To You, Graceless (CAMREN)

4 - Remember to Breathe

***To make the cop thing a tad bit realistic, Camila is a tad taller in this story. Haha! Maybe like 5'5''. Idk. Oh and about the hotel room, I wrote about how it looked like in the first chapter. I just forgot to mention it in Ch3 notes. Whoops. I still DO NOT proofread and this was over 13500 words when I projected 8k. Gotta stop writing long chapters, man. Also, this could use tons upon tons of tweaking to fit more details but I am so lazy. Maybe during the comprehensive editing.

It didn't make sense.

How Camila made it back to her childhood home was beyond her. As far as she was concerned, teleportation was still impossible.

The last she remembered was Lauren's mouth upon every surface of her heated skin, agitating every cell and atom of her body, and propelling her to breathtaking heights that she had never been in.

Man, was it a better sedative than the pills that forced her into the arms of slumber when her mind would defiantly refuse to just shut up.

But she could not recall ever leaving Las Vegas, and having no memory of ever completing her reconnaissance mission felt horrific. She dreaded it. That would mean she failed without even having a chance to. She could just picture her chief's all too familiar condescending stare and the poorly masked disappointment in her FBI contact's face, and she was just about ready to hurl.

It didn't make sense.

Camila found herself in her old room, surrounded by her medals for academic excellence, her one-year-old guitar, posters and CDs of indie bands most of her peers had never heard of, a pile of dirty laundry, a huddle of dirtier shoes and the chaos of homework and notes atop her desk.

Time seemed to have been stilled and the room looked to be perfectly inhabited, as if she had never left. Dust had not even settled except for her bedside lamp. Her mother had been nagging her to clean that thing and each time, she'd swear she would do it but would end up forgetting eventually.

But it was her old room and it was how she left it as a free-spirited 14-year-old. She was somehow home, in a place she had not set foot in since middle school.

It was how it looked like before something happened, except there was one thing missing.

And it still didn't make sense.

Time travel was as ridiculous a notion as teleportation, wasn't it?

It wasn't a kiss of nostalgia that brought her back. It wasn't a wistful recollection to have been situated in the same place but with darkness enveloping everything in sight. Her skin tingled with dread and an inexplicable weight bore down on her shoulder as every ounce of her strength was withdrawn from her body. Her chest was tight and her heartbeats racked her ribs with a purpose; her body was bracing for the worst and it sure as hell wasn't just a recollection.

She was about to live it again.

It just seemed too real.

There was only one touch left, the first domino falling and her vision was immediately drawn towards the empty pizza box littered by oil and three crusts by her feet and a can of soda right next to it. It was upright and its contents were still in the cylinder.

Camila was careful and she refused to move.

If one thing didn't happen, the event that followed it would be cancelled out, right?

It was only logical. Except it wasn't logic that projected that memory.

But as she watched closely, there was another person in the room and because of that, she knew that it wasn't up to her; nothing ever was.