Hold My Hand

Chapter 2

It was Carmilla's junior year, and Laura's sophomore year, and the former was having a significantly harder time getting through classes and endless tests. Junior year is the hardest, they say. 

Carmilla didn't know when, or how, but Laura noticed. Maybe it was because she never got a chance to put her history textbook down before she was assigned twenty more pages to read and take notes on, or maybe it was because she fell asleep during lunch one time while Laura was telling her a story, and she woke up in a confused daze to see the blonde staring at her with a blank expression and a slight redness to her cheeks, which only served to confuse Carmilla even more.

She thought she had been at least a little subtle about how much she was struggling.

But just a week ago, Laura sat down next to her at their lunch table--their lunch table--with an unreasonably tall stack of flash cards which she just barely managed to fit her fingers around. She had that 'let's do this' attitude, and for the entire lunch period they went over vocabulary terms, important topics, and everything in-between from point boring to point even more boring. 

That's how things usually went with Laura. The girl was so stubborn that Carmilla hardly had a say in whatever the blonde decided to do, but that was okay because most times Carmilla blindly followed her anyway. If Laura said they were studying all throughout lunch, then who was Carmilla to disagree? Especially if it would benefit her.

When the period ended and they packed up and went back to their classes, she received a text.

Cupcake: u need a lot of help studying lol. we should work on that outside of school.

She ignores the swoop in her stomach and focuses on what's being offered. She wants to... hang out? Study? Any other possibility is blocked out, and she's already typing her response. 

Does she even need to think twice about it?

Carmilla: that can be arranged. how's Saturday?

--

She does, in fact, think twice. She thinks three times. No, actually, the amount of times she thinks about Saturday from the moment she sends her response on Thursday is probably in the hundreds. The thousands, even. Needless to say, she was nervous.

She spent an embarrassing amount of time stressing over where they would go. Laura had made it clear that her house wasn't available. She's pretty sure 'ant infestation' is a pretty far stretch--even in Styria, where bear invasions are a common occurrence, but she let it slide. She wouldn't want anyone coming over to her house either. The one thing she likes most about Silas High is that nobody cares enough to ask questions.  

But eventually, after much deliberation, she decides that the park is a nice place to hang out and study. 

And that's how she finds herself walking to the park to meet up with a certain blonde. Nervous as hell with a backpack full of snacks, textbooks, and index cards scribbled with hoards of information in tiny handwriting.

"Hey," Carmilla says as she nears the blonde girl sitting on the picnic table. Laura pulls the sleeves of her dark red hoodie over her hands and looks up.

"Hey."

She moves off the top of the picnic table and onto one of the benches next to it, leaving room for Carmilla to sit next to her, albeit not very much. When Carmilla sits down, she can feel Laura's arm pressed against hers, the only barrier being Laura's warm hoodie. The closeness nearly takes her breath away. Where they touch, her arm radiates with a funny kind of pins and needles which have been happening more often when she's around the blonde.