No Control (Book 1)

18. God Only Knows

I threw the phone on the sofa and jumped to my feet. Then I screamed. Harry Styles was following me! HARRY STYLES WAS FOLLOWING ME! Oh my God oh my God oh my God. I screamed again, and ran around the room in a small circle. I jumped up and down a few times, with my hands over my face, then I jumped up onto the sofa and jumped up and down on there a few times too. I felt like I was going to explode with giddiness. Hands shaking, I picked up my phone again. What should I do? Should I tweet him? Would he see it now that he followed me? He followed thousands of people - surely he must have some sort of filter on his tweets, otherwise he'd be bombarded with all kinds of shite.

Then I thought for a moment. When had he followed me? I hadn't seen him use his phone at all last night, except when he called his driver, and I would have noticed if he'd been playing on it.

Then an image flashed through my mind of him sitting in the booth in Lagoon, sliding his phone into his pocket and smirking at me as I returned from the bathroom. He must have done it then, because it was just after that I noticed my phone kept pinging with notifications, but at the time I hadn't realised what they were.

I sat there with my phone in my hand, wondering what to do. Should I tweet him to say thanks for the follow? Or was that too obvious? I didn't want to come across as pathetic, or fangirly. Different options ran through my mind of what to say back.

Thanks for the follow! - Boring.
Nice meeting you xxx - Pathetic.
Thanks for breakfast - Attention-seeking.
Good luck with the rest of the tour! - Trying too hard.

I put my phone back down. This was too difficult. He would probably still be driving anyway so he wouldn't even see it. And I didn't want to draw any attention to myself from anyone else.

Wait - did this mean I could send him a Direct Message now he followed me? I wasn't really sure how Twitter worked, so I googled it. Sure enough, I could DM him and only he would see it. OMG.

The crazy Directioner within me was doing cartwheels. But I was trying really hard to stay calm. All he had done was follow me, and he followed hundreds of fans he'd never even met. He probably only did it out of pity. I decided not to tweet him, at least not yet anyway. Not until I had composed something breezy and nonchalant. I'd managed to hide my excitement for most of last night, surprisingly. I wasn't about to ruin it all with one embarrassing tweet.

I settled instead for scrolling through all his previous tweets, noting I had favourited a fair number of them and wondered if he could see that I had. Then it dawned on me that he had possibly read all my tweets, so I hastily tapped onto my profile to check out the potential damage.

There were only 27 tweets to look at, most of them retweets (and mostly One Direction ones, particularly Harry's). There were a couple of tweets directly to Harry, which I re-read and groaned out loud in embarrassment. It was all very well sending stuff like this when he didn't know who I was, but now we were... well, acquainted... it was a different story.

There was a tweet I had sent him the day after his birthday with a picture of me and a work colleague holding up a birthday cake with a candle in it, with a picture of him on my computer screen in the background. We'd brought cake into work on the Monday after his birthday to celebrate... OK don't judge. I did warn you at the start I was embarrassingly besotted with him. It's still not as bad as the Justin Bieber pencil case.

Although I'm sure Justin Bieber doesn't know my 24 year old cousin has a pencil case with his face on it. But sadly, Harry Styles now probably knew that the girl he invited back to his flat last night celebrated his birthday at her office and tweeted him a picture of it. My cheeks flamed. I contemplated deleting the tweet altogether but then decided it was tough. I am who I am, after all. He certainly hadn't been complaining last night. Or this morning.

My stomach gave another jolt as I remembered him reaching inside my shirt this morning, and my whole body flushed. I wasn't sure I would ever go a day for the rest of my life without remembering the last 24 hours. It was starting to feel more and more like a dream, now I was back in my flat, in familiar surroundings.

I exited Twitter and flicked the TV on. I needed a distraction from everything while I decided what to do. I channel surfed for a few hours, catching up on the soap omnibuses, but not really paying full attention. I couldn't be bothered with food so I ate a bowl of cereal about 8pm, and by 9pm my eyelids were feeling heavy.

I switched all the lights out and climbed into bed. I decided to check Twitter, and saw I was up to 22,859 followers. I shook my head in disbelief. Why on earth would people want to follow me, just because Harry did? I went onto his profile and looked at the last few fans he had followed. They were now "advertising" solo DMs with Harry Styles, and from the looks of things, they had spammed him with literally thousands of tweets. They both had about 17,000 followers each. It was crazy.

I opened up a new tweet and typed @Harry_Styles

I laid there with my phone in my hand for about half an hour, trying to think up something witty, but in the end I gave up and closed Twitter. It would have to wait until tomorrow when I could think with a clear head.