Fic -- Don't You Dare Look Back
Title: Don’t You Dare Look Back
Author: madwomanpoems
Pairings: Jo/Camille, Camille/Lucy
Rating: PG probably
Warnings: ANGST, some non-descript sexual activity
Disclaimer: This isn’t mine guys. I actually don’t own anything and I haven’t acquired anything and I’m just a big vat of nothing without even owning the vat.
Word count: ~5,500
Summary: Camille’s phone bings on the table, and she reaches over to check the number before she gets back to the minty sweetness playing all over Lucy’s mouth. When she sees an unfamiliar number with far to many digits, her stomach drops. She has been expecting this for a while. She has been expecting to be ecstatic about it. But she expected it to have come sooner. But she never expected that it would come while she was wrapped around Lucy, being kissed by a girl who wasn’t too afraid to think about kissing another girl back.
Author’s note: Title is from Landfill by Daughter, cut text is from Recessional by Vienna Teng. In my opinion, both of these songs add a little to the reading, but they, of course, aren’t necessary. Also, I think it’s necessary to include the fact that in my headcanon, Jo and Camille didn’t necessarily part on perfect terms. At least, the goodbye they had wasn’t satisfying for certain parties.
Camille is lying on Lucy’s bed, feeling a little spent and a lot blissed out, her clothes half on and half draped around her, pooling into the sheets. Her eyes are half opened, and she watches as Lucy cleans up her eyeliner just enough to make it comfortable to sleep on without it smudging against the pillows.
She is fighting to keep her eyes open, fighting to wait until Lucy is beside her to let her body rest, fighting not to cling onto her too tight, fighting not to fight too hard for something more than late night movies and even later nights on Lucy’s mattress. She watches her closely, memorizing the way her frame works, the little minutia of her movement.
Lucy is bending over her sink, brushing her teeth, and mumbling around her toothbrush, “Did you maybe take my black jeans home or something? I wanted to wear them to the shoot tomorrow.”
“I’ll check my folded laundry tomorrow morning. Do you want to get breakfast or something before school?”
Lucy rinses out her mouth and slinks back to the bed. She has a tiny smile stitched onto her face, but her eyes are facing down to the floor. “I was thinking that maybe you would want to eat breakfast here tomorrow. I mean, if you like dry toast and sugary cereal with chocolate milk and sugar free energy drinks. Well, maybe we could still go get breakfast,” she mumbled. “But maybe you would want to stay over here tonight?”
“I would love to have chocolate and sugar and caffeine for breakfast with you,” she says, a grin breaks over Camille’s face, and her hands are on Lucy, pulling her close for a kiss. “Mmm,” she mumbles, “minty.”
“Even rock stars should practice good dental hygiene.”
“Oh my god, you are such a bad influence,” she says, snuggling closer to her and kissing her more deeply.
Her phone bings on the table, and she reaches over to check the number before she gets back to the minty sweetness playing all over Lucy’s mouth. When she sees an unfamiliar number with far to many digits, her stomach drops. She has been expecting this for a while. She has been expecting to be ecstatic about it. But she expected it to have come sooner.
But she never expected that it would come while she was wrapped around Lucy, being kissed by a girl who wasn’t too afraid to think about kissing another girl back.
She opens the message, and her mouth goes dry.
got any new years plans? i have a ticket to new zealand with your name on it if you’re interested. - jo taylor.
She throws the phone back on the table and kisses Lucy hard on the lips, tasting her warm mouth with her tongue as she opens her mouth. She’s pulling closer, and Lucy’s hands are slithering over body. Lucy’s fingers are sliding up Camille’s tank top, breaking goose bumps out over her skin.
Something in Camille’s stomach bunches and knots, and it doesn’t feel like it usually does. It feels like she is betraying too many people at once. It feels like a lot of lying and a lot of unspoken words banging onto her ears.
Camille pulls away from Lucy and smacks her hand onto her forehead. “Oh my gosh, I’m such an idiot. I have a huge paper due tomorrow, and I still haven’t finished it.” She sighs softly, and thinks that anyone who says that she isn’t a good actress has no idea how wrong they are. She looks into Lucy’s eyes, and says softly, “I’m so sorry Lucy, but I have to go.” But maybe this isn’t lying, because Camille thinks she might start crying on the pillowcase, crying on Lucy’s shoulder, crying for reasons she never let herself cry about before.
“Hey,” Lucy says sweetly, “don’t worry about it. We can have our little slumber party some other time. Your finals are done next week, right? Then you have break? That’s a good time, right?”
Camille is frantically searching Lucy’s apartment for anything she might have left, because she feels like a criminal, like she doesn’t want to leave any evidence behind of where she was. “Uh. Yeah. That would work. That would be nice. I’m not going home this year or anything.” Her throat tightens up, “But I am going to New Zealand for New Years. So. Just. Before then. Or after I get back. But I don’t know when I’m getting back. So,” she mutters, making a b-line for the door.
Lucy gets out of bed and catches her by the wrist before she can leave. She grabs her other hand and turns Camille around so she can look at her, “Hey, don’t worry about this. I’m fine, okay? You’re fine. Don’t get freaked out if we’re moving too fast.”
Camille looks down at her feet, “That’s not it. I just… I forgot and it got me all frazzled.”
“Okay, Camille. I’m just saying, you can tell me if something is wrong,” Lucy said, looking hard into her eyes. “Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah.”
Lucy kisses her on the forehead, “Thanks for coming over her tonight, kid.”
Camille walks out the door and down the hallway.
She’s crying to hard she can barely stand up by the time the elevator doors shut.
--
Camille is in a plane somewhere over the Pacific, and she hasn’t slept in days.
She’s been telling people that she’s trying to get herself on New Zealand time. She hasn’t admitted, not even to herself, that she hasn’t been able to sleep because she is practically suffocating under her loneliness. She has managed to hide the fact that her dad went back to Albany for Christmas, and the Knights And Company went to Minnesota. She has barely managed to be around Lucy without feeling like a traitor, like she was intentionally trying to keep something from Lucy.
But, as much as she tries to convince herself that it doesn’t need to be shared-that it just hasn’t come up-she guesses that maybe she is.
In fact, except for a few movie nights and some quick kisses on Lucy’s couch, she hasn’t talked to anyone since the last night of her finals.
That was the night that Jo Taylor called her, telling Camille about flight information and about the climate of New Zealand in February and how she’d get from the airport to Jo’s apartment. That was the night that Jo Taylor gave Camille one of her oh-so-typical information dumps, and forgot to ask anything about her personal life, or even mention one thing about her own. Jo sounded a lot more like a travel agent, and a lot less like Camille’s best friend that was half way around the world and had barely spoken to her since the night she told her she was leaving.
