Tangerine

Chapter 53

Soundtrack: Crowbar - Oh, What A Feeling

Dedication: alyssa (@BeautifulBrownEyes_) i'm so happy you started reading tangerine! i always love your comments and you never fail to make me laugh :) thanks for recommending tangerine in your bio and for reading and voting and all that fun stuff, you're the coolest x

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I'm sick to my stomach.

And it's not only from how much alcohol I downed last night.

We kissed.

Harry kissed me.

I kissed Harry.

And it was all for the world to see.

It's the first time the media has ever seen Harry snog someone in a while. It's the first time I've ever been caught by the paparazzi in such an embrace. And most importantly, it's the first time any paps have ever seen my lips against someone else's, for the length of my career. Ever. And that someone else just had to be Harry fucking Styles.

The fucked up thing is, it wasn't supposed to happen.

Harry and I were supposed to go for a short walk and merely be seen with each other. We were simply supposed to make it look like we went for a night out together to create a rise in our fandoms and get people talking. Not fucking display to the world exactly what we've been hiding for so long.

And my apologies for labelling that as "the fucked up thing" because ‒ let me tell you ‒ it gets fucking better. Instead of management wondering if Harry and I kissed on purpose, or even if the whole Scarry thing is real, they ended up praising the two of us on our fantastic acting skills.

Mitch, Harry's managers, our publicists and Harry's personal assistants all bloody well loved it.

They commended us on how we made our attraction seem so real ‒ because, little does everyone know, it was very, very much real ‒ and they were impressed at how believable we made everything look for the photographers.

Since we did kiss, and since there are millions of photos of our kiss being shared around the world at this very instant; multiple fandoms ‒ even ones completely unrelated to ours ‒ have pretty much exploded. Thanks to us, both of our management teams figured, shit. You know what? This is good. Let's do it.

And we couldn't not say yes.

Basically, they were like, "You're gonna date Harry now."

And that was that.

So we just went with it. Even with the lads, we didn't say much. We played most of it off as just another media stunt ‒ which, in all honesty, the whole thing originally was, anyway ‒ and they understood why we did what we did.

The only thing we left out was that our kiss wasn't planned in the slightest.

Which I'm very unsure of how to feel about right now.

It was Harry's idea to suggest that we were told to kiss. The only thing is, I didn't oppose. Honestly, I wouldn't know the first of going about that sort of thing yet anyway. But I am, however, a fucking fast learner. Especially when it comes to maintaining something as particular as my public reputation.

Also, it wouldn't be the greatest idea in the world for Harry and I to tell everyone that we kissed on a whim.

God, would that break us out in a fucking riot.