Recap of the previous chapter (because it's been a while): Leon and Coraline awoke after falling asleep in Leon's car. They raced back to the hotel to get back in time for Coraline's shift, but came face to face with Collette (Leon's PA) in the lobby. After an interrogation from Collette, Leon's manager walked in with a copy of the photo and told him to explain himself.

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            There was a moment of silence, in which everybody in the room seemed to be holding their breath, before Leon managed to speak.

            But even when it did happen, he left a lot to be desired in terms of coherency.

            “I… It’s not… I mean I didn’t…”

            It was perhaps the first time I’d ever witnessed him speechless. Usually, he had an answer for everything, which had to be a side effect of the fame. Charisma was an essential part of the job. Now, however, I was seeing him in a very different light.

            His attempt at an explanation wasn’t getting better with time; in fact, it actually seemed to be growing feebler, threatening to trail off into nonexistence. In the huge gaps his stammering left, Allison’s presence was swelling around all of us, even if her primary concern was Leon.

            “Well,” she said, a little louder than necessary, “I hope you’re going to come up with a better answer than that when you get asked the same question in a live televised interview.”

            Her expression may have looked relatively calm on the surface, but I could tell there was a storm brewing underneath, and the confrontation was set to be anything but. It looked like Leon had realised the same thing; his blue eyes were widened, fear etched across his features.

            “What were you thinking?” she continued, after sensing she was not going to get a reply out of him. “Actually, don’t bother answering that: you weren’t thinking. That’s what caused this whole problem in the first place.”

            His mouth was opening and closing, likening to a goldfish in a way I probably would’ve otherwise found comical, but no words found their way out. In the absence of an opposition from her client, Allison turned toward me, her eyes swivelling to lock onto their new target.

            “And you,” she barked. “You. What’s your name?”

            I swallowed, hoping my voice wouldn’t waver, because it felt like she’d tear any weakness to shreds. “Coraline.”

            Her skin, I noticed, was remarkably wrinkle-free; exactly how much Botox had contributed to that effect? My guess was placed at quite a lot, taking into account the way she was having difficulty putting on a real frown. Instead, she settled for narrowing her eyes as much as possible, hoping it had a similar effect.

            “Coraline,” she repeated, like the word left a foul taste in her mouth. “You know, this is your fault, too. Do you have any idea what kind of trouble this is going to cause?”

            My heart was pounding beneath my shirt, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a tough exterior on the receiving end of a glare that looked a death threat. Then, all of a sudden, a voice cut in from across the room.

            “Don’t you dare start on her!”

            It had been so unexpected that all three of us turned round, coming face-to-face with a slightly exhilarated Leon, breathless from the force of his outburst. However, once the attention of his manager returned, I watched some of it dissipate, replaced by the same frightened look from before.

            “What?” Allison asked, almost challengingly.

            “Don’t start on her,” he repeated, though quieter this time. “It’s not on her fault.”

            But she’d already started shaking her head, evidently having none of it. “Not her fault, you say? And how exactly did you arrive at that conclusion? In case you haven’t noticed, Leon, there are two of you in this picture.” She held up the tablet to emphasise her point.

            “I don’t care,” Leon snapped unexpectedly. A fiery determination had crossed his eyes, which I had a feeling was directed at me, even if he wasn’t quite looking my way. “Say whatever you want to me. Blame me, whatever the hell makes you happy. But you don’t say a word to Coraline. You don’t even speak to her. This is nobody’s fault but mine. So lay off. Just because you’re my manager doesn’t mean you’re hers, too.”

            At the end of this, his words trailed off into quietness, making way for his shallow breathing. For a moment, the entire lobby was consumed by silence, broken only by the whirring of the ceiling fan overhead. There was nothing else against the background noise; Leon’s words had made sure of it.

            I hardly dared to sneak a glance at Allison, but once I did, I couldn’t have been more surprised. She should’ve been livid, or at least something close. But there were no traces of it across her face. Her deep red lips were parted, looking ready to form words that were on the tip of her tongue, but never quite getting there. She was speechless.

            Glancing back at Leon, he was already looking at me. Though he tried to manage a small smile, it was weak: the best he could manage in a situation that had grown so dire. He may have put Allison in her place for a moment, but the obvious remained that there was no quick escape out of all this. The inevitable had happened, and there was no way of changing the outcome.

            In the few seconds spent exchanging glances, however, Allison regained enough composure to speak. And she looked angrier than ever.

            “Go pack your bags,” she commanded, in a tone that Leon could not argue with. “You have half an hour. Then we’re leaving.”

            Collette was still hovering awkwardly beside the front desk, loyalties visibly caught between the two. While she seemed to have been more sympathetic towards Leon when we’d been alone, there was no question about Allison’s superiority, and I guessed she didn’t want to risk angering her either. That was a mistake anybody would make only once.

            Something about Leon’s sudden outburst in my defence had filled me with a momentary optimism, like things might actually have been able to work themselves out. However, I was naïve to succumb to it, because it felt like a dead weight crashing into the pit of my stomach as I watched him silently comply to Allison’s order. Turning to retreat up the stairs without so much as a fight.

