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“I can’t believe I’m actually here!” Liv threw her arms around me in the middle of the airport terminal.

“Liv, I’m so glad to see you but I kind of need to breathe.” I choked out, exaggerating my lack of air. She laughed but let go, throwing her duffle bag over one shoulder and her long blonde hair over the other.

“How was the flight?” I asked as we made our way out of the airport and into a waiting cab. The Italian air was thick, but not too terribly warm, making the drive with the windows down extremely pleasant.

“Oh my gosh. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been stuck next to a guy whose snores sounded like a chainsaw starting and stopping and starting and stopping.” She rolled her eyes. “I couldn’t catch more than a few minutes of sleep the entire time.”

“Well you can always take a nap once we get back to the hotel.”

“Bullshit.” She said just as the cab pulled up to the hotel. “We have a ton of catching up to do, some sight seeing to squeeze in, and a boy band concert to see.”

Liv grabbed her bags out of the cab trunk while I paid the cab driver. We had a small group of fans waiting outside the hotel that we had to push past, but the elevator ride up to the room was uneventful.

“Okay Logan, spill. I wanna hear everything I’ve missed.” Liv jumped on her queen sized hotel bed, landing on her knees like an excited preschooler.

I hadn’t had a chance to really have a heart-to-heart with my best friend since I’d started this job. We were rarely in the same time zone, the hours I worked were sporadic and a little crazy, and Liv had been trying to take care of Evan on her own. Her entire life had changed and she was trying to find her new normal.

“I almost slept with Harry.” I blurted out.

“What?!” Liv screeched.

“And Adam’s here.”

“What do you mean Adam’s here? Like, he’s here in Italy somewhere?”

I shook my head no. “Here like, on the tour here.”

“Oh shit. Start with Adam. Why is he here on the tour and have you run into him yet?”

Grabbing a couple bottles of beer out of the mini fridge, I popped open the tops and handed one to Liv. Sitting across from her on my bed, I pulled my legs up Indian style and took a long drink before nodding.

“His band is opening on this leg of the tour.”

Liv almost spit her beer out. “Madison Lee is opening for One Direction? Didn’t he say that all commercial pop bands were just manufactured puppets?”

“Oh, he did.” I agreed. “I’m guessing he sold out. I hear the money is pretty good. And yes, I’ve seen him. He banged on my door in the middle of the night. In fact, he was the only thing that stopped Harry from taking me on the couch.”

“What did you say to him?”

“Nothing.” I took another drink and smiled. “I slapped him and slammed the door in his face.” I grinned, my smile lighting up my entire face. Liv leaned over and offered up a high fie before sitting back on her heels.

“Nothing since then?” She asked quietly.

“Not a word. I’ve been actively avoiding him so I’m sure that has a lot to do with it. But, I have a job to do here and I have to figure out how to do it with him around.” I sighed.

“Okay, so let’s talk about Harry then.” Liv wiggled her eyebrows up and down, a sly smile on her face.

“I shouldn’t be so attracted to him.” I whispered. “He’s just a child.”

“I know you think the age difference is huge, but he’s not a child.” She argued. “For five years he’s been traveling around the world, working long hours, never getting a true break, and making an obscene amount of money. In this case, age is just a number. That 21 year old is more of a man than half the men we know, and you know that’s true.”

Sometimes I hated her logic.

“How was it? The physical stuff, how did it make you feel?” Liv asked quietly. “If you take away the way you see his age, and who he is, how did he make you feel? Because that’s more important than any other point.”

“He made me forget every issue I had with being close to him.” I answered honestly. I looked up at her and shrugged. There just wasn’t anything else to say. My head was my worst enemy where he was concerned. Time and time again he was showing me that he wasn’t just some shallow kid who lived in the fast lane without a care in the world.

“I think you need a drink.” Liv huffed out. I laughed and nodded, and with just a quick type on her cell phone, Liv found a bar right across the street from the hotel.

“Let’s go.”

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“Oh you have got to be kidding me!” I slammed the shot glass that previously held top-notch tequila on the table. Liv and I had been at Ubriaco, the bar across the street, for a couple of hours. Once we got a little bit of liquor in our system, we decided to spend the duration of the night drinking and gossiping.

Liv told me all about her separation from Jackson and how hard the new living arrangement had been on her. For such a long time, the two of them had to live and make decisions as one person, and now she was having to relearn what it meant to truly be alone. She was adamant that it wasn’t easy, but it was the right thing for them.

They’d grown up and apart and she was learning to be okay with that.

To say I was proud of the woman she had become would have been an understatement. I never wanted this kind of pain for someone so dear to me, but the fact that she stood up for herself said so much about her character.

But now I sat at this round table and watched the man who almost broke me waltz through the door like he didn’t have a care in the world. His presence had always been magnetic. Not just to me, but to almost everyone.

“Are you going to go talk to him?”

I blame the tequila for the way my head nodded ‘yes’ and the way my legs carried me from my table towards Adam leaning against the bar. Before I even reached him, I recognized his moves as he hit on the bartender. He was as smooth as he was magnetic, and at that moment I wondered how I’d ever fallen for it.

“Adam.” I said with a clipped tone from behind him.

I saw his shoulders drop as he took in a deep breath before he turned around to face me. With the shock of seeing him gone, I noticed that his face had aged, his cheeks looked hollow and the spark he used to hold in his eyes was gone.

He looked tired.

“Logan.”

“Why are you here?” I whispered. I didn’t have the energy to fight with him, no matter how many tequila shots I’d thrown back earlier.

“Needed a drink.” He gestured to the bar. I shook my head but didn’t elaborate. I knew that he knew what I meant. For several minutes, we stood staring at each other, neither one of us willing to back down. If he wasn’t going to meet me in the middle of this conversation, I wasn’t going to bother. Rolling my eyes, I turned without a word to head back to my table.

“I never stopped thinking about you.”

His words stopped my feet from moving any farther but I refused to turn around.

“I tried. I tried so hard but no one could ever replace you.”

I spun around to face him again, fire in my eyes.

“You fucking asshole.” I growled. Stepping towards him, I pushed my index finger into his chest. “You don’t get to say those things. You don’t get to act like the victim here. You chose that. You chose that lifestyle over me and you don’t get to regret that now.”

“Logan, I was such --“

“No!” I moved my finger to his lips, cutting off the rest of his sentence. “No, Adam. You don’t get to apologize so you can feel better about the way things played out. I’m certainly not going to. I hate that you’re here, and that probably isn’t going to change anytime soon. But we both have jobs to do, so I’ll stay out of your way if you’ll stay out of mine.”

Without waiting for an answer, I headed back to my table. I needed more tequila, and quick.

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Notes

Hope you enjoyed the new chapter! I promise there will be more Logan/Harry next chapter... It's almost done so I should have it up some time tomorrow.

As always, reviews are amazing! If there's something that's not working (or something that really IS working), I'd love to hear it. :) Thanks for reading!