Ink ➳ Camren

Chapter Thirty Four

All rights go to original author.

________________________________________________________________

The second they were alone, which happened to be upstairs in Lauren's bedroom, brought about by Clara's insistence that Lauren take Camila on a tour of the house while she and Taylor cleared away the dinner plates and got dessert ready, Lauren could feel the tension between them.

"So...Seattle, huh?" Camila walked around the unusually large bedroom looking at the pictures on the walls and the odd nick-nacks placed here and there. None of the decor really seemed like Lauren; it looked like something out of a homemaker magazine.

"That's the plan." Lauren sat down on the bed and watched Camila inspect her room.

"And...you already knew about my plans for Cuba." Camila picked up a framed photo of Taylor and Lauren when they were kids. The brunette smiled down at the picture.

"You might have mentioned it...on the night we met."

"...night we met." They said the last part in unison. Camila continued wandering around, picking up keepsakes that she assumed belonged to Lauren, but it all seemed too well placed, like no one had actually ever lived in this room.

Camila turned and looked at Lauren. "I thought that you and Taylor shared a bedroom."

"We did in the old house. My parents bought this one near the end of our last year of college and we finally got our own rooms."

Camila sat down next to Lauren. "I bet that was exciting."

Lauren shrugged. "I was hardly here anyway."

Camila tried her best not to allow her brain to follow the line of thinking which would lead her from Lauren hardly slept in her own bed to who's bed was she sleeping in then? Instead, feeling a bit unreasonably jealous, she focused on what she did have control over. "When were you going to tell me about your internship?" It came out harsher than she had expected.

"When were you going to tell me about Cuba?" Lauren met Camila's questioning eyes with her own challenging ones. The Jauregui Bitch Glare that Taylor had been shooting at her mother all evening and that Clara had been shooting at Chris each time he said something vulgar appeared quite naturally on Lauren's face.

Seems to be a family trait. It was the first time that Camila had received such a look from her girlfriend and it was also the first time that referring to Lauren as her girlfriend didn't feel completely foreign. If the brunette wouldn't have immediately put up her shields upon hearing Lauren's response, she would have been happy to know that girlfriend wasn't as scary as she had always imagined it to be.

"No need for that, is there? You've known this whole time anyway. What's the difference? You could have told me that you knew. You could have brought it up." Camila folded her arms across her chest. The atmosphere in the room was changing rapidly along with the beating of Camila's heart.

Lauren's eyes went wide as she turned to look at Camila. "Are you fucking joking, Camila?"

Camila's heart was now in her throat. Wrong thing to say. Part of her desperately wanted to slam the breaks, turn the car around, rewind the last few minutes, and take a different route, but the other part had four years of the debate team fueling her verbal fire.

"Joking? Yes, Lauren. You having the advantage of remembering our first night together has been a laugh riot. And it's really wonderful being reminded of it several times a day too."

"Reminded of it?" Lauren got to her feet and turned to face Camila who was looking up at her with steely eyes. "We've hardly spoken of it, because of this." Lauren gestured to Camila sitting on the bed with a sour look on her face. "You get so fucking defensive."