“What are you talking about?” Rina’s eyes searched his face, trying to decipher what he meant. But because she didn’t exactly know Adam, she had no way of knowing if he was just messing around or was hinting at something. It was too coincidental to everything that had been happening since she stepped out of her room.
“Wait,” his eyes lit up. “You haven’t seen it.”
“Seen what, Adam?” Rina appeared laid back and indifferent, but in her mind, she was reeling about the possibilities of what could have happened. She had run through a list in her head, but she knew it wasn’t one of those. It looked much more than that.
Adam retrieved his phone from his pocket and scrolled through it for a few seconds before handing the phone over to her. Rina’s eyes almost popped out of their sockets as she took in the article published earlier that morning with already over a million reads. At the top of the page was a picture of Zayn and Rina leaning into each other at the door of the hotel room, their eyes gazing longingly at each other. The picture framed the moment, framed exactly the way Rina felt at that moment. The tension in the air was palpable, decipherable from the picture, and Zayn’s hands hovered in the air, as if uncertain if he could touch her, as if scared to touch her.
The title of the article, not far-fetched, was ‘Mr. Graham and Ms. Power in a relationship or a Weird Coincidence.” If the situation had been any different, Rina would have laughed about their choice of title. A weird coincidence? What weird coincidence put two people who the world previously believed not to even be in the same space, in this situation?
“You could have told me you were taken when I was flirting with you yesterday,” Adam said, drawing her attention back to him. “Urgh! Why are the good ones always taken?”
“Don’t let my anti-fans hear you,” Rina replied, walking around him. But Adam followed her, staying glued to her side. “They still haven’t let off the fact that they think I am a slut and seductress.”
“They don’t know you.”
“And it is just an article. They could have been mistaken. Don’t believe everything you see on social media.”
“I think this one is pretty convincing,” Adam murmured as Rina walked further into the room. A sudden silence too over the space, solid enough that it could be sliced through with a knife, but in a snap, they all went back to their business, unanimously deciding to get through the schedule for the day without letting anything get in the way. And Rina didn’t think anything could have been better than that.
But Adam wasn’t done yet. “What are we going to do about this then?”
“Do about what?”
“The article. Everything. You know that your anti-fans are going to use this against you. They might come up with insane stories about how you managed to get Mr. Graham into your weird plot. If they could have done that while you worked for Joel Osteen, they are capable of doing anything.”
Rina scoffed. “Like Zayn can be forced into doing anything. Don’t you think it would be stupid of them to come up with something like that?”
“When you put it that way,” he drawled. “Mr. Graham is a formidable force even here in Hong Kong. From the little I know about him, he never does anything he isn’t interested in. Hell, it is hard to get an appointment to see him, so how could you have seduced him?”
“It sounds like you are trying to convince yourself,” Rina couldn’t miss the tone in his voice.
“Maybe I am,” he shrugged. “Everyone seems to have their opinions about you, so when I heard you were going to be our main model for the year, I was looking forward to knowing you for myself, and now what people are saying out there. I wanted to know what makes you thick, what gets you laughing with your face gazing up at the heavens, and the tension on your shoulders melting away. I was looking forward to your version of the story, hoping that at least, even if you haven’t said anything on your social media pages since the drama started, you would at least tell me what truly happened.”
“You had all these expectations?” Rina thought it strange that a total stranger wanted to really know her, while all those people back home, who had been with her from the very beginning, were quick to toss her out and label her a slut. But then again, who could blame them? Kayla was pretty convincing, not to mention that she was such a sweet angel to everyone. It was practically impossible to trace anything back to her.
Adam shrugged. “I thought I could get to know you better.”
“That’s really nice of you, and I mean it. It is. Not many people have been that receptive towards me, but you shouldn’t bother yourself about me and my drama. Don’t get in the middle of it because then, your name will end up being sullied, and in your trying to get out of it, you would sacrifice me without a moment’s thought. And I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, because I would understand that you were only trying to save yourself.”
“Wow! You’ve had it all thought out. Don’t you think you are jumping to conclusions when you barely even know me?”
“I’ve seen it happen before. There’s no saying it wouldn’t happen again.”
“Well, I am not like the persons who have done that to you,” Adam drawled, boxing Rina in. “When I set my sights towards something, nothing can make me waver until I get to the end.”
“Someone said that too.”
“The person isn’t me.”
Adam laughed and tried to put his hands on her hair, but suddenly, a firm and scary voice took over the space. Everyone seemed to go still at the same time, their eyes glued to the unfolding scene.
“Take your hands off her right this minute.”