Fighting Fate

53. Back Home

We're on a flight back home. And by home I mean my home in Sydney, not Harry's in London. He will be staying with me for three days before he flies to his next tour destination. After the show last night, we went straight to the airport and got on this jet. Harry has five days before his next show and thankfully three of those will be spent with me. 

There hasn't been much conversation during this flight between Harry and I. We're not fighting, we're just enjoying some comfortable silence. Harry fell asleep first and while he was napping, I fell asleep too. I woke up to Harry on his phone. Every now and then he would show me a funny meme or a nice tweet. I'm catching up on emails. Politely declining so many interviews which Heather has forwarded to me because people are dying to know why I suddenly moved back home and chose to live life on the down low. 

While I am in the middle of deleting a tonne of emails from my spam folder which I cannot be bothered to read, my phone goes off. A split second later, Harry's phone goes off too. We got synchronised text messages. Shortly after, my phone begins ringing and vibrating against my hand. 

It's Heather. 

When I look up, Harry is holding his phone with the screen facing towards me. 'Look' he mouths. Melissa from Modest Management is calling him. 

We stare at one other with deep concern for a moment and I feel my heart skip a beat because the anxiety within me is growing by the second. Whenever Heather texts me a link, then calls me, it means there is a juicy article that has been written about me. The thing that is frightening me the most if that Harry got sent a link as well. I am assuming it is the same link as mine. 

This means that it involves the two of us. 

"Decline it, click on the link first." Harry says to me. 

Doing as he says, I decline Heather's call and go into my text messages app. I open up Heather's messages and click on the link. I let out an audible gasp when I read the title of the article. Below the title is a picture from two days ago when Harry and I went to that restaurant just out of the city. We chose a place out of the city in hopes that it was more peaceful. 

It wasn't. 

In the picture, Harry is to my left and Travis is to my right. Travis is walking slightly in front of me as he tries to get fans to move out of our way. It was a little windy and we were walking quite fast, so my t-shirt sunk into my body. You can see a little bump. In this photo it does not look nearly as big as what it really is. It could pass as bloating. I am lucky enough to have my father's slim genetics and therefore have never been photographed before with a food baby despite getting them all the time, especially when I eat gluten. 

My handbag looks gorgeous in this picture, but despite being large in size, it wasn't doing a very good job at hiding my stomach in this picture. I was so worried about making it to the car without anybody bumping into me, that I didn't place my bag very well. 

"Fuck." Harry mutters under his breath. "Fuck me. This is all my fault. It's me who suggested going out. You told me your stomach would show through your shirt and you were right."

"This isn't your fault." I assure him because it's the truth. We should be able to go out and enjoy a pleasant meal together, but some people make that difficult for us. "We have been on our phone for hours. Why didn't we get any tweets about it or see it sooner?"

"Refresh your feed. I just went back on twitter. The tweets are coming in like crazy now. Are you still on the article?"

I nod. 

"What time was it posted?"

"5:23am." 

Looking at the top of my phone screen, it says that the article was posted at 11:21am. Heather and Melissa being our managers, got contacted with the news of the article almost immediately. Then they instantly forwarded us the link.