You crawled into the crisp white sheets of Joseph’s bed and laid on your back as you scrolled through TikTok on your phone. It was mind-numbing, and a welcome relief after work had kicked your ass today. Everyone had demanded your attention. It had run you ragged, and your body felt sore with it. The plushness of Jo’s mattress helped a little, offering support to the parts of you that ached the most.
Besides doom scrolling, you were checking your notifications. You had started posting small vlogs on TikTok nearly two years ago and it had garnered you a decent audience across a couple of platforms. It was almost like a second job.
Joseph was in the bathroom, brushing his teeth before he settled in for the night. You could hear the water trickling into the basin as he left the faucet on while he brushed. A bad habit you had lectured him about endlessly to no avail.
You had only been with Joseph for eight months at this point. You had started dating a month after he had been announced to play Haymitch Abernathy in The Sunrise on the Reaping. Looking back, you felt a little embarrassed about how much you had gushed over the book when it had come out, just a month prior to the casting announcement. You hadn’t even known Joseph auditioned for the part. He claims he had been so sure he wouldn’t get the part that he didn’t think it had warranted a mention.
Joseph came into the bedroom, his blond curls, still a little damp from his shower, were pushed away from his forehead. He gave a small jump as he got into the bed, sending you bouncing a little as his weight shifted the mattress. You let out a little giggle and dropped your phone onto your stomach, immediately less interested in the performance of your latest video now that he was next to you. He crawled over to you while you stayed on your back, smiling at him softly as he propped himself up on his elbow, lying on his side to look at you.
“Hey, pretty girl,” he said softly.
Your heart fluttered. It hadn’t mattered that you had known Joseph for most of your life before you had started dating, and it didn’t matter that he had been calling you pet names from the moment you said yes to being his girlfriend; it still made you blush and giggle and feel like a little girl with a crush.
He pressed a soft kiss to your forehead, then your cheek, before brushing his lips against yours. You smiled into the kiss. He moved from your mouth to pepper kisses all over your face. One thing you would never be able to deny was the fact that Joseph was obsessed with you. He loved being with you, spoiling you with affection. If he had it his way, you were sure he’d have you around 24/7.
Even when you were just friends, you had seen the way Joseph had been with his previous partners, how sweet he had always been. Back then, it had made you blush and look away, as if you were intruding on something private. It had also made you infinitely jealous, though you never admitted it. All of that made it feel so unreal to have his affection directed at you now with such intensity.
If you had to guess, his need for physical affection had only been exacerbated by your months-long separation when he had filmed Sunrise on the Reaping.
He had been announced as Haymitch in late April, you had started dating in mid-May, and by the beginning of July, Joseph was on a flight to Germany to start filming. He had been gone until the end of November, at which point you had left Bondi for a couple of weeks to visit family. It had been awful timing, but you couldn’t very well not go on a family holiday despite how much you truly did want to stay and be with him. His time away followed by your holiday meant that though you had been dating for nearly a year now, most of it had been spent separated.
You had visited him once when the cast had been in Spain filming arena scenes. You had come to visit for three days, all you had been able to get away from work. You spent the entire time marveling over all you got to see. Watching as a piece of such a beloved franchise came to life had felt unreal, and knowing Jo had such a big place in it felt like a dream.
Joseph brushed a strand out of your face and rubbed his nose against yours, a bunny kiss.
“I know I’ve said it before, probably too much at this point, but god I missed you, dove,” He said, looking down at you with his speckled blue eyes.
‘Dove’ was his favorite pet name for you, the one he always called you, what your number was saved under in his phone. You loved it too.
“I missed you too, lovey,” You said, gazing up at him with admiration. He smiled, bright and big, at your words before he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you close. You readjusted from your back to your side so you both laid chest to chest with your face nuzzled just below his jaw. Your legs tangled together instinctively, wanting to always be close, intertwined.
You wrapped your arms around his middle and pulled yourself as close as you could to him, pressing a kiss to a mole below his ear. It was summertime in Australia and you had been spending so much time outside that the smell of fresh air and salt clung to his golden skin.
He pulled back, looking at you briefly before kissing you again. “So I’ve been thinking,” He started.
“Dangerous, your pretty head might explode,” You teased, a little smirk on your lips. A little laugh escaped you.
“Haha, very funny,” he said flatly with a roll of his eyes, “I’m serious.”
You pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. Your hands came to rest on either side of his head, ruffling his bleached blond curls a little, “What have you been thinking about, Joey?”
“That I want to post you,” he said.
