"What town is this again?"
"This… Waterloo. Isn't that awful?"
Therese lets out a small, contented giggle and lays her head down on the pillow, eyes blurry with sleep. To start the year like this, listening to Carol smile as she sips her morning tea and looks outside their motel window — barely two months ago, Therese did not know something so momentous could even be imagined and yet here she is, thousands of miles from New York and from everything she had once known to be true, feeling as if her entire life has been spent waiting for this exact morning to happen.
Carol has been up for a while. Therese still feels her everywhere.
There are so many things she wants to ask, so many answers she is ready to give, but she struggles for words that come anywhere close to what she needs. So she does what she does best: she thinks in lines and colours and shapes. She wills her eyes into a camera lens, and waits to get Carol forever exposed behind her eyelids.
Somehow, that is not enough. The need to capture the moment on tangible film surges through her body, sharp and daring and unexpected. "Come here," she asks, softly, extending a lazy arm and patting the green blanket beside her.
Carol turns to face her slowly, left eyebrow arched and head slightly tilted, a mixture of affection and want dancing boldly in her grey eyes.
"Not that," Therese says, smiling at first then suddenly serious. "I want to… I want to remember this," she adds, gesturing abstractly with her right hand as Carol moves towards her and sits on the edge of the bed. I want to remember you, she almost adds, but doesn't. She shakes her head instead and simply requests "Stay here. Don't move."
With a sheet draped messily around herself, Therese gets up and walks towards the other twin bed, still unmade from yesterday, brows furrowed in a frown of concentration. Carol seems confused for a moment, unsure of Therese's intentions. The room is cold, the light that filters through the window bleak and uninviting, and Carol does not look like someone who wants to be left on her own if she is being forced back to bed.
The confusion only lasts a few seconds, though, because just as she is about to request an explanation, Therese turns around, a look on her face that is half apology, half prayer. Knowing exactly what she is being asked for, Carol relaxes, her face softens. She waits for Therese's eyes to lock on hers and nods slightly, granting permission.
Therese smiles back, innocent and blinding like the snow they have been driving through on this journey to the end of their world. Fidgeting with a fresh roll of film, she walks back to Carol and pulls the woman's robe down, baring her shoulders ever so gently, then asks in the smallest of whispers, "Would you lie down for me, please?"
Carol obliges, regal and unhurried, resting her head on the pillow where she could still detect, if she tried, faint traces of Therese's scent from last night. She lets out a contented sigh, turns her head to one side, lifts her right hand to her forehead and just lies there, waiting for Therese to take her first shot.
"I know you are blushing," she says, voice low, eyes closed, the hint of a smile on her lips.
The room is infused with silence, and it is only the intermittent sound of the camera shutter that breaks it every few seconds.
Cheeks slightly flushed, Therese tries to remain focused and clicks away. She discovers, in this very moment, another truth she had not anticipated: there might not be enough film rolls in the world for all the pictures of Carol she wants to take.