just for tonight

Alice’s nose scrunched as she smiled. She was perfectly content as they were –laying against each other in what would be their makeshift home for the next few days –but the soft rumbling of her stomach persuaded her to agree. “Just five more minutes,” she pouted. “Five more minutes and then I’ll get up.”

“Maybe,” she laughed, drawing out the word. “I know who you truly are, Beck, but it won’t be long before I expose you to the world.” With a soft giggle she tapped the tip of Beckham’s nose with her finger. Alice squealed joyfully as he wriggled in his embrace, wishing she could feel his kisses rain down upon her for an eternity. “Fine, fine. I’ll keep your dorky secret with me. You’re my dorky lover who’s only a fool when it comes to loving someone as silly as me.” She ran her hand over his hair and lazily twisted a curled lock around her finger. “Bad advice. I love it when you talk,” she admitted, giving him a small peck on the lips. “I wouldn’t trust you either. You’re too handsome and charming to be true. When I’m with you it feels like I’m in a dream.” Alice smiled and gave him a final kiss before reluctantly moving from his embrace to sit up. “Wear this, don’t eat that, be photographed with so-and-so, promote some ridiculous product I don’t use and don’t want to on Instagram.” Alice rolled her eyes. “Ridiculous.” She clumsily crawled out of the tent and sprung up. Wiping the dirt from her pants she added, “Not as ridiculous as some of the things gossip sites are saying, though. Apparantly I’ve been having an affair with Leonardo DiCaprio! I only met him once!”

“Don’t expose me,” Beckham pouted, but he soon broke out into a grin. “I may be a dork, but I’m your dork, and that’s the main thing.” Brushing their noses together, he leaned in for a proper kiss, slow, savouring, as if they had all the time in the world. Out here, they did, it seemed. “Not a fool for loving you, I’d be a fool to not love you,” he corrected gently. He huffed at the small peck, pouting again. “Nooo, more. No pecks. All tongue,” he laughed, wiggling his eyebrows in an over exaggerated fashion. He kept his hand on her back as she sat up, reluctantly following suit after a moment. “You do look very cool in your Instagram, so I guess it’s working.” Crawling out of the tent after, he pinched her bum affectionately as he straightened up beside her. “He’s too old for you,” he laughed, kissing her cheek. “Though, he is a very lovely chap. I would approve of that affair. Well, if I wasn’t your boyfriend.”

The simple act of hand holding always relaxed Alice. The intertwining of their fingers mirrored the intertwining of their souls. She knew it would sound bizarre if she ever spoke this feeling aloud, but whenever they were together Alice felt as though she was reunited with a part of herself that had been missing. Her profession consisted of pretending to be a particular version of herself that Alice wasn’t sure was real. The more she worked the more unsure of herself Alice became, yet being with Beckham meant that she didn’t have to try to be anything other than who she simply was.

What Alice loved most about Beckham was that he didn’t pretend to be someone he wasn’t with her. There was no facade she had to attempt to break through, no feelings of superiority or ego.  Her world was full of people who weren’t brave enough not to appear cool, even when away from prying eyes, that it was a relief to be with someone who wasn’t afraid to revel in their inner dorkiness. Alice’s eyes lit up as she nodded, gazing outside at the picturesque scenery outside their tent. “Uncooly cool,” she mused. “Hey! You should make that the title of your next song because that in itself would be uncooly cool, so then you’ll reach a whole new level of uncooly cool that not even an ironic hipster could reach,” Alice laughed. She let her head fall against Beckham’s body and raised his hand so she could gently trace his fingers with her own. “I think that just about sums the two of us up,” she giggled. “What’s the weirdest thing your agent’s suggested to try and make you more cool? Or better yet, have you done anything to try and make people believe that you’re not secretly an adorable dork, Beckham Holmes?”

Beckham squeezed her hand gently, before bringing her fingers up to his lips to press a quick kiss against them. “Want to cook dinner before it gets terrifyingly dark, love?” he smiled, glancing up at the sky. It was still alright now, but he knew as soon as the sun completely disappeared, they’d be in danger of seeing nothing at all.

Everything with Alice was so easy, relaxed. Their conversation was never tense, never stilted, and the air between them was never thick and uncertain. “Uncooly cool,” he mused, turning to kiss her forehead. “Too much of a tongue twister, I can barely get some of my lyrics out normally. You trying to make a fool out of me, my love?” he asked, his tone gentle but teasing. Completely turning around so he could hug her properly, he rained kisses down on her cheeks, nose and lips. “Oh, she tells me not to talk too much in interviews on the red carpet, mostly,” he laughed. “Be polite, but end the conversation as soon as I can. I can’t be trusted, apparently I’m too friendly. What about you?”