Jo’s management ,in tandem with Lionsgate, had been pushing him to post more, connect with fans more, especially now that he was this generation’s Haymitch. He had started posting casual things to his Instagram stories, but he had yet to really post anything to his feed that wasn’t promotional stuff for his projects. Even in his stories, though, you had been especially absent. It wasn’t that he didn’t take pictures with or of you. It was that you had said at the beginning of the relationship, almost preemptively, that you hadn’t been sure you wanted people to know about you.
You were already sharing so much of yourself on your TikTok page, but this felt different. You remembered being younger, growing up in the digital age, and watching as the internet tore the girlfriends of celebrities to shreds for the slightest perceived indiscretion. It had made you shiver with worry that comments rooted in jealousy would take over the ones from the people who supported you and actually liked your content.
The idea of him posting you made you nauseous, you couldn’t lie. Joseph was an up-and-coming star with a relatively small fan base compared to other actors, even to some of his fellow Sunrise costars. But still, he definitely had fans, people who thought he was handsome, and the number of fans had felt like it had been growing daily. You worried about how people would see you, know you, judge you based on virtually nothing, trying to assess if you were good enough for their favorite star. It all felt a lot more intense than whatever comments you got with your little TikTok following.
You had to admit, even if it was just to yourself, that you had always thought Joseph was out of your league, even when you had been just friends. He was warmth and sunshine and very much the boy next door while you had always been the quiet, indoorsy type. You were short and chubby and wore glasses and, while this wasn’t a 2000s teen movie, you hadn’t thought you were anything special. All that self-doubt had formed a ball of anxiety that sat heavy in your chest now that you found yourself dating an actor who was bound to blow up in the aftermath of the newest Hunger Games movie.
You really thought Joseph was headed for being this generation’s heartthrob, like Josh Hutcherson had been during his run as Peeta Mellark.
“I don’t know…” You said, a clear note of hesitation in your voice.
“Oh, come on, please?” He begged, “I’ve been chasing after you for years and now that I finally have you, I wanna show you off.”
“I just, I don’t think I could handle what people have to say,” You confessed.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, look at you. You’re like Australian Apollo or Adonis or-“
“Adonis, hu?” Joseph interrupted you with a playful smirk. You nudged him and rolled your eyes. You were being a little facetious, but it still stroked his ego.
“I just mean, you're really hot and I’m not ‘traditionally’ attractive,” you put air quotes around the word ‘traditionally’ and kept talking, “and, I don’t know if you know this,” you dropped your voice like you were revealing a coveted secret, “but you're way out of my league.”
He let out a laugh, like he genuinely couldn’t believe you were being genuine.
“You have got to be joking,” he said, lowering his face to your neck to nuzzle your skin, pressing soft kisses there.
“You’re so beautiful,” he purred, another warm press of his lips against your cool skin. “Love you so much. I wanna show you off, dovey,” he pressed a kiss to the hollow of your throat.
“I don’t know,” you said, but you could feel yourself melting into him. Even if you tried not to, you knew, in the end, you would always give Jo whatever he wanted. You were just too soft for him. He lifted his face to yours, meeting your eyes.
“What if I don’t post your face?” He suggested, “I won’t tag you or anything.”
You thought about that. A soft launch, something that clearly told everyone he had a girlfriend without disclosing basically anything about her. Plausible deniability has never sounded so good.
“What picture would you post?”
Joseph disentangled himself from you to roll over and grab his phone off the nightstand. He returned, lying on his back as he typed in his passcode. You rested your head on his chest as you watched him open his photos app and maneuver to photos he had tagged of you all collected in an album entitled simply, ‘🕊️💚’.
“What about this one?” He said, clicking on an image.
It was a picture of you sitting on your bed back in your own apartment. You were sitting crisscross with your head bent over a book, a pair of wired headphones in your ears. Your hair tied into two lopsided buns on either side of your head. You couldn’t see your face directly, but you could see your lashes, your nose. You hadn’t even known he had taken this picture. It was probably close to a year old now.
“That’s too much,” You insisted, “You could easily figure out how I am.” It was true. It might take a second, but if someone really wanted to know who you were, it would be easy to match your features by comparing pictures.
“How?” He argued, looking over at you.
“You’ve clearly never been an obsessed fan girl,” You propped yourself up to look at him. You had spent so much of your early and mid-teen years being an all-knowing fan girl. You had run fanpages, kept tabs on celebrities and who they were involved with. You knew how stans functioned because you had lived and breathed it for years and one thing you learned was to never underestimate how nosey people could be.
“I can’t say I have, no,” he relented.
“Well, I have, and I’m telling you right now, if you post that, someone is going to go through your following list and find me. I’d bet you twenty dollars they’d find who I am within a day,” you challenged.
