Page 58 of Celebrities Don't Date Bookworms

Hudson@hudsonshaw

@neilhadley @meganwhite0202if you keep talking like this, people are going to think you’re serious

Why Are You Following Me@meganwhite0202

@hudsonshawI am deathly serious :)

Unsurprisingly, my inbox started to fill with responses from fans telling me to quit being so mean to Hudson. I rolled my eyes and turned my phone off. I didn’t care what any of them thought of me or how I should be conducting myself on Twitter. It wasn’t like I knew any of them that well. Sure, a couple of them went to school with me, but we weren’t friends. The only opinions that mattered to me were Sloane’s, who obviously supported my tweets considering she was the first one to like every single one of them, and the boys in the group chat, who had no idea what my twitter was or why I would be interacting with Hudson anyway.

I wasn’t sure when exactlythatshift happened—the one that had me actually forgetting that I didn’t know them in real life because I’d spent so much time chatting with them over text. Other than Sloane, they were genuinely my closest friends, and the fact that I didn’t know any of their real names was just a funny quirk. Nothing weird to see here… or, so I had to tell myself so I didn’t go insane from curiosity. And in the evening, Bay and I talked, the calls getting longer with every passing day.

“Secret?” I asked him during our call on Thursday night. We’d already been on the phone for two hours, and I really needed to hang up and get some sleep, but I was prolonging it for as long as I could.

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Don't tell me it’s something about noodles again.”

He laughed. “No. It’s not that bad.”

I rested my chin on my pillow. “So, what is it, then?”

He was silent for so long that I thought he had muted himself. Just as I was about to say something, he spoke.

“I think we should meet. In person.”

I felt like my stomach had twisted itself inside out.

“What?”

“I want to meet you. I want to see you in person, to put a face to your name. To even know your name.”

I pushed myself up to sit. Lying down felt too informal for this conversation.

“Bay...”

“Don’t say no,” he said softly. “Say you want to think about it. Say you want to wait. But please don’t say no.”

“I thought you wanted to wait,” I said. “You said...”

“I know what I said. But I changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he took a deep breath, “because I think I’m falling in love with you.”

The air was knocked out of my lungs.

“You can’t be in love with me.” I didn’t know why I said the words. After all, wasn’t I the one that was in love with him? So head over heels in love that I spent almost every waking moment thinking about him, wondering what he was doing, where he was… whether he felt the same way about me?

“Why not?”

“Because... Because you don’t even know me!”

It was the same thing I’d been telling myself every day since I realized my feelings for Bay. As much as I believed wholly and completely that I was in love with him, how could I be? I mean, really be?

“I know you. I know your nickname is Eggo because your brother couldn’t pronounce your name as a kid. I know your bedroom walls are yellow, but you secretly wish they were blue. I know you have one best friend, but sometimes you worry that she’ll drop you because you think she’s popular and you’re not—which I can't believe, by the way. I know you’ve lived in Bibridge your whole life and you think you might never leave. I know you consider yourself an average teenage girl even though from talking to you, I can tell that you are anything but average… and more than anything, I know that I am falling in love with you.”

I shook my head and bit my lip, tears welling up in my eyes. Had I really told him all of that? How had he remembered it all?

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