Chapter 33

If Cameron stopped calling Taylor daily, and if her replies were later than usual as she let them sit in her message for longer than necessary, then that was no one’s business but her own. She just claimed that she was busy with her new job, and Taylor accepted it without much fuss. And Cameron was busy, and doesn’t quite enjoy seeing Joe every time she facetimed her best friend at night.

She can’t deny the way Taylor was shining now though, as the tour ended and they moved back to New York together, and Cameron was drowning.

Not that she could actually figure out why, and her therapist ends each of their weekly sessions with a raised eyebrow and a ‘are you sure there is nothing else you want to discuss?’ and Cameron cursed therapists for having a sixth sense for this kind of stuff. Not that she ever took up her therapist on it, it’s not a big deal. It was probably just seasonal depression or something, who wasn’t sad in the coldest months of December and January?

The point was that her therapist was wrong, and there was absolutely nothing to talk about, and she could definitely sit next to her best friend at movie night without losing her mind. Her very distracted best friend who kept smiling and kicking her legs and giggling at her phone like a school girl with a crush.

“If you don’t want to watch Supergirl we could always watch something else,” Cameron paused the episode on Lena’s beautiful face (what could she say, she was a bisexual with a preference for woman, more specifically Katie McGrath).

Taylor finally looked up from her phone, and shook her head. “No, it’s fine, I am just multi-tasking.”

“Okay then,” Cameron made a face and unpaused the episode, cursing when the sorry-excuse-of-a-man came on screen. Season four wasn’t bad, but it got more and more political and Cameron had a feeling that her mothers was about to get divorced soon and so she wasn’t really ready for that. Kara should probably tell Lena soon about her being supergirl, but then was there really a good time?

Cameron wrapped the blanket tighter around herself and leaned against the armrest of Taylor’s couch. Joe was back in London for filming or something, so Taylor had invited her over to her apartment up on Cornelia Street, but Cameron felt like the blonde was more interested in her phone than in anything happening on screen. Which was okay, because not everyone enjoys watching Supergirl (although Cameron can’t comprehend that because she loves the show, or maybe because she loves Lena Luthor, same thing), but she would’ve thought that Taylor would at least pay attention to her.

Throughout their dinner, conversations were sparse, and Cameron struggled to start up any sort of conversation while Taylor was glancing down at her phone every other minute and had the audacity to show Cameorn ‘cute photos of Joe‘ because Cameron would rather die than see any more cute photos of her boyfriend.

“If you want time alone with your boyfriend I can just leave,” Cameron finally snapped at the start of the next episode, and she paused the show as she turned to Taylor, who finally placed down her phone with a frown.

“What? No, we haven’t had a movie night in so long.” Taylor tried to reach for the remote to unpause the episode but Cameron snatched it away. “Come on, Cameron, I’m all yours now. It’s just that Joe just landed and I wanted to make sure he was settling back into London nicely.”

“I’m sure he could settle back into his hometown quite nicely by himself. We barely talked tonight, and I feel like I’m intruding on something while you texted Joe this whole time,” Cameron stood up from the couch, turning away from the blonde as she placed the pillow back to its original spot and folded up the blanket. Taylor pulled the blanket out of Cameron’s hand before she could fold it up and she looked so frantic as she searched Cameorn’s face for something.

“Hey, what’s wrong? I’m sorry we haven’t hang out as much recently, I just feel like you don’t really want to be bothered so I stopped reaching out as much-”

Cameron shook her head and swallowed down the lump in her throat. “You’re always with your boyfriend, what do you want me to say? I can’t even call you without his stupid British accent in the background and I feel like I don’t have my best friend anymore.”

“Well, I’m sorry that I’m actually happy for the first time in years, and that he makes me happy!” Taylor snapped, stepping away from Cameron, who finally looked up from the floor, and the whole thing was quickly turning from sadness to anger.