“I follow like a thousand people! There’s no way.”
“A thousand people, but they could easily rule out any of your coworkers, family, or any page that’s for promotion. Try again,” you said, laying your head back down.
He grumbled, but he went back to scrolling until he found a picture he had taken of you when you had visited him in Spain. You had been in a rental car, and you had been absolutely beaming at him, just excited to be somewhere so interesting with someone you loved.
“Let me take a picture of you,” you remembered him saying as he pulled his phone out. “You’re glowing,” he had told you before snapping this picture. Your wide smile had turned into a small, shy one in the photo, but you could tell there was a bigger one being suppressed. It was a cute photo of you, maybe one of your favorites.
He opened the photo editor and cropped the photo to below your eyes, so you only saw the bottom half of your nose, your small smile, and your slightly baggy outfit.
“What about that?” he asked, showing you the cropped image. “Can they still find you?”
While arguably, it showed just as much of you as the previous one, it felt different. Maybe because it had cropped out your eyes, a key feature, you thought, in comparing people.
“Maybe, do you have another one?” you asked.
He sighed, playfully annoyed, but he did this for you. He pulled up another photo your friend had taken of the two of you just a few weeks before he left for filming. You had gone out for dinner and drinks with a few friends that evening, and you would be lying if you said you hadn’t gotten a little tipsy. Jo always teased you for being a lightweight when it came to alcohol.
Everyone had been walking back to the parking lot when he had put his hand on your head and said, “Gotta keep a hold of you or you’ll slip away.”
He also loved teasing you for being a runner when you had too much to drink. You were the friend that would slip away, suddenly on a side quest that led you away from your friends who would have to hunt you down later. You were nowhere near that intoxicated, but you had laughed and let him rest his hand on your head as you continued toward the car, putting your hands over his.
“I like that one,” You said, softly. “It’s very us.”
“So, I can post this one?” He asked, looking at you with glittering eyes.
You sighed and smiled at him, “Yeah, I guess so.”
He let out a sound of excitement as he moved to the Instagram app. You watched as he selected the photo, captioned it with “dove” and a couple of emojis before saving it to his drafts.
“We’ll save it for tomorrow,” he said.
He placed his phone back on the nightstand before settling down and pulling the covers over both of you properly. He held you to him and kissed the top of your head.
“You’re so not out of my league by the way,” He said and then, “if I’m Adonis, wouldn’t that make you Aphrodite?”
Your lips curled into a little smile as you pressed your face into his chest. Your cheeks burned and your heart was fluttering uncontrollably in your chest. You hadn’t expected him to say that. You had just meant he was incredibly good-looking.
But also you wouldn’t agree. You had read enough myths to know being compared to Aphrodite only brought bad luck. At your own thought, you let out a stifled giggle.
“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted,” he said softly with another kiss to the top of your head as he pulled you firmly against his side.
a/n: part 2 to this story. Writing these made me wanna do a Jo SMAU but I’m deadass not funny enough for that 💀 thanks again for all the love on my writing! Happy reading! I’m working on three Valentine’s Day pieces so stay tuned for those :)
Content: Reader is niche-micro-influencer, and she decides to post a soft launch of her own. Everyone immediately clocks it. Rushed ending.
word count: 2.17 k
Your kitchen was stifling and filled with the aroma of chocolate and coffee as you stood at the counter, giving the scratch brownie batter you had been assembling one final fold for good measure. Your friends and family went crazy over the simple treat so you decided to share the recipe with your TikTok following, something they asked for every time you took a picture of the brownies to post. You had spent the last hour filming clips with the help of your friend, laying out a list of ingredients and those you preferred to use. It had taken you nearly three times as long to put the batter together than it usually did between filming and refilming.
You had opened the windows and the sliding glass door to try and let the ocean breeze dispel some of the overwhelming heat in the kitchen, but it hadn’t done much besides invite crawling insects in. You were also keeping tabs on a small lizard that had taken up sunbathing on the balcony railing, fearful it would make a break for the inside of your home.
It all would have been extremely tedious if not for the help of your best friend. She had been lured over by the promise of freshly baked treats, but really you had trapped her to help you set up the camera and wash all the dishes when you were done. The things people would do for a good brownie could not be underestimated.
She moved your phone that stood at attention on a tripod, angling it so she could catch a clip of you scraping the batter out of the silver mixing bowl and into a square baking tin lined with parchment paper. You slid the pan into the oven and closed the door.
She dismounted your phone from the tripod and handed it to you. You leaned with your back against the counter as she moved to the sink to hold up the other end of her deal. You methodically moved through your Instagram and TikTok, checking comments and likes. You had been semi-MIA for the past week, not posting much on your feed, but sharing a lot on your Insta stories.
