AMELIA

Cam drives for straight seven hours, and we don't stop except to refill gas, stretch our legs, and take a restroom break, thanks to the food Mom packed for us. In-between some of the time, I fall asleep, and when I am awake I watch sitcoms on the monitor, cuddling in my blanket.

When we finally stop it is in a town in North Carolina, where we have some good food in a local restaurant and check into a cozy hotel. We are too tired to do anything together, we have a quick phone call with Mom and then fall asleep as soon as we shower.

The next morning around nine, our trip continued. This time I have the wheels, and Cam is my passenger. He talks most of the time, taking advantage of my blanket and eye mask and when he is not hiding from the sun rays, he takes our phones and snaps pictures of me driving, swearing he has posted it on his IG.
For safety reasons, I don't use my phone while driving so I don't get to confirm if he is joking or not.

After four, in almost about the evening, I arrive in Knoxville, Tennessee. It is so beautiful, that we stopped in places this time, sightseeing, hiking, and watching the river. We are supposed to stay overnight and go back on the road the morning after, but that is impossible. Cam in the morning makes us stroll all through their market square, which I wouldn't take back for anything. We listen to aspiring musicians, there are a lot of shops we explore. I even bought some frames for our Portland bedroom and sent pictures of Cam and me to Isaac, Malia, and my family. We overstay our stay here. Mom has to call us at night after we return from having some delicious cuisine, scolding us about the looming school resumption.

Our next stop is Little Rock, Arkansas. Cam drives this time, we don't do much, given we are both tired but we manage to go to a zoo, have so much fun, and have some snacks, ending up kissing at the end which leads us to resort to going back to our hotel room and waking up tangled and naked on the carpeted floor. Cam drives again on the fifth day for another seven hours as we had scheduled, arriving in Oklahoma City.

We have our energy reloaded, so we make the best out of it. We see the beautiful gardens, nestle there for a while, basking in the serenity.
Talking about serenity, Gordon calls Cam, asking for his whereabouts for he is supposed to return to training this week.
The instance Gordon learns about our location, the man gets horrified, he immediately starts planning to send a jet over but Cam tells him we are on a road trip, we will be fine, and he doesn't have to worry. He worries though. The moment their call is over he informs almost everyone on the team, and it is rest in peace to Cam's notification.
Cam only attends to Myles, who says in the phone call that he thought the pictures Cam posted weren't recent, he didn't know the seriousness of the situation until he learns from Gordon. He sounds as though we are driving toward danger. Cam had to turn off his phone after the phone call ended. And when Mom has to call through my phone she almost flips out, overdramatically afraid something bad happened.

I just can't believe our family at this point. So I turn my phone to airplane mode and we continue to enjoy our stay in Oklahoma. As the sun sets while we stroll down the street, we run into some of Cam's fans, who want pictures and even take us on the sweetest tour of a place downtown called Entertainment District. We get on a water taxi and snap pictures with statues and a lot of things. We check into a hotel only around two in the morning, delaying our next drive, since we don't wake up until past noon.

With sunglasses on and a cup of bitter coffee, I take the wheel, staying on the road for another seven hours. Most of the time Cameron is deep asleep.

There was so much to do when we arrived in Texas, so we overstayed our welcome too. We spend another day only to go see the Cadillac Ranch and ride some horses. I get to see a side of Cam I never knew was there. He is like a carefree child, willing to try every new thing, and doing it together makes it even better. In New Mexico, we only visit the historic museums because we are so exhausted and need a good sleep. It is in Las Vegas that things get crazy. It is one of the places I have always wanted to visit.

Cam and I are our wildest. We club, we party, we gamble, we have sex every chance we get, we get drunk together, we do things I never thought possible, play hide and seek in our suite naked, and every morning, we go down for breakfast with dark sunglasses because of hangovers. In Vegas, we stay for three days doing all those crazy things on repeat. Of all the places we've been, I am my most reckless and young here with Cam. Shopping for ridiculously expensive clothes and watching romantic movies in an empty movie theater. It was like a movie kind of love, it gave me a fluttery feeling in my stomach.

The morning we have to leave, it is around 5 am. Cam takes my naked body into the bathtub along with him. I am supposed to care because I used to think I wasn't ready to be in a bathtub or shower with Cameron, but it has come to a time that I feel like I know him from the beginning of time and he knows me too. So I didn't oppose, I loosened up for the first time, succumbing to his gentle caress as he cleaned me up while I leaned against him, enjoying every bit of it. At that moment, it is everything life has to offer.

Cam handles the final drive, it is a straight-up twelve-hour drive, which he refuses to share with me. We stop to eat in Arizona, but that's all that we do there. The times we stop, we just have to restock our snacks, take a restroom break, stop by the side of the road to stretch our legs, and cuddle in the driver's seat for an hour or less before carrying on, and then finally, we get to Portland on the fourteenth day, past ten at night.

It is cold and even crazy, it is raining when we pull into the driveway, parking behind my car that I missed.

"Here we are!" Cam sighs. His head falls back to rest, and he tilts over to watch me.

"Yup," I mumble, chewing back my smile and feeling butterflies in my stomach under his gaze.

He takes my hand and brings it to the left side of his chest. We stay like that in here, while I feel the gentle thump beneath my palm until the rain stops at past midnight.