Girl That You Love

Emma had hoped that the popularity of the video would have died down within a week just like the rumors about her and Dan. However, people apparently loved watching other people getting hurt, especially if that person was or was somehow related to a celebrity, even one whose name was on top of a movie marquee. Wendy was receiving constant calls from news outlets to get Emma and Patrick on air, with every type of news correspondent and radio, TV and Internet personality weighing in on the video and what it meant for celebrities, their family and more importantly, what it meant for Emma and Patrick.

An outpouring of support among their more famous friends came through Twitter (Brendon and Travis were especially disapproving), and even in the Fall Out Boy fan base. Many of their diehard fans condemn the girl that attacked Emma and the girl that filmed it, although Emma couldn’t really blame her. It made her YouTube page a hit and that was probably something she had been wanting for awhile. Emma tried to not listen to the other side, the dark side of the fandom, the few fans that actually thought Emma deserved what she got.

For their part, they tried to focus on moving into the new house. Emma had hired movers, who had gotten all of the big furniture items in and then Pete, Joe, Marie and Tracy came to help them decorate and also to break in the kitchen a little.

Emma and the girls had escaped to the bedroom to sort through her clothes and set up the décor there because Marie claimed that “ the master bedroom should be the first thing established in the new home of a soon-to-be married couple.”

The boys, on the other hand, were more focused on Patrick’s new recording studio that he had had set up. Emma couldn’t blame them. That was the one place that all of them felt the most at home at. It also had soundproof walls so she could only imagine what they were talking about.

“Emma, these sheets are incredibly soft and kind of sexy,” Tracy commented, as she and Marie smoothed out the deep red satin sheets.

“Oh, well, they have this climate cool feature and I love the color red, that’s why I bought them,” she replied stuffing her underwear in the top drawer of their eight drawer dresser.

“Wow, Em, way to ruin the sexiness with a practicality speech,” Marie retorted, stuffing one of their pillows into the matching shams.

“Well, you haven’t seen the comforter yet,” Emma protested, pointing to the large gray plastic bin labeled “Comforter” with a permanent marker.

Tracy and Marie looked at each other excitedly and pulled the bin onto the be and opened it up.

“Oh my, Emma, no wonder you and Patrick like to have sex a lot,” Marie cooed, pulling the comforter out. Emma was pleased with the comforter choice. It was made of black stain with a red lace design on it. She had bought sheer black curtains to cover the long windows because ,at eleven stories up with slightly tinted windows, she doubted they would be seen by anyone.

“I don’t think the comforter would be the reason,” Emma laughed. “I just wanted to spice up our room a little bit. I mean, it’s just ours you know? I want it to be special.”

“Well with a room like this, you’ll be having babies in no time,” Tracy laughed.

“Oh gosh, I hope not,” Emma exclaimed. “I don’t think we’re quite ready for babies yet.”

“Really?” Marie asked. “I mean I see the way you two are with Bronx, I mean it would be a natural fit for you.”

“I, uh, well what about you Marie? I don’t see you and Joe in the throes of making babies,” Emma said, trying to steer the conversation away from her and Patrick.

“Joe and I have a plan, Emma, a plan that I take very seriously.”

“Yeah, she has it all planned out on her computer too, tracking it with her day planner,” Tracy joked, and Marie shot her a look.

“I told you that in confidence!”

“Wait, she’s serious?!” Emma sputtered. “Wow Marie…”

“Hey, you know I like order and planning. Joe is the mess in our relationship, but he knows that when it comes to this stuff, I’m the one who’s in charge.” She huffed. “It’s a scary thing to have a baby. It changes everything.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I could have been with Pete if he didn’t have a child,” Tracy commented. “I mean the man he is now that he has Bronx, that’s the man I love. I don’t know if I would have been in love with the crazy ego-trippin’ wild child he used to be.”

“Yeah, Pete has grown up a lot,” Emma said thoughtfully. “I don’t even know what would happen to Patrick and me when we have a kid.” The thought terrified her.

“You guys would be fine. You’ll be that cute urban couple in your jean jackets and skinny jeans strolling your baby through Central Park,”

“And the baby will be wearing a pair of baby hipster boots,” Marie added and she and Tracy giggled.

“Oh my god, well it looks like you two thought this out more than we did,” Emma laughed, shoving her bras into the next drawer. “Hey can you two finish that bed and help me with these clothes. I’m still only on my stuff, and Patrick has apparently become a clothes horse since we last lived together.”

It was true, since he had lost all of his weight, he went a little overboard on suits and button down shirts and shoes. She appreciated his newfound sense of style (now that they were almost 30 it beat the trucker hats and skater tees that he had worn in the past), but her side of the closet did not.

