gathered from my lack of conversation with Fran over breakfast. She rattled off everything she knew about One Direction, which, thankfully enough, wasn’t all that much. Even then, I had barely gotten a word out when I left the table only five minutes later.

I flipped the phone so it faced Fran, who was still sitting, ashamed and blushing fire trucks, in the corner of the settee.

“I swear to god, Fran. Were you texting Harry Styles?” I licked my lips when she didn’t answer, her forehead wrinkled confusedly. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“No.” She sounded truthful enough, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

But the air in my lungs shot back out when Louis’s mobile rang with another text. I nearly dropped it on the floor, which wouldn’t have been the greatest thing, considering it was all old, thinned, and faded shag carpet. A number of bowls had broken just by falling off the couch alone.

I turned the iPhone back around and read the new text aloud, but only just under my breath.

“Sorry?”

I read the text again, this time louder, looking back at Fran from over the top of Louis’s mobile. “It’s from a ‘Vic.’”

Fran laughed behind her hand, her pale pink nails easily matching her cheeks. “Is a member of the UK’s most successful boy band gay?”

My chest kind of sunk at the thought, but I regretted it the second I felt it. “He’s gonna fucking sue my arse,” I groaned, gripping my forehead. My hand became wet again with the soap still clinging to my hair, so I wiped my palm on my towel, a frown weighing down my face.

“No. No, wait.” Fran sat up, uncrossing her legs and setting her feet on the floor.

I eyed her curiously. “What?”

“Vic. Victoria. Victoria Anders-James.”

The corner of my mouth screwed up. Obviously, I had no clue who she was talking about. “Em. Okay. Who is she?”

“His girlfriend.” She chuckled darkly and stood up, crossing her arms over her chest. “More like ex-girlfriend if you ask me.”

“Aren’t you quite the little Sherlock Holmes?” I mumbled, staring at his mobile. The screen was black again, and I hoped to god that it wouldn’t start ringing with this Victoria Anderson-whatever her name was on the other end. I couldn’t risk Fran picking up the phone like one of those deadly curious Nazis from any of the Indiana Jones films without looking at the screen first.

“Okay. Em.” I turned around, pulling my towel back up as it slid dangerously low. With my luck, any one of the tenants in the building over would get breakfast with a show through the blinds if I wasn’t careful. “Fran, you’ve got to promise, and I’m being fucking serious here, okay?” I licked my lips again, giving her a pointed look. “Don’t pick up the phone unless it rings, and only if the person on the other end isn’t this Vic. Please. Just promise me that. I don’t want the guy suing us.”

Fran snorted and plucked the mobile from my once again wet hand. “I may be looking at his mobile like it’s the Holy Grail—” Yep, definitely an Indiana Jones Nazi. “—but there’s no way I’d pick it up if she was ringing him. Okay? Like...” She paused, rolling her eyes before staring at Louis’s iPhone clutched between her fingers. “I mean, anyone who’d be willing to date an international pop star has probably got some serious issues. I don’t want to get mixed up in that bullshit, thank you very much.”

I gave her a harsh look, my mouth open wide as I tossed my free hand into the air. “Way to jump to conclusions, Francesca,” I scolded.

“I’m just saying,” she huffed, brushing me off. She walked over to the kitchen and set the iPhone on the island next to the knife block, face-up. “It’ll stay here. I’ll stop snooping, I promise.” She walked back to the living room and ruffled my hair as she passed me, dropping herself back onto the sofa as she wiped her hand off on her shorts. “I swear, Blake.”

I brushed my bangs out of my face, my lips set in a hard line. I turned and started out of the room, but I was just at the mouth of the corridor that led to our bedrooms and my waiting shower when Fran called my name. I turned around, still gripping the towel around my chest like my dignity depended on it, and gave her a prompting look.

“Why’d you take his mobile, anyway? Why not just leave it with the receptionist?”

My cheeks got red, and I glanced at Fran before training my gaze on her feet. “I wanted to meet him again, I guess. He seemed... fascinating? I… I don’t know.” I sighed, defeated, and ran my fingers through my hair, which was now a lot less wet and far more slick and soapy. I frowned and wiped my hand on my towel, but the slimy feeling wouldn’t rub off. “But right now,” I admitted, leaning against the wall, my eyes downcast as I wrung my fingers, “I’m starting to regret it.”