Page 45 of Harrison's Wedding

She slips her hand in mine, and I lead her out of our room and into the hallway. I turn right and walk to the next door along the hall before stopping in front of it.

“Seb’s next to us?” Heather laughs as I knock on the door.

“Yup, we figured it’ll make it easier for you two to have whatever crazy fuckfest it is that you’re planning now,” I grin at her.

“Makes sense.” Heather nods very seriously at me as Hayden opens the door to the room so he can let us in.

We walk into Seb’s sitting room, and as soon as he sees us, he stands up from the armchair he’s sitting in and starts clapping. Hayden joins in as well, and both of them are giving us wicked grins.

“Great performance, guys!” Sebastian announces.

“Thoroughly enjoyable,” Hayden agrees as he follows us over to where Seb is standing.

“Oh, fuck,” Heather says in a horrified tone.

She’s looking back and forth from Seb to the wall on our right, and I follow her gaze as we both look at the painting on the wall. Which is when I realize that this wall is shared with the living area of our suite—the place where Heather and I recently had very loud sex.

I burst out laughing and ask, “Did you enjoy the show, then?”

“Well, I mean, Heather seems to have forgotten how to say my name mid-orgasm, but other than that, yes. Very entertaining, guys. You should take it to Broadway!” Sebastian smirks.

“Stop laughing,” Heather says, obviously trying to sound stern, but failing miserably because she starts laughing as well, “fucking hell. How embarrassing. Hi, darlings.”

She hugs both Seb and Hayden before the guys sit down in two armchairs, leaving the sofa free for me to sit there with Heather.

“How was the flight?” she asks as she leans into me, and I wrap my arm around her.

“Not bad. The press was insane, though,” Hayden tells her.

“I swear to god, somebody grabbed my junk when we were trying to get in here. It was fucking crazy.” Sebastian frowns as he says it.

It sounds a bit dramatic, so I joke, “Not everybody is after your junk, Seb. It was probably an accident.”

“You don’t think everybody is after my junk? Tell that to my lover!”

Sebastian winks at Heather, and she laughs before saying, “But seriously, though. If that really did happen, Seb, that’s not okay. It was pretty bad for me too. Ally thinks that we should get some kind of permanent security.”

I frown at the thought of getting a bodyguard. It’s weird, because I know objectively that the situation with the paparazzi has been getting worse for a while now. It’s become our new normal, but if we’re no longer really safe, that’s a problem.

It’s just strange to be thinking about having personal security because I still feel like the gawky seventeen-year-old kid who met a bunch of guys at a music camp. I know I’m a rock star, technically, but I don’t feel any different than I did before we got famous. I’m still me, and the guys are still the same friends I’ve always known, making the same stupid jokes with me.

“Are we sure that it’s not going to die down, though?” Hayden asks, sounding as unsure as I feel. “I mean, it’s not that bad at home; maybe it’s just because we’re here for Heather’s show and everyone knows where we are?”

I think about the conversation I had with Ariana on Tuesday night. A reporter literally hunted her down at her work to try and get some kind of scoop on her and Gabriel. It was invasive and definitely scary.

I realize that these guys almost certainly don’t know about this yet and tell them, “I don’t know that you’re right about that, Hayden. Gabriel and Ariana have been followed around a bit lately. Someone even had Ariana showing them houses; she’d seen them three or four times before she realized that they kept asking too many personal questions and figured out it was a reporter.”

“That’s disgusting!” Heather bursts out. She shakes her head. “Poor, Ariana. That must have been awful.”

She, Sebastian, and Hayden are all wearing equal expressions of disgust. I’m sure that they feel as squeamish about the situation as I do. Gabriel was right to be furious.

“How come none of us know about this?” Hayden frowns at me.

“She only figured it out the other day. I don’t think you’ve seen them since, Hayden, and Sebastian and Heather…” I trail off and shift uncomfortably at the reminder of the tension within our group.

Sebastian says, “I may not be her biggest fan, but I would never wish that on her. That’s fucked up.”

A tense silence falls over our group as nobody responds to Sebastian’s comment. We all thought we knew what we were getting into when we set out to become famous rock stars, but I don’t think anything could have truly prepared us for the reality of it.

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