Camille, by Ella Dawson (a January guest post special!)

Guest posts on my blog have been – and will continue to be – sporadic. As tempting as it can be to use them as a way of plugging the inspiration gaps that open from time-to-time, I feel like that does a bit of a disservice to the people who supply them. If someone whose work I love takes the trouble to write something for me – or asks me if I’ll publish a piece they’ve already written – I want them to know that I’m hosting it because I think they’re awesome, not because I couldn’t think of anything to write that week, and not because I had a regular guest slot that I needed to fill.

Today’s guest post comes from Ella Dawson, whose work I’m always delighted to feature here. The story she sent me back in August, Slush, was cold, hard and intense, and I loved how skilfully Ella inhabited that style; her versatility is evident in the fact that today’s piece, Camille, is none of those things, but still stands up as both a compelling read and an accomplished (and deeply personal) piece of writing. If you enjoy it as much as I did, do check out the rest of Ella’s work, or hit her up on Twitter to let her know what you thought.

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Camille

He had never been in love before but had heard enough about it to know he wasn’t capable of it. It didn’t seem appealing, characterized as it was by an utter lack of control. Falling in love meant falling and hoping that the other person would catch you. There was no guarantee that they would. That was why there were two types of love songs: the glowing, poppy ones that bordered on nauseating, and the slow ones riddled with heartbreak. Being broken didn’t sound fun. He worked too hard to keep himself together to risk some rogue agent barging into his psyche like a bull in a china shop.

But Camille wore her battered, throbbing heart like armor. This was a woman who had been in love and never collapsed under its weight. He remembered sitting next to her on some park bench and listening to her talk about Ben and how messed up everything was becoming. “Loving him is like cupping polluted water in my hands,” she said, kicking at some crispy, fallen leaves with the toe of her ballet flats. Only Camille could get away with saying something like that. She earned those confessions that bordered on lyrics by sending him blunt, demanding text messages about their lunch plans.

When other people made pretentious declarations they always sounded like they were lying, but her mouth sung around what he would otherwise deem weakness. Months later when she finally kissed him, he imagined he could taste her whole life, every split lip of betrayal and chap of tenderness. They had a way of seeing through each other. It was a friendship he didn’t understand but knew he couldn’t lose.

There was a long, exposed zipper on the back of her dress and he tugged it down slowly, tooth by metal tooth. Most women he just fucked, but sex was something different with her. Sex with Camille had a way of peeling his skin back until his hands shook as he touched her. He guided one sleeve off her shoulder, and then the other, and she turned to stare at him with big, gray eyes that burned even when she cried—he knew, he had seen it. She had an elegance that disguised so much force. Sometimes she wrote her anger into his bones and wanted it to hurt but tonight wasn’t one of those nights. She reached out with one of her tiny hands and brushed his hair out of his face, and she smiled as she poked some of the freckles littering his cheek. He grabbed her wrist and kissed her thumb. That was how they worked: she gave him her time, and he allowed her to see him like this. And she had the decency to never point out how afraid he looked of her polite invitations to sleep over afterward.

For some reason this was the night he finally took her up on the offer—something about the weather, or maybe how warm she was—and she fell asleep first, almost immediately. Camille seemed so tiny, this weird assortment of fragile bones and confidence. He wasn’t tired but closed his eyes and absorbed her sleep-twitches, listened to her breathing deepen. It was the quietest revolution, the softness chaos, having this woman in his arms. He didn’t like knowing what this feeling was. It meant he was just like everyone else after all: a brooding kid caught up in a dimpled hurricane. Which was a pretentious, unearned way of admitting he might love her someday if he wasn’t careful.