“My uncle,” she replied. “He’s a physiotherapist so he was able to bandage her up. We almost went home after that but Maisie wanted to stay. She was more annoyed that she couldn’t run around with me than she was by the actual pain but we were still able to have a lot of fun.” Alice looked down and miled to herself at the memory. They had made the most out of the situation and spent the remainder of their trip building stick people and seeing who could tie the fastest rope as they sat by the fire. It was like their own version of Girl Scouts.

Alice laughed and joined Beckham at their tent. “But it’s so much more fun being totally and completely uncool,” she chuckled, hugging Beckham from behind. Her job may have relied on trying to maintain a ‘cool girl’ appearance but Alice was a dork at heart, and the people who knew her best were well aware of that. “We’re camping and on a trip abroad…” Alice peered around at Beckham. “Does that make us cool or uncool?”

“Lucky,” Beckham grinned, reaching out to tap her hip affectionately. He loved watching her get lost in her thoughts, her memories. It was almost as if she were watching her own home movies play in her mind. She looked content, free from stress which was harder and harder for them these days with their careers taking them in opposite directions most of the time.

As soon as he felt his arms around her, his smile widened, dimples appearing deeply into his cheeks. He leaned his head back to kiss her cheek, sliding his hands over hers and lacing their fingers together easily. If bodies were made in a factory, custom sized for a counterpart, it seemed that Alice and Beckham had been designed for each other. In every way, they’d just seem to fit so perfectly, so comfortably. “Makes us uncoolly cool,” he grinned, nodding in satisfaction. “Because location wise, this is very cool. But I brought Scrabble so…”

“Sounds like a plan,” she nodded, giving Beckham a mock salute with a soft laugh. She was about to turn away when he spoke again. It wasn’t as though no one had ever told Alice that they loved her —best friends, drunken aquaintances, friends whose feelings she didn’t reciprocate —but they didn’t mean anything as near as it did when Beckham said it. He made her entire face light up with a beaming smile as she said, “I love you too, Beck. I really do.” She bit down on her lip, knowing that she was probably grinning like a fool, but part of her didn’t care. She loved Beckham, and Beckham loved her back. 

Chucking at herself, she turned around to collect firewood. Camping wasn’t a regular event for the Faithfull family. Most of their vacations were confined to hotels or family member’s houses within Europe. While she used to enjoy the comfort of a hotel to the great outdoors she loved being surrounded by nature. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I went camping?” she asked, bending down to gather some kindling. “I was about ten or eleven and I went with Dad, his brother and my cousins: Maisy and Patrick. We only went to Dorset but Mum was worried that something would go wrong. Thankfully nothing did, for m anyway. Maisy followed me up a tree and ended up spraining her ankle when she fell off. I only went camping again five years later. With arms full of fallen branches and twigs she cleared the ground with her foot and dropped them. “At first I used to think it was boring, but the older I grew the more I came to appreciate it.”

After collecting more wood and moss she dug a small pit and carefully stacked it. Once the fire was lit she sat back to admire it, before turning her attention to admire Beckham instead. “Did you do a lot of camping when you were younger?” 

Beckham’s lips turned up in a fond smile when she saluted him, but then the words slipped out of his mouth and he felt a rush of panic. Not because he didn’t mean them, but because he did mean them, and he knew that he’d meant them for awhile now -- it was just that this wasn’t exactly the way he’d planned on saying it, and there was a small part of him that was terrified she didn’t feel the same way. But then she spoke again and warm relief washed over him in waves and he pulled her into his arms, raining kisses down over her cheeks. “Now, firewood, Faithfull.”

After watching her for a second, he returned his attention back to the tent, managing to erect it without completely making a mess of it. Growing up, camping had been a semi-regular thing in his family, but his sister had always taken charge and put their tent up, claiming that Beckham was so clumsy he’d just trip over the poles and if they let him put it up, it would collapse in on them halfway through the night. Which may have been a fair point, but he was fairly confident that this would do the job.

Alice had never expected to find herself featured in a gossip magazine. Hell, she had never expected she would end up in a magazine at all. Seeing her face in fashion magazines as she modelled clothes she felt were far too good for someone like herself to wear was strange, but it also made her proud. However, finding a photo of herself walking hand-in-hand with Beckham while they were on a date was not something she was impressed by. 

The Faithfull’s were private people and seeing her private life being discussed by strangers made her uncomfortable. She knew she was beginning to gain some recognition when her social media following steadily grew and teenagers tried to sneak photos of her when they thought she wasn’t looking. Being stopped by people who were fond of her work was something Alice enjoyed, but being followed by a middle-aged man as she tried to spend precious time with Beckham simply freaked her out. 

