Hey Stranger || Jerrie

Chapter 17

Perrie had been walking for just over two hours when she found herself at the National Mall. Her feet and legs tired, she decided to take a seat against a tree. She pulled out her phone, expecting the see texts from Jade, but found none. She knew Jade was probably just giving her space like she’d requested, but a part of Perrie had hoped that Jade would have tried to contact her regardless.

With her phone out already, Perrie decided to open Twitter. Without even thinking much about it, she searched for Amelia’s twitter. She had over sixty million followers. Perrie supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, but she was a little bit shocked by the sheer number of followers. She began to read through some of the tweets, smiling when she read the one about Leigh-Anne.

There were others that made her smile too though. Like one from two weeks earlier:

@AmeliaThirlwall: Clap lights are for lazy people

Perrie didn’t even have to look at the date to know when it was tweeted, because she knew it was as a result of phone conversation they’d had. Perrie had been in bed, talking to Jade with the phone on speaker. She was nearly asleep, but her room lights had been on. She’d complained to Jade about it and after she had insisted that clap lights should be more mainstream, Jade had called her lazy.

As she read through them, she found that nearly half of Amelia’s tweets related to Perrie and conversations they had, the only ones that didn’t were promotions for her tour. Some were more obvious than others, but the dates of them helped. Like the tweet from the night they’d first Skyped and Jade had played the guitar for her.

@AmeliaThirlwall: We’ll play hide and seek and turn this around, all I want is the taste that your lips allow #GiveMeLove

Besides the tweets that were directly related to her though, Perrie noticed when Amelia started tweeting more and more. It was mid-May, right after Perrie had accidentally called her instead of Jesy. Prior to that, Amelia’s tweets were limited, maybe one a week at most, and always directly related to her work.

Even online she seemed happier with Perrie in her life. Perrie had to admit that she felt the same. She’d just decided to stalk through her girlfriend’s i********: when her phone died. She sighed slumped back against her tree.

Her legs were still a little sore and despite the fact that she knew she should get home and charge her phone so she could call Jade, she wasn’t ready to go yet. It was a good thing she wasn’t though, as moments later a familiar figure walked up to her.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Jonathan laughed as he leaned up against the tree Perrie was sitting at to stretch his quad. He was dressed in athletic clothing and had obviously just been on a run. “What’s up? Where’s your girlfriend?” He looked around as if searching out the celebrity.

“I kinda ran away from her,” Perrie admitted. Jonathan was someone that Perrie never had a problem talking to. Her relationship with him was so different than her relationships with Jesy and Leigh-Anne. With Jesy, they didn’t really talk about their problems, they were just there, often a shared hurtle. They only talked about the important things when life got bad. And with Leigh, they’d first bonded over being cheated on and while at first that’s what their conversations had focused on, they’d eventually changed so that they now often had heated debates about the most random of things, but always something intellectually stimulating. Jonathan though was different. He wasn’t Perrie’s best friend, that was a tie between Leigh-Anne and Jesy, but he was someone that Perrie trusted entirely.

“You ran away from Amelia?” Perrie balked, “Why?”

“I dunno,” Perrie sighed, “I kinda freaked when people recognized her when we were at brunch and they started taking pictures.”

“Didn’t you know what you were signing up for when agreed to be her girlfriend?” His question wasn’t asked with disdain or contempt, but rather honest curiosity.

Perrie thought for a moment before she answered, because she didn’t exactly have a straight answer. “No, I didn’t,” she finally responded, “Well not really anyway. Because even though we only became official or whatever on Friday, there’s been something between us for months. Since before I knew who she really was. I got in to it without all the details.”

“And you’re having trouble adjusting,” he responded with a nod of his head. “That makes sense. You thought you knew her, and you do, you know probably a more real her than anyone else, but that’s hard for you to believe when there’s a big part of her that she was hiding from you.”

“Pretty much yeah,” Perrie laughed, “How is it that you figured that out so quickly when I couldn’t even figure it out myself.”

“I know a bit about lying in order to protect the people you love,” he explained before adding on, “And then realizing that by lying you weren’t really protecting them at all, but rather hurting them.” Perrie knew that Jonathan blamed himself for Jesy’s mistreatment, and while he logically knew that it wasn’t really his fault after years of being brainwashed, he still blamed himself. It was something he struggled with a lot.

Perrie braced herself against the tree as she stood up off the ground so that she was on the same level as her friend. “I guess it really wasn’t the paparazzi that freaked me out,” she realized. “Yes, that was a bit surreal, but really it was the realization that a relationship with Jade wasn’t going to be simple. It was easy when it was just us, and even when we were with her people. But the real world is going to be really hard.”

“Probably,” he nodded, brushing his mop of dark hair off his sweaty forehead, “You’re still early on in this though. If you think it’s going to be too much, you can end it before it gets too messy. If that’s what you want.”

“No,” Perrie shook her head strongly, “I definitely don’t want that. I care about her way too much for that. I guess I just need to talk to her about my concerns. I think eventually the world will find out about us, but for the moment I want us to stay private. We already discussed that and she agreed, but I think we still need to talk.”

“About the fact that she lied to you?”

“I don’t know, maybe. She already explained to me why she did it, and I completely understand and I’m not mad at her for it…” she paused, trying to put her feelings in to words.

Sensing Perrie’s internal struggle, Jonathan offered his interpretation of the situation, “Maybe it’s not as much about her apologizing, but more about you explaining to her why you felt uncomfortable about it.”

“Yeah,” she nodded as he put to words her exact feelings.

“Now go get your girl,” Jonathan spoke as he embraced the girl in a hug.

“My phone’s dead, what time is it anyway?” Perrie asked, wrapping her arms around Jonathan in his embrace.

“Just about four,” he said, causing Perrie to pull away quickly.

“She’s leaving for the airport soon. I need to go see her,” she responded briskly. She quickly hustled to the road, Jonathan on her heels, and hailed a cab. As the cab stopped beside her she opened the door and turned back to Jonathan. “I’m glad you just happened to be on a run at the National Mall when I needed to talk to you. Thanks.”

“Fate is funny, isn’t it?” Jonathan laughed.

“You knew I was there, didn’t you?”

Jonathan simply gave Perrie a short nod, opting not to reveal his secret, as the blonde got in to the cab and sped away.