Camilla

It takes me an hour to get from the studio out to the comedy club. I’m still not used to the traffic in L.A. and it’s been six months.

Other transplanted New Yorkers tell me I’ll never really get used to it.

I tell myself it doesn’t matter, because I’m going home. I like L.A., but finding teaching work proved harder than I thought, and it turns out, I miss being in a classroom.

And I like the bits of work I’ve cobbled together, but it all feels painfully too close to the subsistence living I’d confessed to Elizabeth I knew all too much about. I’ve been here, done this, got the well-worn t-shirt because I can’t really afford a trip to the laundromat.

Poverty is too high a price to pay to be an artist.

I’ve put my application in for open positions in the New York school system. When I get pinged for one of them, I’m heading back to the east coast.

But tonight I’ve got a show to do.

“My last girlfriend was a philanthropist. An honest-to-God lady who lunched and gave more money than I’ve made in my entire life to causes she will never personally experience. When we met, I was living on my ex’s couch—technically homeless—and she took me to a charity gala for an organization that provides outreach to homeless LGBTQ youth.” I wait a beat. “When we stumbled into her bedroom later that night, quite tipsy on the most expensive champagne I’ve had in my entire life, I gotta say, the urge to role-play a very inappropriate Daddy Warbucks kink definitely took hold.”

I love the burst of surprised laughter when they don’t see the punchline coming. I bite my lower lip and let myself laugh a little, too. It’s funny. I miss her, I want to say, but that’s not funny at all. “Which is really an improvement on the other fucked-up dating stories I’ve got, so I’ll take it.” I slide into the dating straight girls is easy chunk of my routine. It hasn’t changed much since New York.

Low standards, easy to please, what does that say about me…

Except then I loop back to Elizabeth. I don’t call her that. She wanted to know if I’d give her a made up name. I couldn’t. And this is where my routine shifts from what I used to do.

“So for a while, I told myself, hey, self, you may not impress someone with real standards. Better stick to straight girls. And then I met Lizzie, and I lied to her. I told her I had high standards, which was more of a pipe dream than an actual thing. But the wonderful thing about this woman was that she believed me.”

That gets a few warm laughs.

I grin. “I know, right? That’s refreshing in and of itself. I said, I wanted to be treated right, and she said, yeah, makes sense.”

More laughs.

“And it didn’t work out because…we didn’t have enough time. But it didn’t not work out, because she was lovely. Which isn’t funny, but that’s okay, because you’re still thinking of me in a Little Orphan Annie outfit.” I wave at the room. “You’ve been great. I’m Camilla, and remember—I could steal your girl.”

It’s a good variation on the old routine. It’s not quite there yet, but something I’ve learned out here is that sometimes, you can only revise a set so much.

The next one I start working on will be better.

I hope Lizzie features heavily in it.

There’s a knock at the green room door as I’m gathering up my stuff. “Hey, Camilla, there’s someone to see you.”

I turn around, my professional smile on my face, but it drops when I see that it’s not an agent or producer.

“You’ve changed your set a bit,” Elizabeth says, nervously side-stepping into the room. “I liked it.”

My mouth drops open.

She grins at me. “Was I really your last girlfriend?”

“Hey.” I run my hand through my curls, painfully aware of her gaze following my every move. “Yeah. I’ve been kind of focused on working out here.”

“I knew you were working hard.”

We talked a few times after I flew out, but what we’d had in New York had been so physical, so intimate, replacing it with phone calls and text messages had seemed…weak. “You’ve been on my mind,” I admit. “I’ve missed you.”

Her eyes light up. “Good.”

That makes me laugh, and I hold out my arms. “Come here?”

“Oh, yeah.” She leaps at me, and we’re both laughing as we kiss. She finally pulls back enough to look at me. “I haven’t dated anyone else, you know.”

“Good.”

“Is this okay? That I came out here? I thought it might be easier to beg forgiveness. You know the saying.”

I don’t bother to answer her. “I’m moving back to New York.”

Her eyes go wide. “Yeah? Would it be too soon to ask if you need a place to stay?”

I laugh again and kiss her. “You really have no sense of boundaries.”

“Not when it comes to you.”

“I’d love to crash at your place.”

“Not on my couch, though.”

“Nope.”

“The guardian-ward fantasy was a nice touch,” she whispers after we kiss again. “Is that some of that fifteenth-date sex acts stuff we didn’t get to?”

“Uh…” I grin. “Maybe?”

“Because I’ve got a big hotel suite, if my little orphan Cammie wanted to come back and play…”

I crush her against me, my arms tight around her torso, my face buried in her soft, shiny hair.

She rubs her fingers over the buzzed sides of my head. “Too much?”

“No,” I whisper against her skin. “Just right.”

“I’ve missed you, too, in case that wasn’t clear.”

I breathe her in. “Good to know.”

“Cam?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we find a bed soon?”

Hell, yes.

This time, I’m the one who falls to my knees first. We half-heartedly do the role-play thing, where she “teaches” me how to go down on her, but there’s too much laughing and hugging and kissing in between. Whispers of how much we missed each other.

She tastes sweet and tangy, familiar and perfect. Like home.

The hotel suite is big, as promised, but all I see is her. All I can feel is her body moving against mine, her hands in my hair as she guides me between her legs and up her torso.

Over and over again until dawn.

Sounds pretty good to me.

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