Guarded

16

A/N: Thank you all so much for reads, comments and votes. I have finals this week so I probably won't update until Thursday or Friday when I'm free for the rest of the summer! So, hopefully this will hold you over! 

I was at Lizzy’s within thirty minutes and she welcomed me with open arms.

“I need your help with something,” I said once we sat down in her room.

“Anything,” she said.

“I have a thousand messages and I need to get back to them. Can you help me?” I know it sounded lame but I needed to get my mind off of Harry and focus on Cost right now. I would see Harry in a few weeks, like Aunt Stacey had said, and everything would be sorted out then.

“Of course!”

We agreed on a script for responding the messages and took shifts in responding to them. Four hours later, I think we had gotten through all of them.

“There! That’s it! Last one,” Lizzy exclaimed.

“Now Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and everything else.” We found a picture of Cost and I that hadn’t been published online. We both looked happy. I uploaded the picture and thanked the followers for their condolences and asked for my privacy to be respected in this time. Within minutes it had over 100,000 likes and replies.

I noticed some of the usernames had ‘1D’ in them. “Lizzy, what’s 1D?”

She rolled her eyes, “You’re kidding, right?”

I looked at her confused. “No, seriously, what is it?”

She pulled up Harry’s instagram. It had a picture of Cost and I on it and mentioned how a ‘dear friend’ needed support at this time and asked for our collective fan base to be respective during the mourning period.

“Oh, 1D is One Direction,” I said. It was actually really nice Harry had done something like that but at the same time, it had only gotten me more attention that I really didn’t want at this point in time.

“Duh, don’t forget that or else the ‘directioners’ will be coming after you. I’m sure there’s death threats on the internet out there just because Harry mentioned you. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when you two officially become public.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Lizzy had explained how the band had an insane group of followers. Most of them were harmless fans but there were some who took things very personal and would attack people. “It’s all very childish, if you ask me,” she said. “But, you needn’t worry about that for now. How is Harry by the way?”

I wasn’t sure. I checked the time on my phone. He must be in Phoenix by now, but I hadn’t heard from him one way or another. “Good question. He was sick this morning but seemed better when I left him.”

I told her how he had gotten sick from the burger joint and she seemed grossed out.