Diving Deep (UK Crush #2)

Chapter 12

The three of us sat on the bed, again with me in the middle, laptop on my lap, and started by googling "UK Crush". That's all it took, pictures of the three of us from last night started popping up, most featuring me prominently with captions like "Who is she?" and "Who's the mystery girl?", with a few more imaginative writers coming up with headlines like "UKC crooners step out with mystery girl".

    The stories had very little information in them, basically stating that Teddy and Matty were seen arriving and leaving the club with an unknown woman last night. Some of the stories went into detail about what I was wearing, discussing my cleavage, the height of my heels, and most described me as "cute", with one going so far as to call me "lovely".

    "See, Birdie, you're 'lovely', haven't we been telling you that for months?" said Teddy, giving me a squeeze. He then clicked on "videos", and a bunch of videos of us from inside the club popped up, of me dancing with Teddy, with Matty. There was video of Teddy and me kissing, and the comments section was filled with speculation on who I was "with", with opinions split about eighty-twenty for Teddy and Matty, probably because of the kissing.

    We then went to "UKC Madness", their official website, which was relatively calm, since it was run by their own people, but Twitter was another story. There must have been over a hundred different stills and videos of just Teddy and me kissing, with curse filled comments numbering in the thousands under them. Some of them even knew my name.

     "I know her name is Tinker Bell," one had written. "What kind of name is that? I hope she gets her period while swimming in a tankful of sharks!!"

    "OMG, she's so fat! Theo must have been desperate..."

    "He could have anyone, and he chooses her?"

    "What a slut! There are pictures of her making out with Matty a little while later."

    "She's probably screwing the whole band."

    "The lads wouldn't do that!"

    And on and on.

    "Oh my," I said in a shocked voice. Knowing it was going to happen and seeing it in black and white on a screen were two different things. Matty put a comforting arm around my shoulders, grabbing Teddy's arm in the process, so that they were both holding me.

    "I'm so sorry, darling. I told you, but there's really no way to prepare yourself for the first time, is there?" said Teddy sympathetically, kissing my temple.

    "I don't understand, though. Isn't it just a matter of time until they find out who I really am?" I asked in confusion. "I mean, I look really different, but eventually someone will recognize me as your interpreter from those pictures in Japan, and someone from the tour can check the paperwork and tell my real name, right? I mean, how hard would it be for someone who didn't particularly like me, someone like Nancy, or that dick Randy, to just call up one of these newspapers or reporters or whatever and just tell them my name is Aileen Foster and I was a music student at USC?"

    I felt Teddy and Matty look at each other over my head, and I looked from one to the other. "What?" I asked suspiciously. "You two aren't telling me something." I closed the laptop, set it on Matty's lap, and turned to face them, stretching my legs between the two.

    "Well, we wanted to protect you from this kind of thing while we were in Japan, you know?" It was Matty who spoke. "This was before we knew that there would be anything lasting between you two, so we thought it was just going to be for the five weeks of the tour and movie shoot. After the whole swimming thing, Randy was really angry, he acted like Geth and you had tricked him, and we were all worried that he would try to do something to get back at you, because he couldn't really do anything to hurt Geth, you know? So the four of us went to Betsey and told her that we wanted the crew to know that if any word of your real name got out to anyone not associated with the tour, the person responsible for the leak would be fired immediately and never be rehired to work with us again, effective immediately, like the day we found out." He paused for breath.