Demi Lovato Imagines

Screening

Nothing. Which, seeing as you're on the verge of losing everything, pulls you in further. You see her sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at something in her hands. Her face is still, blank even. Unlike the usual animation you're used to when she gets home from work and is asking excitedly about your day. How you'll miss it. How you'll cope? You shake that thought out your head, focusing on the person who has illuminated your life for the past eleven months. 

You shuffle over towards the bed, watching for any sign that she doesn't want you there. When she doesn't move, you slowly lower yourself onto the space beside her, feeling the soft cotton sheets under your thighs. Despite this, you keep your spine stiff as a rod. You see now, in her hands, is an unlabelled disk, gleaming inside a plastic wallet.

"Do you want me to go somewhere else tonight?" you ask in a low voice. "To give you time?"

She frowns, a look of genuine confusion. "What?"

"I can go to a hotel. Just until you feel able to talk."

That's it, take it nice and easy. No need for snap decisions that will see you permanently banned from her residence. There's another long pause until she finally responds.

"Why?"

"I just...I don't know, I just feel like you're wanting some space? Away from me?"

She's looking at you, that is, her eyes float in your general vicinity. But they retain the glassy quality of someone not really seeing anything. 

"I don't want you to go," she mumbles, almost as if she's speaking another language. But you take it, all the same; your whole body sinks into the mattress, your spine folding over on itself. 

"Okay," you breathe. Okay, good. "I'll stay." You drop your gaze to her hands, to the disk. "Do you...want to talk about that?"

That. That which you don't even have a name for. That which, for some reason, appears to have caused this whole scenario in which your stomach has fallen out of your ass. She runs her thumb along the edge of the plastic, leaving an angry red mark on her skin. You say nothing, do nothing. 

"It's finished," she says, so quietly you almost didn't catch it.

"Finished?"

"The...documentary."

It takes your brain a second to catch up. The documentary? Yes, the documentary she told you was scrapped because of everything that happened in 2018. The documentary you heard was destroyed because of how irrelevant, how negligible the content now was, that there was no point in keeping it. The documentary she cried about - the first time she ever cried in front of you - because she hated to think how in denial she was at that point in her life. And you held her, blind-sighted by her sudden shift in mood that evening on Roe beach, whispering in her ear that that was then, and this is now, and things are different. 

And you thought that was it.

"I thought," you begin, choosing your words as carefully as one picking their way across a minefield, "that you weren't releasing that documentary?"

She releases a puff of air from her nose, a sort of sad laugh. "We're not. It's a different one."

You press your knees together, pinching your hands between them. Immediately, you feel your heart pulsating in your thumbs. "Okay." Then, unable to decipher the answer yourself, "So, you made another documentary?"

She nods, wordless. 

"And...and this is it finished?" you ask, pointing your eyes towards the disk. "This new documentary?"