Camille had texted Jo a few times after Jo had called, just trying to talk to her about anything, even if it was just to tell her how excited she was about seeing New Zealand, about seeing the movie set, about seeing her.
Jo hadn’t texted back.
Camille lays her head back against the seats and watches as the clouds roll by underneath her. She watches them, seeing Lucy’s lips and breasts and Jo’s long fingers and sad eyes. Camille watches as her own conflicting feelings glide past her plane.
She feels very high above it all, and her thoughts start to wonder away from her; her eyes start to close.
--
She is falling. Her eyes spring open, and she realizes that she is still on the plane. It is dark outside, and they are losing altitude. The plane is landing, she figures, as her ears pop uncomfortably. The pressure from the plane is pounding on her chest, and for a minute the suffocation of her anxiety at seeing Jo again is gone. The plan hits the tarmac and comes to a stop. She can still feel the G-forces on the chest.
She grabs the bag from above and walks off of the plane, feeling her hands grow slick on the plastic handle of her luggage.
She’s nervous; it takes a lot to make Camille nervous.
It takes a bomb waiting to be detonated or to blow up in her face.
--
She’s by luggage claim, waiting for her bag to come around on the conveyer belt. She searches without searching for a town car driver with her name on a sign while she watches for her large black duffle to come back to her. She listens to the accents mixing and thinks about how hard it would be to replicate that for a role. She watches the reunions. She wonders how hard that will be to replicate in her real life. She wonders if it comes naturally, or if she’ll have to work hard to make her reunion seem carefree and overjoyed instead of anxious and hurt and self-conscious.
She grabs her bag and throws it over her shoulder, her knees nearly buckling under its weight. She turns around, feeling nearly suffocated by the weight of it. She’s looking for any one who might be there to pick her up, primarily the sort of nondescript man in a black cap that has a tendency to drive around people with too much money to know how to operate their own cars.
But that’s not who she sees.
She expected to be happy when she saw her. She expected her heart to flutter like humming bird, like something happy and hopeful that Jo always made her feel, but there is lead in her chest and her knees really to buckle a little this time.
She walks over and she can’t breathe.
Jo looks good before Camille gets too good of a glance at her. She has more muscle on her body than she used to, probably from all of the stunts in the movie, but looks thin, like the heat and the hours are getting to her, like she’s not eating like she does when she’s stressed and unhappy, like she is being stretched thin like butter over too much toast. She looks tired, not like Camille, who has been too nervous to sleep, but like she has been tired for months, like she has not slept even on breaks from shooting, like she hasn’t found anywhere she can lay her head since the move.
Jo calls her name, and it mixes with the accents around her. Jo sounds exactly like she looks, exactly like she is: a girl uprooted.
But the thing that makes Camille’s mouth goes dry is that Jo’s hair is shorn up around her ears. The blonde tresses are twisting up around her temples.
“Hey,” she says softly, her voice drawing raspy up her throat. Her bag drops off of her arm and to the floor, and she is too busy starting at Jo’s brown eyes to do anything about it. She can’t orient herself on this side of the world, where Jo looks tough and stunning but still sounds like a southern bell.
“Hey, Camille. I thought I’d come get you after all instead of sending a driver. Want help with that?” she asks, scooping up Camille’s bag before it seems awkward that they aren’t hugging, and they aren’t smiling, and they are barely even talking. She hikes it up with ease and throws it onto her back without struggling.
“Thanks,” Camille says awkwardly as Jo has turned around and is making her way to the doors. Camille follows until she reaches the town car that must have brought Jo here, and must be taking them back to wherever it is that they’re going. The driver takes her bag and shuffles her to a door in the backseat, shutting the door behind her.
Shutting her in with Jo.
She feels trapped, she feels suffocated, she feels lost in her own head.
“Your hair looks nice like that,” she blurts out, because the silence that is sitting between them is about to choke her alive.
Jo smiles a little, like this is easy, like this is how this was supposed to go, like she is just enough ashamed and just enough proud to get through this just the way it is intended, and rolls her eyes. “I hate it, but they made me do it for the part. I’m avoiding my mother as long as possible. I think she might actually die if she sees me like this.”
“I like it. I think it suits you.”
Jo’s eyes soften up and something that is that thin film of acting in the back of her eyes that is only visible to other actors, that is only gone when the scene-when the metaphor or the lie or the self-deprecation-breaks, shatters. She is quiet when she talks and turns her eyes away from Camille’s, watching as the buildings start to zoom past her eyes, “Thanks.”
“Have any auditions lately?” she says, out of the blue, breaking up Camille’s thoughts as she scans the horizon.
“No. I decided that I’d be graduating at semester, so I’ve been focusing on school.”
“So you’re done with school?”
“Yep. You?”
“I still have a few hours of classes every day. I can’t wait to be done. How are the boys?” she asks, and for a minute she looks happy.
“They’re good,” Camille smiles, glad to have found some neutral territory in all of this, because she knows her world won’t explode for a few minutes. “They’re as ridiculous as ever. They went to Minnesota for Christmas, you know, and it’s been weirdly quiet at The Palmwoods.”
Jo smiles at the word. “Anyone new?”
“Uh. Well, there’s this film student guy, he’ll be gone before next New Year’s day. A few models. They never stay long. A violinist who talks to no one. And a rockstar, named Lucy. She’s… different,” Camille says, and feels her face breaking into a smile. “She fits in well, but she’s different.”
“You guys are friends?”
Camille is probably grinning even though she doesn’t want to be, “Yeah. I think so. We’ve gotten pretty close since she came.” Something in this line of discussion makes her uneasy, because it is so close to a lie, just like leaving for New Years was so close to a lie to Lucy.
Secrets she could deal with, but Camille has never been fond of lies.
“Is Kendall seeing anyone?”
Camille’s stomach sours at the name. God help her if she sat on a plane for thirteen hours just to do some second-hand uninteresting spying on Jo’s ex-boyfriend. She sighs a little, trying to keep it under her breath.
“Oh. You know Kendall, married to the band,” she smiles, feeling the weight on those words that she knows Jo Taylor won’t see, because Jo Taylor can’t see the way Logan and Kendall look at each other and how James and Kendall press each other against walls and the way that Kendall looks out for Carlos like they’re closer than brothers and the way that they are all home to each other. Jo Taylor can’t see that because there are so many reasons she won’t, because she doesn’t see that as love, and she has never pushed anyone against a wall to feel their hips and eyes on you.
She’s never wanted to, as far as she’s ever admitted it.
“Yeah,” Jo says with a smile, looking down at her shoes.
