Chapter 42 - Life

The rain pelted down outside and reminded Cam of a summer’s day back home. There would be a multitude of comments about it there, but here everyone just accepted it as a necessary event. It was still humid, the heat clinging to the air just waiting for the clouds to pass and the sun to shine again.

It didn’t matter much to Cam as she swung back and forth on the newly acquired porch swing. She’d given everything up once before when she had packed her bag and headed for LA. Then it had been a perfect escape, something she needed to do; to start again so to speak, but now, things were different. For days now, her mind had done nothing but go over and over the possibilities, but she still didn’t have an answer.

She loved living in LA. It was vibrant and exciting if you wanted it to be, and then it was peaceful and quiet down at the beach. She lived at the beach; it was most people’s idea of a dream home.

Glancing around at the trees and the view across the lake, she admitted that this was probably high up on those dream lists too, and she was lucky that she could enjoy both, but did she really want to live here for good?

“Can I join you?” Her wife’s voice interrupted her thoughts.

She smiled up at her. “Of course.” Cam shifted up a little. Not that she needed to make more room; there was plenty of space to fit her slender wife’s body in, and if there hadn’t been, she would have enjoyed the snuggle opportunity.

“You okay?” Michelle asked, leaning her head against Cam’s shoulder and smiling herself when Cam’s arm automatically wrapped around her.

“I think so,” Cam said, dramatically patting herself down. Michelle gently slapped her. “I’m alright, just thinking.”

“I can tell. We could hear the cogs from inside,” Michelle teased. “Your mother thinks something is wrong, I didn’t want to tell her anything just yet though.”

“Hmm, she does like to know everything that is going on.” Cam chuckled. “Will do her good to be out of the loop for a change.”

They sat quietly together for a moment, each of them just enjoying the closeness and the view in front of them, but eventually Michelle asked what she’d been dying to all day. “So, what are your thoughts?”

“On moving here permanently?”

Michelle would usually throw a sarcastic comment back at such a ridiculous question, but this was far too important to joke about. “Yeah.”

“I’m not against the idea, I just…I hadn’t considered it seriously. I never thought for one second that you’d want to give up everything you’ve dreamed of, or that you’d want to live anywhere but LA and Hollywood. I guess I’m just trying to process what that would all mean…for all of us.”

“I think, that for the last few months especially, I’ve been a little jaded, and I put it down to hormones and being pregnant. That’s exhausting.” She smiled when Cam kissed the top of her head. “But over the last few weeks, I realized that I’d just…things have changed for me. I still love acting, but the whole needing to be a star aspect…it’s just gone. In fact, the entire celebrity existence scares the crap out of me now. I don’t want our kids having to live like that.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Cam admitted, “Does that make me a bad parent?” Pulling her arm free, she sat forward. “Am I selfish because I haven’t considered them before this? I just assumed they would love the beach and go to school and…”

“No, baby, it doesn’t mean that at all,” Michelle soothed. “You don’t have a selfish bone in your body.”

“I am pretty sure that that isn’t true,” Cam scoffed with a grin. “If we moved here, what would we do with everything in LA?”

“We don’t have to do anything with it. We can visit, spend summers at the beach?”

Cam nodded, but then another thought hit her. “My mum and sister, your family, they all moved there to be closer to us and now we’re just going to up sticks and move away…what about Maria?”

Michelle looked away, her eyes glassy with unshed tears. “I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers Cam, I just know that this is where I want to be. And we have all the time in the world to enjoy being parents. We have enough materially. We’re luckier than so many people that we don’t have to worry about working if we don’t want to. We do it because it’s a choice, but financially we can just sit back and enjoy life. And it’s not like we’re moving to the moon. We can always see our loved ones, whenever we want to. Who knows; in time, we might change our minds and move back, but right now…I think this is the best place for us, all of us.”

“Alright.” Sitting back, Cam pulled her in close, their arms wrapping around each other. “Alright, we’ll move here.”

“Really? You’re sure?”

“Kate said something that hasn’t left my head for days now…Home is where my heart is, and my heart is with you and the kids. We’ll make this work. And we’ll work something out with everything else.”

“We will,” Michelle agreed, visibly relaxing further into Cam’s embrace.