Wherever You Go [Katy Perry Fan fiction]

Chapter Fifty-Eight

It must have been around four when I left the studio, with Shannon riding shotgun in my Maserati as we drove to a small cafe I always liked to go to after a session in the studio, just a few blocks away from Capitol. My mind was actually thinking on one lady in particular that had played an important role in my life for quite some years now. A person who travelled the world with me and never complained when I growled at her in the morning, but, in fact found it hilarious when I would shoot her dirty looks across the room before throwing a thick pillow at her and insisting that she left me for another half hour's sleep. Tamra could never take me too seriously. I thought about how distant we've been with one another these past two weeks or so. Having spent so much time together over the past, what feels like decades, few years, I guess we sort of learned the ways of each other. Tamra knew that there was something I was keeping from the team, and from her.
She's always a person I open up to, whether it's about something stupid that's playing on my mind or whether it's something that I get in really deep about. She's always there. Tamra knows that the respect that she has for me goes both ways, which is why I felt the sudden emotion of guilt writhe through my body at the fact I'm not letting her in on something that could possibly change everything in my life.
I had my hands holding firmly onto my steering wheel and my RayBans sat comfortably on my nose when I turned to face my strangely quiet best friend, looking at her through the dark lenses of my glasses. She rested her brown head of hair in the palm of her hand, her elbow leaning on the side of her car door. Her lips were in a pout as she chewed on the inside of her mouth. That was the face I recognized as being Shan's thinking face.
I focused my eyes back on the road again, slowing down as the lights switch from green, to amber to red. I sat in the seat of my car watching as a young girl around the age of twenty, walked across the road arm in arm with a woman who looked to be in her late forties. Their eyes were both of a dark, warm coloured brown, similar to the colour of the hair they both also shared. I guessed by the similarities in them both that they were mother and daughter, and just the sight brought a small smile to my face. It made me think of me when I'm that age. Me and Sammie still doing our shopping trips to the mall and getting our nails done.
"Who does that remind you of?" I say to Shan, nodding my head at the dark haired women crossing the road. I look at her and smirk.
"You and Sammie?"
I laugh, "Yeah. Except, we'll both probably be trying to trip the other one up because you know that we can't even walk in a straight line sometimes without being complete idiots," I look over at Shannon as I'm speaking, my laughing slowly fading out when I see that she isn't making an effort to laugh with me, but more that her attention was somewhere else and she probably wasn't even listening to me. "Shan?"
"What?"
I let out a heavy breath through my nose, quickly looking back at the road to see the lights switching back to green. "You're just somewhere else today." I mutter, more to myself than Shannon, but she hears me anyway and I feel her look at me. I take my foot off of the break and allow the car to continue along the road.
"Sorry, I'm just, tired I guess."
"You know, that's the exact excuse I use when I don't want to say the real reason behind the way I'm acting."
"The way I'm acting? And what does that mean?" Shannon's voice definitely allows me to hear that she's slightly annoyed at my choice of words. I look at her for a short second or two, seeing her looking back at me with her eyebrows creased into a V shape, waiting for me to respond.
"It just means that I was slightly disappointed when we drove past those five shirtless guys back there and you didn't even try to honk my horn," I smirk, hoping to add a bit of light into the situation, and as much as I did expect Shannon to laugh at my comment despite her weird mood, she didn't even give me a smile. "You usually can't resist making me look like an idiot, Shan," I once again attempt. But nothing. I shake my head. The Shannon I know would definitely take every moment she had to make me look like an idiot or shoot a dig at me. "And this is the part where you're supposed to say 'Katy, you don't need my help to make you look like an idiot'."
"You do have a habit of doing that all by yourself." I feel myself smile after she's spoken. A dig, but a good dig. I was getting somewhere. Me and Shannon are always at our best when we wind each other up. That's our thing. The first day we met, I remember wearing a navy blue and white polka dot dress, to which Shannon was quick to tell me, looked like something Dolly Parton would have worn in the 60's. That was probably around twenty minutes into our friendship, before I knew anything about her, before I even knew her name, in fact. And the rest is history. I haven't been able to shake the little lady from my side since that very day. Not that I would even dream of complaining. Shannon Woodward has picked my broken pieces off of the floor and helped me glue them back together at one point in my life. Shannon is the one who tells me when I'm right and when I'm wrong, but takes my back no matter what. I sometimes wonder how different my life would be without her.
