Imaginary Lover // Camren Fanfiction

Chapter 26

As soon as I left Lauren's house the next morning, I decided
to head straight to Ally. Actually, I had decided I was going to do that long
before I left Lauren's house. Something Lauren said had hit a nerve; actually, everything she said hit a nerve with me. When I was with her I was like a hedgehog, all prickly and sensitive, as though all of my senses were alert.

The funny thing is, I thought all my senses had been alert already, as a professional best friend they should have been, but there was one emotion I hadn't experienced before and that was love. Sure, I loved all my friends, but not in this way, not in the way that made my heart thud when I looked at Lauren, not in a way that made me want to be with her the whole time. And I didn't want to be with her for her, I realized it was for me. This love thing awakened
a group of slumbering senses in my body that I never even knew existed.

I cleared my throat, checked my appearance, and made my way into Ally's office. In Ekam Eveileb there were no doors, because nobody here could open them, but there was another reason—doors acted as barriers, they were thick, unwelcoming things that you could control to shut people
in or out and we didn't agree with that. We chose open-plan offices for a more open and friendly atmosphere. Although that's what we were always taught, lately I had found Lauren's fuchsia front door with the smiling letter box to be the friendliest door I had ever seen, so that shot that particular theory to hell. She was making me question all sorts of things.

Without even looking up from her desk, Ally called out,

 "Welcome, Camila." She was sitting behind the desk, dressed in purple as usual; her dreadlocks were tied up and scattered in glitter so that with every movement she sparkled. On each of her walls were framed photos of hundreds of children, all smiling happily. They were even covering her shelves, coffee table, sideboard, mantelpiece, and windowsill. Everywhere I looked were rows and rows of photographs of people Ally had worked with and become friends with in the past. Her desk was the only surface that was clear and on it sat one single photo frame. The frame had sat there for years, facing Ally, so that nobody ever really got a chance to see who or what was in it. 

We knew that if we asked, she would tell us, but nobody was ever rude enough to ask. What we
didn't need to know, we didn't need to ask. Some people just don't quite get the gist of that. You can have plenty of conversations with people, meaningful conversations, without getting too personal. There's a line, you know, like an invisible field around people that you just knew not to enter or cross and I had never crossed it with Ally or anyone else for that matter.

Lauren would have hated the room, I thought as I looked around.

She would have removed everything in an instant, dusted it and polished it until it gleamed with the clinical glow of a hospital. Even at the coffee shop she had arranged the salt and pepper shaker and the bowl of sugar into an even quadrilateral triangle in the center of the table. She always moved things an inch to the left or an inch to the right, backward and forward until they stopped nagging and she could concentrate again. Funny thing was, she sometimes ended up moving things back to exactly the way they were in the first place and then convincing herself she was happy with them. That said a lot about Lauren.

But why did I start thinking of Lauren just then? I kept on doing that.
In situations that were totally unrelated to her, I would think of her and she would become part of the scenario, I would suddenly wonder what she would think, how would she feel, what would she do or say if she was with me. That was all part of giving someone a piece of your heart; they ended up taking a whole chunk of your mind and reserving it all for themselves.
Anyway, I realized I had been standing in front of Ally's desk, not saying anything, since I walked in.

"How did you know it was me?" I finally spoke.