Page 63 of Celebrities Don't Date Bookworms

“Well, I didn’t,” I groaned. I never thought I would see the day that I fell for a celebrity, and honestly, I was surprised that Sloane had. I didn’t know what about me screamed “will fall in love with Hudson Shaw”. I obviously couldn’t tell her this, but I thought that if he and I hadn’t met with false identities—even if we still had those same interactions in the coffee shop, and with me as his guide at school—I highly doubted I would have even come close to falling in love with him. And now I was in the really awkward position of having to reconcile who I knew Bay to be with who I thought Hudson was. In my mind, the two were as different as could be. But clearly, I was wrong about one of them… and there was one I was hoping for it to be.

“He’s perfect for you, Megan,” Sloane said.

“How?”

“He’s cute.Famous. Dreamy…”

“Are you just describing every member of Take Five?”

Sloane laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know what it is about him, Megan. I could just tell from the first time I saw you interact… there’s chemistry there.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Every interaction I’d had with Hudson in person had been awkward and uncomfortable for me. And all our interactions on Twitter had just been us insulting each other. Bay, on the other hand… Everything I’d done with him had felt perfect.

How were they the same boy? I didn’t understand.

I groaned and pressed my face into my hands. This was all such a mess, and I couldn’t even sort it out in my own mind.

“It’s not that bad,” Sloane laughed. She pulled my hands away. “Okay, he’s famous—so what?”

“I can’t date a celebrity.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s… him! And I’m me. Normal old me. You really think he would want to be with a regular girl?”

“Has he suggested that he does?” Sloane asked.

“I guess so?” He didn’t seem upset about it when I was talking to him. In fact, he’d actually seemed—dare I say it?—happy. But what if I was misreading this whole situation? He hadn’t expressly said that he wanted to date me or anything, I was just assuming that was what he meant. What if I was completely wrong? Or what if he liked me as Eggo, but now thathe had gotten to know me as Megan, he felt differently? What then? “I told him I hated his band.”

Sloane stared at me blankly. “Why? Why would you do that?”

I shrugged. “He asked. And I told him.”

Okay, maybe he hadn’t technically asked me per se, but I didn’t want to get into the whole story. The point was that I’d said it.

Sloane let out a long breath. “Well, the good news is that if he still wants to talk to you after that, then he definitely likes you. And maybe it’s better that he knows everything up front.”

“You really think he might still like me?”

Sloane brushed a lock of hair over my shoulder. “If he doesn’t… it’s his loss. Trust me.”

fifteen

After Sloane left,I couldn’t stop thinking about Hudson, as much as I wanted to think about literally anything else. I thought I just needed some time to let the news of this to sink in, but I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about it, and rerunning the moment in my mind over and over again. I needed to watch something else or do… something to stop myself from dying of embarrassment at the memory of this.

I laid down on my bed and opened my computer. I was totally set to start watching a show or something, but instead, I found myself searching for Take Five videos—like that was going to help the obsession. The first things to pop up were their music videos, and an article all about them, and their lives. Two weeks ago, clicking on that probably would have been helpful since I’d known almost nothing about them, but now, I had a feeling I knew more about Hudson Shaw’s life than any of them did. Did they know that he still talked to his friends back in London, or that he hatedlong noodles, and even numbers, or that if he had to choose that he would rather live in an attic than a basement? Did they know that he was shy as a kid, but always loved to perform on stage, or that his sister was his best friend in the world for the first six years of his life?

Did they know that he was in love with me?

I was sure the image he presented in interviews and other things fans got to see was different than who he was anyway. Wasn’t that the reason I hadn’t realized who he was all this time? Wasn’t that how I’d somehow fallen for Bay while hating Hudson at the same time? If I said that to Sloane, she would probably disagree since she somehow seemed to think that he and I were meant to be based on Hudson and I’s interactions in real life, but I wasn’t convinced that she was right. I wasn’t ready for her to be right.

The next search result after that did pique my interest, however: a YouTube channel simply titled “Take Five Vlogs.” As far as I knew, none of them were major players on social media; sure they all had it, but it was the typical celebrity pages that were posted on only occasionally, and probably only by their PR team. What would they have to post on YouTube?

I clicked the link and glanced over the videos. From what I saw, there were less than twenty proper videos, but there were a significant number of livestreams spanning the past couple of years. In fact, the first video seemed to be from when they got put together as a band on the show.

I bit my lip as I hovered my cursor over that first video. I knew I wasn’t actually doing anything wrong by watching these videos—they were available to the public, and I had every right to look at them. But it also felt a little weird to look back at this archive of Hudson over the years when he couldn’t do the same with me. I barely even had any photos from two years ago because I was mortified by the past, and wanted to erase it as much as possible. Was it wrong for me to do this? Or was that just the nature of dating a celebrity?

I sighed and grabbed my phone. My first thought was to text Sloane, but I already knew what her answer was going to be, and it felt like cheating to ask her just to validate my feelings. No, I needed to outsource this question to somebody else, and unfortunately I only had two options: Twitter—where I had amassed far too many followers to be comfortable, especially since most of said followers were only there to interrogate me about how I got the boys to follow me—and the group chat—which Hudson was in, and would definitely see. That would definitely be weird for me to do, but my only alternative was to make the decision myself.

---