It had been seven days since Joseph had posted a photo of the two of you on his Instagram. If you were being honest, it hadn’t been nearly as big of a deal as you had made out in your head. You had been so anxious about how people would react, what they would have to say about you, but in reality, the vast majority of the comments had been really supportive. Even the ones that had been jealous had been playful and funny, clearly happy for you and Jo even if it meant their chance with him was suddenly an absolute zero.
Every time you had scrolled social media the last several days, you checked to see if anyone had connected you to Joseph’s post, but it seemed no one had. Your connection to Jo was so private, there really was no way anyone would have guessed it was you in the photo. That had been the goal after all. After seeing the positive reaction in his comment section though, you were starting to feel the temptation to make a post of your own.
You had mentioned to your audience, in passing, that you had a boyfriend, but you had been mindful to never share much of Jo, not even a hand. Your followers had even developed a bit of a running joke that your boyfriend wasn’t real as they had never seen solid proof of him. The bit had made you laugh, so you hadn’t bothered to disprove their theory.
“I swear to god,” your friend said, noticing you on your phone. She rinsed soap from a measuring cup and set it in the drainer to dry. “You and Joseph are like the only thing I’ve seen people talking about.”
Your friend existed online in a weird space online where celebrity gossip, the Hunger Games, and niche micro-influencer overlapped. It all made her, for better or for worse, the target audience for just about any video talking about ‘Joseph Zada’s new girlfriend’. She had sent you videos of various people joking about their devastation, finding out Jo was taken. You had both laughed good-naturedly. It felt surreal to see people post about this boy you had known so much of your life, but especially when it was in tandem with you.
“It’s been a week. They’ll move on eventually,” you assured.
“It’s been a week and you have yet to post him yourself,” she mumbled. “I’m sure Jo’s punching the air right now.”
“You were just complaining that we’re all you’re seeing on your feed and now you’re scolding me for not posting my boyfriend?” you asked with a smile, crossing your arms over your chest.
“I’m not scolding you. You make it sound so dramatic,” she wouldn’t look up from the dishes as she worked. She asked, in a voice that said she was trying to be sly about it, “are you going to post him?”
You shrugged, looking down at your slippered feet. He had said you could if you wanted. It didn’t even have to be a soft launch. You could post a picture of the two of you kissing for all he cared. Your friend was closer to being right than you cared to admit. He was very clearly fiending to be posted, but trying not to push you.
“Oh, what?” your friend sighed, looking up at you finally, a rouge soap sud sticking to her cheek, “Does everything have to be a philosophical quandary for you?”
You stammered and blushed at her mocking, trying to find the words.
“Okay, well you date a famous person and tell me it’s not stressful to post about,” you mumbled.
“Girl,” she rolled her eyes. ‘Girl’ had become her newest overused phrase. She loved adding it to the beginning of any statement she thought was obvious, “if I was dating someone famous, I’d be posting them all day everyday. I’d be giggling and kicking my feet and going ‘you snooze, you lose’ to anyone being nasty and jealous.”
“That’s awful. You can’t say that,” you laughed, bumping her shoulder with yours as you moved to stand next to her. If she was washing the dishes, you supposed you could dry them.
“I’m just saying, I’d be, like, marking my territory," she explained. “Plus Joseph is like painfully in love with you and it’s way too cute to just keep to yourselves and, as your single friend, it’s way too sappy to keep being personally subjected to. You both make me sick,” she teased.
You fell into a thoughtful silence as you continued working through the small stack of dishes together. You didn’t speak again until everything was put back where it belonged.
“Help me pick a photo,” You relented, pulling your phone out of your back pocket and moving to stand next to her.
She helped you scroll through the dozens of photos you had taken of or with Jo in the last year. Finally, she settled on one from around Christmas. Him, in a white t-shirt, leaned over where you had been sitting on the couch as he talked to you about something you couldn’t remember now. In the background, the sliding glass door was open to let in the warm summer air, just as it was now. Your friend took your phone from your hands and cropped the image of Jo so that only his left shoulder and bicep along with a bit of his jaw and blond curls were visible. It could really be any blond curly-haired boy.
You favorited the image so you wouldn’t lose it as you traversed to the Instagram app. A pop up in the corner announced a new set of notifications, demanding your attention, but you ignored it, worried you’d lose your nerve if you took too long.
You stared at the blank space that awaited your caption, rolling over ideas in your head. Jo had posted you with your pet name as a caption, but you didn’t really have an especially unique pet name for him, always defaulting to ‘Jo’ or ‘Joey’, or in cases of extreme desperation, ‘babe’ and ‘baby’.
