Left Behind [Discontinued]

Prologue - Not Quite Ready

It was crowded here, backstage that is. There were people mulling about in various degrees of pace. Most of them had headsets on, indicating that they worked here. Some were barking orders, while others were straining their ears to listen in the too loud area.

In the midst of all of the backstage ruckus, there was one person standing still. And the chaos backstage couldn't match up to this person's inner chaos.

Normani stood in the middle of the area. She hadn't moved for some undefined number of minutes. It was as if she were a statue.

Her eyes, which were slightly widened, weren't particularly trained on anything. Both of her arms were located at their sides. Her left hand was lightly attached to the bottom of the sleeve to her jacket, while her right hand was gently balled into a fist. Her top teeth not so gently met her bottom lip, the enamel straining against the skin.

A thousand thoughts circulated throughout her head as she stood there, but there was only one thing that kept popping up: she was leaving. She was leaving tonight and Normani couldn't do a single thing about it. She couldn't stop her. She's tried for over a year. Hell, everyone has tried for over a year and there was no changing her mind.

Still standing there lost in her thoughts, Normani mentally goes back to the night that she found Camila standing at her and Lauren's apartment door last year.

It was two o'clock in the morning and really, could Camila think of a more inconvenient time to arrive at her ex's and ex best friend's apartment door. It wouldn't be weird at all. It's not like she was there in the middle of the night to break Normani's heart in some way once again. Oh, wait.

She wasn't sure what compelled her to tell Normani first, but here she was – outside at two in the morning.

"Take a deep breath kid. You can do it," she thought to herself as she rapped on their door repeatedly.

She was standing outside for a couple of minutes, waiting to be let into the familiar apartment. A thought in the back of her head told her to stop knocking on the damn door, but she's never been good at listening to social cues – or common sense cues.

When Normani finally opened the door for her, shockingly – not really, Camila almost knocked her on the chest. Normani was shocked to have her standing in front of her at 2am, let alone in the familiar outfit that the girl was wearing.

Camila was wearing Normani's blue "Lyfe" sweater. A sweater that Normani hadn't seen in months and never quite knew where it went. Though, considering she still had one of Camila's the 1975 shirts in her closet, she really shouldn't have been shocked that the other woman had one of hers.

Looking at Camila at her door, she realized that she hadn't seen her at her apartment at wild hours of the night since they broke up in July. In fact, the last time she was there it was to tell her something that led to their breakup. Great.

Clearing her throat, she broke the silence that engulfed them. "Uh, hey Camila?"

The younger woman just blinked at her silently. Her hand was still hanging in the air, balled into a fist. She looked tired and her eyes were a dull tinted red. Looking further, she could find a mixture of anxiety and panic in them as well.

Normani waited a beat for her to respond, but she never really did. Noticing that Camila wasn't responsive made her silently freak out in her head. But of course, she'd never show that. Where Camila wasn't calm and collected, she was and vice versa. That's how the two of them always worked.