            Of course he was going to. What else could I have been expecting? He was under her control, bound by all sorts of contracts I couldn’t even begin to understand. Sure, his defence had been sweet, but it wasn’t a miracle by any stretch of the imagination. It was never going to get rid of Allison completely, nor was it going to change her mind about taking him out of Walden-on-Sea. I’d been stupid to consider it, even for a fraction of a second.

            The sight of him climbing the stairs had me overcome with an unfamiliar feeling. All at once, I felt a pang in my chest, a sudden compulsion to do something. He couldn’t leave on these terms, without saying a proper goodbye. I had to speak to him.

            But when I started for the same set of stairs, a stern voice had me stopping in my tracks before I’d made it halfway.

            “Where do you think you’re going?”

            I should’ve anticipated it. Had I really thought Allison was going to let me slip away after him? Sheepishly, I turned around, letting our gazes cross once more. “Uh…” I began. “Upstairs?”

            “You’re not going after him,” she said. “I don’t want you putting any funny ideas in his head. I’m not having you two making an escape out the window, or something stupid like that. You’re going to stay here where I can keep an eye on you and make sure Leon’s packing his stuff without distraction.”

            “Allison.” The voice came from over by the front desk. It was Collette, who sounded slightly pleading. “Is this really necessary?”

            The look the blonde-haired woman gave her bordered on disbelief. “You can’t tell me you’re on his side,” she said. “You might be his assistant, but remember who you work for.”

            Whatever Collette had been about to say, she seemed to decide against it. Allison folded her arms over her chest, keeping me firmly in the corner of her vision, as if ready to jump into action if I tried to make a run for it. I couldn’t help but feel like I was in some sort of prison. Despite knowing I was still in the hotel lobby, a space I knew like the back of my hand, it felt different in a way I couldn’t explain. Like everything had imperceptibly rearranged itself, so it was all just a little bit off.

            Then, suddenly, it came to me. Exactly what I needed to do.

            I turned on the spot, and Allison’s head snapped toward me instantly, as expected. “And where do you think you’re going?”

            I wasn’t dumb enough to make a move in the same direction; that was way too obvious. But that didn’t mean there weren’t other ways to get around her.

            “I was just going to the toilet,” I said, hooking my thumb at the door I’d been aiming for, headed by a large arrow pointing in the direction of the Ladies. Boosted by a sudden onset of peculiar confidence, I found myself adding, “Or am I not allowed to do that, either?”

            She was visibly suspicious, for which I couldn’t blame her. The door was in the opposite direction to where Leon had gone upstairs; she couldn’t outright accuse me. It was the way to the toilets, but I also had a comprehensive enough knowledge of the hotel to know if you took a right at the end of the corridor and headed up the fire exit, it happened to be a shortcut to the Lighthouse Suite.

            “You can’t physically keep her here,” Collette reminded Allison, and I silently thanked her. “She’s nothing to do with us.”

            It looked like this trivial fact didn’t bother her in the slightest, but she knew Collette had a point. “Fine,” she snapped eventually, though not without a scathing look in my direction. “Go. But don’t even think about going anywhere near my client, or there’ll be trouble.”

            I held my hands up in mock surrender, wondering where my newfound confidence had emerged from. The intimidation I’d previously felt had melted away, and she no longer seemed anywhere near as scary. Maybe it was the knowledge that I had Collette’s silent backing. She hadn’t said it aloud, of course, but the surreptitious smile shot just outside of Allison’s vision was enough to reassure me. “Just going to pee,” I said, before heading out of the room.

            Though I did kind of need the toilet, I had no intention of heading there. Tearing past the door of the Ladies and down the corridor, I yanked open the door to the fire exit and sprinted up the stairs. I was already out of breath, but that wasn’t going to stop me. Refusing to slow my pace, I stopped just inches short of the lightwood door of the Lighthouse Suite, almost going crashing headfirst into it.

            I pounded on the door a lot harder than necessary, all too aware of the seconds ticking away, marking the limited time I had left to have this conversation. Any minute now Allison would realise I was taking way too long and probably come looking for me, so I had to get it over with quickly.

            When the door swung open, revealing a confused-looking Leon, I almost went barrelling into him in my haste to get inside.

            “Coraline!” he said, as I narrowly avoided a collision with his chest. “What are you doing here?”

            “Managed to slip past her,” I panted. He closed the door behind me, and I felt myself relax a little upon hearing the catch click into place. “Wasn’t easy, but I had to talk to you.”

            “She’s going to kill you if you get caught.”

            “I know,” I said, “but I’m trying not to think about that right now. There are more important things to worry about.”

            Only then did my gaze catch on the rest of the room. It was a mess, but there was something significant about it, a little more off than usual. A few seconds later, and I realised what it was. On top of the permanently unmade bed was a suitcase, though there weren’t many clothes actually inside it. Instead they were all spread around the outside, tangled in the covers, none of them folded, but resembling the process of packing all the same.

            “What are you doing?”

            He glanced behind him, following my gaze. “Uh… I’m packing. What do you think?”

