One Shots | camren

love made in the lab

Camila has never really appreciated why windows in tall buildings are always sealed. Like, maybe she just wants to crack a window open every once in a while, get some fresh air or something.

Well, she's never appreciated sealed windows until now that is. Right now, she's two seconds away from jumping out of their seventh floor research lab and she honestly, probably would have, had the windows not been sealed. So she has whoever invented sealed windows to thank for saving her life.

It's almost nine at night and she's still at the lab running this stupid experiment. She's been working since eight in the morning and she's exhausted. Camila is spending her gap year between graduating college and matriculating into medical school working in a research laboratory in Columbia University. She'd already gotten accepted to a few schools, but her heart is pretty much set on Columbia. It's where she went to college and has spent the last three years getting involved in their neurology department's research on neurodegenerative diseases, so she really can't think of anywhere else she'd rather go.

Camila has also fallen in love with New York so that all but seals the deal. Right now, however, she's anything but pleased about working in this lab. Their lab is getting ready to submit a grant proposal and so everyone is working hard to generate as much clear and concrete data for their preliminary results. This means late nights and early mornings in the lab and Camila just misses her bed and her cat and now the centrifuge machine isn't working.

She was on her last run on this dumb centrifuge when it just stopped working. She's called some people that work in the same lab and they advised that she turn it off and wait another 30 minutes?! and just try again, so that's what she's doing: waiting and contemplating about jumping out the window.

--

Lauren is mopping the floor on the seventh floor of Columbia's Center for Neurological Research lab while trying to read her notes for her Torts class the next morning. She took a full-time job as a custodian in the building because it's the only full-time job she could secure while still attending law school. As a first year J.D. student at Columbia, there isn't much flexibility in her schedule. Her parents cut her off right before she started undergrad when she came out to them, so she's been fending for herself for a while. A full ride to Columbia for pre-law meant she was able to work and save money to be able to continue living in New York and attend law school. Student loans is covering the rest of her tuition.

Lauren doesn't care much about spending the rest of her life paying off student loans if she can have her dream career. She'd wanted to be a lawyer since she can remember hanging out in her dad's office at the age of six, marveling at how her dad worked tirelessly for other people. She's sad that her hero won't see her achieve her dreams, but she likes to imagine her dad is somewhat still proud of her.

So now, she's taking classes during the day, and working as a custodian from 5 pm to about 1 in the morning. She doesn't get much sleep or rest in between school and work and studying, but her eyes are on the prize so she makes it work. Unfortunately, however, that doesn't give her much time to build real relationships, so casual, no-strings attached hook-ups will have to do. Her many one-night stands and lack of commitment may also have everything to do with abandonment issues she's brushed to the back of her mind.

She's looking at the different examples of non-contractual wrongs most frequently covered in tort cases when she hears a very frustrated "Ughh!" coming from one of the labs on the floor. She immediately goes over to the source and figures it's the brunette that she always sees working late as of recently.

Lauren and the girl has this sort of implicit acquaintance kind of relationship where they don't really know each other's names, but they've seen each other so much the last few weeks that they're on a wave-and-smile-at-each-other basis now. The brunette works on both the sixth and seventh floors and uses multiple lab rooms for her experiments, depending on what equipment she needs.