Gone Away are the Golden Days (One Shot)

(One Shot)

She tells her she looks beautiful, and Camila perks up and starts spinning around like the complete dork she never really stopped being. Lauren watches her dance around to the radio playing over the store in the dress she's getting married in in a month, and she starts longing for a time that has been gone for quite a while.

Camila spends the night because it's part of their monthly tradition, and Lauren bites her tongue when she wants to ask if it'll be the last one. It tastes bitter and she knows it.

"I can't believe my life turned out like this," Camila whispers in the dark once they're in Lauren's bed. There's a space between them that used to never exist when they shared a bed, and Lauren doesn't know who is to blame anymore. "I never thought I'd be this happy."

"I'm happy for you, Camz."

And she means it, she thinks.

-

Lauren throws her a bacholorette party three days before the wedding that gets completely out of hand. Dinah gets wasted and accidentally punches a hole in the bathroom wall. Marielle ends up having to hold Normani's hair all night while she throws up. Strippers disguised as policeman come, and Ally profusely apologizes for their volume before she realizes they actually getting arrested. There's cake and enough alcohol to kill them.

When everything has winded down around five in the morning, Camila slumps next to Lauren on the couch and leans her head on her shoulder. She intertwines their fingers, and it's so strangely intimate that Lauren feels seventeen and infatuated all over again.

They sit that way for a while and the house is so quiet that Lauren can hear Camila's whisper clearly, even if she's kind of drunk.

"I'm scared."

"Scared of what?"

"Everything changing."

Lauren doesn't have the heart to tell her that everything already had.

-

Camila asks her to help her with her vows, and Lauren can't look her in the eye when she reads them out loud in the quiet space of her apartment. The words she'd written were beautiful and honest and Lauren didn't understand the feeling of betrayal in her gut, then the guilt that came after she realized she wished Camila had either written them for her or not at all.

It rises to her throat, and she almost chokes on it when Camila finishes and looks up with an embarrassed gaze, wanting Lauren's approval. Lauren had always been better with words.

It takes her a moment, and she hopes Camila will think the speech just choked her up, but she finally realeases a breath and says, "He's really lucky."

-

Lauren stays up almost all night crying the night of the rehearsal dinner because it finally all resonates in her mind. She realizes the concrete unavailability of her best friend that would be sealed in a few days, and it stings because this idea that she and Camila would always be it for each other wasn't true anymore.

She never took that step, and Camila built the fucking stairs for her a long time ago. Nothing ever really happened between them physically, but it didn't feel that way. It was always more than a friendship, but less than a relationship and neither of them ever knew what to think other than that they wished it didn't have to be the way it was. They both knew it. They just didn't talk about it. There was always that step to take, they were both just scared to death the other girl wouldn't take it with them.

They were a ticking bomb that turned out to just be a dud. So Lauren cried and cried hard for a time when she still had time.

She knows that she should bite her tongue. She knows it's too damn late. She knows it's unfair. She knows it's selfish. She knows all of it, but she doesn't stop herself.