written in ink » c.h.

ii

The fact that you hadn't been famous - if you could being on the New York Times Best Sellers list for five weeks (even though it had already been out for two years) running being famous - for very long had definitely affected Calum's search for information about you. He'd spent several long hours on his computer and only come up with five things about you: what your name was, how old you were, what your Twitter was, what your publicist's contact information was, and that you had a poetry book titled From the Heart on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

When he woke up the next morning, the first thing he'd order himself breakfast.

The second thing he'd done was (essentially) stalk your Twitter. Part of him was hoping that he'd find more information about you there, but he was having no such luck (which he should have expected when he saw that your profile picture was the cover of From the Heart); your feed was only filled with snippets of poems from your new poetry book, retweets of poems of yours that fans had either gotten tattooed on their bodies or made art about, live-tweets from televisions shows or movies that you watched, and the occasional vague meme reference.

And the third thing he'd done (after he finished his breakfast) was actually go out and buy From the Heart, which hadn't been hard to find at all - there had been a small display of it in the poetry section of the bookstore he had gone into before he spent the whole day reading it from cover to cover, only taking a break from it when he had been dragged out of his room to do a radio show. But his mind had been at his hotel room the whole time, wanting to be reading your poetry instead of sitting in a cramped booth for a couple hours.

+ + +

By the time that Luke had waltzed into Calum's hotel room, he had read From the Heart once, taken a nap, read through From the Heart three more times (each time pausing on the poem titled beautiful (as the moon)and read it aloud before continuing with the rest of the poems you had written), ordered dinner and read your book one and a half more times, considered calling your publicist to ask if you'd be interested in writing a song him - er, 5 Seconds of Summer - given your poetic ability before deciding he should consult with everyone else before he made that kind of call, and finally ended up laying on the bed with his pillow over his head, phone still in his hand.

Luke dropped down onto Calum's bed, grabbing the pillow off his bandmate's head and hitting him with it as he asked, "hey, you coming drinking with us or what?"

"What?" Calum asked as he swatted at the pillow.

"Drinking," the blond boy emphasized, "you know, with your band. You in or not?"

Calum grabbed the pillow from his bandmate's hands and tossed it across, causing a whine to emit from his lips before he abruptly stopped, noticing the look on Calum's face.

"Dude, why do you look so bummed out?"

"I -" Calum said before he stopped, pausing to lick his lips. This was ridiculous! Absurd! He couldn't be thinking straight. But yet again, he was pretty sure. Like 110% - no, 200% - sure. "I think I'm in love."

"What? With who?"

"Y/N," he sighed. Somehow in his reading of your book and stalking your Twitter, his admiration of your poetry had turned into adoration of you. That's how he had ended up with the pillow over his head: because he wasn't sure if he was just absolutely in love with your poetry or you, and it had made him lapse into an existential crisis.

"Who?" Luke repeated, not recognizing your name.

Calum sat up, grabbed your book from where he had set it on the bedside table and handed it off to Luke. "Her," he said, pointing to where your name was printed on the front cover before he fell back against the mattress, "but she probably doesn't even know I exist and I am doomed to a lonely existence." He rolled onto his stomach, sighing deeply into the white comforter. "She doesn't even follow us on Twitter, Luke!" he groaned, voice muffled.

"Okay, c'mon buddy," Luke said, hauling Calum off the bed, "we're going out to numb that heart."