It’s quiet for a long time, and it’s damn awkward, and Camille can’t figure out what happened to them. They never used to have a problem finding things to talk about, and when they didn’t, it was happy quiet. It was calm and peaceful in all of the ways this transactions wasn’t.
Mercifully, the town car rolls to a stop in front of a small but luxurious looking apartment building. It’s just the kind of semi-secluded but close enough to a coffee shop apartment in which producers famously house young stars. It’s hard to think of Jo like this, even with her cropped hair and sinewy thinness.
They pull themselves and their bags into the front, door and Camille can feel her feet dragging in exhaustion. She leaves dumps her suitcases in the front hallway and she can feel a little of her strength coming back into her body. She leans against the door and waits for Jo to turn around and look at her.
Jo puts her hands on little table and looks back at Camille and smiles awkwardly before she speaks. “Well, um, what do you want to do while you’re here? I mean, there isn’t too much in the way of sight seeing, but I’m sure that we could-”
Camille cuts her off before she can get any words out, because she doesn’t want to hear about sandwich shops and modern art museums. That wasn’t the reason she came out here. She hits her head back against the door and looks at the ceiling, trying to keep her voice from cracking, “You shouldn’t have invited me out here if you didn’t want me to come.”
She can’t bear to look at Jo for a minute, because she can’t stand to see her deflecting the words, she can’t stand to see Jo looking confused and baffled at her outburst. Camille will hate herself for this for a very long time, but she wants to see Jo hurt. She wants to see Jo crying like she didn’t when she said goodbye. She wants Jo to feel the hurt that she felt when she told her, clean and simple, that she was leaving and barely stuck around to spend a last few moments with her. She wants to see all the hurt that she’s felt for, god, so long that she can’t remember it not hurting-before Jo left, before she decided to go away without any regard for her, back before, when she was with Kendall, when she would talk about their dates without thinking about how Camille felt, when she wouldn’t look Camille in the eye whenever they said goodbye-all played out over Jo Taylor’s perfect, All-American face.
Camille is a nice girl, but god help you if she isn’t; she’ll always go straight for the jugular.
When she can manage to look over at Jo, there aren’t tears streaming down her face like she wants them to be. Jo is grinning like the cat that caught the god damned canary, and she is closing in the distance between herself and Camille. Camille is shrinking into the door, fearing for a second that the bright New Zealand sun has finally gone to Jo’s head. But Jo’s face is coming into Camille’s personal space, and there are long fingers gripping around the back of her neck.
Jo’s lips touch hers, and the world melts down around her.
Jo pulls back and smiles so it looks like her face is about to break, “Oh god, I’ve missed you.”
They are clinging and crying against the door, and Camille is pulling Jo close, closer than Camille ever thought that she’d get to have Jo. She can feel Jo’s stubby nails digging into her neck, keeping her locked in tight. Camille pulls her mouth away from Jo’s to gasp for air, and starts running her mouth down Jo’s neck.
Jo gasps a little and pulls away. Camille hates herself for moving to fast, for scaring Jo off, like she always knew that she would.
Jo’s sheepish when she smiles and grabs for her hand. She whispers softly, “Would you come to bed please?”
Camille is melting under the proper southern hospitality of it all and melting into Jo and every bit of tired and care is gone as she pulls Jo down onto the mattress with her because this is her Jo, after all of this time, wanting her in her bed, in her arms, in between her legs.
--
When she wakes up, there is afternoon sun on her face and she is alone in a king sized bed that smells like vanilla and raspberries, that smells like Jo. She stretches out like a kitten, letting out a tiny yelp, and gets up to grab her dress off of the floor. Camille’s feet are padding across the floor, and she feels better, happier, than she has in weeks and months and maybe even years. She shimmies her dress around her hips and walks out of the bedroom, looking for the kitchen she knows that she must have passed on her way into Jo’s bed. Her joints are loose and feel disconnected, just like the trail of thoughts floating around her head. But they can take her to the smell of coffee that she knows will take her to Jo.
She walks to a kitchen table where Jo is sitting, checking her phone and eating Clementine segments with a spoon and sipping on green tea.
“I made you coffee,” she says softly, with a gentle smile splaying across her face, making her look more self-conscious than ever.
“I know. Well,” Camille laughs, “I smelled it. And I remembered that you don’t drink it.”
Jo grabbed the back of her hand and held on tight, looking her straight in the eye while a warm silence clung on in the air like the curling steam of Jo’s tea. But Camille can’t let it be, and a flash of Lucy’s mischievous smile flashes before her eyes, looking so different than Jo’s.
She jumps up, letting Jo’s hand drop onto the table top with a clang. Her voice cracks as she speaks, “Where are cups?”
“In the cupboard just above the pot.”
Camille takes longer than she thought she could to fix her coffee. She busies herself as long as possible stirring soymilk into it.
Jo’s voice breaks through the clinking of her spoon, “You want something for breakfast?”
Camille is shaking her head, trying to keep her eyes from filling up. She turns around with a start, “I’m seeing someone.”
Jo looks down sadly at her bowl and nods. “I know. Lucy, right?”
“How’d you-”
“I knew when I asked you if you were friends. For a good actress, you are a terrible, terrible liar.”
Camille stares into her coffee cup and chuckles softly, “There’s a reason I’m a method actress.”
“Do you love her?”
She watched the patterns in the tiles as she shook her head.
“Could you love her?”
Camille looks up, looks into Jo’s eyes and thinks about how they’ve never had a conversation like this, one where no one is keeping secrets, one where nothing is going unsaid. She smiles a little, “Yeah. I think so.”
Jo gets up and stands in front of Camille, closing the distance between the precious space between them. Camille feels like she is running out of oxygen.
“Do you love me?”
Camille’s breath hitches before she can speak, and she has to look up into Jo’s eyes so tears don’t splash down onto her bare feet. “Yeah.”
Jo takes the coffee cup out of Camille’s hands and sets it on the counter. She grabs up Camille’s hands in her own.
“Then stay with me, Cami. Stay with me.”
There is so much sincerity and hope in Jo’s voice that Camille thinks that she just might die. But she pulls Jo close so that they’re foreheads are resting against each other, and Camille thinks she might have a little bruise on her head from where they hit. She takes her hands from Jo’s and wraps them around Jo’s almost dirty curls. She kisses her and pulls her back again. She puts her forehead back where it was resting and starts to shake her head.
Her voice is thick with tears when she speaks, “No, Josephine. I can’t. Not right now. We can’t be together right now.”
“Why?” her voice is dry and harsh.
“Because I’ve got family and friends and a-something back home. My career is back home. And yours is here. And you aren’t ready for a girlfriend. And don’t tell me you are, Josie. I know you. And you won’t be able to go out to bars and parades and concerts and hold hands and kiss me in public. And you… I can’t sit up in this house and have no one question it and hide myself and not work.”
