Taylor Swift, Harry Styles pose for pic at VMA party. So what?

By Nardine Saad

Aug. 27, 2013 12:02 PM PT

Taylor Swift and her ex Harry Styles may have had a contentious time at MTV’s Video Music Awards on Sunday, but you’d never know it based on a photo an Instagram user snapped at one of the show’s after-parties.

We knew this photo was trouble ...

The “22” singer posed for the snapshot with her ex and her tourmate Ed Sheeran at a fete at the SoHo Grand Hotel Club Room.

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“Hosting the VMA after party @grandlifehotels With Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran & Harry Styles,” DJ Spiky Phil said when he posted the photo, in which he also appears.

Mind you, there are two whole people between Swifty and her One Direction ex-beau. While the immortalized moment looks innocuous enough, we’re guessing the two were just wrangled into posing together rather than making headway on the Camp Pop Music Accords. We’d love to know what their exchange looked like before and after that picture was taken. Awkward much?

The photo is surprising only because the two, who dated briefly last year before breaking up in January, were on full display during the award show (nearly as much as Miley Cyrus’ everything was). Perhaps, when Styles posed for the photo, he hadn’t heard about his former flame’s mouthing “shut the ... up” toward him and his band mates when they were presenting the night’s first award. Or maybe he thought she was talking about someone else during her acceptance speech for “I Knew You Were Trouble.”

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You know, the one where she thanks “the person who inspired this song, who knows exactly who he is,” because he earned her a Moonman.

Yes, she did.

After she performed it at the Brit Awards in March, Swift revealed that she had penned the infamous song about Styles.

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“Well, it’s not hard to access that emotion when the person the song is directed at is standing by the side of the stage watching,” she told Britain’s Sunday Times Magazine at the time. “You’re balancing the analytical side of your brain, which is telling you where to go and how to go there, with the other side of your brain, which is saying, ‘Feel everything you’re singing, and show it on your face. Feel everything exactly as you felt it when you wrote the song.’ ”

So what do you think of this pic? Innocent or awkward? Authentic or staged? Copacetic or drama mongering?