Crossroads

Chapter One

She heard him singing.

It had been a long time since she heard his voice but she would know it anywhere.

It made her heart skip and her breath hitch.

She had not expected him to be here.

He was supposed to be out somewhere in Vancouver shooting for his series. She had been told he wouldn't even be here for a month.

Emma Watson, donning a simple sundress, her hair bunched atop her head in a slapdash manner, with thick shades to cover her eyes, stopped and hid behind a coconut tree, trying to calm her pulse.

She could not let him see her.

It would be too odd, too awkward, and too hard to explain.

She sneaked a peek a few meters away to where he was standing, holding a guitar, with his back turned to her. One of his friends held a camera pointed at him while another friend seemed to direct him where to turn and how to look so the camera can capture him just right.

They were in the middle of the sandy walkway but none of the people walking seemed to mind the hindrance he and his friends made. Scattered all around the beach were other obstructions of pretty much the same nature – skaters performing stunts, fire throwers, one-man bands busking to music new and old in rhythm with the sea, men and women bounding up and down doing parkour, and everything else possibly imaginable.

She had seen some of those on his instagram posts.

That had been the catalyst for her to think of Venice Beach as somewhere she would escape to for the time being, a place where she would just catch her breath, and be anonymous.

Tom Felton always looked like he was having so much fun here and people didn't bother him.

She wanted that same kind of anonymity before the deluge of press tours, movie promos, and interviews coming her way in a week.

She loved her job but part of it was doing promos that began from sun up to sun down where she was dissected, scrutinized, and held up against the light for inspection. Even when she was younger, she always made sure she had herself centered before embarking on those because they could easily squeeze out one's spirits dry. Acting in front of a camera is sometimes far easier.

It had only been when she was talking to Matt Lewis a week ago and he, in quite an offhand manner, mentioned a video Tom uploaded, that she first caught a glimpse of Venice beach's walkway.

She went through his instagram then and realized how he was still pretty much the same and he looked like he was having the time of his life. Belatedly, she thought to herself that she shouldn't have thought otherwise. As people grow older, they don't change. They just become more and more of who they are as they lose the self-esteem issues that held them back in their childhood and teenage years.

Still, she was looking out for signs that could give her a glimpse of the unease his recent break-up with his former fiancée may have caused him.

She was sure it must have been difficult and that as a friend, she should have reached out to him when she learned of it.

But somewhere or sometime in the past years, they had stopped talking because of her own slip up.

She could have never guessed that confessing about a teenage crush on him would bring on an almost obsessive desire for a number of people to see them together.

Emma was used to being paired off with anyone of her friends from the Harry Potter series but being paired off with Tom became a headache, especially with the kind of harassment some folks heaped on Jade.