Living In The Shallows (UK Crush #1)

Chapter Twenty-Three

The last two weeks had been a flurry of activity that had settled into a sort of a routine. The week spent in Kyoto had been a busy one, between the show, the interviews, and the sightseeing. The boys complained we'd seen so many temples that they'd all blended into one in their memories, and my vocabulary had been tested, trying to come up with all of the correct historical terms.

My presence had finally surfaced on social media, with a few pictures of me hemmed in between the boys going from the bus to the hotel.

"Who's this girl? Anyone know?" And "who's the mystery girl?" were the captions under my photos. Within hours someone had found footage of me standing off to the side on one of the Japanese TV shows doing my interpreting thing, and had posted a still with a circle around my face with the caption "Mystery Solved!", but no one knew my name. Ronan had indiscreetly posted a few selfies of the two of us doing stupid things like eating off the same plate, but once people knew I was "just the translator", they seemed to lose interest in me. Obviously the fandom had nothing to fear from plain, quiet, Aileen the Mouse.

The film crew had been doing a good job keeping me out of the footage, so we weren't too worried there'd be a lot of me in the movie, and the boys and I had had a wonderful time just hanging out, playing games, and reading to each other.

I had actually spent quite a bit of the time I'd had to spend in bed because of my injury reading from The Diaries of Anaïs Nin to Teddy. Anaïs Nin was one of my favorite writers and essayists, who, though known for her erotica more than anything else, had been so much more than that. Her journals, begun at the tender age of eleven, captured her amazing life, a life lived without fear, and I'd seen him reading some of her essays on his own on his iPad, which made me inordinately happy. It gave us one more thing to talk about on the long bus journeys, on the monotonous travel days.

After Kyoto, we had zipped down for a quick week in Kyushu and a couple of beautiful days in Okinawa for filming at the beach.

Now we were headed back toward Tokyo for a few days in "the countryside" of Nikko, the historic summer residence of the Imperial Family of Japan. They used to spend the warmest months of the year there, away from the stifling heat of Edo, as Tokyo used to be known. The boys were going to be treated to a traditional ryokan experience. It could roughly be translated as "bed and breakfast", but to me it had such a connotation of romance to it that couldn't be conveyed by the simple term "B&B". Anyway, it was supposed to be a few days of rest before the big build-up to their huge charity concert at the Tokyo Dome at the end of the tour.

The end of the tour. I pushed the thought away.

I looked over at Teddy, who once again was listening to my music, bopping along to who knew what. He had already transferred most of my stuff to his phone; I didn't know why he insisted on still using mine. He looked back at me, singing something, smiling. At some point during the past couple weeks it had just become an accepted thing that we would sit together on the bus, next to each other to eat, that our rooms would be next to each other. Even Matty had accepted it.

I had worried endlessly on the day of the Kyoto show that they wouldn't even be speaking when they took the stage, that the rift between them would show, but they had been themselves, their beautiful, loving, twirling, laughing selves. Melanie had worked magic with Teddy's make up; the only visible sign had been the cut under his eye. It had been visible as a line, looking like someone had drawn a mark with a Sharpie or something. Other than that, everything had seemed perfect.

Things were still tense off stage, and I hadn't known how long that would last, particularly between Matty and Teddy. Matty felt things so intensely, and nothing I said could convince him that if I could let it go, then he should let it go. But slowly things had thawed, and their love for each other had done the rest.