not in love || l.s. ✔︎

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A/N: HAPPY MITAM DAY!

I'm dedicating this chapter to @sharpen-your-knife. Thank you for all your comments <3

So, they sang Torn during the Live Lounge performance... Why do we stan a band that is actively trying to kill us?

This chapter is told from Darby's POV. It's quite different but I hope you find it interesting. This is the first time she meets Harry and the rest of the boys.

Next week I'm posting a big Louis chapter, told from his POV in the present. It's taking me a long time to finish but it will be ready by next Friday.

DARBY / PAST

I got my first job by sleeping on the sidewalk outside a hotel for two nights straight.

In November.

One Direction had a gig at Madison Square Garden. Nobody knew when they were coming or going from the hotel, so your best chance of meeting them was to wait outside the entire time they stayed there.

I had hit the ground running after college, doing three back-to-back internships and trying desperately to place my work at Spin, Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, or any paying market that would have me, with no luck. I wouldn't wow anyone with wordy think pieces about the evolution of hip-hop or a review of some baroque pop album. What I needed was a scoop, something they hadn't seen a hundred times before, something authentic, something they couldn't say no to.

I was visiting my parents for a weekend, lying down in my childhood bedroom, staring at all my old 1D posters and Ziam manips when it came to me. The solution was staring me right in the face. I would interview the biggest band in the world. Simple! I had loved One Direction since I was sixteen and secretly continued to love them in college even though all my friends thought they sucked. I could write about a lot of subjects with authority but I could only write about one with true passion.

Despite being a hopeless, lovesick fangirl my whole life, I had never actually stalked a celebrity before. I came to the hotel equipped with a sleeping bag, a change of clothes, a canteen for water (which I got friends to refill because I couldn't leave my post), three layers of clothing and my phone, which had all of my questions and research on it as well as the app I would use to record the interview.

There were a few enemy camps, legions of girls who knew instinctively that I had never done this before. They didn't know what nefarious purpose I was there for but they somehow picked up on the fact that my intentions weren't totally pure.

The band didn't leave the hotel for the first 24 hours of their stay. A group of flannel-clad seventeen-year-olds huddled together, taking turns warming up in the coffee shop a block away. They said it was so they could charge their phones but I could see them trembling. It was like the French invasion of Russia out here. We were dropping like flies. By day two I was wondering if I might give up. My fingers were so cold I couldn't turn the pages of the books and magazines I brought to keep me busy. Chloe was getting really worried. She brought me an electric blanket but one look at my blue lips made her second guess her support of this suicide mission.

"Your lips are tuning blue."

"Tha eel fie," I said.

"At least come with me to the coffee shop to warm up."

The girls lined up against the barricade smiled sweetly, dark circles beneath their eyes, keen to get rid of me and take my spot by the door.

"Never!"