Around the campfire later that night, everyone was unusually quiet. Tori hadn't mentioned what she'd seen, but it was almost as if everyone already knew how upset Jade was. They were being careful around her, and nobody seemed to be mad anymore about what had happened earlier. Not even Beck was angry. He was just being Beck, acting like nothing had happened even when nobody expected him to. It seemed that he'd already forgiven Jade for kneeing him in the balls, which Tori thought was pretty amazing. She would never know what that actually felt like, but she did know that it hurt a lot, and for him to have forgiven her so easily – and to look past all the things like that she'd done before - he must really love her.

That thought brought back the memory she'd been trying to keep out of her head all week. Sitting in her lawn chair next to the fire, Tori watched Beck and Jade quietly interacting, and Jade's voice replayed in her head.

"Idon'tthinkIloveBeckanymore." Tori hadn't really thought about what had been said that night, so it wasn't until this moment, looking back, that she realized that she was the reason why Jade had said that. Tori had been the one to make Jade question both her relationship with Beck and her sexuality, and that realization suddenly made Jade's anger seem completely reasonable. Tori hadn't liked the idea at all, but try as she may, she couldn't deny that she'd felt something when Jade had kissed her, and so she had finally come to terms with it and partially moved on with her life – something Jade hadn't quite done yet.

Despite the feelings Tori had realized she had for Jade, watching the girl look at her boyfriend in such a sad, defeated way nearly broke her heart. Beck and Jade had been together for so long, it would just be weird if someday they weren't. If they broke up, everything would change. Everything would be awkward.

Eventually Beck grew tired of Jade ignoring half of everything he said, so he turned to Andre, who was sitting at his left, and started a conversation with him, Cat, and Robbie.

Tori watched Jade, who just stared into the fire and didn't make a sound. The fact that she hadn't threatened to hurt anyone with the weapon right in front of her proved just how upset she was.

"Jade." Tori whispered, leaning toward the other girl.

"What?" Jade asked calmly, not moving a muscle.

"I uh…I'm sorry if you're uncomfortable with me being here. I know I've messed things up for you."

"No, I messed things up for me. You did help though." Jade responded quietly. "And I umm…sorry about the black eye."

"It's okay. You didn't mean to kick me in the face." She paused for a second, and then quickly added, "…did you?"

"No, that wasn't intentional. Serves you right though." She finally looked away from the fire and made eye contact with Tori, even though it only lasted a couple of seconds before she looked away again.

"That was stupid. We shouldn't have done that." Tori said sympathetically.

"Tori," Jade said, looking directly into Tori's eyes once more. "could you just…stop talking to me? I really can't handle this right now."

"Uhhh, yeah. Sorry. I totally understand." She barely got the words out before Jade stood up and went inside the cabin without anyone else noticing.

…

The group's first night sleeping at the camp was uncomfortable, to say the least. Everyone woke up extremely early – the light reflecting off the surface of the lake lit up the inside of the cabin right away – and the complaining started there. The floor was too hard, it got too cold, they were hungry, they were bored. Beck looked like he wanted to kill himself before the clock had even struck 9 AM, and Tori seemed to be the only one who empathized with him at all, even if guilt was the main reason she was on his side.

"Hey, guys, let's just forget about all our complaints and do something fun, okay?" She said loudly over the sound of everyone else's voices.

"Like what?" Andre asked her, getting a blank stare in return. She hadn't thought it out that far.

"Umm…we could…"

"I know what we could do!" Cat said excitedly. "We could-"

"No." The rest of the group cut her off, and she frowned, looking deeply offended for only a split second.

"It was just a suggestion." She muttered.

"Well, there's the lake…" Tori mumbled. "Is it safe to swim in?" She asked Beck, who appeared to have calmed down quite a bit since everyone had quit complaining.

"Yeah, we could do that." He nodded enthusiastically, and everyone else seemed to agree that this wasn't a bad idea, so they changed into their bathing suits and hit the beach.

Clouds rolled in within minutes of everyone getting in the water, but Tori didn't let that stop her from enjoying the game of Marco Polo she was playing with Andre, Cat, and Robbie. Cat and Robbie were getting more and more agitated each time they lost, but Tori and Andre were having a blast.

Beck and Jade hadn't even made it into the water before they started fighting, and Tori found herself glancing over at the shore every few minutes for the entire half hour before Cat and Robbie quit playing Marco Polo and the game ended.

