Never Let Me Go (Camren/Norminah)

Chapter 14: Cabello

So far, there had only been a small of different times in her life when Lauren Jauregui had felt genuine fear. She didn't have any desire to purposely rehash the moments, but for some foreign reason as she sat nearly alone in a New York coffee shop, it was all the inspiration that happened to be stirring. Before Lauren sat a laptop, an open but empty document and a steaming cup of tea that was getting stronger and stronger with every passing second.

"This is why I don't take creative writing classes." The girl mumbled to herself, her chin dropping into the palm of her hands. "Maybe I could switch into something more practical for my elective. Like shop class."

"It would help you learn to build a bookshelf." An unfamiliar voice piped up from a few tables away. The person attached to it was female, a year or two older than Lauren herself and engrossed in a thick novel. "That's all shop class is really good for, I have like... four younger brothers who've all taken it."

Lauren blinked. "I'm just not a writer." She shrugged. "There's not much originality up in this coconut."

"Consider yourself lucky." The girl lowered the set of black framed reading classes that were perched on her nose and set them on the table before her. She had long red hair, the bangs of which were cut neatly just across her brow ridge and makeup done to suit. "There's such thing as too many ideas."

"Is there?"

She nodded. "My husband gets angry at me because I've constantly got nine-hundred thousand book ideas on the go."

Lauren looked at her blank screen with a small scowl. "And you're sure you don't just have one book idea with nine-hundred thousand different things in it?"

"It's likely." The woman smiled. "I'm in town for a signing, but I like taking a breath or two when I can. What it is you're stuck on over here?"

Lauren angled her chair so the conversation would flow a little easier. "So I'm taking this creative writing elective because I need one more to graduate, and my roommate convinced me it'd be easy. I'm just stuck. I need a short story themed around the complex of fear done and ready for submission in a few hours."

"Hm, well that sounds like quite the cramming session you've got ahead of you tonight." The girl looked around. "No wonder you've found a quiet little place to get it done."

"So any advice?" Lauren asked as the thick novel the stranger was reading was tucked away in an oversized purse.

"Fear is a word that can branch off into a hundred different meanings." The girl replied, standing up and slinging the strap over her shoulder. "You can't just write about it as a complex, you have to dig for something that has specific meaning for you. Go back to the times in your life when you felt the most fear, remember how you reacted and work from there. The only things writers really have to build characters from are their own lives. Everyone has to start somewhere."

Lauren watched as the girl picked up an empty cup of coffee and the delicate saucer underneath before giving her a kind wave and a nod of good luck.

"Okay, so no real advice." The green eyed girl muttered under her breath, looking back at her screen. After a quick google search of the upcoming book signings in the area, she finally landed on the red-headed stranger. An author by the name of Larsen Dearborn happened to be a New York Times Bestseller, known best for her work with vampires and various other mystical undead. The featured novel on her website showed a cover with two figures, the silhouette of one man standing over another with a wooden stake raised high above his head, the second cowering on the ground defensively.