A/N: Going through all of my old fics, found this and decided to edit it.

Disclaimer- I don't own Gallagher Girls

The first reaction was leftover heartbreak.

The walls she put up after Josh were still there, only invisible and electric now. She had promised herself, after Josh: No more relationships. No more crushes. No more heartbreak. It was too much, too high a cost for it. What she went throught with Josh made her believe love wasn't worth it, and she should just stay away from boys for eternity.

Of course, at the time it seemed simple and easy to follow, with Gallagher being a girl-only school. Then Blackthorne had to "visit" and thing got so much more complicated. The minute she heard about them staying, she knew things would be way more complicated than she planned.

The next reaction was denial.

There was no way on God's Green Earth that Cammie was falling in love, or even like, again. After all the drama with Josh, she thought she wasn't (and never would be) ready to love ever again. Josh was her first love, and she had a hard time letting him go. But... Zach Goode changed that. Just one look, one smirk, and Cammie knew she was in for it.

So she decided to deny it.

It wasn't a out loud decision, more of a subconscious plan: deny, you never get anywhere, no one gets hurt. Fall in love, you get too close; everyone gets hurt. So somewhere, deep inside her subconscious mind, she chose to deny it. It helped, of course, that he would be gone at the end of the semester and she would- hopefully -never see him again. If asked, she didn't like him. No matter how much Bex questioned, how long Liz would prod her for an answer, how many looks Macey gave her, the answer was no. She refused to tell anyone. Including herself. Which, again, all crumbled after Zach kissed her at the end of the semester.

At this point, she was left with dreaming.

Dreaming that he would come back, one day, and love her. Hopeless, school girl dreaming that was over-romanticized and obviously never going to happen (Him jumping out of a plane with a rose in on hand and a guitar in the other hand, serenading her by the lake? Come on, really?). She had long before this point decided that he was a subject, something for her to examine and learn about, while NOT stocking him. She hadn't yet considered him a crush, she refused to let that thought into her head, but had decided that he was definitely more than just a friend. So she ended up somewhere in between the two, refusing to admit to liking him, but getting caught up in unrealistic daydreams, which were unintentional, of course. Finally, when she saw him next in Cleveland, she knew she couldn't go on the way she was.

So it became a crush.

She was, indeed, into him this whole time, but when she finally let herself admit it, a whole new rush of feelings and emotions rushed into her. She allowed herself to blush or swoon whenever his name was brought up, and even flirted a little. Not that he came up often in her conversations, or that she saw him enough to bother to flirt, but it was a step, in theory. Then, when all the Circle of Cavan drama unfolded, she knew she couldn't really hold in the feelings that she forced herself to hold in.

So she let it become love.

Love, really, was where she had started. She just wouldn't admit it, wouldn't let go of Josh, of fear, that she had hid it for so long. The fear still, as it would forever, most likely, stay with her, scaring her until she was absolutely sure Zach wasn't going to leave her. A hard thing to believe, when both of you are spies being hunted down forclassified reasons. So it would take time. But Cammie could do time. She had made herself wait for what seemed like ages before she even let herself go this far. She could wait for a little longer.

Which brought her here, standing over his bed (and trying to convince herself she wasn't creepy by doing so) for the past half hour. She studied his face, trying to memorize every detail. His perfect hair, his tanned skin, his small, relaxed smirk that lay on his sleeping face. Cammie leaned down an gently pressed her lips to his.

"Goodbye,"

Cammie said it softly, then placed a note for him on the bedside table next to him. It explained, everything, how it had taken her so long to let herself love him, only to have to leave and possibly not see him again for a long time. It explained that she was sorry, so sorry, for leaving like this and not agreeing to run away with him, only to later run by herself, because this was something she had to do alone, no matter how much she wished he could come. It was signed at the bottom, 'Love, Cammie' for a reason, and she tried not to imagine his broken face after reading this letter.

She stood up, sweeping a tuft of hair out of Zach's face and began to leave. Then, so softly that she herself could hardly hear it,

"I love you."

A/N: It was weird, reading this again. I wrote it about 2 years ago, I think it was one of the first actual decent things I wrote on FF. I don't keep up with this series any more (I read the summary of the last book on Wikipedia), but it was fun to read over this and remember when I did.