Caroline's hands were warm.
But Cameron felt nothing.
The sheets tangled around her limbs like restraints, suffocating rather than soothing. Caroline's kisses trailed along her neck—lazy, practiced—and Cameron tilted her head automatically. Not out of want. Not out of need. Just out of habit. Politeness.
Caroline's touch was easy. Too easy. It didn't ask anything of her, didn't demand emotion, didn't pry. That was what Cameron liked about her. She could disappear inside the moment, inside the motions, and no one would ask if she was okay.
Because she wasn't.
She let herself be moved, touched, taken. She kissed back, responded when expected, clawed at Caroline's waist the way her body remembered how—but none of it meant anything. There was no hunger. No tension. No tenderness. No comfort.
Only motion.
Breathing. Skin. The smell of detergent that didn't belong to her. Shadows stretching across the bed from the streetlight outside. The dull rhythm of a performance she didn't audition for but kept showing up to anyway.
She didn't come.
Didn't try.
Caroline didn't notice. Or maybe she did and didn't care. She kept moving like this was normal—like they were still the same reckless girls they used to be, back before things got complicated. Before Cameron met Jasmine. Before Cameron broke everything.
When she had been with Jasmine, there had been an unbearable, electric tension leading up to it. A hunger that swelled until it could no longer be contained. When she had been with Rosalie, it was effortless, soothing, an unspoken understanding between them. But this? This was neither.
Only emptiness, wrapping around her like a thick fog, numbing her down to her bones.
The next morning, Cameron moved like a ghost. Quiet, quick, clothes wrinkled, throat dry. She didn't say goodbye. Just a mumbled, half-hearted excuse—things to do, gotta go—as if there was still a life waiting for her beyond Caroline's apartment.
There wasn't.
But Caroline didn't stop her. She never did.
And that was the point.
No expectations. No consequences. Just one night of forgetting followed by silence.
God, she needed silence.
But even in silence, her mind screamed.
The days after blurred into one long, gray smear. Time bled into itself. Morning and night were indistinguishable. She barely ate. Slept in patches, if at all. The vodka vanished from her cabinet, and she didn't remember drinking it. Cigarettes burned down to the filter between her fingers without her realizing. She floated through hours like a ghost in her own life.
She wandered into neon-lit bars and let strangers take her hand. Rooms pulsed with music too loud to think over, which was the point. Women touched her like they knew her, like she mattered. She laughed when she was supposed to. Moaned when expected. But her mind was always somewhere else.
Detached.
Every time someone touched her, she imagined it was Jasmine.
And then hated herself for it.
Because Jasmine was still calling.
Texts. Missed calls. Voicemails she refused to open. Each one a siren she wouldn't let herself hear.
At first, Cameron wanted to scream. Why did you let me fall in love with you? Why did you let me believe in something you never meant to give?
But she didn't.
Because Jasmine hadn't really lied.
She had smiled too softly. Said maybe in another life. Said if I could change... Said I didn't know you felt that way, even though she always did.
It wasn't cruelty.
It was just Jasmine.
And that somehow made it worse.
Rosalie didn't call back either.
Not once.
Cameron tried. Three times. Then twice more. Then once, just to hear it ring. Nothing. Not even a "fuck you." Just silence.
But silence says enough.
Rosalie had known. That laugh before the beach trip—Hm. You barely lasted a month. It wasn't bitter. It was a certainty. Resignation.
Cameron had always been reckless. Always made messes. Always ruined good things.
Rosalie had given her stability. And Cameron had chosen chaos.
And now, chaos was all she had left.
So she spiraled harder.
She let strangers take her into corners of clubs, into backseats, into restrooms where the walls pulsed and the music swallowed regret. She kissed them because she could. Because they weren't Jasmine. Because they didn't look at her like she was some celestial thing—they just looked. And that was enough.
She didn't care about names. Or where they were from. Or what came next.
She didn't want a connection.
She wanted to disappear.
Some nights, she didn't come home at all. Other nights, she curled up in the bathtub, fully clothed, water running just loud enough to cover the sound of her breathing.
She didn't cry.
There were no tears left.
Only the static buzz behind her eyes. A low, relentless hum.
You were never enough.
You were always too much.
You ruined it.
Every memory with Jasmine replayed on loop.
But now, each scene came with commentary.
That touch? Friendly.
That smile? Polite.
That night in bed? Not what you thought it was.
She had built a world out of almosts and maybes. Made a home out of delusion. And now she wandered the wreckage, trying to find something to hold onto.
But there was nothing left.
Just her.
Just this.
Just a hollow-eyed girl in a mirror she barely recognized. A body on autopilot. A body without a soul.