“I could-”
“Shhh,” Camille says, tears shedding onto the floor. “You can’t right now. And that’s okay. It is. We can still talk. We can still be… whatever we used to be. We can be best friends again,” she says, stroking her fingers through her hair. “But I can’t go back to where I used to be. I can’t love you and hurt and miss you all of the time anymore. I can’t kiss Logan and pretend that I want to date him anymore. And you can’t not do that anymore. I’ve seen the tabloids. You’ve got a boy here.”
“He’s just someone for that paparazzi.”
“I know, sweetie. That’s exactly what I mean. Could you give that up and tell everyone that you’re dating me?”
Jo shakes her head.
They sit in the silence, Camille’s hands shaking like a leaf onto Jo’s firm body.
“We can’t. Not right now, my sweet Josephine.”
And this is where Jo breaks. Not into a shuddering mass or a million pieces or a complete and totally wreck like Camille. Josephine Taylor cracks herself straight down the middle, into two perfectly symmetrical pieces.
“But I love you,” she says, her breath ragged and her eyes full of tears.
“Oh Jo,” Camille groans. “I love you too. I love you more than I-I love you, okay. Don’t… please don’t think I don’t. I just-”
“Does she? Does Lucy love you?”
“No. And maybe if it was just you and me we could do this but it isn’t and... I would hold you forever if I could, but we have to keep living our lives and…”
“I miss you so much that it hurts.”
“I know,” she says, wrapping Jo close and holding her tightly, pressing kisses onto her head and neck.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Jo pulls back and her eyes are red when she looks at Camille, “Maybe someday?”
“Maybe,” Camille says, smiling through her tears.
“When are you going back home?” she asks, pulling her close again.
“Soon.”
“I’ll be back in LA in July.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“You’re going to get back together with her?”
“If she’ll take me.”
“I hope she does. You deserve someone that makes you happy, someone who treats you okay.”
The words “better than I could” hang in the air like poisonous gas.
Camille pulls away from Jo and looks into her face. She runs her thumbs under Jo’s eyes, wiping away the tears that sat on her face. “God, you’re so beautiful. I really do miss you,” she says, kissing her hard on the forehead.
Jo sniffles and looks at the clock on the microwave. “I need to get ready for work.”
Camille nods and Jo walks away.
She plucks her cell phone out of her bag and sees three missed calls from Lucy. She shouts down the hallway that Jo’s run off to, “I’ll be outside if you need me. I need to make a call.”
Her heart is about to explode as she listens to the ring.
--
“Hey, Luce,” she says, eight kinds of breathless.
“Hey. You could have called you know,” she says, laughing. “I thought that perhaps you were on the world’s longest flight.”
“I did something awful.”
The joking goes straight out of her voice, “What?”
“I slept with-”
“They girl you were in love with?”
Camille lets out a shuddering breath.
“Hey. Camille. Don’t,” Lucy sighs. “Don’t get too worked up about it. At least. Just… we never said this thing we have is exclusive. Can we just talk about it when you get home?” She skips a beat, “You are coming home right?”
Camille laughs a little, “Yeah.”
“Then we can talk about it when you get here. I-I understand, okay? Now, when do I get to see you again?”
“Pick me up at the airport on Tuesday?”
“You bet.”
--
Jo is in jeans and a t-shirt when she gets back into the apartment, toweling her hair off. “What did she say?” her voice kind of tense and kind of cold.
But the thing that really broke Camille was that there was so much fucking hope in it.
“I don’t know. That she understood. That she’d pick me up when I got back home.”
“So you’re getting back together?”
“Maybe. Hopefully.”
“So we can’t just… pretend to be together until you have to leave?”
It’s like a knife in Camille’s chest.
“No. Not even if she hadn’t. It would have hurt too much. For both of us.”
“I have to get going,” Jo said as she walked towards the door. She stopped in front of Camille before she left. “Get some more sleep. You look exhausted,” she said, kissing her on the forehead.
--
She is on a plane again. And it feels like she has lived this a thousand times.
She feels very high above it all, and her thoughts start to wonder away from her; her eyes start to close.
--
She is falling. Her eyes spring open, and she realizes that she is still on the plane. It is dark outside, and they are losing altitude. The plane is landing, she figures, as her ears pop uncomfortably. The pressure from the plane is pounding on her chest, and for a minute the suffocation of her anxiety at seeing Jo again is gone. The plan hits the tarmac and comes to a stop. She can still feel the G-forces on the chest.
She grabs the bag from above and walks off of the plane, feeling her hands grow slick on the plastic handle of her luggage.
--
She’s holding all of her things, looking for Lucy. She’d promised a million times that she would come. But still, Camille wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t show up. She starts digging around for phone. She thinks to call James, because she needs someway to get back to the Palmwoods.
She is pushing the buttons on her phone when someone says, “hey” over her shoulder.
“Lucy,” she whispers, her face breaking into a grin. She turns over her shoulder and drops her bags. Lucy starts to smile, but Camille throws her arms around her before she can see it all, nearly toppling them both over.
“I was at the wrong luggage claim. I’m so sorry I’m late.”
“I thought you weren’t going to come.”
Lucy laughs a little, “I told you I would, didn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t have blamed you. I’m just-I’m so sorry Lucy.”
“Hey. Let’s just not do this anymore. I understand. There was a guy I loved before you. And we weren’t exclusive. And I probably would have done the same thing if I was still in love with him and in a relationship like ours. I… understand. I forgive you. Really and truly. Are you over her now?”
Camille waits and it feels like the world is spinning out around her. “I still love her. But… not like it’s crushing me. Just like she’s a piece of my heart that I can’t get around.”
“That’s how first loves are, Camille. You never get over them. But you get beyond them,” Lucy looks soft like she never does. She looks okay and happy and safe and secure and like something to which Camille could harbor herself.
“We’re okay?”
Lucy slings Camille’s duffle bag over her shoulder and throws her other arm across Camille’s back. She presses a kiss to Camille’s temple.
“We’re good, kid.”
“You want to go get something to eat?”
“I was thinking we’d order in. And maybe you would want to stay the night. We could eat sugary cereal and cold pizza for breakfast?”
Camille smiles, enjoying that she can kiss someone in the airport terminal, that she can stay with someone over night, that she can tell everyone she meets that she’s seeing this girl. That this beautiful girl would want to spend time with her, to forgive and forget and be with her for real. But mostly, she smiles because sometimes feelings don’t have to hurt, don’t have to cut you up inside to be real.
“I’d like that a lot,” she says, wrapping her back arm around Lucy’s waist.
