Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
What I never considered, as the weeks fly past, is that Gus would be hard to escape.
Now, I see him everywhere.
It’s cruel.
The world is a cruel place.
But it’s not just that. Whenever something popular comes to an end, unfortunately often a celebrity death but this time the breakup of the band, the world wants to consume that thing in bulk.
So everywhere I go now, whether the shopping centre, the supermarket, even at work, I hear his music, pretending I’m not hyper focussing on his solos.
I know all the bloody lyrics to their popular hits at this point.
I’m basically a super fan. I’ve been recruited.
I must never let my sisters find out.
He’s even on TV. The usual news cycles ignore actual worldwide catastrophes and issues, to instead air J4S’s breakup conference, where they’ve forced the three remaining boyband members into a room with microphones.
It hardly seems worth it either. They clearly have nothing to say to each other, the spark in their eyes extinguished.
They answer the questions with short and quippy responses without any emotion behind them.
I pause on a closeup of Gus.
It was just a fling, right?
Those moments we shared. The way fate forced us together. It was just a fluke.
The chemistry between us – he’d have had that with anyone.
I have to believe it or I’ll go insane.
The weekends are the worst, when things are too quiet in my apartment. So, this week I call my sisters over for lunch, since they all live in Brighton too, because I want a distraction and some company.
I know Millie will come for free food.
Abby is too kind to say no.
And Gemma won’t want to be left out if we’re all here without her.
When they arrive, we sit around the breakfast bar, tucking into the roast dinner I’ve served them.
“There’s no way you cooked this,” Gemma accuses, pointing her fork in my direction. “Do you even know how to use that oven?”
“Excuse me!” I scoff. “I can cook.”
“Yeah. Sure. But she didn’t,” Abby interjects.
I faux gasp at her, surprised she can stoop so low.
She laughs, mouth half-full. “Sara, the Deliveroo man was leaving as I was walking down the street. And besides, the oven is still cold, and the takeout containers are in the bin.”
I take a sip of my drink. “Well, bugger.”
They all find this very funny. It’s in a moment of quiet afterwards when we have our mouths full that I realise Millie is blasting music from her phone and Just4Summer are playing.
I roll my eyes. It’s the song about hot summers that go on and on and on.
It’s annoyingly good and I can’t believe I didn’t discover them before.
I don’t bring this up, however. The subject matter feels too close to the bone. Still.
Instead, I ask about my sisters. They tell me what they’ve been up to over the last few weeks, but I swear they keep glancing at each other, like there’s something happening here I’m not privy too. As the eldest sister, I’m immediately suspicious.
And to make matters worse, the music just keeps switching to more J4S songs. In fact, this is their Best Of playlist on Spotify. I should know, I’ve listened to it enough at this point. It almost seems deliberate, but I can’t imagine why it would be.
It’s just that Gus’s voice seems to reverberate right through me, right to my core. I’m losing my appetite and there’s apple crumble and custard for dessert.
Dammit.
Gemma scoffs whilst reading something on her phone and I look up to find them all typing away. Are they using the group chat that I’m not in?
“Alright. What’s going on?” I demand.
Millie glares at Abby. Gemma groans at Millie. Abby sighs defeatedly.
“Seriously. What am I missing?”
“I’m just going to say it,” Millie blurts out, raising her hands.
“No,” Abby says. “Let her come to it on her own. When she’s ready.”
“She’s never going to do that, Abby. She doesn’t share things with us. She never has.”
“What?” I mumble.
Millie shrugs. “You think you’re better than us and it shows.”
“I… don’t…” I say, shaking my head slowly, entirely confused.
“It’s actually kind of disrespectful at this point.” Gemma puts her fork down and gives me a reproachful stare.
“What are you talking about?”
“If she doesn’t want to tell us, she doesn’t have to,” Abby adds.
“You’re right,” Millie agrees. “She doesn’t have to share her dirty secrets with her little sisters. But she does have to accept she’ll never be in our group chat.”
“What are you bloody talking about?” I huff, throwing my hands up. I feed them for free and this is what I get. Honestly, they wonder why I am the way I am.
“Fuck it. I’m just going to show her,” Millie says.
“Show me what? What is actually happening right now?”
Millie scrolls through her phone before holding the screen towards me so I can see what she’s showing me.
Ah. I see.
It’s Gus and I strolling through Monaco, hand-in-hand. I have my big hat on so unless you knew me well, you’d never recognise me. Unfortunately, my sisters do know me quite well so it doesn’t take me long to realise why they’re annoyed.
I feel like I’m busted.
Am I busted?