"So now you've reminded me of how much of an idiot I make myself look sometimes-" I send her a playful glare, "are you going to talk to me about what's on your mind? Because you know that I will force it out of you if I have to."
"I'm just stressed, and that's the honest truth." Shan responds through a sigh. A heavy, exhausted sigh. "I've not had a day off in fuck knows how long, one of the producers at work won't stop being an ass and to top it off I've just found out that my best friend has got cancer. Not to mention Greg not knowing when to shut his mouth." Her words come out quickly and full of frustration, as Shannon's hands slid between the strands of her dark hair, gripping tightly to the roots. "How are you so calm about all of this? Because I feel like I'm going insane."
"If you could see inside of my head, Shan, you'd think otherwise." I turn my head to face her, giving the petite chocolate brown eyed woman next to me a comforting smile. A smile that said 'I understand. I get it. You're not on your own'. "But I've got to be strong for myself and for my family, and when I say family, that includes you."
I stop the car outside the cafe - a small building on the corner of Adlington Street beneath a block of empty apartments. Out of the way from the heart of Los Angeles. Just how I liked it.
The engine, that was currently the only sound in the car, comes to a stop when I take my keys out of the ignition, and everything is then completely silent. So silent that you could hear a pin drop from the other side of the road. Shannon was just looking ahead of her, out of the car window, still chewing on that same place in the inside of her mouth. The hand that held my keys drops into my lap whilst I look at my best friend, seeing how tired and exhausted she looked. She looked like I normally do around four months into a tour.
I swallow the little bit of moisture in my mouth, "I always thought you were the tough one." I admit quietly. "I always envied how easily you're able to pick your shit back up off the floor and carry on." I placed my hand softly on Shan's shoulder, feeling my fingertips lightly tickle the skin of her neck unintentionally. "I guess even Shannon Woodward's not always able to do that, huh?"
Shannon turns her head to look at me, until I have two big brown eyes piercing into my own. A glossy layer is the first thing I notice, making the deep shade of brown in her eyes just the slightest bit lighter, and I see that she's fighting away the tears that are threatening to fall down her pale cheeks. Maybe I had been so blinded recently by my own fears and inhibitions, that I was unable to notice my bestfriend's slowly deteriorating self. I hadn't realised the lack of sleep she had been getting, or the stress work was causing her. Now, she sat beside me with darkened skin under her eyes and eyelids that looked as though they were painful to keep open. "And that's okay, Shan. That's always going to be okay. You don't have to pretend with me, just because I'm sick. I'm going to get through this shit, I know I am."
"You are strong enough to, you know," and for the first time, I see Shannon give me a proper smile. A smile that said 'don't give up, I'm here for you'. I cried on her shoulder just days ago and didn't even realise just how frightened she must have been once I had left, and she was alone, dealing with those thoughts of what might happen, on her own. The shock and the realization. Shannon needed assurance, she needed to know that I wasn't giving up. Although, I know that Shan knows me far too well to ever believe that I would go down without a fight.
"I know. I've got far too much to live for." I look out of the window in front of me, just about being able to see the beautiful view of the calm sea glistening beneath the sun. Everything's quiet again. I know that Shannon's looking at it too, except now she looks a lot calmer herself. Her eyebrows no longer crease along her forehead and her eyes sit with a more softer look."I laid in bed the other night, and I thought about things that I look forward to in the future. I thought about Oliver and my kids. I want to get married, Shan," a smile appears on my lips at the thought, and even though I'm not looking in her direction, I know she's smiling too. "I want to travel the world again. I want to see Sammie perform on stage in front of thousands of people for the first time, see her walk down the aisle in a white dress, and be able to stand there cheering at Lucas' graduation." I feel a single tear fall from the corner of my eye, tickling my skin as it slowly slides down my cheek. I use the back of my hand to quickly wipe it away. I knew that if Shannon saw me crying it would only set her off, and then the sight of Shannon crying would make me even worse. I had cried far too much these past few days. So much that it had actually tired me out. I didn't want to taste those salty tears right now. "Then there's the small things like teaching Lucas how to drive, him getting his first car, Sammie buying her first house and me helping her move in. I mean I know all that stuff is just normal family stuff, but it's things that I want to be around for. They're the things I'm living for, and the thought of not getting to see my kids grow up and have children of their own is just...that terrifies me. That's why I'm so sure that I'm not going to let this beat me. I'm not letting anything take me away from my family, Shan."
The pair of us face the other after I have spoken, to which I notice a smirk wiped right across her face. "Always were a stubborn one, weren't you?" She huffs, "and you ask where Samantha gets it from."