When they were finished unpacking, the pizza had arrived by way of Robbie. Although Emma hadn’t received any new death threats in the mail (she hoped it was because they couldn’t find out where she and Patrick had moved), Marcus felt safer if Robbie was still around in case any fans did catch wind of her whereabouts. He also had all of the death threats sent to the police, but they couldn’t find any evidence to use to track where they originated.

“Pizza, beer, and my woman, man this is a pretty damn good day, even if I had to move shit around and use a hammer,” Pete joked, resting his feet up on Tracy’s lap. She shooed them off with her hand.

“Eating here!” she exclaimed, sticking out her tongue at him. He grinned and ripped a piece of his pizza off with his teeth. “Animal,” she muttered pretending to be disgusted, although her face said otherwise.

Emma had scarfed down her own pizza and then retreated into the kitchen, noticing a few boxes of dishes that still needed to be put away. Pete, Joe and Patrick were regaling them all with a story about the BBC One Radio awards in London, and Emma felt a gnawing need to escape. She made the excuse of getting more to drink and left the living room to head into the kitchen. She started to unpack dishes and could feel a presence behind her.

“You really don’t know how to sit still do you?”

She turned around and smiled at Robbie. “Nope,” she said before turning back around to finish putting the dishes away. She stood on her tiptoes to try and get some of the china up into the top shelf and she felt Robbie’s hand grab hers.

“Okay, shortie, let me help,” he said, taking the stack of plates from her hand and with ease set them on the top shelf.

“Thanks,” she said.

He looked down at her. “Something tells me you in here to avoid being out there,” Robbie commented.

Emma blushed. “Busted, huh?” He looked at her questioningly. “I just… I’m just a little nervous that’s all. Between everything that’s happened and moving in here, and the wedding, I mean gosh that’s less than two months away now! I just want everything to be perfect.”

Robbie rested a hand on her shoulder. She was caught off guard by his proximity, but didn’t think much else of it. “Emma, you already are perfect, you don’t have to stress yourself out to be even more so. If Patrick can’t see it already, then what’s the point?” he said in a low voice.

Emma laughed lightly. “Oh, I know Patrick can see it. I think I am trying to convince myself more than anyone else.” She crushed the now empty box and threw it in the pile with the others.

“Well, we are all our own worse critics, right?” he said, stepping back from her.

“Hey, what’s going on?” She turned and saw Patrick walking into the kitchen.

She walked away from Robbie, suddenly feeling strangely uncomfortable being so close to him alone in the kitchen. “I just saw one last box of dishes that wasn’t put away and felt compelled to get them up, babe,” she said, wrapping her arms around his neck and giving him a kiss. Patrick smiled.

“Babe, I would have gotten them later for you,” he said, kissing her lips.

“It’s okay, they’re up now and Robbie helped me with getting the china on the top shelf.”

“Oh okay,” he gave Robbie a thin smile. “Thanks man.”

“Yeah, no problem. I’m, uh, going to go ahead and patrol the perimeter a bit.” With that, Robbie slipped out of the kitchen.

Once he was gone, Patrick handed Emma her phone. “Christian won’t stop calling.”

She looked down at her phone and groaned. She was still off, but he had been trying to contact her about the whole video controversy. She knew that he would want to comment on it, being that she was his employer and that she was also a writer for the biggest music magazine in the world, but she wasn’t ready yet to hear what he had to say.

“Emma, you have to talk to him sometime. If you want, I’ll go in with you,” he offered.

She smiled. “You’re so chivalrous.” She sighed. “Okay, I’ll let him know I’ll be at work tomorrow. We’ll go see what he wants.”

The next day, Patrick and Emma headed down to the office. As soon as she walked in the door, she was met by a pacing and red in the face Christian.

“Jesus Christ Mann! Did the girl break your phone during the damn scuffle!” he shouted at her, alerting all of the staff to her presence in the office. She saw Joel look up from his desk and roll his eyes at Christian. She couldn’t help but grin at that.

“Well, hello Christian, good morning to you too. How was Chicago you ask? Well thanks for asking. Beside my dad being a colossal ass and getting beaten up by a teenage girl, it was fucking fantastic. How was your Thanksgiving?” She said sarcastically.

Patrick eyed her nervously. He was obviously not expecting her to give Christian so much attitude.
“Do you let her talk to you like this?” Christian said to Patrick.

“Uh….”

“Shut up Christian. I’m sorry I didn’t alert you the minute a major story broke in my own personal life, okay? We had bigger things to deal with. Like Good Morning America, paparazzi and moving for starters,” Emma interrupted.

“Emma, regardless of the fact that I was worried that you could have been injured, you have an obligation to this magazine, to me, to give me a heads up when your publicity may affect business dealings with this magazine,” Christian said.

“How did a YouTube video of me getting beat up affect your magazine Christian?”

“Well, A. our name is getting thrown around because of your correlation to us,”

“Oh I’m sorry, since when was that a bad thing for you before?”

