The Adventures of BFF!Bill and tiger

Self-consciousness in the era of the rich and famous

Usually, you were better at reeling it in, getting it under control. Usually your need to knock your best friend down a few notches on his celebrity pedestal overruled any ounce of self-consciousness that had ever crept into your mind during your friendship.

Bill had always been drawn to your casualness about it, and you held on to that fact when all of it seemed to be getting the best of you. You were his safe space away from it, you protected him from it at times, forced him to face it at others times, but most of all you just...didn't seem to care. There was a realness about you, from the very beginning, that he couldn't get enough of because it had been so absent in most of his previous relationships, romantic or otherwise.

And he wasn't stupid, he knew what was going on most of the time and he wished for a certain level of normalcy. Group vacations got awkward when he took part, the other women in the group never leaving their faces bare and free of make up when he was around. Even though he was a friend, their outfits seemed more carefully planned, their nonchalance a little more forced, their laughs a little more fake.

You had been unapologetic from the beginning. You didn't seem to mind who saw you without make up, or what you were wearing. You had called him over to help install a shelf (because it was an IKEA shelf, and Bill was "all Swedish and shit") and he smiled when you whipped open the door, a half eaten slice of pizza in one hand, hair amuck, in your pyjamas. Bar nights were low key, it was rare he saw you in heels but even though you were considerably less done up than most of the others, you still managed to catch nearly every eye in the bar with your loud laugh and your ability to beat nearly everyone at both pool and darts. And yet, you seemed oblivious to it every time.

But what was intriguing to Bill was often hard to manage at times, for you. You could usually push the thoughts to the back of your mind until they eventually disappeared, but when it was a culmination of events, it became harder and harder to ignore.

Bill was beautiful—conventionally, physically, emotionally—in every sense of the word, Bill was beautiful. And once you got to know him better, his physical beauty became the lesser of all of them, but it was still there and sometimes your forgot that it was the only beauty that some people knew or saw in him. And when compared with normal folk, Bill stuck out like a sore thumb.

He would be oblivious to the looks, but you seemed to catch them every time.

It had started the weekend before, when he brought you to a fitting for an upcoming photoshoot. He had recently signed on with a new designer as a spokesperson and was leaving for a few days to an exotic location for a new magazine spread. You had refused at first—spending the afternoon in a designer's studio sounded like a nightmare to you—but he had begged for your company, and you agreed.

You wished you hadn't.

Between the dirty looks the assistant kept throwing your way, how the designer had looked hesitant to even shake your hand as if the resignation of going out in public in jeans and a loose shirt was contagious, you wanted to crawl into a hole and cry. They fawned over Bill, his height, his measurements, his long legs—he was a designer's dream, and every scrap of material they put on him looked phenomenal. You caught the way the assistant took her time measuring his inseam, the way she looked up at him, biting her perfectly outlined red lips. You fiddled with the sleeves of your shirt—the sleeves which were too long, the chest probably a little too tight, and subconsciously sucked in the two rolls that always seemed to protrude from the top of your jeans when you sat down.

This assistant, you were willing to bet, didn't have any of that.

It had snowballed from there. For the first time in your friendship, you felt...inadequate. You felt like you finally saw what everybody else had been seeing for awhile; that you were a completely mismatched pair.