out of my mind

five

Weeks pass. Camila starts skipping school. Her high school is one of the places that never follows its policies about attendance, so for the time being, she knows she's safe.

Before she goes to Lauren's place again for the fourth time in a weeklong span, she opens the drawer, looks at the knife her mother gave her.

She never keeps in its box.

Lauren doesn't remind her of Sofi, she never will. 

But Camila worries. It may not be a knife this time, but it will be something. She neither knows or cares how this information sticks itself into her throat when Lauren guides her to the bed, but it pushes itself out like bile as Lauren starts to slip Camila's shirt off.

"I don't want you to die because of me."

She has a tendency to break everything she loves, like porcelain flowers that slip out of her hands.

Lauren chuckles a bit. "That isn't going to happen, babe."

"I don't know that." I am the one that stamps the cherries under my foot. I am the one that holds precious things and lets them drain from between my fingers.

I killed my sister.

"You're so funny, baby, but nothing is going to happen." Lauren's chuckles have dissolved into a sly smile. She already knows what she wants, and she is a master at getting it. "Now, take your shirt off for me, eh?"

"Lauren -"

"Nothing will happen." the older girl's tone is dripping with sternness, enough to halt whatever else Camila was planning on saying, the words deciding to lodge themselves in her throat this time. She slinks her body to hover above Camila as she takes her shirt off without anymore protest.

Camila finds her sense of awareness again at five in the afternoon, when she wakes up naked, and nestled into the bed. The sheets had been thrown off the bed in the flurry that had followed since her attempt at the conversation with Lauren.

What she needed to say could be saved for later, Camila supposed, as she sat up in the queen bed, to see Lauren on her right, fast asleep. Her lover was clad in a black lace bra and jeans, green eyes hiding themselves in the curtain of sleep; her feet were bare. There was a smile on her face as she slept that reminded Camila of Mona Lisa, and a small trail of drool that trickled from the corner of her mouth down to the pillow cushioning her head.

Camila grins and wriggles her clothes back on.

"You're ethereal to me," she whispers, already knowing how much of a deep sleeper Lauren is. "You seem to make the oxygen in the atmosphere disappear whenever I see you. You twist everything I know about myself until all I want is to be with you. How do you do this? You - you draw me in so easily, our bodies are drugs that we're each addicted to...but I think I'm in love with you, Lauren."

The beeping of her Uber ride outside alerts her to how late she is. She couldn't care less.

"I promise I won't hurt you." she murmurs, before getting out of the bed and covering Lauren up in the sheets that were on the floor - that she almost tripped on.

She closes the door with a smile on her face and a blush in her cheeks, moonstruck by an illusion.