”Will you get paid?” I asked, even though that had to be the stupidest question ever, but Aida nodded vigorously with an insidious smile on her lips.

“A lot?” Em then asked reading the face expression of hers. She nodded again.

Em and I both immediately started doing those freaky hand gestures that at first I think scared Niall a bit, but by now – when he’d seen us doing them multiple times, whenever we would get excited about something – he was almost falling off his chair from laughing.


“Well, how did it go then? You know, the photo shoot?” I asked once we’d calmed down a bit. “Were the boys nice to you?” I placed my hand on Niall’s thigh under the table and started trailing traces up and down on it outside his black skinny jeans.

“It was so much fun!” Aida smiled and turned to Niall. “You guys are really funny to work with. It’s a bit weird though, being all… professional around them, but honestly it didn’t feel like a job at all.”

“I can just imagine you guys mocking around each available moment,” Em smiled along with the rest of us.

“The only part that feels like a job is what I’m busy doing now, you know the editing. Jesus Christ, that really takes a fucking long time…” Aida sighed probably not looking forward to the many long hours she would have to spend on that during the night.

“Don’t forget our gig tomorrow at the bar,” I reminded her just in case she would forget in the middle of all these things happening for her.

“I know, don’t you worry, I’m a professional,” she smirked.



The following morning Niall drove me to the bagel shop before he would have to head to multiple interviews that day himself.

Once again my subconsciousness was mocking me as I got reminded that it was Wednesday.

And time for another session with my psychologist, Lena Henderson. Because I am a bulimic.

Yeah, that’s exactly what I am. A bulimic. And here I have the loveliest person, Niall Horan, by my side thinking that I am a person just as lovely as him. But no. I’m not. I’m a bulimic and a liar. My whole existence is one big fat lie – almost as fat as my thighs - and I’m in no intention of being honest at any time soon. So until then I’m just making a fool out of everybody else around me, they seem so pleased with the person that they’ve experienced until now, why not let them believe in that person for a little while more? I’m not in the mood for exposing myself. And of course it’s all about me. How I feel, how I think of myself and whether I want to tell the truth or not. Not at all about what everybody else around me would feel about my behavior. No way in hell would I put aside my own needs for the people who would do it for me.


This time I wasn’t so lucky with pushing these thoughts away as I have before. They seemed to stick on to my head for the entire day and only to get enhanced to closer towards three o’clock where Harry would pick me up as always and drive me to the house in Notting Hill. He had insisted on keep doing that for me, apparently he was convinced that it would help in some way.
And silently I deep down knew that it did help just a tiny bit.

I had agreed to go with him to grab some dinner before I would meet the girls at the small bar in Camden for our gig that would just be an hour long concert with some of the music that we’d already done before.


Niall would be busy all day with some radio interviews before heading out of town to meet up with some old friends of his that he only could fit room in his busy schedule at this time, when all the boys had a couple of days free and afterwards doing some performances before heading home for Christmas. He would be gone for all his days off, it was an old deal he’d made with them and it really made me happy to see how excited he was to be spending time with them again.

Through the past couple of days he’d proven to be a much greater human being than I’d realized until now, he was making it harder and harder for me to deal with my own horrible self, which was also the reason why I had started to feel so incredibly nervous about my appointment with the Lena, I was afraid that it would only tear open the suffocating feelings that had been building up the more I got to know Niall.



“Maja, I’ve been thinking about something…” Harry started speaking once I’d jumped in to his car that was waiting for me at the usual small street.

“Yes?” I said waiting for what he had in mind.

“Does Aida celebrate Christmas?” he asked me.

“Uhm… No, not like celebrate it, she’s not a Christian but she does buy us girls small gifts and so on, if that’s what you’re thinking about,” I answered.

“She’s a muslim, right?” he then asked to which I just nodded.

“How will her parents react to her you know… being with me?”

“Haven’t you guys spoken about this?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“Well no, I don’t want to… offend her in any way. Or… you know, I don’t want her to think that I’m prejudiced or something, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do. But don’t worry, you won’t, she’s very open when it comes to stuff like that, I think she might be used to questions like those.” I smiled as comforting as I could despite the growing knot in my stomach leaving almost completely without breath as we started driving towards Notting Hill.

“Okay,” he breathed. “Okay. And then I have another question.”

“Spill it out.”

“Can I come in? You know. Just wait inside the house during your appointment? I don’t have much to do in that half hour.”

“Well…” I stuttered not knowing how I would feel about that. But on the other hand, he really was just doing his best to help me and to have him wait outside the house for thirty minutes seemed a bit ridiculous. “Yeah, of course.”

“Okay thanks.”


A little while later he parked his car at another small street a bit away from Lena Henderson’s house since it would seem a bit dodgy to the media if Harry Styles’ car would be parked right in front of it, none of us wanted to cause any hysteria what so ever in this kind of situation.
But of course in those five or ten minutes it took to walk the last bit, the English December whether decided to show itself from its worst side when the rain started pouring down heavily. None of us had brought an umbrella, so instead we ran through the streets trying helplessly to avoid it, but by the time we finally reached the house we were both completely soaked. Or at least I was, Harry had somehow worn a jacket that wasn’t as cheap as mine and it didn’t let in any of the rain.


