Follow Me Back (complete first draft of the published book)

Chapter 19: Bad Guy

Chapter 19: Bad Guy

Taylor (@EricThornSucks)

@TessaHeartsEric I swear I'm not a bad guy. Talk to me? Please?

Eric sat up in bed, staring at the message at the top of his recent tweets. He'd been tweeting at Tessa for four days straight, without so much as a hint of a reply. His account looked utterly dead now. No followers. No notifications. No messages. Nothing but stony silence.

The sight of it made him groan with frustration.

He knew it was probably hopeless. Tessa had made her decision. He should cut his losses and deactivate the account. And yet he couldn't quite bring himself to pull the trigger.

Why couldn't he let it go already?

He'd tossed and turned all night these past few nights, ever since Tessa unfollowed him. He couldn't seem to put her out of his mind. He'd grown accustomed to their nightly chats - downright dependent on them, apparently. He'd finally found a safe place to vent his worries and frustrations, and she helped him put them in perspective. She offered a sympathetic ear, but it was more than that. She also had this sixth sense for telling him whenever he was exaggerating. She called him out on his bullshit all the time.

"You're catastrophizing."

"Pretty sure that's not a word," he'd replied, the first time she said it. But it was a word - another psychobabble term he'd looked up afterward on Wikipedia - and she'd been damned good at catching him whenever he was guilty of the crime.

Now she wanted nothing more to do with him, and he couldn't shake the sense of loss. Life had felt so much less bleak these past few weeks. He'd even started smiling again. How long had it been since he'd bothered to smile without a camera lens pointed at his face?

Maybe that was why he couldn't sleep these days. Maybe it was the sinking realization that, without her in his life, he had nothing left to smile about at all.

"Come on, Tessa," he whispered to his phone. "Come back. You can't really be that mad."

With a sigh, he started entering another useless tweet:

Taylor @EricThornSucks

@TessaHeartsEric I can't sleep. I miss talking to you.

He rubbed his eyes wearily, his finger hovering over the Tweet button. What difference did it make, really, whether he sent it or not? He had zero followers. No one would ever hear him either way.

Eric set the phone back on his nightstand and switched off the lamp.

Sleep. He needed sleep. The dark circles under his eyes were growing deeper by the day. He'd heard the makeup artists whispering about it behind his back this afternoon. They could only cover it up for so long before the record label started getting on his case. That was all he needed. Did he have an insomnia clause in his contract? Did they reserve the right to render him unconscious with a blow to the head if he failed to get his beauty sleep?

He rolled over in bed again and reached to plump his pillow, but a flash of color from his night stand caught the corner of his eye.

His phone?

A notification?

He grabbed it and let out a yelp of triumph at what he saw. At last. She'd answered. A new tweet:

Tessa H @TessaHeartsEric

@EricThornSucks thanks for ruining my life.

The message probably should have discouraged him further, but he couldn't prevent the crooked grin that had popped onto his face. She was still out there somewhere. She hadn't evaporated into thin air. And he knew what she was doing. He'd learned that much from her in the month since they'd started talking.