Page 97 of Overexposed

Even that didn’t really help me shake the unsettled feeling in my gut. In my opinion, celebrities courted the press and the public. They needed us more than we needed them. But…those girls could have killed themselves with their actions. The paps could have caused more than one accident. If Gem hadn’t been such a good driver or if the trucker hadn’t been aware of what he was doing, it could have all ended so much worse.

The hashtags about the Harrisons and the accident were everywhere. So were pictures, including swoony comments on them about how heroic Seven was.The perfect man on-screenand in real life.

Too bad he was with such a shrew.

Shrew?

I rolled my eyes at the wildly outdated term, but there was a hashtag that caught my attention: #stellamustgo. That didn’t bode well. Nor did the one next to it: #freeSevenHarrison.

Oh goody, that one was trending. Like I was somehow holding him captive? That was new.

I clicked that one first. The sheer volume of posts, links to other social media sites, reels, clock app videos, and more had me sitting up slowly with bile rising in my throat.

There was intense, and then there wasthis. All of the messages had a clear theme. They didn’t want Seven back with Clara Belle—not all of them anyway. She had some fans, but most were happy they were apart. They didn’t think it had been a real relationship anyway.

But me? Oh, they wanted me gone yesterday. They’d have happily seen me die in that crash.

He’s a ten, except he has an ugly bitch noose named Stella around his neck.

#Steven is a terrible fate for our man Harrison. He deserves better. She’s ruining him.

Those were mild. The more I doomscrolled, the bat-crap crazier they became.

Stella’s a dirty pap. I bet she has the goods on him.

OMG #stellathedevil is she blackmailing him?

We have 2 #freesevenharrison, have u seen this?

The photo accompanying it was blurred, so I had to click to clear it up. It was a photo of Gem, me, and Ollie at the restaurant when Ollie slid in to join us for our lunch date. We were all laughing, but Ollie was holding my hand.

The replies to that particular image began as angry and descended into vile. Oh and look, a new hashtag. #stellatheslut

If you didn’t want everyone to know what you were doing, don’t do it in public. Celebswantedto be photographed and theywantedthe reputation. That was my firm belief for the entirety of my paparazzi career, and I was unapologetic in the images I sold with that belief.

Except…I didn’t want any of this.

I wantedthem.

This was—fuck, this was a mess.

As much as I told myself to stop doomscrolling, I couldn’t seem to come back up from this particular rabbit hole. I ended up on some Reddit board where Seven’s fan group seemed to live. The Stella hatred there was next level.

They had pictures of my car. My motorcycle. Someone had found my driver’s license picture. Were they fucking serious? There was a picture of me in high school in my goth phase that had lasted a solid minute. Every single image included something else about me they didn’t like.

I was too tall. Too skinny. Too fat. My ass was round. My ass was flat. I had big boobs. I had no boobs.

“Make up your fucking minds,” I snapped at the screen. My absolute favorite was that I was a clout chaser followed by a gold digger.

Then they brought Dad and wild conspiracy theories into it, and I wanted to throw my phone across the room. Or vomit. Or scream. Or…run.

Everyone knows that once upon a time, Seven; his twin brother, Gemini; and their best friend, Olivier Griffiths, were the hottest tickets. They got the Snatch Squad nickname because they had their pick of girls. They still could, but Stella is going to drag Seven down. Iheardthat after her father’s accident, Stella Charles started down the celebrity pap road to make the celebrities like our beloved Seven pay for her father’s mistakes. She’s probably blackmailing him with sex pics and videos now.

Assholes. They were all fucking assholes.

This chick just went on and on. She had so many posts. Oh and look, a special set of links to all her platforms. It was more of the same; the vitriol grew more and more heated the closer we got to today. Apparently, she’d been on a crusade about me from the day the first story broke.

Oh, wait, that was on me. After all, I’d sold that picture myself.Fucked yourself, didn’t you, Stella?

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