I don’t know what to say. Because is this even a crime? Why am I not allowed to keep secrets from them? This all feels a little unjust, so I hold my head up as I face them. This doesn’t prove anything anyway. That could be someone else. Could be. It isn’t. But it could be for all they know…
Millie snatches the phone back and scrolls again.
This time I’m shown a deeply pixelated photo of Gus and I laughing at a small restaurant in Old Town, Dubrovnik.
Then Gemma adds to the evidence, showing me a photo taken from on the yacht. Gus is spinning me on the dance floor, Edith and Paul smiling at us adoringly in the background.
Well, ok. That’s undeniably me. I’m going to struggle to squirrel out of this one.
“So?” I say, eyeing them. “What do you want me to say?”
“SO?!” Millie scoffs, finally putting her phone down.
Abby’s eyes go wide. “So? Sara.” She says my name like she’s about to put me in a timeout.
Gemma shrugs like she’s unsurprised but still disappointed by my response. “Told you. She doesn’t air her dirty laundry with us.”
This gets my back up. “Hold up. Gus is not dirty laundry.”
There’s a collective gasp. “SO, IT’S TRUE!” Millie shouts. They’re all staring at me, gobsmacked.
“What do you want me to say!?” I ask, gesticulating. “We hung out a little. So what?”
“Sara, Gus Kenwood doesn’t just hang out with random strangers. Also, his fans have done the math. You guys missed the cruise. There’s this big social media search for the blonde girl in all the photos. They’re hunting you.”
I scrunch up my face. “Hunting me?”
“Yeah. But don’t worry,” Gemma says, waving her hand dismissively. “They’ll never guess it was you.”
Millie nods, snorting. “Yeah. You’re safe.”
“Wait?” I blink rapidly, completely and utterly shocked by this revelation. How long did they know? How long have they been keeping this from me? What if someone actually worked out who I was and harassed me in the street?
“What do you mean?” I demand, fiddling with my hair. “I’m so confused. Who is hunting me?”
“Gus’s fans,” Millie says like it’s obvious. Oh, yeah, like duh.
“But why?”
“Because you’re not with him now. They want to know what went down. What happened, obviously.”
“Obviously,” I breathe. Except it isn’t obvious to me at all. I shake my head. “No. I need more detail. Tell me why.”
“Because, Sara, some people are powered by gossip. And you know what really hurts? When those people don’t even get to hear from their own sister that they had a romantic summer fling with the most beloved popstar ever.
” She means her. She means I hurt her feelings by not revealing this intimate, painful information about myself to her right away. I can’t help feeling that’s unfair.
And besides, “You said you preferred Jax.”
She points at me across the table. “Not the point. I have been sat on this for weeks. Abby told me not to say anything. It’s bad enough that I’ve lied to my friends, telling them it wasn’t you,” she flails her arms around dramatically.
“It couldn’t be Sara. Oh no! She’s too uptight and goody two shoes to go and have a fling mere months after absconding from her wedding.
And, of course, if it was her, she’d obviously tell her own sisters. Right? RIGHT?”
I part my lips to defend myself, but nothing comes out.
The truth is, I’ve been waiting for all those feelings I harbour for Gus to fade away.
Like Millie said, it was a fling. How could it be more?
It was fourteen days… How deep can my feelings honestly be?
I’m being horribly dramatic. He’ll find someone famous, someone who understands his lifestyle and he’ll move on.
That can’t be me.
“Do you all feel this way?” I ask, checking my sisters’ expressions one at a time.
Gemma nods. Not really surprised there.
“Abby?”
She cringes. “It’s just… Well…”
“Oh my God. You guys think I don’t have secrets?”
“No. We’re sure you do,” Gemma says, twisting her lips. “But you don’t share them with us. You never tell us anything juicy. Which, when you were with Mike, wasn’t surprising.”
Millie snorts. “Yeah.”
“Wait. What do you mean by that?”
“He was boring,” Abby says.
I gasp. “Abby!”
“He was. He made you boring too.”
“Why didn’t any of you tell me?”
“Because you act like you’ve always got your shit together,” Millie says. “It’s gross and annoying. It’s hard to keep up with, always comparing yourself to your perfect eldest sister.”
“And you wouldn’t have listened,” Gemma adds. “Look. We know you’d do anything for us. We know that. But the reason you’re not in our group chat is because you’d probably judge us for the things we confess in there.”
I scoff. “As if! I want to know your gossip. Wait? So, it wasn’t set up for you three to bitch about me?”
“We do that too,” Millie says, rolling her eyes. “But no. It was set up to tell each other the stupid shit we do.”
“Sometimes it feels like you’re more our mother than our sister,” Abby interjects.