Page 44 of Code Word
Close-ups of us.
Had he kept these?
Or was he sent these?
Had some crazy motherfucker sent him every single documented photograph of me and him together?
And he was now missing?
My heart came to a screeching halt and the room swayed and pulsed in my ears. I had to put my hand on a table to steady myself, and that’s when I noticed some photos in particular.
The white borders and stamp across the front, the studio setting. I remembered those suits... we’d joked about being in Reservoir Dogs, and we’d even sung some lines about putting the lime with the coconut, and we’d joked around like idiots, and my god, we’d laughed...
These were photos no one else had access to.
They’d used one for the article inVogue, along with others from the outside shoot by the pool. As far as I knew, no one else had even seen those images, and these had the photographer’s set stamp on them...
I picked them up off the floor. There must have been twelve photos, all originals, all focused on Luke and me.
Us laughing. My arm around his waist, my head thrown back as I’d laughed and him looking at me.
My god, how he was looking at me.
The next image: this time he was smiling at the floor, and I was looking at him.
Did I really look at him like that? Like he hung the fucking moon.
Clearly I did look at him like that because there I was, caught on camera...
And the next one, it was a group shot, all five of us, and I had my arm draped around his shoulder. Why were Luke and I standing closer than the others were? Why did I notice that now and not before?
There were dozens upon dozens of photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine pages. At concerts, on tour, walking downtown in Sao Paulo, on the train in Japan, in a limo in Paris...
Me and him.
It was always me and him.
Sitting together, sitting on top of each other, asleep on each other—on a plane, backstage, in bed.
In bed.
Sound asleep, my arm across his chest.
Headline after headline,Bluke, Bluke, Bluke.
And what Jeremy said came back to me.
Think back to all the hype around the whole Bluke-shipping thing and ask yourself why every person on the planet thought you were a couple.
Whydidour fans ship us so hard? Why was the world convinced we were together?
Because it certainly fucking looked like it. Not the things we did in front of fans for a reaction, but the quiet moments the fans weren’t privy to.
Why... why didn’t I see that until now?
We’d always played into the whole Bluke thing; we’d joked about it, laughed, and hammed it up.
But it was only ever a joke.
