Original AN: A shift in perspective sheds new light on the past. We catch up to where Camila's head and heart has been all this time. Welcome to Camila's ted talk.
My AN: Finally we get to see Camila's side of things. This is the longest chapter so far, enjoy!
————————
And all that I've known to be of love
And I am gentle
You ran off with it all
And I am desperate
And all that I dream
Where do you run, where do you run to?
(Mercury by Sufjan Stevens)
————————
Burnt sienna and brilliant green.
A breath-stealing look across the gymnasium floor, a stellar collision in the corridor.
A first kiss under the stars, a first time under the rain.
Ever since they met, Camila has been in love with Lauren.
Where her mother had loved her father with quiet, measured grace, and her father adored her mother with not-so-quiet and immeasurable ardour, Camila is the product of both.
With grace and ardour, she has loved Lauren. For sixteen years, Camila's heart has been in constant expansion making room for her boundless, radiating warmth (a brilliance so hot that sometimes it burns).
She has been gentle and faithful. Patient and kind.
Confident and steadfast. Desperate and broken.
She has felt weightless and been left speechless.
But not once has her love wavered. Even after Lauren's did, heartbreakingly and without cause, Camila's love remains, tender and true.
————————
*****
"Camila, what happened?"
Camila shakily lifted her arm to reveal the small velvet box clutched in her hand. She shook her head, with greater violence than the soft, almost inaudible 'no' that had precipitated the tearful trek leading her to stand heartbroken in front of her sister's apartment door. Hours since, the rejection still reverberated in her chest, a substitute for where her heart should be beating.
She was immediately drawn into a crushing embrace. Unable to find any words, Camila could only sob into Dinah's shirt, distraught and gasping in spurts of uneven air.
Dinah rubbed a soothing hand up and down Camila's back. "You're okay."
Camila weakly mumbled an unintelligible reply into the now wet shoulder. She was far from okay.
—
Two months later, Dinah was already waiting halfway down the same hallway, wordlessly taking the duffle bag while the other arm pulled Camila in.
"She—" Camila had to pause for the crack in her voice to finish its break, "she said no," and a tear to fall, "again."
Dinah held on tighter.
"You're okay."
*****
————————
Her heart is pounding.
It's screaming for her to turn around and go back to Lauren.
But as her feet carry her out the door farther away from their apartment and faster than she has the wits to stop, it takes everything in Camila not to break. For the third time.
YOU ARE READING
Except You Love
Fanfiction"my love, i have never gotten over the consequence of you, i don't think i ever will" Lauren and Camila. Inevitable and inseparable. Until they weren't. After four painful years and an ocean apart, Lauren gets a second chance at a first love with Ca...
