Second Snapshot (Picture This Sequel: Niall Horan)

-Operation Commence. [Chapter 20]

She gushed but as she brought it closer my eyes were glued to one picture near the bottom right hand corner. They were surrounded by a few pictures from her concerts with One Direction but they were irrelevant as this picture held so much…memory yet privacy, love and everything else that described last summer in it. After a concert. I remember the night so well. Ellie was off gushing with Zayn and me and Niall had managed to steal a few minutes before we would trek through the car park crowds to the car to go home. My arms around his neck, his tight around my waist as I stood on my tip-toes my body pressed so close to his it must have been a challenge to move. It was dark but the lights from the concert arena were bright overhead. My hair was as usual spilling down my back in unruly blonde waves and his was scruffy but you couldn’t really see our faces hence the distance, it was a side view after all. Just us, there, thinking we were alone kissing around the back of the huge building. Intimate, as we always were.

“What? What’s up? Oh…”

I dragged my gaze away trying to supress the smile tugging at my lips. I was supposed to be upset, distant and gloomy that the relationship was dead, when in fact, it was as alive as ever.

“It’s a cute picture though…Don’t you think?”

“I guess…”

Her face softened a little and I felt a pang guilt hit me that I was keeping something from her, and not just something, something big, or at least it was in this situation, this family. It had been so long, I don’t think anyone but people who really believed we were meant to be together expected us to get back together, ever. And yet, here we were, enduring a forbidden relationship behind everyone’s backs.

“Well, I just think it was so sweet. I mean there’s everything on here, from when we were like seven to my prom last year and…Oh gosh even your prom is on here I can’t believe I haven’t noticed that before!”

“Wh…How did they get pictures from my prom?”

She shrugged.

“Pictures get leaked all the time. Sometimes you don’t even notice they have it all goes so fast, but anyway. I guess I have some questions…The tabloids are raging about you and Horan so wasson?”

Pictures get leaked all the time. It’s not like I haven’t experience that before. It seems that since Ellie’s fame has just continued to rise the same with my Father’s company and my NYC job, there is no scrap of a detail revolving of my life that isn’t leaked, even in the smallest of ways, they’re always on my case, criticizing my every move and a lot of times I’ve been at the point where I just don’t feel as if I can do it anymore. Never again. But then, I realise there’s so many people relying on me so many people that need me in order to make their clockwork work as well as mine and I’m too nice to let down those people and just disappear, however nice it would be.

“Nothing’s going on.”

I replied a bit too quickly and she raised her eye-brows.

“That’s not what some people are suggesting.”

She shrugged sliding the board back underneath her bed and beginning to scroll through something on her phone.

“Well who exactly is suggesting otherwise?”

I questioned and she smirked a bit.

“Everyone.”

When I just looked at her she shrugged again.

“I don’t know. If you say there’s nothing going on then I’ll believe you but just know that I think there should be…Anyway how’s Mallory doing? I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”