Your Love Is My Drug (Camren)

13. The Comfort of You

Chapter 13

It turned out to be vastly different than 'okay' when Camila stopped using so much.

Sympathies and praise didn't touch her the way they should have when she was so uncomfortable and irritable or, oppositely, anxious and jittery, jumpy. Lauren's sincere words of praise didn't get under her skin they usually would have, but instead barely scratched the surface. They didn't make Camila think she was strong enough to do this for longer than a few days.

A dark cloud settled over Camila whenever she started to think that maybe she could do this for longer than Florida. A nagging voice at the back of her head told her that she was sorely mistaken about that. She could hear it over her own voice, over Lauren's. Camila could hear it even when the voice had long gone and the words were just a memory; a notion that had crept under her skin the way she wanted Lauren's beliefs to, like an antidote to the poison coursing through her.

The times when Lauren would notice Camila was discomforted and tell her it was okay, sometimes with a touch to her hand or a run of her fingers through soft hair, Camila wanted to believe in it. It had been a long time since she believed in anything, since she submitted herself in such a wholly way. It wasn't that she didn't want to surrender, it was that she couldn't. She didn't remember how.

She wanted to be sure of something. Anything. Right now, all Camila was almost sure of was a dark fear that she understood to be a painful reality; that the next week was going to be preparing for an Oscar winning role. Once that was out of the way, she was going to fall right back down again.

When a frown or a sigh was the only way to challenge that, Lauren took Camila's expressiveness and vocality for pain every time and reiterated her support. All it did was press play on that voice again, drowning out any placations Lauren, or even herself, may have had.

But it was okay.

Lauren was there with no decent pain medication —it was the soft stuff, not the good kind that would really take more than an edge off— and no way to call for help from someone who would know where to go for it, assuring her that the pain would go away eventually.

There. That made it all better. Whew, what a relief. Eventually she'd be okay.

Eventually she would stop looking and feeling like a walking corpse.

Camila didn't express any of that snark but she felt validated enough to think it bitterly as each hit barely took the edge off long enough to concentrate on everyday life and, well, recording an album. The justification disappeared each time she thought about how the current reality was that she was using less. She was really doing it. It disappeared each time she saw Lauren doing little things to help her, and then Camila felt like a bitch.

Lauren had talked to her a lot about how to start acting the way she wanted to be perceived by people. Even if she was having an awful day, let it be a last resort that she let the press know about it. Camila had already gathered such information for herself but it didn't hurt to be reiterated being as she'd been praying for someone to even look at her the wrong way this morning.

It didn't help that Lauren refused to take the bus and arranged for a car to pick them up and take them to her place so she could freshen up. There was nobody to catch in the act. It wasn't as if Lauren's driver —some middle-aged man named Andrew— was giving her the evils through the back view mirror. He didn't look at her at all, except for those two times when he asked if she was all right and to tell her that there was water and aspirin in the front that would get rid of that hangover for her. If she wanted it, of course.

He was being nice, she was sure of it. But it was still easier for Camila to be annoyed by it and will Lauren to hurry the hell up before she blew chunks in the back.