twenty-six;

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Dedicated to Kayla for being bossy and pushing me. (ily)


Special POV: Michael Clifford

She was leaving back to Australia and I hated every single cell in my body. I wanted to hate her too because maybe if I hated her it wouldn't make me so freaking sad that she was going away. Possibly for good. No more visiting her shitty LA apartment and finding her in her pajamas. No more walking in to see her sitting in a salon chair at Marcy's with her legs propped up on the little tables drinking coffee. No more blue and black hair. No more holding hands or hugging her whenever I wanted. No more sarcastic humour. No more teasing.

No more Mali.

What the actual fuck, Michael?

Really, I wasn't sure if this was what was best. I'd told Mali – Charlotte – that I needed to let Adam know because these were our careers on the line. Man, I didn't want to exist without her but I wasn't ready to cause shit for 5SOS or the 5SOS fans if the authorities found out that Mali – Charlotte – had been travelling with us on a fake, and very illegal, passport. I wasn't ready to fuck up Luke and Ash and Cal's careers over my feelings for a girl. Not just any girl though; a girl who I probably didn't even really know but was in love with.

She would never be just a girl. She would always be everything I wanted. But if she could lie through her teeth about her name then I didn't even want to know what else was a lie.

The fake ID, Carlos, the fans calling her 'Charlotte'. It all made sense now.

It was more than just her not telling us her name though. It was the fact that she'd skipped countries, not towns. Was she lying about why she did that too? I mean, I wanted to believe that everything else had been real but I didn't trust her. Not now. I was scared of her. And that hurt.

MALI'S POV:

It had been a nice adventure, a sweet getaway. And I'd remember it until the day that I died. I wanted to be happy that it had happened rather than sad that it was over but it was so much easier being upset when everything I'd grown to love was being ripped out of my hands like it was never mine. I didn't believe that Mali was fake. She was real and she was me. The fact that I couldn't explain that to any of them was painful and frustrating. They'd all felt betrayed.

Mel and Liv wouldn't speak to me as I got in the SUV from the Spanish hotel back to the Spanish airport. Neither said goodbye and I cried. Calum and Ashton had politely told me to have a nice trip but I'm assuming they really wanted to tell me to get fucked and be done with me. Neither hugged me and I cried.

Luke and Michael agreed to see me off at the airport.

Luke held my hand in the car and didn't pull away from me when my tears dripped down onto his arm. Out of all of them, Luke treated me the most human. Luke was pissed off but he was still Luke. And he still treated me like he treated Mali. He was honest and he was kind. And I was going to suffer through months, maybe even years, of missing him once I'd said goodbye to him for real.

Michael wouldn't speak to me and I knew it was because I'd hurt him. He wouldn't look at me either and the thought of never being able to stare into those grey green eyes again made me want to throw up. My heart was in a permanent state of painful beating and his voice singing 'Wrapped Around Your Finger' to me in the car all those months back played over and over again in my head. Even when he was gone, I could still listen to his music. I could still watch videos of him on the internet. I could still read his tweets and see which part of the world he was in at any given moment. But none of that would ever amount to the feeling I got when he called me 'gorgeous' or told me I was an idiot. None of that would ever amount to the feeling I got when I'd read on his fan website that he liked all girls, no matter what hair colour they had. None of that would ever amount to the feeling I got when he hugged the bad away from me. None of that would ever amount to the feeling of safety that accompanied anything Michael-related. None of that would ever, ever, ever, amount to how I'd felt when I'd kissed him. None of that would ever be enough. Listening, watching and seeing all those things from my rich bedroom back in Australia would probably be more torturous than just missing him in isolation.

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