“It’s not, but our legal department and publicity department want to do something about it. I can’t put anything out until I talk to you, and you saw it fit to disappear for the better part of the week while this story spun out of control.”

She glanced at Patrick, who rubbed her back, comfortingly. She knew Christian was right of course. She was in the news business and right now she was the news. It was so strange how that worked. “You’re right Christian, I’m sorry.”

He started to yell again. “Wait, what?”

“I’m sorry,” she said again more dispirited than before.

“Well jeez, I didn’t even get to get to my B. Oh well.” He took a beat and said, “Well, I’m just happy that you are okay. I think it was smart, on your part, Patrick to retaliate as quickly as you did by the way.”

Emma rolled her eyes and looked at Patrick who was shining a little bit with pride. “Oh boy, there goes his ego, inflating one millimeter at a time.”

“Emma, I think you should do a piece,” Christian said, ignoring her comment. “A personal essay of sorts.”

“What?” she was surprised by this. “Why? We never really do personal pieces…”

“Yes, but no one here ever dated a celebrity and got beaten up by a fan. You’re like a trailblazer,” Christian said wryly.

“Jeesz, here I was hoping to trailblaze by being the first female editor-in-chief at this magazine,” she muttered sarcastically.

“Well, you have to start somewhere, I suppose,” Christian replied. “But anyway, I think that’s the best thing that we can do. I mean sure, I can have Ahmed write some bull shit op-ed about fame and personal life and crap, and he’ll talk about Kurt Cobain’s suicide and the tragic Phoenix that is Britney Spears, but I think hearing it from the horse’s mouth would be better.”

Emma looked at Patrick. “We weren’t going to do any news on it, no interviews or anything.”

“We weren’t,” Patrick agreed. “But, Christian has a point. You are a journalist first and foremost, Emma. This is your thing. Write about the experience, put it out there for yourself, for the Stone. That’ll be how we address it formally. It’s like you’re interviewing yourself.”

Christian smiled. “I love that you’re marrying him, he’s got intuition,” he said. “I think I’m reconsidering that threesome idea I had earlier with the two of you. Come here I want to hug you.” He made a move for Patrick and Emma came between them.

“Christian, keep your bisexual paws off my future hubby,” Emma said, making a face. “I see what you two are saying, but I don’t want to write some lame woe is me piece about how it’s not fair that my privacy is being ruined because I chose to be with Patrick. Somehow, I don’t think that will make me look like a fairy princess it will just make me look like a spoiled lucky bitch.”

“Then write it however you want. It’s your essay, your narrative,” Christian replied. “Make it glitter and shine with the essence of Mann, or Stump, or whatever your last name will be soon. But make it so by midnight Friday. I want this on the website by Sunday and in the magazine by next Friday.”

Emma sighed and looked at Patrick who gave her an encouraging smile. “Christian, you better be getting us one hell of a wedding present.”

He grinned. “Honey, I already have the Swarvoski crystal handcuffs and dominatrix swing ordered.”

Emma slapped him playfully. “Shut up,” she said, grabbing Patrick’s hand. “I’ll have that piece to you. Now, I’m going to take Patrick and we are going to go enjoy our new home for a little bit.”

“You know, Emma, I was serious about that threesome,” Christian called out as she and Patrick walked out of the building.

“Yeah, so not going to happen!” Emma shouted back.

Once they were in the elevator, Patrick asked her, ”Was he REALLY serious about the threesome?”

She raised her eyebrow surprised by him asking that. “Why are you?”

Patrick grimaced. “No, no way. I just…”

She laughed. “Patrick, there are some things about Christian that are better not knowing. Unfortunately for me, I get to know them all because we have entered this strange boss-friend territory. We’re like Ann Hathaway and Meryl Streep in Devils Wear Prada, except, I don’t think I’ll ever get a cool free wardrobe like Ann and Christian’s snark isn’t nearly as witty as Meryl’s.”

“I don’t know he’s pretty witty,” Patrick commented. “So, anyway, all that talk about threesomes and stuff, kinda made me in the mood for…”

Emma grinned slyly at him and pulled him into a long kiss. “Let’s go break in that new bed some more.”
Over the next few days, while Emma and Patrick were “breaking in” the bed and a few other places in the new house, she took a break so that she could work on her piece. It was weird for her to write about something that seemed so embarrassingly personal to her. After a few rewrites and nearly throwing her computer across the room of her small home office, she finally had a draft that she wanted to show Patrick.

He was on his computer listening to some Rosetta Stone he bought of Japanese, to help him talk to fans over there, when she came up to him. He took his earphones out and smiled at her. “What’s up? Are you finished?”

She nodded. “Yeah, and I want you to read it. I mean, it’s a lot about us, so I want to make sure you’re okay with it.”

