Stand By Me - Leah Williamson

There's A Fire Inside Of You

Kameron's POV

The girls were nothing short of incredible, all of them so ridiculously talented, which I knew from seeing them play in the past, each person would bring so much to this team. And all of them so welcoming. 

Just before we'd entered the cafeteria, I'd dropped Leah's hand, it was more of a mutual drop, to be fair, neither of us wanted people speculating things and on big tournaments like this, there was always camera crew filming, we didn't want any footage which would lead to more media stories, even if we were just in the background of a shot people would pick up on it, everyone had too much time on their hands, these days.

When I walked in, Beth ran towards me, I'd text her before telling her that I was coming and to tell the other girls that knew the plan, to completely ignore all the bad stuff and let me do my thing. I didn't want their worries holding me back from the team, or to affect them either. 

"Oh my god! You're here!" Beth screamed, I ran up to her, launching myself at her and wrapping my legs around her waist as she spun me around, it was always surprisingly easy to completely fall for the act myself, it was like a switch in my brain, one that I was very thankful for. In those moments, the laughter felt genuine, I didn't even have to think about it anymore, it just happened. "I've saved you and Leah a seat at our table," she pulled us over to the table with Alessia, Keira, Ella, Lucy and Jill on. 

I walked behind Alessia and wrapped my arms around her, giving her a quick hug from behind, we hadn't even had a casual conversation yet, everything had happened so fast in the past few days, I was happy to just be in a seemingly normal environment. Well, only seemingly normal for very few people alive, and I was lucky to be one of them.

"Shall we get our food then?" Leah put her hand on my back.

"Yeah, let's go."

I picked up one of the fruit bowels and a granola yogurt, everything here looked so well prepared, our staff had always looked after us so well, we were treated like champions, hopefully we could actually become champions as well, but none of us wanted to get ahead of ourselves. 

People thought we would do well in the Euros, especially on home turf, but there were so many other incredible teams, Spain was the team I was most admirable of, their style of football was just beautiful. We didn't have a great track record against Germany either, but we just had to do whatever we could. I'd treasure every moment of this, win or loose, because there was never going to be an opportunity like this again. 

Leah and I sat back down at the table, I was next to Lucy and opposite Alessia, Leah sat diagonal to me. 

"You all good?" Jill asked me as she sipped her tea. 

"Yeah, I'm feeling good, ready for camp," I responded a smile covering my face. 

"I'm glad," she replied. 

"So what's happening today?" I felt ready to fully launch myself into the Lioness team, whatever personal issues I had were not going to hold me back from this.
Now that I was here, and had seen everyone, I knew that I couldn't let this chance slip me by. It should be easy to keep myself so busy here that I could forget everything bad going on in my life, I just had to keep distracted, keep my eye on the ball. Quite literally.

"It's just team stuff today," Alessia explained, "We all hang out, though I think Sarina wants to speak to each of us one on one today. Then we have a lunch with all the coaches and everyone behind the scenes so we can all get to know each other as one big team. And then in the afternoon we have some checks. It's pretty chilled."