Color Your World | Adult F/F Romance [COMPLETE]

Jamie Lovely 1 (new)

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Once upon 1989, Jamie Lovely was born to a grey world. Yes, colors existed, an experience shared by billions of people at any given time, but they were beyond her perception. This was not a genetic anomaly. This did not render her strange. Color was a gift of love, a rite passage that came with age, a secret told to anybody but her. She was born without the ability to perceive the shades of the color wheel, as everyone was. The difference between Jamie and those who pored over The Greymann Color Institute's Guide to Color Differentiation day by day was that Jamie had given up on seeing the rainbow. Colors came with love and love was just a precursor to loss. Jamie had seen enough of that. Twenty-seven-years-old and she had married her grief and the colorless life it promised. She had given up on love.

But love, fledgling and strange and incomprehensible, had not remotely washed its hands of her.

Here was where it started:

Jamie was awake at 2 am after staying in the shop till midnight to prep croissants for the next morning. She was nestled in her bed surrounded by the plushest butter yellow pillows (Hex code #eae455; butter at the perfect temperature for baking cookies) money could buy. She was scrolling through her favorite YouTube channels for something to watch. Honestly she knew what she was going to choose from the start, but she pretended for the sake of plausible deniability. When nothing else leapt out at her, she swiped back to her old standby: the best (the most daring, the funniest) beauty blogger in the game. She'd been watching Color Your World with Kieran Dillahunt since she was seventeen and Kieran was twenty, and in some ways she thought of the other girl as an old friend. They'd never really talked directly--Kieran had hundreds of thousands of followers on this channel alone and she had multiple channels for all her projects--but her videos had been there during the worst moments of Jamie's life and she still considered them a comfort, though Kieran posted less frequently than she had back then.

That was why Jamie was surprised to get a notification that Kieran had posted a new video ten minutes ago. Kieran was just short of famous nowadays. She spent her time jet-setting between fashion events in NYC and LA and hosting parties in Ibiza or Dubai. She had two separate cosmetic lines on shelves at Sephora, was the face of Helzberg Diamonds UK, and had debuted a street fashion line with Adidas at Fashion Week the year before. In short, Kieran, better known by her online handle Dillahunting, was busy, usually too busy for YouTube anymore. Not that Jamie begrudged the older woman her success. Jamie wasn't seventeen and mourning over her parents anymore; she'd finished high school and done the college thing, and now she was doing the single, self-made business owner who don't need no lover thing. Both she and Kieran had moved on from living their whole lives online.

Good.

And yet, the moment Kieran's new video loaded, Jamie's face lit up like it was New Year's Eve 2006. Kieran might have upgraded her accessories and swapped her cheap ombre home bleach job for a Vidal Sassoon blowout in decadent stormcloud (Hex code #4e656a; something between smog and a hurricane), but she was still the same girl who had titled one of her videos, Gel Liner: the Scourge of Our Times and stolen Jamie's grieving teenage heart. For that, Jamie didn't mind staying up a little bit later to give her one more view.