"What do you think they're fighting about?" Andre asked Tori as they both watched the argument taking place a few dozen feet away on the shore.

"No idea."

"Jade's been a lot worse than usual lately." He commented, dipping under the water for a second and popping back up before Tori had a chance to say anything.

"She's got a lot on her mind."

"What, did she tell you that?" Andre questioned, a slight hint of laughter in his voice. "Did you two have a heart to heart?" He laughed loudly at the thought, and didn't notice the look on Tori's face.

Less heart to heart, more lips to lips, she thought to herself, just as Jade looked out onto the water and caught them staring.

"She caught us."

"She totally saw us watching." Tori agreed, crouching so that the water came up to her nose.

"She's gonna be mad… Oh crap she's coming this way. Can Jade swim? I hope she can't swim. Stop right there Jade. Don't get in the water… Oh man she got in the water. She's in the water." Andre narrated what Tori was watching from beside him, and they were both relieved when Jade stopped a few feet out from the sand to talk to Cat, who was sitting in the water looking for interesting rocks

"Act cool. Maybe she didn't actually see us." Tori said, anxiously wringing her hands as she turned her back to Jade a moment later.

"Nah, Tori, she saw you. She's coming this way now and I don't think it's to talk to me." Andre told her, looking relieved. "See ya!" He swam away as Jade got closer.

"Please don't tell me you just broke up with Beck." Tori said when Jade stopped in front of her. Her reason for asking this wasn't so much that she wanted them to stay together forever. It was just that if Beck and Jade had just broken up again, the rest of the camping trip wasn't going to be fun for anybody.

Jade didn't say a word, and just looked down.

"You did." Tori mumbled. "Umm…where's he going?" She asked once she looked over by the cabin and noticed Beck getting into his truck.

"To get me some coffee." Jade answered simply.

"…You just dumped him…and you're making him go get you coffee…"

"He knows he'll learn the meaning of a nasty breakup if I don't get some caffeine soon." Tori nodded in agreement and was about to ask Jade why she'd come to her when Andre returned.

"Hey…Beck's coming back, right? He's not leaving us here is he? 'Cause I'm not staying in that cabin for the rest of my life."

"He's on a coffee run." Tori answered.

"Well why didn't he take me with him? I'm sick of this campground. And Robbie's being really weird." They all looked over to where Robbie was belly-flopping into the shallow water right next to Cat, who kept squealing every time he splashed her.

"Umm, he kind of wants to be alone, I think." Tori said slowly, responding to Andre's question while she watched Cat and Robbie playing in the water like six year olds.

"Yeah." Jade replied quickly. "Anyway, since he's gone I'm kind of in charge now, and I just came over here to tell you guys we're gonna prepare for that horror unit tonight at sundown." She smiled a truly creepy smile at both Tori and Andre, which only disappeared when Cat suddenly cried out.

"Jade come help me! I cut my finger on a rock!"

"What do you want me to do about it?" Jade yelled back at her, over her shoulder.

"I don't know, just make it better!" Jade sighed, muttered "I swear sometimes it's like I'm her mother," and left to go pacify Cat.

"…So Jade's in charge of the horror thing…" Andre said a moment later. "Should we be scared?"

"Terrified."

…

An hour later, Beck still wasn't back, and Jade was getting crankier by the minute. After helping Cat with her cut, hardly ten minutes had gone by before Jade went off on her for complaining about getting sand in it. Robbie – with Rex in tow - had run off after one simple look from her, and Tori and Andre knew enough to stay back and say nothing.

"I'm done. This water is gross and you people are boring." Jade complained to anybody who would listen.

"Yeah, I'm getting kind of cold anyway…" Tori muttered, looking up into the cloud-filled sky. "I think there's a couple showers in the bathroom that we could use to clean up. You coming, Cat?" She looked over at the redhead, who was sitting in the sand several feet away, still pouting over her injured finger and the way that Jade had treated her.

"Not if Jade's gonna yell at me again."

"I won't yell at you." Jade promised, and nobody really believed her, but the three girls still went to use the showers together anyway, stopping by the cabin first to get some soap and shampoo.

"This is disgusting." Jade commented, draping her beach towel over the half wall that divided the showers from the bathroom stalls. "There aren't even shower curtains. What if I wanted to do this naked?" She didn't get an answer from Cat or Tori, and just grumpily turned the knob, jumping back when the water shot out of the showerhead with a lot more pressure than she'd expected.