Ever since they dated, neither one of them really talked publicly about their relationship. Patrick avoided questions that would come up, but since most of them were prescreened by Wendy, she made sure that they were taken out. She understood Patrick and Emma’s desire to keep many parts of their relationship private. Even when it was so public on the outside when the proposal and videos and gossip columns.
Patrick took her computer from her and started reading out loud:

“There are a million reasons not to date a celebrity. First of all, your privacy is disappears, the privacy of your family disappears. But I’m okay with that. I’m typically a very open person anyway and as a journalist, I have to be. That’s how I can be so damn good at my job.

Secondly, your life becomes the stuff of high schoolers nightmares. If you didn’t think that person at the water cooler at work was gossiping about you before, well they sure as hell are now. But now, let’s add in that person, the art department, the editorial staff, the marketing and legal departments and then the few million people around the world who actually give a shit about who you’re dating, what your future plans are and what you will be wearing at your wedding (I’ll give all you gossip columnists a freebie on this one, it’s Vera Wang). They start to make up lies about you. That’s not so cool. They attack your character and make you feel terrible about yourself and question who you are. I’m a big girl, I’ve heard worse, as an awkward teenager with braces growing up (I’m sure someone has a picture of that that could be sold for a nice price), but it still stings as an adult who has tried to grow out of her self-esteem issues.

Third, you apparently gain a lot of haters. People who for no apparent reason at all do not like you and would rather see you dead than dating the one person in the world that gives their life meaning. I get it. I was completely head over heels in love with Justin Timberlake when I was 16 years old and I hated the fact that he was with Britney Spears. But we didn’t have Twitter or Tumblr or any of the other crazy social media sites back then. So I stewed in my hate all alone.

There are a lot of other reasons that I could mention, but none of them really matter in the end because they can’t compare to the number of reasons that I am completely and utterly in love with Patrick Stump and why I would choose to be with him over any other man, a hundred times over. Notwithstanding the fact that he is the sweetest, loving and most honest man I have ever met, he and I share something that I can’t explain. Some people call it a connection, others might say soulmates, but I think I that simply it’s that Patrick is my person. When we met, Fall Out Boy wasn’t a worldwide famous pop punk band, and I wasn’t a senior writer at the Rolling Stone. We were just two kids who loved music and fell in love with each other.

A lot of people have been asking me to “respond” to the video that came out about a week ago. Everyone has already heard what Patrick had to say about it, briefly in less than 140 characters, but so many want to know how I am “holding up.” Everyone acts as if this is the end of my world and that somehow this has broken me. I’m not going to lie to you all and tell you that it wasn’t embarrassing because it was. But do I hate the girl who attacked me, or the girl who filmed it all and posted it for all of your viewing pleasure? No, I don’t.

That’s all I really wanted to say about what happened. I know that’s not what the magazines wanted to hear, or the fans or anyone else who apparently cares about all of this, but this is all I have to say on it. All I want to do is to keep my eyes ahead and focus on what’s in front of me, and I hope that everyone else will follow suit. Trust me, something tells me that this isn’t the last crazy thing that will happen in the wild, fantastic life that Patrick and I are building together.”

Patrick looked up at her and smiled. “I have never seen you in braces before… I think I would buy those pictures.”

She grabbed her laptop from him. “In your dreams. So what did you think?”

“I thought it was good. You didn’t sound like a bitch or a crybaby. You sounded like you.”

She smirked. “And what does, sounding like me sound like?”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her down onto the sofa next to him. “An intelligent, witty and compassionate woman who is in love.” He gave her a peck on the lips.

“Okay, what do you want?” she said, pulling away slightly and giving him an expectant look.

Patrick’s smile wilted. “That obvious huh?” She nodded. “Okay, well, so I know that you wanted to do New Years Eve in New York, but they are going to need me in LA the week before and the week after, so as much as I don’t mind flying back and forth…”

“You’d rather just stay,” she finished for him, sighing. “And you head to Mexico the week after that for your few tour dates there before the wedding.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I asked them not to, but when Ryan wants you to come and record…”

“You go and record. Yeah, I know.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “I guess New Years in LA would be fun. We have done New Years in New York before…”

“Yeah for MTV, remember how wild that was?” Patrick reminisced.

“Yes, I think Pete got Hemingway drunk, if that is even possible since he’s a dog.”

Patrick laughed. “He was walking a little of kilter the rest of the night.” He paused. “Thanks though, for being so understanding. I feel awful that I haven’t really been able to be that involved in the wedding process.”

Emma shrugged. “All I want is for you to show up. So what if you’re not there to vote on the flowers Barbara picked out or the place settings that Lizzie said looked awful? “

“She really doesn’t like the place settings you picked out?”

“Hates them. I almost reconsidered, but then I remembered that her idea of dishware are those plastic plates they sell special for summer cookouts at Wal-Mart, so I’ve decided she’s not qualified to judge the place settings.”

“Fair enough.”