Through Her Eyes (Camren)

Chapter 25: Shadows of a Past

No one came to the door.

Lauren and Camila stood before it, silent on the doorstep, waiting. Waiting for something. Lauren didn’t know exactly what. She didn’t think Camila knew either, but still, they waited, breathing in unison. Anxiety fluttered through Lauren’s veins.

“No one’s going to answer,” she said finally, her shoulders slumping, either in relief or disappointment.

There might be something they needed inside the house, something Camila needed. She must have known this place. It felt like a familiar place. Not familiar to Lauren, but familiar to Camila, like Lauren could feel it through her.

Lauren shook her head, stepping back from the door. Maybe she’d just started thinking like Camila after spending so much time with her.

“Do you remember this place?” Lauren asked. She turned to where Camila had been standing at her side a moment before and found only air. “…Camila?”

Suddenly, Lauren was alone on the doorstep of the eerie house.

She shuffled back, nearly tripping with her own shoelaces. It wasn’t that Lauren was scared of the house or what was inside it, it was just… she had to find Camila.

Calling Camila’s name softly, as if she might disturb the person who was apparently not home, Lauren checked the obvious places – in the tree by the side of the house, on the sidewalk next to the trashcans, by the garden befriending the weeds.

Camila was nowhere to be seen. Lauren’s heart caught in her chest. She looked around at the bare front yard, anxious.

The house couldn’t take Camila away from her. She couldn’t lose Camila again just when she’d been about to get the answers to all her questions. There was no point in finding out about Camila’s past if Camila wasn’t there in the present.

It was just a house.

A hand clenched around Lauren’s wrist and Lauren yelped.

Camila watched with calm brown eyes and Lauren sighed, tension releasing from her shoulders immediately. She slung her free arm around Camila’s waist, pulling her closer for a short moment. “Don’t leave me like that,” Lauren admonished.

“You have it backwards,” Camila told her. When she smiled it didn’t look happy.

“What?” Lauren asked, furrowing her eyebrows worriedly. Camila ignored her question as Camila often did.

“Come on,” Camila said instead, bumping her nose against Lauren’s cheek before dragging Lauren after her. She led Lauren down the side of the house, past an open fence.

It reminded her of the place Camila had lived, crawling through a hole in the fence, crawling through a window to a condemned building where she slept.

A shiver struck Lauren at the thought, the person who she had come to care for more than anything, living in that place by herself.

It only made Lauren dislike this house more.

They stopped at a high window. Camila poked the screen with a testing finger, looking to Lauren proudly.

“No,” Lauren said immediately. “No. Nope. Bad idea.”

The glass pane of the window was open, only a screen and a small jump keeping them out of the house. Camila tugged at the edge of the screen.

“Camila,” Lauren protested, embarrassed to find her voice came out high and whiney. She wrapped her hand around Camila’s arm to stop her when Camila tugged harder on the screen. “You can’t just go crawling through people’s windows.”