Paper Heart - Bradley Will Simpson

Chapter 5.

            The months had passed, summer was already here and July was almost upon us. Chloé was sitting on the parquet floor of her bedroom, in the middle of all her clothes spread out loosely on the room floor. She only had forty-eight hours left before the big departure and she hadn't started packing at all. She hadn't slept for days; she couldn't even remember how long it had been since she hadn't had a real night's sleep. But the adventure that lay ahead of her made her anxious and excited at the same time! The containment measures had been lifted in most European countries, the epidemic was still there, but it was clearly decreasing and the internal borders of the European Union had just been reopened. Although the conditions for entering the UK were still strict enough, professional reasons made it possible to avoid them, and so the Faith had been authorised by the British government to enter Britain to work with the Vamps. On July 2nd, at two o'clock in the afternoon, the Faith would land in London and then go to a famous studio to start work as soon as possible.

           Collaboration between the two groups had been extremely prolific during this last period. Just over five songs had already been written and were already well put together. The young people met weekly to share their progress and, in the meantime, everyone was working in their own corner. Well, more or less. The three sisters worked a lot together, as they had always done, but Chloe also wrote a lot with Brad. They conversed every day by videoconference and sent tons of messages to each other. There was a kind of creative chemistry between them; if they were good at what they did, they were great when they worked together. Their first song, Personal, was Chloe's most successful one and therefore her favourite. Perhaps because it was the beginning of her musical collaboration with Bradley and the Vamps and surely also because this song, as the little voice in her head whispered so well, had a text that was particularly evocative of the feelings that the young singer aroused in Chloé. She was terribly stressed at the thought of meeting Bradley for the first time, and just the thought of meeting him made her feel terrible. She felt that her attraction to the singer was reciprocal, she thought she had picked up many encouraging signs in their nightly discussions, but she was afraid that her naivety and optimism would play tricks on her and make her see signs where there were none.

          Chloe was at this point in her reflections when Laura stormed into her eldest daughter's bedroom with her arms full of clothes.

"Filling this suitcase is a puzzle, I can't believe that you only get about 20 kilos in your hold luggage! she complained as she dropped on Chloé's bed. You have to help me choose outfits because if I listened to myself, I'd pack my whole wardrobe.

- Lau', your wardrobe is at least twice as big as mine, I haven't even been able to simply start packing and you're asking my opinion?! cried the eldest of the three sisters. Why don't you ask Alex? As far as I know her, her luggage must have been ready for a week already.

- But I asked her! You guessed right, her suitcases are already packed in a corner of her room, but she refused to help me on the pretext that she had to work on her law degree, no but frankly!"

              Laura did not share the studious character of her older sisters. In addition, the youngest was so confident in the future of their group that she had almost forgotten that she was still enrolled in a bachelor's degree program. For her part, Chloé was certainly optimistic about the success of the Faith thanks to their future collaboration with the Vamps – following the live announcement on Instagram, the tabloid press had already been talking about it for weeks – but she was still working on her entry into the second year of her master's degree. However, she was content to read only a few articles when she could, because she had to admit that she was now devoting all her free time to music.