            It was the obvious answer, of course. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but there was something about the sight of it that made it seem a little more real. Leon was leaving, and in about thirty minutes’ time I’d be left with nothing but memories of the crazy summer that had only just been getting started. “You’re going?”

            He was looking at me, studying my expression. I knew I must’ve looked pathetic, my face drooping as I realised what had been apparent the whole time, but it had only just started to sink in. “Yeah,” he said gently. “I haven’t really got much of a choice, have I?”

            I was struggling to gather my words together; they were all jumbled somewhere in my throat, scrambled on the journey from my brain to the outside. “I just… I don’t… this can’t be it,” I said dumbly.

            There was a moment of silence, in which Leon just looked at me sadly. I knew it was coming, but he said it aloud anyway. “It is.”

            “No.” The word was barely a whisper, a feeble protest in a situation much too complicated. It was never going to do anything, but I felt the inexplicable compulsion to try. “Please.”

            “I’m sorry. We knew it was going to end up like this eventually, didn’t we? We knew it was coming.”

            But that doesn’t make it any easier, I found myself thinking.

            It was strange; I hadn’t expected to be so affected. What had started off as a ridiculous plan of Leon’s had grown into something so much bigger, without me even realising it. Before I’d had time to properly grasp it, I’d let myself start to feel something, and in perhaps the most dangerous situation of them all.

            For once, I hadn’t tried to stop myself, and now I had to face the consequences.

            “Look, I really am sorry,” he continued. “This is just the kind of thing that happens with me, okay? I’m not normal. I don’t have a normal life. I can’t… I can’t have people like you without all these other complications. And I should’ve made that clearer when we first met, but I was caught up in the excitement, and I don’t know what—”

            “People like me?” I echoed.

            He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut in an attempt to block it all out. “God, I wish it didn’t have to happen like this,” he said. “I should never have started it. I should’ve thought more about how it was going to end up. Then we wouldn’t be here…”

            “Leon.”

            “You’re a sweet girl, Coraline,” he said, our eyes meeting just in time for my stomach to erupt in a round of butterflies. “And I like you more than I probably should. But I’m an idiot who never should’ve let it get to this point. I’m not a normal guy. It’s not fair to do things like this to people, because I’m just fooling them that it’s ever going to work out, and all I end up doing is hurting the ones I care about…”

            He shook his head violently, snapping out of it. “We have to forget this all happened.”

            The fluttering in my chest stopped abruptly; it felt like my heart had dropped to the pit of my stomach. “What?”

            “It’s the only thing we can do,” he explained. “When I walk out of here today, you’ve got to pretend you don’t know me. Pretend we’ve never met. Nobody can know about anything that happened this summer, because it’s only going to make things worse.”

            “I can’t do that,” I said.

            “It’s not a choice, Coraline,” he replied, a little too sternly. “From here on out, none of this ever happened. We don’t even know each other.”

            “I can’t lie to everyone I know,” I protested. “This is going to get out somehow. What do you expect me to do if my face ends up in a magazine, in a photo with you? Carry on denying it?”

            “Whatever it takes,” he answered simply, though it was anything but. “I’m just trying to protect you.”

            “From what? I’m not asking to be protected, Leon. I’m capable of handling things myself.”

            “You don’t understand what it’d be like,” he told me. “You don’t know what it’s like to have people following you everywhere. Paparazzi on your doorstep. Tracking everything you do. They’re ruthless. They’ll ruin your life.”

            “What if I say I don’t care?”

            “Then that’s because you don’t understand!” he said exasperatedly, throwing his hands up in the air. “Listen to me. They will ruin your life. I’m trying to stop that happening. I’m trying to help you. And the only way I can do that is if you pretend this entire thing never happened.”

            “It’s not that easy.”

            “I never said it was going to be easy,” he answered, shaking his head. “It’s just what we have to do.”

            Tears were already brimming in my eyes, obscuring my vision, making everything swim in from of me. It was pathetic, I knew, but for some reason I couldn’t hold them back. I wasn’t one to let out my emotions often, let alone in the presence of other people, but I’d gone well past the point of controlling myself. “That’s really what you want?”

            “We’ve got no choice,” he said. “I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”

            I swallowed over the lump in my throat, feeling stupider by the minute. “Did you actually feel anything?” I managed to ask, after a moment’s pause. “Did any of this mean anything to you?”

            For what felt like a long time, he just looked at me, blue eyes looking far less bright under the circumstances. When he did eventually speak, it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to hear. “I think it’ll be easier for both of us if I don’t answer that.”

            It was all I could take; the first tear broke the barrier, rolling silently down my cheek, sure to be followed by others. The rest of my words had died in my throat, nowhere to be found.

            And by the time he managed to get out his final sorry, I was already halfway down the hall.

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Hi, guys! Sorry for taking so long with this again, though you probably expect that from me now. It was just because I've spent the last month writing 50,000 words for Camp NaNo (which I completed yesterday!). Now that I'm done, I promise I'm going to get my shit together and finish this story. There isn't that much left, but I'm going to do it.

In the meantime, bear with me. This will get finished and I won't leave you hanging.  I love you all :)