“Oh great!” I exclaimed when we got inside as I tried to wipe off any running makeup on my face. “Oh no, my clothes are completely wet!”

Harry on the other hand couldn’t help but laugh at my poor frame as I desperately tried to fix the hair of mine that had gotten even flatter than before, though I didn’t think that was possible. He made me laugh along, even though I really was pissed that I didn’t have anything to wear by now.

“Here,” he suddenly said reaching me his sweater from underneath his thick jacket. “Put this on.”

“You don’t need that?” I asked.

“No, I have lots of clothes on, I’ll be okay. And you’ll be freezing if you don’t borrow it,” he smiled and I immediately took the sweater from his hand and put it on after having ripped off my jacket and beloved red flannel shirt underneath that had both gotten completely soaked from the cold rain. My hands were actually shaking when I fumbled around with Harry’s sweater and it felt like ages before I felt its warmth penetrate my icy skin.

“Oh God, that was nice,” I sighed. “Thank you.”

“No problem. Now where do I wait?”

We both went to sit on some chairs in the small hallway outside Lena’s room after having announced my arrival to the secretary behind the desk.


The session was all right. She gave me a new receipt on some light anti-depressant that she’d been waiting on giving me until she knew how I really felt. The fact that I hadn’t improved one bit in the past almost 3 months only added fuel to my self-destructive fire inside my head.


“Uhm… We have to go by the pharmacy on the way to dinner,” I mumbled to Harry when we walked back towards the car. To my relief the rain had stopped pouring outside which was really lucky since I didn’t have any other clothes with me, nor did Harry, to change in to.

“Oh okay,” he just said probably knowing what I was talking about. He really was the most amazing friend, he seemed to know exactly when people wanted to keep something to themselves and when they didn’t, he was never pushing me to tell anything and so I never did, but yet he still insisted on spending his time on helping me this way and I was forever thankful for that.


I got my medicine – which was much more expensive in the UK than in Denmark – and we went out to eat at a small Italian restaurant that was located in a more deserted area of London but still we would have to use the back entrance in order not to attract too much attention.
We had a lovely time eating the most delicious pizza with parma ham and parmesan cheese and talking about so much stuff. He didn’t ask about my consultation, nor the medicine, we just talked. Like the friends that we were. And it felt really nice.


Somehow the paparazzi’s still managed to get a hint of where the mighty Harry Styles were and once we were about to go outside to his car at the back entrance we were getting mobbed by all the people out there. The flashes were endless and blinding me the entire way, I’m quite amazed that I actually managed to find my way to the door without falling. Of course they all thought that Harry and I were dating and cheating on both of our girlfriend and boyfriend, Harry knew that they would if they found out where we were, so he’d instructed me in just getting in the car as fast as possible without answering any questions.

He tried to go away from them fast once we were both seated and ready to leave, but people were constantly standing right in front of his car blocking the way to get as much pictures as possible.

I couldn’t help but remembering the pictures of Harry and Kendall Jenner a long time ago when they were leaving a restaurant as well. Everybody thought they had something going on despite the fact that they kept telling people they were only friends. God, I hope people wouldn’t go as crazy about this as much as they did back then.
But as far as I could tell this wouldn’t go down as an unnoticed story. Crap.

Harry drove me to the bar in Camden, he wanted to listen to our concert. And I assumed that he also missed Aida according to the way they kissed each other when they saw each other. I don’t think there was anyone in this world that could make Em and I feel as embarrassed as the two of them, sometimes they just didn’t really leave that much left for imagination.

The set to our concerts began consisting more and more of mainly our own songs, since we got to write more of those during the past couple of weeks of playing gig after gig.
The audience wasn’t as big as at Dirty Dicks, but that was because the bar was smaller cause as far as I could tell, the place was completely packed with people by the time we hit the tiny stage.

People seemed to love the music, which was such a relief. Every time we would have a performance to deliver I would get so extremely nervous that no one would like what we did, but that hadn’t been the case so far. As I looked around at the people I noticed some of them from before, apparently we had gotten a small collection of fans who also always came and talked to us afterwards asking when we would do our next concert. We then could inform them that that would be on Saturday at Dirty Dicks.

The great thing about doing all these gigs at once was that we got more and more used to perform in front of people. We got to know each other as performers, something that we hadn’t done much of before. We all knew that we would have to deliver each time in order to have to slightest chance of succeeding with our music and it really was already a lot of hard work and pressure, even this early in our so called career, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it. Spending my entire free time on music didn’t seem like a challenge at all, more like a relief.


“Thank you so much for coming,” we all greeted some of the people asking for our phone numbers to do more concerts.

“Do you want a drink or something?” Harry asked us once we’d finished packing up our instruments.

“Yeah, cosmopolitans,” I said before asking the girls knowing that we all loved that red drink.

We sat down in the bar and chatted casually about the music and what performances the boys were about to do and so on. Everything seemed completely all right until I suddenly felt a hand grip tightly on to my arm. It was Em’s hand.

“What the…” I glanced down to see that her knuckles were going completely white from squeezing my shirt.

“Em. What’s wrong?” I asked quietly. I tried to make eye contact with her but her eyes seemed to be stuck on something at the entrance and as I followed her gaze I noticed a man looking at her from the door.

A skinny man. With bad teeth.

Notes