The photo was cast in a golden light from the afternoon sun. Jo’s curls like spun golden, like honey. It clicked briefly in your mind, an old song you had heard often when driving around with your grandparents.
‘Honey honey🐝🌷,’ You wrote finally. Your finger hovered over the post button. Your heart was suddenly in your throat as panic took its place in your chest. Your friend let out a dramatic, frustrated sigh and slapped your hand, forcing your thumb down. Into the void of the internet the post went, to collect the opinions of your followers. You locked your phone and set it face down on the counter.
“Why don’t we watch something while we wait?” You asked. You had meant while you waited for the brownies to be done, but maybe you also meant until you were mentally prepared to look at your phone again.
She laughed knowingly and led you to the living room, like you were a guest in your own home, where she turned on a show she was obsessed with and insisted you watch.
The egg timer on the counter went off thirty minutes later, pulling you away from the show that you had actually found yourself completely drawn into. You ignored the reflex to check your phone when you spotted it on the counter. You slipped on a pair of oven mitts and pulled the brownies out, setting them on a cooling rack before returning to the living room.
Another episode and then you were both back in the kitchen, cutting the brownies into nine roughly-the-same-size squares, each claiming a piece for yourselves. You both stood, leaning against the counter, eating in silence. Your friend because she was so lost in how good her brownie was and you because you couldn’t stop staring at your phone. It had become the new lizard on the railing, too tiny to be a real threat, but still something that had you acting a little skittish. You listened as it buzzed intermittently. The sound did nothing to calm your nerves. Once she had finished eating and wiped her fingers of any leftover chocolate, your friend snatched your phone off the counter.
“Okay, let’s see here,” She said, typing in your passcode, an open secret between you, her, and Jo, as she returned to your side.
The post had already garnered a lot of attention in the last couple of hours. The top comment with nearly as many likes as your post came from Jo, a simple ‘🌹’.
Between all the early comments from your own followers, some of which you recognized by their usernames, were newer ones from people who had put the pieces together. The first comment to sound the alarm came from day1user, ‘is that joseph fucking zada?’, left before Jo’s own comment. That made you and your friend laugh, such a simple question loaded with such emotion. You recognized day1, they had been a follower you and Jo shared, something that was no longer surprising now that he had gotten so big. Despite their keen observation skills, they surely had no idea that the two of you were connected. They were often in both of your comment sections and had probably just put the two soft launch posts together.
It was also clear that a lot of the newer comments had come from people who didn’t follow you and had come to check out the post as it circulated around with more and more people speculating on who the boy in the picture was.
Still clutching your phone, your friend unlocked her phone, moving to X, that cesspool of an app she used to keep up with fan update pages regarding you and Joseph. She let out a cackle as she loaded one for you first, spinning her phone around for you to see. It was a tweet, written like official news, “(y/n) soft launches boyfriend, suspected to be Joseph Zada” followed by a screenshot of your post and a cropped screenshot of Jo’s comment.
Back in your own comments, several people argued it wasn’t Joseph, just some blond guy. ‘How would she know Joseph Zada anyway?’, one asked as if forgetting before he had been Up-and-Coming-Actor Joseph Zada, he had been her perfectly-normal, childhood-friend-turned-lover Jo.
You took your phone from her and pulled down to view your notification center. Jo had sent several texts since seeing your post.
All things considered, the soft launch thing was kind of fun. Watching both of your fans interact in the comments, giggling, debating, and joking together, it was a little funny. Maybe you could keep up this soft launch thing, just a little longer before you let Jo finally post you with no restrictions. Even if it was just for your own amusement.
the Joseph Zara propaganda is working on me.. currently making a Pinterest board as we speak… can you like describe how he is bc I lowk wanna write a fic of him👀
omg yes!! he’s so incredible and his acting is insanee
you need to watch we were liars because he plays johnny sinclair and he’s amazing there + he’s haymitch abernathy in sunrise on the reaping which comes out next year and i’m super excited for it
i’ve been his fan for a while now and he’s genuinely so nice, his face card is lethal too and he also plays charlie in invisible boys!! AND HE’S GREAT WITH KIDS
Hey all, I’m currently 65k words (and counting) into writing a We Were Liars fan fiction I started before uploading here.
It’s not x reader like the rest of my works so I’m not sure if there’s an audience for it here on tumblr, so I wanted to gage interest.
I currently have no plans to make it an x reader because it’s so long and that would be very involved since the story is nearing completion, but that maybe something I would reconsider if others are interested :)
