Camila lay in bed, sleepy but sleepless. She'd bought coffee on her way home from Lauren's, and that had been a mistake. She closed her eyes as her mind wandered back to the actress. Camila felt desperate to dissect every minute detail of this situation. She wanted to think of every question so that every question could be answered. Lauren was Laura and Laura was Lauren. It all seemed impossible.
Her thoughts drifted, dancing along the edges of her consciousness. Random images floated through her mind: a pen, a flower, a volleyball. She thought she might finally fall asleep. But then the actress' face popped back into her mind.
Lauren Jauregui was gay. It was this that Camila came back to. It was this she was having the hardest time believing. She wanted not to focus on what should've been a trivial matter. After all, Camila was not the sort of person that cared about the private lives of celebrities. It should have been an afterthought. But Lauren Jauregui was gay and Camila could not get past it. She couldn't get past the actress admitting to it in the first place.
How much would information like that be worth to the media? Probably a lot. And Lauren Jauregui trusted Camila not to tell.
The thoughts wandered again. Laura was Lauren. Did that mean that Lauren had really never dated anyone? It seemed inconceivable. What of Adrian Cruz? And who was Saucy Fipbic? Someone Camila might recognize? It felt like detective work, piecing together all of the vague details from Laura's emails and trying to make sense of them against the backdrop of Lauren's life. She couldn't remember Saucy's real name and it was driving Camila insane.
She opened her eyes and reached over the edge of the bed to get the laptop. She silently berated herself, but that didn't stop her. Moments later she was entering keywords into a search engine. Lauren had been in New York in December and if Camila recalled correctly that's when the date with Saucy had occurred.
It took some time and quite a lot of clicking around from link to link and blog to blog but eventually she found what she'd been looking for. The blog post title read: "Lauren Jauregui Samples New York's Fine Cuisine" and there was a candid picture of the actress standing next to a beautiful brunette. The article beneath the photo said, "Lauren Jauregui dines out with writer-director/ex-Broadway star, Normani Kordei, at New York's Gray's Papaya."
The article went on, but Camila stopped reading. She stared at the picture for a long time. So that was Saucy Fipbic. Not at all what Camila had pictured. The Saucy in her mind had always been somewhat plain and pimply, with shaved, boyish hair and maybe an excessive number of piercings. But Normani Kordei was anything but plain or pimply, and her hair was long and straight and perfectly styled. The two of them made a stunning couple.
But were they a couple? Camila went back into her email archives to see if she'd somehow missed an email or two pertaining to the current status of Lauren and Normani's relationship. The last Camila had on the subject was an email in which Saucy had been named the queen of mixed signals. "Hmm," said Camila, switching back to her Internet browser. Finding information about Normani Kordei was easier than Camila had expected. The woman was everywhere, even MySpace. Her details there read: single, lesbian. Camila spent some time looking at random pictures and reading people's comments before deciding she'd done enough stalking for the day.
Camila jumped when the door to her room opened suddenly. Heart pounding fast, she frowned at Dinah. "Please learn to knock," she said.
"Oh whatever, like you're ever in here doing anything naughty." Dinah leaned against the doorway. "You look like crap. Have you slept?"
Camila placed the laptop back on the floor and yawned. She shook her head by way of an answer.
"Okay, I'll leave you alone in a sec, then. Are you busy tonight?"
