Alter Ego: His Sultry Lover

"Stephen thinks highly of his mother and offered her up to you as family. He is a good judge of character. Don't worry about that." Katherine had no other option than to reassure. "You're in a relationship with Stephen. You can always maintain your distance with his mother if things aren't great. Or you could break up with him," Katherine suggested slyly to see how Angelina would react.

"I'm not breaking up with him even if he is the devil incarnate," she responded stubbornly, huffing and puffing as she complained about her friend being unsupportive.

"If you're so sure about him, then why are you getting scared of meeting his mother. The outcome is set. You are not breaking up with Stephen. Anything else, you can find a solution to. You have the ending of the story, so you don't need to make yourself anxious over nothing."

Angelina grew silent for a minute before speaking. "You sound like a relationship counsellor. You're scaring me," she confessed. Katherine rolled her eyes and didn't reply the stupid insinuation. "Oh, I forgot to tell you… there is a post on social media about you… you might want to check it out." Katherine swivelled around, surprised.

"Is it bad?" she asked nervously.

"Now really," Angelina shrugged. She pulled out her phone and handed it over to Katherine to see. It was Laurence's friend Ian who had posted.

[IanVlogs: Don't these two look like a pair of lovebirds?]

He had written over a picture of Laurence and Katherine standing together. This had been taken that morning before they left and from the time it was posted, Ian wasted no time to share it with his followers.

"Figures," Katherine said in understanding. "That's why I got stopped in the grocery store today." She sighed. Her first exposure into the world of the rich and famous and people were already making rumors. She felt worse about Cage's situation, this time from personal experience. And it wasn't even the tip of the iceberg.

"You can call yourself an influencer now. Someone stopped you while you were frolicking about," Angelina joked. "The hashtag RinBoi is trending, too." Katherine looked disgusted by the hashtag. "It takes your usernames and puts it together. You got entangled in a ship."

Katherine forgot all about the food and typed in the hastag to see the posts that had been made. People calling them cute, asking if they were dating and what not. It could be said that her channel would get more followers soon, too.

LazerBoi had a lot of young men and women on his profile. Some of them would have a problem with him being partnered with someone else online and there would be backlash. She managed to read the top posts only but there were hundreds of tags and reposts of the original picture shared by Ian.

Katherine grew awkward at the prospect and chucked the phone back at Angelina.

She went back to cooking before the thought came to her.

She needed to tell Cage before he found out from some other source.

[K: People think I am dating LazerBoi. I didn't have any idea this would happen.]

"Informing Cage?" Angelina asked. She helpfully went forward and started to cook the dish, instead. It wouldn't taste as good but Katherine was too distracted to cook anything without burning her hands.

"Yeah. He's going to get a shock," she whispered as she looked at her cellphone. She knew he would be shooting some very dangerous scenes today, so she didn't expect him to reply. Yet she was scared that she would get angry that something of this nature had happened.

"Don't worry about it. Cage knows how bizarre people can be when they are speculating." Katherine hoped for the same. Cage had never let her down, so he wouldn't do it this time around as well. She predicted that he would get jealous, though.

Over the next two hours, Katherine sent quite a few messages to Cage, but he was yet to reply to any of them. She sighed as she rested her chin on her hand and waited for the phone to light up.

She needed some advice urgently. Apart from the general feeling of being overwhelmed there was also the fear of what Cage thought about the situation. She felt guilty that such a thing had happened. She had shipped people with others before but when she was the one being shipped, she felt like her heart was being torn apart by worry. Fans could get crazy and they could get violent. Moreover, she was a taken woman who needed to preserve her integrity for when they decided to introduce her as Cage's girlfriend.

Her phone chose that moment to vibrate violently. She bit her lip as she leaned forward and pulled the phone to her ear without checking who it was.

"Hello? I'm sorry-" she started in a panic. She wanted to apologize first before he got the chance to speak. "I was beginning to think you never not going to reply," she uttered those panic-laced words.

"I don't think I received any messages from you," the foreign voice replied. She pulled the phone away from her ears instantly and stared at the name flashing on her screen. Laurence.

"Laurence," she greeted him, more composed than before. "I apologize. I thought you were someone else." Thankfully, she had not blurted out Cage's name. That would lead to a whole new conversation.

"I got that part," he chuckled lightly. "So… I was wondering… have you been on social media lately?" The fact that he sounded nervous made her worry a little less. So he hadn't planned it himself and his friend was just being an asshole.

"Are you talking about the RinBoi thing going around the internet?" she asked tentatively, wanting an explanation on the matter.

"Yeah," he sighed. "I wanted to call and ask if you were okay. I saw that hundreds of thousands of people had seen the post and interacted and I just hope you are not freaking out." He kept the talk of his friend posting the photo with an ambiguous caption out.