Caught (Camren)

•19•

I always had a thing for words- long words in books that rolled off of my tongue and took their time etching themselves in my brain, and short words that were sharp and to the point and got where they were meant to go at the speed of light. I loved quotes and, as much as I may have wanted to hide it, highlighting paragraphs in readings that stood out or held a deeper meaning was one of my hidden talents. There was one quote by Cecelia Ahern that, if just a little shorter, I would have tattooed on my body in a heartbeat, obtaining a permanent memory of the words that I began to notice had more significance than I originally thought.

"Our life is made up of time," it said. "Our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. [...] And yet time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could."

If there was anything on earth that I craved, it was more time, and especially time to make things right. I had one week left with Lauren. Seven days to show her my upmost affection and give her a multitude of reasons to not leave me behind when she left, but seven days was not nearly enough time to make up for the three months that I wished I could redo. Were those ninety days spent to their full potential? No, and I knew that. Were those ninety days enough to make her want to stay even after she was gone? Maybe, but I doubted it. Still, the memories that I shared with her would never be forgotten no matter how many miles separated us. I just wished they didn't consist of liquor stained breath and sirens in the distance.

Another aspect of time that I found to be entirely unfair was the sort of time that snuck up behind me when I was least expecting it. It was the kind that shoved me over the edge and sent me hurtling to the ground hundreds of feet below with nothing but the sheer force of reality to break my fall. I'd felt it a total of three times over the course of the three months that I'd felt whole with Lauren by my side and nowhere to go but a party on the corner; the first time when Lauren begged me to stay away from her and I realized that it was a whole lot easier said than done; the second, when it hit me that a quarter of my life had been wasted on nights that I couldn't even remember; third, when I woke up one morning with a hungover Lauren in my bed and the reality that it was time to put my foot down set in. There was another quote from Sarah Dessen that I'd never paid attention to. I always thought I was living by its true meaning, taking the path that my heart desired, but as I laid there with Lauren on my chest and thought about how much she really meant to me, I realized I'd never been so wrong.

"There comes a time when the world gets quiet and the only thing left is your own heartbeat," it read. "So you'd better learn the sound of it. Otherwise you'll never understand what it's saying."

That was when I decided to leave. I'd heard my own heartbeat loud and clear two times too many, and both almost ended in disaster. I knew that if I continued down my path that I would end up somewhere I didn't want to be. I'd always known that, but I'd never had a reason to turn around, and Lauren was my reason now. If it meant keeping her safe and keeping her by my side, I was willing to give up everything. I held my chin in the air after my eyes were finally dry from a night of long decisions, and I told myself I would go college in North Carolina. I would be as far away from Andrew and his drugs and the alcohol that practically stained my skin as I could get, and that was good enough for me. It took me three months to come to the decision to drop everything to protect Lauren, and it left me with a week until we were eight hundred miles apart. One week until my decision meant everything or nothing at all. Time sucked.

...

I knocked quietly on the opaque glass door that led to my dad's office, waiting for his signal to enter and then pushing my way inside. He was slumped over his desk, scribbling something on a notepad as he glanced back and forth between the paper and his laptop screen. He seemed busy, but I didn't have time to waste.