Cat was second to brave the disgusting shower room, and she took the one next to Jade, leaving the most revolting corner shower for Tori. The knob was partially broken off of this one, so Tori struggled with turning what was left of it far enough to get any water pressure at all. It took forever for the water to heat up to a bearable temperature, so by the time Tori stepped under the stream of water, Jade and Cat were already rinsing the shampoo out of their hair.

Cat passed Tori the bottle of shampoo once she'd gotten the soap out of her eyes and took the body wash from Jade. Tori struggled getting the cap off of the bottle, and caught herself watching Jade as she rinsed the last of the bubbles off and started messing with her bikini top, which was slowly coming untied. Tori couldn't force her eyes closed no matter how hard she tried, and Jade caught her staring just as she reached behind her and grabbed the almost completely untied knot.

"What are you looking at?" She hissed as she retied it.

"Nothing." Tori squeaked, earning her a curious look from Cat.

"Listen Tori," Jade said, turning off the water and storming over to her. "I know you've got some kind of thing for me but you need to keep it to yourself." She snarled these words in Tori's face at a volume low enough that Cat couldn't hear her. "I don't like you that way and I don't like you looking at me that way." Her voice softened with this lie, but she still looked rather intimidating, so all Tori could do was nod. "Got it?" She asked her, receiving another nod. "Good." With that, Jade turned her back to Tori, grabbed her towel, and left, leaving the other two alone.

"What was that?" Cat asked casually as she finished her own shower.

"N-nothing." Tori croaked, still surprised by Jade's reaction.

"She's just upset because Beck's not back with her coffee." Cat explained obliviously. "I don't know if you've noticed, but Jade's extremely addicted to caffeine. She tried to give it up once and Beck almost died."

"…Really?"

"Well, she broke his arm. Or was it his ankle?" Cat wondered aloud as she patted her hair with her towel. "Well, she broke something. He wasn't very happy."

"Can't blame him…" Tori mumbled in response, closing her eyes as shampoo started to run down her face.

"Do you still need the soap?" Cat asked her a moment later.

"You can take the shampoo." The taller girl answered, trying to keep the soap running down her face from getting in her mouth.

"Okay!" Cat chirped happily before she ran off too, leaving Tori alone to finish her shower in peace.

…

The sun was started to come down when Beck finally came back. Everybody had started getting worried that he wasn't going to return hours before, so when he finally did, with a cup of coffee for Jade and no explanation for why he'd been gone so long, everybody let out a sigh of relief, but didn't ask him what he'd been doing all those hours.

The noise level picked back up once they started getting the fire ready for their late dinner, and things had almost gone back to a relatively normal state by the time the slowest eater (which was Cat, since she couldn't shut up long enough to actually eat) had finished.

"So I came up with a plan for tonight." Jade said out of nowhere, after spending several minutes staring into space and paying no attention to the conversation going on around her. "We were all gonna come up with scary stories and tell them around the campfire. That was the plan, right?" Everyone nodded. "Well seeing as that's extremely lame, I was thinking we would do that…only we'll all go out into the forest once it's dark, and we will split up and each one of us will go off by ourselves. No flashlights. Cell phones in our pockets. Nothing to distract us, because we'll be using this time to come up with our horror stories." Everyone just stared back at her, not sure what to think of this plan. "Trust me, you'll come up with a good one out there all alone in the forest…in the dark… with the owls…and the wind…and the creepy sounds…"

"…That sounds scary." Cat finally complained, breaking the silence that had smothered them once Jade had started speaking.

"That's the point."

"Well…" Beck was next to speak, looking directly at Jade before his eyes drifted to Tori, and then flashed across the rest of the group. "That's basically why we all came out here, isn't it? Sounds like a good idea to me."

"Yeah, if we can't come up with a good scary story out there, then we're doomed when we get back to school. I think it's a good idea." Tori agreed, with a hint of nervousness in her voice.

"Of course you do." Jade replied bluntly.

"What, I'm not allowed to think you have good ideas?" Tori shot back, knowing fully well why she'd received a reaction like that.

"The sun's almost down, so we should all get ready." Jade changed the subject, looking away in such a painfully obvious way that everyone else noticed, which brought back the uncomfortable feeling they'd only just gotten rid of.

