Our Beating Hearts

6

"SO, LET'S TALK LOVE ACTUALLY," Harry says, leaning toward me. Everyone else finally out of earshot, scoping out the dessert counter. Which is actually the only counter, because we're at Henri's, and Henri's is a bakery. Sorry, but cupcakes are a dinner food-fight me.

I glance back to make sure Louis fully absorbed in pastries and iced doughnuts before turning back to Harry. "Okay, so, Louis may kill me for telling you this."

"Of course. He's very secretive," Harry says, and we grin at each other.

Louis Tomlinson may be the least secretive person on the planet.

"Anyway, I didn't know about this until last year, but apparently-" I pause to bite into my cupcake. "Apparently, our very own Louis Tomlinson has written a single work of Love Actually fanfiction."

Harry's eyes light up. "Okay."

"And I have reason to believe it's on fanfiction.net."

"Are you serious?" He presses his fist to his mouth.

"But he won't tell us his pen name."

"I bet we can figure it out." Harry is already pulling his phone out.

"Fanfiction dot org?"

"Dot net."

"Okay." He's quiet for a moment, scrolling.

"I think there are like a hundred stories in the whole fandom. Calum and I were able to narrow it down to fifteen possibilities."

"Oh, so you've already been working on this."

"I tried for weeks, Harry. Weeks."

Junior year, right after Calum and I started hanging out more.

We were all spending the night at Luke's, and his mom had exiled the girls to the guest room after an illuminating game of Truth or Dare. Luke and Michael fell asleep pretty quickly with their arms around each other, but Calum scooted all his blankets next to mine on the floor-on our stomachs, side by side. "Ashton, we have to find it," he whispered. He was still a little tipsy from Truth or Dare, and I was somehow tipsy by association. I had the full list of Love Actually stories pulled up on my phone.

"Do we start at the top?"

"Or we could start with the Keira Knightley self-insert sex erotica," said Calum.

I giggled. "Sex erotica?"

"Yes."

"As opposed to sex-free erotica?"

"I mean, I'd read that, too," she said. "Okay, this one."

And so we started. Right away, we could rule out a few grammatical shitstorms, along with anything that seemed too technically knowledgeable about sex. "There's no way," I'd insisted. "I guarantee you-I would literally bet you a million dollars that Louis Tomlinson has never heard of the perineum."

"I concur," Calum said, tapping the back arrow. I've always thought that was such an intimate thing to do: touching the screen of another person's phone. He opened the next story. It was weird. Once we knew Louis had written one of them, it started to feel like he could have written any of them. Or all of them. Under ninety different pen names. Maybe all those times he said he was checking his email, he was actually writing sex erotica.

Then he shifted slightly under his blankets, and his whole body pressed against mine. My right side to his left. And I forgot how to speak.

"It's this one," Harry says, jolting me back to the present. He slides his phone toward me on the table.