Fifty Million Followers [BOYXBOY]

23.

As stories about celebrities go, everything becomes old news. But this, it doesn't fucking leave us alone.

When we move from A to B, there's usually buzzing paparazzi and fans. While we understand the fans are just excited to see us and want a picture, the paparazzi could be doing anything else. They violate and they insist and they push to the fucking limit.

We step out of a car, they're there, we walk through an airport, they're there, we're fucking shopping for boxers because this hotel doesn't give guests washing machines and we've been here for almost three weeks now, and they're there, locked out of the shops, but still filming, still snapping.

The hotel itself has become it's own monster, with locked doors and the same people monitoring day in day out. We're allowed to leave, but outside are more things ready to swallow us whole.

We can't go online or switch on the telly without seeing our faces, seeing our words being twisted, seeing Candice Fitzpatrick.

Oliver and Luke are not speaking, instead maybe glaring, sometimes nothing at all. Luke is fucked most of the time that he's asleep for all of this battle anyway. He and Demitri go out to parties and Oliver doesn't follow. Sometimes I do, just to get away, just to be with people like me.

But I never go to a Dawn Senate party.

.....

We leave another interview feeling like shit. Like the shit on your shoe when you walk through a dog park. It's for radio, so people can't see Luke's prominent cheekbones, Demi's bloodshot eyes, or my consistent frown.

But they all heard Oliver's voice.

Ever since Candice left L.A, he's been dragging me into the studio and making him work that fucking muscle and...I just realised how dirty that sounds.

I wish it was as dirty at it sounds. No, his voice is raspy from all the singing, from all the vocal warm ups, from actually using his fucking voice for what it's supposed to have been doing for the last two years.

While Oliver mopes for most of the time we're around other company, when it's just me and him, he cracks smiles, he laughs, his eyes light up. It's magical watching him play the piano with me, watching him watching my fingers. I know he stares at me, I know his eye contact can make a person feel so welcome and valid and in that moment, you are important.

He gives me far too much attention these days, and I love it, but I feel like I don't deserve it.

"I think you should call Candice." I say one evening, taking a long and secluded route we'd found from the studio back to the hotel. It's a calm street with unattached houses with giant drives and their own post boxes on the edge of each property. It's so American, but also it's nothing. We barely see anyone and if we do, they haven't a fucking clue who we are, and ignore us. Flowers wrap around white picket fences, and Oliver doesn't give me eye contact for the first time today.

"You talk to her?"

"We all do."

"Even Luke?"

I hesitate. "We don't talk about Luke. She misses you." I'm not trying to mend a relationship that wasn't there, but a friendship, or some kind of thing that reminds them that they should care and respect one another. I shrug. "I mean, you don't have to. If you're not ready..."

"Scottie," He stops walking. We're in the middle of the road at this point, cars parked either side. "I...I didn't love her. You understand that right?"

"Why didn't you break up with her?"

"I don't know." He looks up, and starts walking faster. "Come on, I want to show you something."