Author: madwomanpoems
Pairings: Jo/Camille, Camille/Lucy
Rating: PG probably
Warnings: ANGST, some non-descript sexual activity
Disclaimer: This isn’t mine guys. I actually don’t own anything and I haven’t acquired anything and I’m just a big vat of nothing without even owning the vat.
Word count: ~5,500
Summary: Camille’s phone bings on the table, and she reaches over to check the number before she gets back to the minty sweetness playing all over Lucy’s mouth. When she sees an unfamiliar number with far to many digits, her stomach drops. She has been expecting this for a while. She has been expecting to be ecstatic about it. But she expected it to have come sooner. But she never expected that it would come while she was wrapped around Lucy, being kissed by a girl who wasn’t too afraid to think about kissing another girl back.
Author’s note: Title is from Landfill by Daughter, cut text is from Recessional by Vienna Teng. In my opinion, both of these songs add a little to the reading, but they, of course, aren’t necessary. Also, I think it’s necessary to include the fact that in my headcanon, Jo and Camille didn’t necessarily part on perfect terms. At least, the goodbye they had wasn’t satisfying for certain parties.
Camille is lying on Lucy’s bed, feeling a little spent and a lot blissed out, her clothes half on and half draped around her, pooling into the sheets. Her eyes are half opened, and she watches as Lucy cleans up her eyeliner just enough to make it comfortable to sleep on without it smudging against the pillows.
She is fighting to keep her eyes open, fighting to wait until Lucy is beside her to let her body rest, fighting not to cling onto her too tight, fighting not to fight too hard for something more than late night movies and even later nights on Lucy’s mattress. She watches her closely, memorizing the way her frame works, the little minutia of her movement.
Lucy is bending over her sink, brushing her teeth, and mumbling around her toothbrush, “Did you maybe take my black jeans home or something? I wanted to wear them to the shoot tomorrow.”
“I’ll check my folded laundry tomorrow morning. Do you want to get breakfast or something before school?”
Lucy rinses out her mouth and slinks back to the bed. She has a tiny smile stitched onto her face, but her eyes are facing down to the floor. “I was thinking that maybe you would want to eat breakfast here tomorrow. I mean, if you like dry toast and sugary cereal with chocolate milk and sugar free energy drinks. Well, maybe we could still go get breakfast,” she mumbled. “But maybe you would want to stay over here tonight?”
“I would love to have chocolate and sugar and caffeine for breakfast with you,” she says, a grin breaks over Camille’s face, and her hands are on Lucy, pulling her close for a kiss. “Mmm,” she mumbles, “minty.”
“Even rock stars should practice good dental hygiene.”
“Oh my god, you are such a bad influence,” she says, snuggling closer to her and kissing her more deeply.
Her phone bings on the table, and she reaches over to check the number before she gets back to the minty sweetness playing all over Lucy’s mouth. When she sees an unfamiliar number with far to many digits, her stomach drops. She has been expecting this for a while. She has been expecting to be ecstatic about it. But she expected it to have come sooner.
But she never expected that it would come while she was wrapped around Lucy, being kissed by a girl who wasn’t too afraid to think about kissing another girl back.
She opens the message, and her mouth goes dry.
got any new years plans? i have a ticket to new zealand with your name on it if you’re interested. - jo taylor.
She throws the phone back on the table and kisses Lucy hard on the lips, tasting her warm mouth with her tongue as she opens her mouth. She’s pulling closer, and Lucy’s hands are slithering over body. Lucy’s fingers are sliding up Camille’s tank top, breaking goose bumps out over her skin.
Something in Camille’s stomach bunches and knots, and it doesn’t feel like it usually does. It feels like she is betraying too many people at once. It feels like a lot of lying and a lot of unspoken words banging onto her ears.
Camille pulls away from Lucy and smacks her hand onto her forehead. “Oh my gosh, I’m such an idiot. I have a huge paper due tomorrow, and I still haven’t finished it.” She sighs softly, and thinks that anyone who says that she isn’t a good actress has no idea how wrong they are. She looks into Lucy’s eyes, and says softly, “I’m so sorry Lucy, but I have to go.” But maybe this isn’t lying, because Camille thinks she might start crying on the pillowcase, crying on Lucy’s shoulder, crying for reasons she never let herself cry about before.
“Hey,” Lucy says sweetly, “don’t worry about it. We can have our little slumber party some other time. Your finals are done next week, right? Then you have break? That’s a good time, right?”
Camille is frantically searching Lucy’s apartment for anything she might have left, because she feels like a criminal, like she doesn’t want to leave any evidence behind of where she was. “Uh. Yeah. That would work. That would be nice. I’m not going home this year or anything.” Her throat tightens up, “But I am going to New Zealand for New Years. So. Just. Before then. Or after I get back. But I don’t know when I’m getting back. So,” she mutters, making a b-line for the door.
Lucy gets out of bed and catches her by the wrist before she can leave. She grabs her other hand and turns Camille around so she can look at her, “Hey, don’t worry about this. I’m fine, okay? You’re fine. Don’t get freaked out if we’re moving too fast.”
Camille looks down at her feet, “That’s not it. I just… I forgot and it got me all frazzled.”
“Okay, Camille. I’m just saying, you can tell me if something is wrong,” Lucy said, looking hard into her eyes. “Okay?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure you’re all right?”
“Yeah.”
Lucy kisses her on the forehead, “Thanks for coming over her tonight, kid.”
Camille walks out the door and down the hallway.
She’s crying to hard she can barely stand up by the time the elevator doors shut.
--
Camille is in a plane somewhere over the Pacific, and she hasn’t slept in days.
She’s been telling people that she’s trying to get herself on New Zealand time. She hasn’t admitted, not even to herself, that she hasn’t been able to sleep because she is practically suffocating under her loneliness. She has managed to hide the fact that her dad went back to Albany for Christmas, and the Knights And Company went to Minnesota. She has barely managed to be around Lucy without feeling like a traitor, like she was intentionally trying to keep something from Lucy.
But, as much as she tries to convince herself that it doesn’t need to be shared-that it just hasn’t come up-she guesses that maybe she is.
In fact, except for a few movie nights and some quick kisses on Lucy’s couch, she hasn’t talked to anyone since the last night of her finals.
That was the night that Jo Taylor called her, telling Camille about flight information and about the climate of New Zealand in February and how she’d get from the airport to Jo’s apartment. That was the night that Jo Taylor gave Camille one of her oh-so-typical information dumps, and forgot to ask anything about her personal life, or even mention one thing about her own. Jo sounded a lot more like a travel agent, and a lot less like Camille’s best friend that was half way around the world and had barely spoken to her since the night she told her she was leaving.