“Oh that’s great, that’s just it isn’t it,” her voice came out more sarcastic than she had thought it would be, but at that point she didn’t give a fuck. “It’s Joe this, Joe that, why don’t you just run off into the sunset with him because he makes you so fucking happy! Who needs a best friend anyway because you have your Joe, who could solve everything and fix everything and he’s just so perfect. Why don’t you just rewrite history so Joe could be there instead of me! Because apparently everything I did doesn’t make you happy.”

Cameron was panting by the last word, and it took every ounce of self respect to not just lay down and cry right now.

“I’m sorry my happiness caused you so much pain,” Taylor was fuming, and Cameron stepped past the blonde to grab her purse on the table. She was not doing this. “I thought you would be happy for me! So this is it, you’re running away? Why can’t you just accept the fact that Joe makes me happy and deal with it!”

Cameron laughed coldly and stepped into her sneakers. “Oh, I have been dealing with it. I have to wake up every day to the news talking about what a fucking amazing couple you are, and I spent years with you in London trying to help you find your footing and I will never regret a single moment of that. But it seems like it was all for nothing because according to your album, Joe fixed everything. So excuse me for feeling like I’m something you could just use and throw aside as if it means nothing!”

The room was silent, and Cameron bit her lips and opened her front door, stepping out onto the street as Taylor frantically followed.

“What?”

It was dark out, and there was no one on the street, but even then, Cameron wasn’t one to make a scene.

“Cameron, what are you talking about? I would never throw you aside, you mean everything to me,” her voice was quiet, panicked, and if Cameron was in a better mental place, maybe she would’ve stayed and talked it out.

“You have a fucking funny way of showing it,” Cameron looked back. “I think maybe some space will do us some good, I didn’t mean to throw my problem onto you.”

Even under the streetlight, Taylor looked so confused that Cameron wondered for the first time if the blonde hadn’t really thought about it that way, that maybe she was just making it all about her again, that maybe she was the one blowing it all out of proportion. But maybe the space would do them some good, to think over what the past two years were and how to move forward from there.

“I think space would be good.”

They didn’t say goodbye, and it took everything within Cameron to walk to the end of the street without looking back.

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She cried herself to sleep when she got home, and talked about the fight with her therapist in their next session, in which the other woman gave her a look that seems to say ‘this could all have been fixed if we talked about it earlier‘, but like Kara and Lena’s inevitable identity reveal, this fight felt inevitable. Her therapist said it sounded like caretaker burnout, which Cameron responded sounded like a load of bullshit but Liv (the therapist) claimed it was a real thing.

Her weekly session because biweekly and it felt surprisingly nice to talk to someone about it who gave no judgement and talked her through ways to handle this.

The hardest thing was the distance, and although there was a year in which conversation between Cameron and Taylor was scarce, they had still talked, and they had been a constant part of each other’s life for so long that it felt so weird to suddenly just… stopped.

At the end of March, Cameron bought a ticket back to Nashville and let her mother hold her as she talked about how her relationship with Taylor fell apart so fast. It was probably the longest conversation she had with her mom in years but it felt more grounding than she had felt in months.

Abigail visited at the end of the week, and Cameron allowed the redhead to hug her tightly and refused to let her go until Cameron pulled away first.

“I have wanted to do that for months,” Abigail had whispered against her skin, and Cameron smiled.

“I have been told that I am really cuddly,” they pulled away, and spent the rest of the day at the park with picnic blankets and food.

“I’m not picking a side in this fight though, you know that, right?” Abigail turned to Cameron halfway through their picnic, and the brunette nodded stiffly. “I think this distance thing could do both of you well, but you have to talk it out at some point.”

Cameron sighed. “I know, I’m just not ready yet. Soon.”

They don’t talk about it for the rest of their time together, and Cameron felt ready to return to the city at the end of the week. It hurts to be away from Taylor after spending so long having her life revolve around her best friend, but Liv claimed that she needed time to reclaim things that are her own, without Taylor in it, so she had been hanging out with Emma more, especially since the english actress was back in the states to film the Little Women.

Things wouldn’t be better for a while, but Cameron felt like she was slowly gaining a footing back into her own life.