We climb out of the car and into the humid air outside, both of us still chuckling to ourselves at Shannon's comment, which to be fair, was pretty correct. I am always the one telling Sammie just how stubborn she can be, when it's me that she gets it from. I'm the exact same. I sometimes forget just how similar me and that teenage daughter of mine are. I think the fact she used to know me as her sister adds to it, because when you have an older sister, they act as your role model. It's someone to look up to; someone you share things with and open up to at a young age, about things you don't really tell your parents. I guess that's one of the positives of Sammie growing up around me the way she did. She felt comforted to know that she had that older sister that would take her back and was there to talk to when she needed.
"She learns from the best," I say to Shan, pulling up the hood of the grey jacket I had thrown on earlier.
I tuck the loose strands under the material so that not a strand of black hair is visible. My eyes still remain shielded behind my glasses. I called it a way to stop recognition. Not that it ever fucking worked though. I could be covering every single inch of my body, yet the paparazzi would still know it's me. Sometimes I wonder just how their minds worked, or if I have a GPS attached to me somewhere so that they can track my every move. Yeah, those are the things you think about when you're in this position.
The bell above the door rings when me and Shannon step into the air-conned building, and two smiles from the ladies behind the counter greeted us. Politely, I smile back. I had been here a few times in the past so I was quite familiar with the workers, both around their late fifties, but somehow not a grey hair in sight, though I had never actually gotten around to asking which one of them was Kathy, as the words 'Kathy's Cafe' hung above the door.
"Afternoon, are you ready to order?" A thick southern accent asks me. I look up to notice the smaller lady of the two stood in front of me on the other side of the counter, her long, manicured fingers placed on the glass surface that separated us, leaving small traces of her fingerprints after she moved her hand away. She wore a warm smile, something that reminded me a lot of my mother. It was one of those smiles that immediately made you feel comfortable when you were speaking to her. Again, just like my mother.
"We are. Just two coffees, please," I figured a coffee was what Shan needed right now. "To drink in, not take out."
"If you would both like to take a seat, we'll bring them over to you in a couple of minutes." With a nod and a thank you, both me and Shannon make our way over to the only window table in the cafe. A table that allowed us to look out at the palm trees that stood tall on the beach and the sun that was just about to set for the night. I noticed how red the sky had gone, a sign that tomorrow was going to be another beautiful day; not that we ever expected anything else here in California. That was something you could almost guarantee - waking up to sunshine tomorrow morning.
I peered over the top of my glasses to look at Shannon, who sat picking at her nails as we waited for our coffee, her eyes focused on me. "How's everything back in the Hudson/James household?" She asks me, now placing both of her hands on the table. "Have you told Oliver?"
In response to Shannon's question, or questions, should I say, I slowly nod my head. "Yeah, Ol knows everything."
"How did he take it?" I lift up my shoulders and drop them back down, "as well as he could have done, I suppose. He just kind of froze to begin with and did everything he could to convince himself that it wasn't happening, but," I use my warm tongue to allow a little bit of moisture to my lips. "Oliver knows the doctors aren't wrong, not matter how much he tried to tell himself otherwise."
My head to slowly falls into the palm of my hand, feeling the coldness of my skin cool down my hot cheeks. When I look back up at my best friend, I see that she's done the same. Both of our elbows rest against the wooden table, propping up our head in our hands.
A heavy breath comes from Shannon direction, "And how is he?"
"He's- he's okay. We've spent a lot of time talking about it and, I know that he wants to try and be the strong one for our family. He doesn't want me to worry about him, you know? Which I can't help because I know how much this is hurting him. I know that he's terrified." I place my free hand across my chest, "I'm terrified myself, Shan. But, honestly? He really has been amazing. I can just sit there and it will hit me like a ton of bricks. I don't cry, or even mention it, but I feel the palms of my hands start to get all sweaty and my heart starts beating really quickly, and it's as if something has clicked inside of him...and he's there seconds later, his arms around me and telling me he loves me."
A smile is present on her face. I think it comforted her a lot to know now that I wasn't at home struggling with this on my own. I had the man I loved giving me his support and doing everything he could to be the best to me he could be, especially right now. I couldn't possibly ask anymore of him. Oliver's one of them people who has a heart so warm, so caring, that he comes across as selfless, because never will he put himself first. In Oliver's mind, his existence is never as important as those around him. But without Oliver, my life would be nothing, because then I wouldn't have him, and I wouldn't have my children.