Camille had texted Jo a few times after Jo had called, just trying to talk to her about anything, even if it was just to tell her how excited she was about seeing New Zealand, about seeing the movie set, about seeing her.
Jo hadn’t texted back.
Camille lays her head back against the seats and watches as the clouds roll by underneath her. She watches them, seeing Lucy’s lips and breasts and Jo’s long fingers and sad eyes. Camille watches as her own conflicting feelings glide past her plane.
She feels very high above it all, and her thoughts start to wonder away from her; her eyes start to close.
--
She is falling. Her eyes spring open, and she realizes that she is still on the plane. It is dark outside, and they are losing altitude. The plane is landing, she figures, as her ears pop uncomfortably. The pressure from the plane is pounding on her chest, and for a minute the suffocation of her anxiety at seeing Jo again is gone. The plan hits the tarmac and comes to a stop. She can still feel the G-forces on the chest.
She grabs the bag from above and walks off of the plane, feeling her hands grow slick on the plastic handle of her luggage.
She’s nervous; it takes a lot to make Camille nervous.
It takes a bomb waiting to be detonated or to blow up in her face.
--
She’s by luggage claim, waiting for her bag to come around on the conveyer belt. She searches without searching for a town car driver with her name on a sign while she watches for her large black duffle to come back to her. She listens to the accents mixing and thinks about how hard it would be to replicate that for a role. She watches the reunions. She wonders how hard that will be to replicate in her real life. She wonders if it comes naturally, or if she’ll have to work hard to make her reunion seem carefree and overjoyed instead of anxious and hurt and self-conscious.
She grabs her bag and throws it over her shoulder, her knees nearly buckling under its weight. She turns around, feeling nearly suffocated by the weight of it. She’s looking for any one who might be there to pick her up, primarily the sort of nondescript man in a black cap that has a tendency to drive around people with too much money to know how to operate their own cars.
But that’s not who she sees.
She expected to be happy when she saw her. She expected her heart to flutter like humming bird, like something happy and hopeful that Jo always made her feel, but there is lead in her chest and her knees really to buckle a little this time.
She walks over and she can’t breathe.
Jo looks good before Camille gets too good of a glance at her. She has more muscle on her body than she used to, probably from all of the stunts in the movie, but looks thin, like the heat and the hours are getting to her, like she’s not eating like she does when she’s stressed and unhappy, like she is being stretched thin like butter over too much toast. She looks tired, not like Camille, who has been too nervous to sleep, but like she has been tired for months, like she has not slept even on breaks from shooting, like she hasn’t found anywhere she can lay her head since the move.
Jo calls her name, and it mixes with the accents around her. Jo sounds exactly like she looks, exactly like she is: a girl uprooted.
But the thing that makes Camille’s mouth goes dry is that Jo’s hair is shorn up around her ears. The blonde tresses are twisting up around her temples.
“Hey,” she says softly, her voice drawing raspy up her throat. Her bag drops off of her arm and to the floor, and she is too busy starting at Jo’s brown eyes to do anything about it. She can’t orient herself on this side of the world, where Jo looks tough and stunning but still sounds like a southern bell.
“Hey, Camille. I thought I’d come get you after all instead of sending a driver. Want help with that?” she asks, scooping up Camille’s bag before it seems awkward that they aren’t hugging, and they aren’t smiling, and they are barely even talking. She hikes it up with ease and throws it onto her back without struggling.
“Thanks,” Camille says awkwardly as Jo has turned around and is making her way to the doors. Camille follows until she reaches the town car that must have brought Jo here, and must be taking them back to wherever it is that they’re going. The driver takes her bag and shuffles her to a door in the backseat, shutting the door behind her.
Shutting her in with Jo.
She feels trapped, she feels suffocated, she feels lost in her own head.
“Your hair looks nice like that,” she blurts out, because the silence that is sitting between them is about to choke her alive.
Jo smiles a little, like this is easy, like this is how this was supposed to go, like she is just enough ashamed and just enough proud to get through this just the way it is intended, and rolls her eyes. “I hate it, but they made me do it for the part. I’m avoiding my mother as long as possible. I think she might actually die if she sees me like this.”
“I like it. I think it suits you.”
Jo’s eyes soften up and something that is that thin film of acting in the back of her eyes that is only visible to other actors, that is only gone when the scene-when the metaphor or the lie or the self-deprecation-breaks, shatters. She is quiet when she talks and turns her eyes away from Camille’s, watching as the buildings start to zoom past her eyes, “Thanks.”
“Have any auditions lately?” she says, out of the blue, breaking up Camille’s thoughts as she scans the horizon.
“No. I decided that I’d be graduating at semester, so I’ve been focusing on school.”
“So you’re done with school?”
“Yep. You?”
“I still have a few hours of classes every day. I can’t wait to be done. How are the boys?” she asks, and for a minute she looks happy.
“They’re good,” Camille smiles, glad to have found some neutral territory in all of this, because she knows her world won’t explode for a few minutes. “They’re as ridiculous as ever. They went to Minnesota for Christmas, you know, and it’s been weirdly quiet at The Palmwoods.”
Jo smiles at the word. “Anyone new?”
“Uh. Well, there’s this film student guy, he’ll be gone before next New Year’s day. A few models. They never stay long. A violinist who talks to no one. And a rockstar, named Lucy. She’s… different,” Camille says, and feels her face breaking into a smile. “She fits in well, but she’s different.”
“You guys are friends?”
Camille is probably grinning even though she doesn’t want to be, “Yeah. I think so. We’ve gotten pretty close since she came.” Something in this line of discussion makes her uneasy, because it is so close to a lie, just like leaving for New Years was so close to a lie to Lucy.
Secrets she could deal with, but Camille has never been fond of lies.
“Is Kendall seeing anyone?”
Camille’s stomach sours at the name. God help her if she sat on a plane for thirteen hours just to do some second-hand uninteresting spying on Jo’s ex-boyfriend. She sighs a little, trying to keep it under her breath.
“Oh. You know Kendall, married to the band,” she smiles, feeling the weight on those words that she knows Jo Taylor won’t see, because Jo Taylor can’t see the way Logan and Kendall look at each other and how James and Kendall press each other against walls and the way that Kendall looks out for Carlos like they’re closer than brothers and the way that they are all home to each other. Jo Taylor can’t see that because there are so many reasons she won’t, because she doesn’t see that as love, and she has never pushed anyone against a wall to feel their hips and eyes on you.
She’s never wanted to, as far as she’s ever admitted it.
“Yeah,” Jo says with a smile, looking down at her shoes.