Her manager had warned her that this was to be expected if she wanted a good modelling career but Alice wasn’t ready for that. It didn’t help that she was dating a musician. With some time off before fashion week she and Beckham had fled to Costa Rica where they would spend the week camping by a secluded waterfall. They could afford staying in a luxurious hotel, but Alice opted for being able to stay close to nature so that she could stay grounded and relaxed before the frenzy of fashion week.

With her heavy backpack strapped to her back she walked beside Beckham through the dense and beautiful forest until they reached the clearing of Nauyaca Waterfall. Alice stopped in her tracks when she saw it and gasped. “Oh, it’s amazing!” Slowly, she looked around in awe at the secluded waterfall and the gleaming water below it. She smiled at Beckham and placed her hands on his cheeks as she kissed him. “This is beautiful, really, really beautiful, Beck. It feels so good just to get away, doesn’t it? And it seems like we have the whole place to ourselves, too. There’s nowhere else I would rather be right now than right here with you.” 

The quiet was always a relief to Beckham -- for his whole life, whenever he needed to escape, it was always somewhere secluded, alone, just the sounds of his own breathing and nature. He functioned better in the quiet, was able to lose himself in his thoughts, sort out the confusion in his mind and just be. He felt like himself in the quiet, not the public persona Beckham -- the one who cracked bad jokes in interviews but stayed relatively aloof so as not to allow anyone to know too much about his private life, not the onstage Beckham who danced (terribly) and sang and tried to make the audience have as much fun as he was having. In the quiet, he was just Beckham, the kid who’d grown up in a small town outside of London, with an older sister he adored, and a mum who was his best friend. The Beckham that Alice had deemed worthy to give her heart to -- in his opinion, his greatest achievement to date.

With a (rare) break in both of their schedules -- something which was becoming more and more uncommon -- they’d opted to drop off the map for a bit, disappear into the wilderness. Shun the big cities, the luxuries that both of them could afford now, and flee the chaos of the rest of the world and reconnect with each other and with nature. Their security teams hadn’t been keen on it, had wanted to send at least one person into the wild with them, but they’d both stood firm that they would be fine, and had begrudgingly promised to take a satellite phone in case of an emergency.

Alice: I vote we go to a chocolate fondue place next time we see each other!

Alice: Finagle! I like that word. Where are you off to afterwards?

Alice: We should set aside a weekend and just go anywhere we want to. We seem to be the best at spending one day together... If you could be anywhere right now where would you be?

Beckham: I second this vote, motion carried!

Beckham: Off to LA, trying to crack the US market. We're sorta in, but gotta drum up more noise there.

Beckham: Let's definitely do that, these one day adventures with months in between are fun and all, but not enough.

Alice: Thank you!!!

Alice: Yes, desert bar. Massive desert bar with lots of chocolatey, calorie filled goodness!

Alice: Bananas are pretty great but considering I'm so glad I got the desert bar :P

Alice: Two weesks I'm in Italy for three days, Germany for one and then I'm back in London! I've got two shoots and a few meetings lined up so it will be a busy few days. Will you still be in England then?

Beckham: You're very welcome, lady love.

Beckham: Calories don't count at a dessert bar. It's just a well known fact.

Beckham: You gotta have your potassium intake! I would like to dip it in chocolate but alas.

Alice: Hopefully! There was one photographer that I really clicked with and he said he'd love to do a shoot with me so hopefully something happens. Either way it was a great night. I tried so hard not to stay at the dessert bar the entire night but it was soooo difficult not to

Alice: 1 Attachment Sent [https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/28/b6/11/28b61123c972c75895c224d04e3f1f8f.jpg]

Alice: That's exactly what a wonderful sort of person would say :) When are you back in London?

Beckham: That's great, love! Hopefully something comes of that, I've got all my fingers and toes crossed for you. Dessert bar?!?!?!?!

Beckham: ... I am so depressed.

Beckham: This is my view right now... [http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/33100000/-Instagram-Harry-Styles-one-direction-33131503-612-612.jpg]

Alice: I did! It wasn't quite what I was expecting but there were a lot of people from "the industry" which was great. Oh, you would have loved the food!

Alice: Good because you are very special person, Beckham Holmes. Is it bad if I do?

Beckham: Hey, that sounds really promising! Did you make some good contacts? Ok, now you have to tell me about the food, did you take photos?

Alice: My friend's driving me home from a party and your song came on the radio!! Is it bad that I still haven't told her what it's about? I like it being our secret xx

Beckham: Did you have a nice night at the party, love?