IMAGINES: Celebrity Encounters Starring You Read Online Free PDF

you do. And I love them,” you say. You’re holding his face in your hands. “I’m so sorry. I was just messing around at work, and I didn’t think about how it would affect you. The pictures you take of me are more than enough for me. You don’t need to be worried, okay? I’ll take the phone apart and put everything back at work. No one will ever know, I promise.”
    He nods, sniffling, drying his eyes.
    “Okay? Are we okay? I’m sorry. I’m so so so so sorry.” You lean up to kiss his cheek. He’s still not looking at you.
    “I have to get to work,” you say. “Do you want to drive me? So we can get a little more time to hang out? I like when you drive me places.” You move away and start to get ready. You take the phone out of his hands and feel his eyes on you as you bend, as casually and meaninglessly as possible, to throw it into your backpack.
    “Okay,” he says. “Sure.” There’s something going on behind his eyes. He’s still so far away. You feel like your love is a chain, you feel like he’s hanging off a tall bridge from the end of your love, and you have to haul that love, hand over hand, all the way up, to bring him back to the bridge, to reality, to life, to you. It’s delicate work—at any minute the love could slip from your hands and he’ll fall back down, and you’ll have to begin the work of pulling him up again. It’s exhausting.
    “I need to finish getting dressed and then we’ll go, okay?”
    You pick up your clothes and turn away, pausing briefly asyou think of the phone lying in your bag on your bed. Part of you wishes there was a way to take the bag and walk away, and then just keep on walking, forever. But that’s not realistic. There is no part of you that’s capable of something like that.
    HOURS LATER, it’s well into your work shift and there is another balding male customer yelling at you about something. You’re not really paying attention. You’re still thinking about your interaction with your boyfriend earlier and feeling weird about how you left things. He drove you to work and you apologized a million more times, and you asked for more details about his day, trying to be very interested and supportive, but it didn’t help. You felt like his mind was still elsewhere.
    You asked if you could hang out later and talk after work, and he said he had a project that was probably going to keep him busy. He looked at you and you had no earthly idea what was going on behind his eyes. But you knew that it was your fault. You knew you should just tell him. About Kim, about the phone, the file, everything. Why not just come clean and start again? Really do the work of proving your devotion to him.
    On the other hand, it was all going to be over soon anyway, so why even make a big deal about it? Kim would sneak back in after your shift, you would give her the phone and the information, and she would sneak back off to her life of illegal selfies, while you returned to your life of . . . whatever it was. To this. To getting yelled at by some customer because he didn’t like your tone.
    You stand there and let the customer’s anger wash over you. You are a rock. His anger is a stream, traveling swiftly around you. Only wearing away at you on the smallest, most microscopic level. It would take years of this man yelling at you beforeit caused any visible damage. You have built up a thick, callused layer of emotional skin over the years of being yelled at IRL and on the internet. There is no way for you to exist, either corporeally or electronically, without being a vessel into which people can empty their anger.
    Yes, okay , you are saying to the angry man, who hasn’t stopped to take a breath in as long as you could remember. You nod. Encouraging him. Letting him know that you are sympathetic, which you aren’t, and actively listening, which you aren’t.
    It isn’t as though this is going to go on forever. The customer yelling, sure, he’ll lose focus and end