It’s quiet for a long time, and it’s damn awkward, and Camille can’t figure out what happened to them. They never used to have a problem finding things to talk about, and when they didn’t, it was happy quiet. It was calm and peaceful in all of the ways this transactions wasn’t.
Mercifully, the town car rolls to a stop in front of a small but luxurious looking apartment building. It’s just the kind of semi-secluded but close enough to a coffee shop apartment in which producers famously house young stars. It’s hard to think of Jo like this, even with her cropped hair and sinewy thinness.
They pull themselves and their bags into the front, door and Camille can feel her feet dragging in exhaustion. She leaves dumps her suitcases in the front hallway and she can feel a little of her strength coming back into her body. She leans against the door and waits for Jo to turn around and look at her.
Jo puts her hands on little table and looks back at Camille and smiles awkwardly before she speaks. “Well, um, what do you want to do while you’re here? I mean, there isn’t too much in the way of sight seeing, but I’m sure that we could-”
Camille cuts her off before she can get any words out, because she doesn’t want to hear about sandwich shops and modern art museums. That wasn’t the reason she came out here. She hits her head back against the door and looks at the ceiling, trying to keep her voice from cracking, “You shouldn’t have invited me out here if you didn’t want me to come.”
She can’t bear to look at Jo for a minute, because she can’t stand to see her deflecting the words, she can’t stand to see Jo looking confused and baffled at her outburst. Camille will hate herself for this for a very long time, but she wants to see Jo hurt. She wants to see Jo crying like she didn’t when she said goodbye. She wants Jo to feel the hurt that she felt when she told her, clean and simple, that she was leaving and barely stuck around to spend a last few moments with her. She wants to see all the hurt that she’s felt for, god, so long that she can’t remember it not hurting-before Jo left, before she decided to go away without any regard for her, back before, when she was with Kendall, when she would talk about their dates without thinking about how Camille felt, when she wouldn’t look Camille in the eye whenever they said goodbye-all played out over Jo Taylor’s perfect, All-American face.
Camille is a nice girl, but god help you if she isn’t; she’ll always go straight for the jugular.
When she can manage to look over at Jo, there aren’t tears streaming down her face like she wants them to be. Jo is grinning like the cat that caught the god damned canary, and she is closing in the distance between herself and Camille. Camille is shrinking into the door, fearing for a second that the bright New Zealand sun has finally gone to Jo’s head. But Jo’s face is coming into Camille’s personal space, and there are long fingers gripping around the back of her neck.
Jo’s lips touch hers, and the world melts down around her.
Jo pulls back and smiles so it looks like her face is about to break, “Oh god, I’ve missed you.”
They are clinging and crying against the door, and Camille is pulling Jo close, closer than Camille ever thought that she’d get to have Jo. She can feel Jo’s stubby nails digging into her neck, keeping her locked in tight. Camille pulls her mouth away from Jo’s to gasp for air, and starts running her mouth down Jo’s neck.
Jo gasps a little and pulls away. Camille hates herself for moving to fast, for scaring Jo off, like she always knew that she would.
Jo’s sheepish when she smiles and grabs for her hand. She whispers softly, “Would you come to bed please?”
Camille is melting under the proper southern hospitality of it all and melting into Jo and every bit of tired and care is gone as she pulls Jo down onto the mattress with her because this is her Jo, after all of this time, wanting her in her bed, in her arms, in between her legs.
--
When she wakes up, there is afternoon sun on her face and she is alone in a king sized bed that smells like vanilla and raspberries, that smells like Jo. She stretches out like a kitten, letting out a tiny yelp, and gets up to grab her dress off of the floor. Camille’s feet are padding across the floor, and she feels better, happier, than she has in weeks and months and maybe even years. She shimmies her dress around her hips and walks out of the bedroom, looking for the kitchen she knows that she must have passed on her way into Jo’s bed. Her joints are loose and feel disconnected, just like the trail of thoughts floating around her head. But they can take her to the smell of coffee that she knows will take her to Jo.
She walks to a kitchen table where Jo is sitting, checking her phone and eating Clementine segments with a spoon and sipping on green tea.
“I made you coffee,” she says softly, with a gentle smile splaying across her face, making her look more self-conscious than ever.
“I know. Well,” Camille laughs, “I smelled it. And I remembered that you don’t drink it.”
Jo grabbed the back of her hand and held on tight, looking her straight in the eye while a warm silence clung on in the air like the curling steam of Jo’s tea. But Camille can’t let it be, and a flash of Lucy’s mischievous smile flashes before her eyes, looking so different than Jo’s.
She jumps up, letting Jo’s hand drop onto the table top with a clang. Her voice cracks as she speaks, “Where are cups?”
“In the cupboard just above the pot.”
Camille takes longer than she thought she could to fix her coffee. She busies herself as long as possible stirring soymilk into it.
Jo’s voice breaks through the clinking of her spoon, “You want something for breakfast?”
Camille is shaking her head, trying to keep her eyes from filling up. She turns around with a start, “I’m seeing someone.”
Jo looks down sadly at her bowl and nods. “I know. Lucy, right?”
“How’d you-”
“I knew when I asked you if you were friends. For a good actress, you are a terrible, terrible liar.”
Camille stares into her coffee cup and chuckles softly, “There’s a reason I’m a method actress.”
“Do you love her?”
She watched the patterns in the tiles as she shook her head.
“Could you love her?”
Camille looks up, looks into Jo’s eyes and thinks about how they’ve never had a conversation like this, one where no one is keeping secrets, one where nothing is going unsaid. She smiles a little, “Yeah. I think so.”
Jo gets up and stands in front of Camille, closing the distance between the precious space between them. Camille feels like she is running out of oxygen.
“Do you love me?”
Camille’s breath hitches before she can speak, and she has to look up into Jo’s eyes so tears don’t splash down onto her bare feet. “Yeah.”
Jo takes the coffee cup out of Camille’s hands and sets it on the counter. She grabs up Camille’s hands in her own.
“Then stay with me, Cami. Stay with me.”
There is so much sincerity and hope in Jo’s voice that Camille thinks that she just might die. But she pulls Jo close so that they’re foreheads are resting against each other, and Camille thinks she might have a little bruise on her head from where they hit. She takes her hands from Jo’s and wraps them around Jo’s almost dirty curls. She kisses her and pulls her back again. She puts her forehead back where it was resting and starts to shake her head.
Her voice is thick with tears when she speaks, “No, Josephine. I can’t. Not right now. We can’t be together right now.”
“Why?” her voice is dry and harsh.
“Because I’ve got family and friends and a-something back home. My career is back home. And yours is here. And you aren’t ready for a girlfriend. And don’t tell me you are, Josie. I know you. And you won’t be able to go out to bars and parades and concerts and hold hands and kiss me in public. And you… I can’t sit up in this house and have no one question it and hide myself and not work.”
