Stranded [harry styles] ✓

5

"Jules, you are aware that he looks young enough to be your son?" 

She's still ogling the lifeguard. 

And he's totally aware of it. 

He looks incredibly uncomfortable; even from here I can see the pink tinge in his cheeks. He keeps looking at us and then pretending he's looking at something else. Smooth. 

"The young ones are far more...thrilling." She rolls her 'r'. 

I want to puke. 

Instead I spit my drink back into the cup.

"As if you just said that!" I exclaim, practically snorting with laughter now. I wedge my cup into the sand beside my towel, not fancying drinking my own spittle. "It all makes sense now."

She peers over her glasses at me, finally tearing her eyes away from the poor guy.

"What does?"

"Why you never got married!" I chortle. "Faithful is most definitely not a trait you're familiar with, Jules." 

"Meh." She shrugs and slurps on her cocktail. 

We sit in silence for a long time and I wonder if I've hit a nerve. Jules' wild lifestyle and lack of settling down has never been a conversation we've approached or one that my parents have ever discussed in my presence. 

 "Now he's a bit dishy!" Her overexcited squeal breaks into my thoughts.

I look up and squint at the figure wading out of the water. His skin is spattered  with tattoos and he's wearing a cap backwards on his head.

I recognise him.

"That's Harry Styles." I laugh. I think of my friend of Addie and her One Direction plastered bedroom walls. She'd kill to swap places with me right now. I consider texting her. 

"Harry Styles?" Jules repeats. She clearly has no clue who he is.

"He was in One Direction." I inform her. "He's doing his own thing these days."

I'm surprised I know so much information. Boybands have never really been my thing and 'What Makes You Beautiful' didn't ever make it onto my iPod. Clearly Addie's rambling 1D facts made themselves at home in my brain. 

"He's famous? And rich? And hot?" Jules is grinning broadly now. Plotting, I imagine.

"How funny that he's on the same beach as us. No one even seems to have noticed." I realise that the swarms of girls that should have been surrounding him are nowhere to be seen. It's almost as if nobody recognises him. 

"Ah well, more room for me to see clearly." Jules smirks.

It's one of those situations where you feel like you should go and say hello and get a photo just to be able to say you've seen/met a celebrity. Except I'd feel like a total fraud given that I've never really appreciated anything he's done. But then again, would Addie kill me if she knew I'd been so close and hadn't done anything about it? 

I decide to ignore both Harry and Jules and go back to staring at the sea. The sun is warm on my skin and I settle back onto my towel. I feel my eyelids growing heavy; even flickering closed for a brief second. But a scream interrupts me. 

"What the hell is that?" Jules asks. She sounds worried.

I throw my glasses off and see her pointing up at the cloudless sky. People have started to get up off their towels and have also craned their necks upwards. I do the same.