STILL THE ONE

Chapter 12 - You're The Feelin' I'm Missing

I'm in Toronto and I got this view
But I might as well be in a hotel room, yeah
It doesn't matter 'cause I'm so consumed
Spending all my nights reading texts from you

Oh, I'm good at keepin' my distance
I know that you're the feelin' I'm missing
You know that I hate to admit it
But everything means nothin' if I can't have you

I can't write one song that's not about you
Can't drink without thinkin' about you
Is it too late to tell you that
Everything means nothing if I can't have you?

Christmas meant family and here she was surrounded by hers. Her parents, sister and extended family, their friends, all eating and drinking and laughing and making music. She felt a lightness to her heart, being here with them, just one in a number, not the one everyone was relying on to put in the big performance, to be a success, to look perfect, just Karla, one of this big family. But this time, she felt a pang of loneliness in the crowd, because she missed Shawn. She never felt lonely when she was with him, he was the other half of her soul. She twisted the bracelet on her wrist, running her fingers over the engraved initials.

"That's a beautiful bracelet," one of the women said under cover of the rowdy crowd.

"Thank you, it was a Christmas gift," she said with a smile.

"From someone special I would say by the way you keep touching it," the woman said.

"From a friend," Camila confirmed.

The woman laughed. "A friend? That is not the gift a friend gives." She walked off to talk to someone else and Camila touched the bracelet again. They were wrong, he WAS a friend, he was her best friend, but that wasn't all he was. He was something much more.

The three weeks passed slowly and at first she and Shawn texted constantly and rang or FaceTimed each other regularly, at least once a day. But a couple of days after Christmas Shawn flew with his family to Hawaii for a two week holiday and it was harder to stay in more than irregular text contact when he was with them all the time and there was a time difference. She spent the next ten days after Christmas with her family and then flew back to LA to prepare for the release of the album. It was so exciting and her days were busy. A few days before the album dropped, Shawn flew from Hawaii to New York for an endorsement photo shoot. They were back on opposite sides of the country again, both busy and at the mercy of time differences. They texted daily, usually more than once, they were getting shorter and more impersonal but their phone calls were few and far between, and there had been no FaceTimes since he had left Toronto.

***

Shawn was sure the fates were conspiring against them. Camila was on a promo tour for her album, flying all over the States, to Canada and to Europe, but none of them lined up with his own travel. He had to work on his album and was holed up for the until early February in studios in Malibu and Jamaica getting it finished. He couldn't keep up with where Camila was, they hadn't spoken in weeks, just texted. He felt like their time in LA was a dream now. He missed her like she was a movie he had watched or a book he had read, and his emotions came out in his music so that he added some new songs to the album in the end and everyone was thrilled with this heartsick Shawn and his new burst of creativity.

Camila's album had debuted at number one, her new single was in the top five, she was getting a lot of airplay, and the critics loved it. He had told her what he thought of it, when she sent it to him a couple of weeks before release. He loved "All These Years", a last minute addition that he knew was about him. The rest of February was jammed with promo for his album and rehearsal for the tour. He barely slept, he didn't know what city he was in, or what day it was, finally making it back to LA for tour rehearsals. He wanted to be in Miami for Camila's twenty-first birthday on 3 March, but they had decided at Christmas that it would probably not work. It was not a big star-studded event, but a family affair, and it would be difficult to explain why he was there. On the day of her birthday he tried to ring her a few times and in the end he sent her a long text, hoping no-one else would read it. He wrote it to Karla and signed it Raul. From the official Shawn Mendes he sent a huge bouquet of sunflowers, her favourite, and a bottle of tequila, since she was now legally able to drink. He sat in his apartment in LA and drank a toast to her, wondering what things would be like when she got back in a week's time.