“I could-”
“Shhh,” Camille says, tears shedding onto the floor. “You can’t right now. And that’s okay. It is. We can still talk. We can still be… whatever we used to be. We can be best friends again,” she says, stroking her fingers through her hair. “But I can’t go back to where I used to be. I can’t love you and hurt and miss you all of the time anymore. I can’t kiss Logan and pretend that I want to date him anymore. And you can’t not do that anymore. I’ve seen the tabloids. You’ve got a boy here.”
“He’s just someone for that paparazzi.”
“I know, sweetie. That’s exactly what I mean. Could you give that up and tell everyone that you’re dating me?”
Jo shakes her head.
They sit in the silence, Camille’s hands shaking like a leaf onto Jo’s firm body.
“We can’t. Not right now, my sweet Josephine.”
And this is where Jo breaks. Not into a shuddering mass or a million pieces or a complete and totally wreck like Camille. Josephine Taylor cracks herself straight down the middle, into two perfectly symmetrical pieces.
“But I love you,” she says, her breath ragged and her eyes full of tears.
“Oh Jo,” Camille groans. “I love you too. I love you more than I-I love you, okay. Don’t… please don’t think I don’t. I just-”
“Does she? Does Lucy love you?”
“No. And maybe if it was just you and me we could do this but it isn’t and... I would hold you forever if I could, but we have to keep living our lives and…”
“I miss you so much that it hurts.”
“I know,” she says, wrapping Jo close and holding her tightly, pressing kisses onto her head and neck.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Jo pulls back and her eyes are red when she looks at Camille, “Maybe someday?”
“Maybe,” Camille says, smiling through her tears.
“When are you going back home?” she asks, pulling her close again.
“Soon.”
“I’ll be back in LA in July.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
“You’re going to get back together with her?”
“If she’ll take me.”
“I hope she does. You deserve someone that makes you happy, someone who treats you okay.”
The words “better than I could” hang in the air like poisonous gas.
Camille pulls away from Jo and looks into her face. She runs her thumbs under Jo’s eyes, wiping away the tears that sat on her face. “God, you’re so beautiful. I really do miss you,” she says, kissing her hard on the forehead.
Jo sniffles and looks at the clock on the microwave. “I need to get ready for work.”
Camille nods and Jo walks away.
She plucks her cell phone out of her bag and sees three missed calls from Lucy. She shouts down the hallway that Jo’s run off to, “I’ll be outside if you need me. I need to make a call.”
Her heart is about to explode as she listens to the ring.
--
“Hey, Luce,” she says, eight kinds of breathless.
“Hey. You could have called you know,” she says, laughing. “I thought that perhaps you were on the world’s longest flight.”
“I did something awful.”
The joking goes straight out of her voice, “What?”
“I slept with-”
“They girl you were in love with?”
Camille lets out a shuddering breath.
“Hey. Camille. Don’t,” Lucy sighs. “Don’t get too worked up about it. At least. Just… we never said this thing we have is exclusive. Can we just talk about it when you get home?” She skips a beat, “You are coming home right?”
Camille laughs a little, “Yeah.”
“Then we can talk about it when you get here. I-I understand, okay? Now, when do I get to see you again?”
“Pick me up at the airport on Tuesday?”
“You bet.”
--
Jo is in jeans and a t-shirt when she gets back into the apartment, toweling her hair off. “What did she say?” her voice kind of tense and kind of cold.
But the thing that really broke Camille was that there was so much fucking hope in it.
“I don’t know. That she understood. That she’d pick me up when I got back home.”
“So you’re getting back together?”
“Maybe. Hopefully.”
“So we can’t just… pretend to be together until you have to leave?”
It’s like a knife in Camille’s chest.
“No. Not even if she hadn’t. It would have hurt too much. For both of us.”
“I have to get going,” Jo said as she walked towards the door. She stopped in front of Camille before she left. “Get some more sleep. You look exhausted,” she said, kissing her on the forehead.
--
She is on a plane again. And it feels like she has lived this a thousand times.
She feels very high above it all, and her thoughts start to wonder away from her; her eyes start to close.
--
She is falling. Her eyes spring open, and she realizes that she is still on the plane. It is dark outside, and they are losing altitude. The plane is landing, she figures, as her ears pop uncomfortably. The pressure from the plane is pounding on her chest, and for a minute the suffocation of her anxiety at seeing Jo again is gone. The plan hits the tarmac and comes to a stop. She can still feel the G-forces on the chest.
She grabs the bag from above and walks off of the plane, feeling her hands grow slick on the plastic handle of her luggage.
--
She’s holding all of her things, looking for Lucy. She’d promised a million times that she would come. But still, Camille wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t show up. She starts digging around for phone. She thinks to call James, because she needs someway to get back to the Palmwoods.
She is pushing the buttons on her phone when someone says, “hey” over her shoulder.
“Lucy,” she whispers, her face breaking into a grin. She turns over her shoulder and drops her bags. Lucy starts to smile, but Camille throws her arms around her before she can see it all, nearly toppling them both over.
“I was at the wrong luggage claim. I’m so sorry I’m late.”
“I thought you weren’t going to come.”
Lucy laughs a little, “I told you I would, didn’t I?”
“I wouldn’t have blamed you. I’m just-I’m so sorry Lucy.”
“Hey. Let’s just not do this anymore. I understand. There was a guy I loved before you. And we weren’t exclusive. And I probably would have done the same thing if I was still in love with him and in a relationship like ours. I… understand. I forgive you. Really and truly. Are you over her now?”
Camille waits and it feels like the world is spinning out around her. “I still love her. But… not like it’s crushing me. Just like she’s a piece of my heart that I can’t get around.”
“That’s how first loves are, Camille. You never get over them. But you get beyond them,” Lucy looks soft like she never does. She looks okay and happy and safe and secure and like something to which Camille could harbor herself.
“We’re okay?”
Lucy slings Camille’s duffle bag over her shoulder and throws her other arm across Camille’s back. She presses a kiss to Camille’s temple.
“We’re good, kid.”
“You want to go get something to eat?”
“I was thinking we’d order in. And maybe you would want to stay the night. We could eat sugary cereal and cold pizza for breakfast?”
Camille smiles, enjoying that she can kiss someone in the airport terminal, that she can stay with someone over night, that she can tell everyone she meets that she’s seeing this girl. That this beautiful girl would want to spend time with her, to forgive and forget and be with her for real. But mostly, she smiles because sometimes feelings don’t have to hurt, don’t have to cut you up inside to be real.
“I’d like that a lot,” she says, wrapping her back arm around Lucy’s waist.