"Right. Let's get going." Beck stood up and went back to the cabin first, urging the others to follow his lead, which left only Jade and Tori around the remains of the dying campfire. Both of Jade's hands came down hard on the armrests of her lawn chair, making a loud clapping sound, and Tori swore she could hear a vertebrae in Jade's neck snap when she turned her head to shoot Tori one of the evilest looks she'd ever seen on a human face before she too went back to the cabin.

It took fifteen minutes to convince Cat that she wouldn't be killed by a wild animal if she went off by herself for an hour, and everybody was feeling the stress of this weekend camping-trip-gone-wrong by the time they all split up and started walking off into the woods.

There were dirt paths worn into the ground from all the hikers that used to frequent the campground in its better days, or else Tori would not have agreed to wandering around in the woods by herself at night. She was still a little nervous that she would get lost, so she tried to make out any kind of landmark she could see, which wasn't much, considering the moon was the only light source and it was partially covered by clouds. She pulled out her phone and made a mental note of the time, reminding herself that she had just one hour to come up with a horror story.

First things first, she needed a setting. Obviously not a forest.

The mall. A small town mall at night. Nobody around but one lazy security guard, a few unlucky shoppers who got locked in, and a vicious murderer… No, that was a stupid idea.

A hospital! A woman wakes up in the hospital only to find that everyone else is a zombie, and – no, that wouldn't work either.

Tori went through countless other settings – an abandoned warehouse, a runaway train, a ski resort, a theme park – and was having a lot more trouble than she'd expected. She decided to settle on a penthouse apartment in the heart of Chicago, but her thoughts were interrupted by the crack of a twig behind her. She spun around in the pitch black and didn't see a thing, which made her wonder why she'd expected to at all.

"Hello?" She called, mentally kicking herself after the word came out of her mouth. What did she expect to get in response? "Oh hey it's just me, the friendly campground slasher here to cut you into pieces. No worries." She might as well already be in a horror movie. She fit the role of Stupid Girl Who Is First To Die really well.

Back to her story idea. She needed an antagonist. A woman. The antagonist in these kind of stories was almost always a man, so she'd go with the opposite. Now this woman needed a story. Escaped mental patient? Raised by wolves?

Another loud sound interrupted her thoughts, this time coming from ahead of her. This time she just swallowed hard and started walking faster.

Back to the antagonist. A figment of the protagonist's own imagination, perhaps? A crazy killer neighbor lady who was actually just her brain's projection of her own abusive mother…

"Tori." Tori nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of her name. Had she imagined it? She must have. It was probably just the wind.

"Tori Vega." Alright, that was definitely her imagination. She was listening for her name now, so obviously she'd thought that she'd heard it.

"Victooooriaaaa." She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, even though she wasn't supposed to use it, and tried to shine a light around the path. She saw nothing, and the voice had stopped, but she still couldn't move. This was definitely the perfect setting to think of scary things, she decided.

"It's just my imagination." Tori said out loud. "Of course I'm hearing voices. I'm expecting to hear a voice. It's just the wind. I'm not crazy." She sighed in relief. "Except I'm talking to myself, so maybe I am…" She shook her head and turned around, just in time to see a dark figure jump down from the tree above her, landing only inches away from her on the ground. Tori's heart nearly stopped, and she tripped over a branch as she scrambled away from whatever had just fallen from the tree, causing her to collapse into a bush. The figure on the ground slowly stood up and moved forward into a small beam of moonlight that illuminated Jade's face.

"Shit. Jade, you almost gave me a heart attack!" Tori squeaked in shock. Jade held out her hand, and Tori took it, only to find out right away that Jade didn't plan on letting go. She pulled Tori up and got in her face, squeezing her wrist so hard it would probably leave a bruise.

"Are you happy?" Her voice went up at the end of her question, just as the clouds above cleared, lighting the woods up just enough to show the hysteria shining in Jade's eyes.

"I-What?"

"Does it make you happy – Does it thrill you… knowing you've ruined my life?"

"Jade, I didn't-"

"YES YOU DID!" She screeched, letting go of Tori so suddenly that the smaller girl nearly lost her balance and fell again. "You did! You ruined everything! Everything is different because of you!" She ran her fingers through her hair, and spun around. "It's not supposed to be like this."

"Jade, you can't control how you feel any more than I can."

"It's not how I feel. It's you. It's all you. You just… I don't have feelings like that. I swear I don't. Sometimes I think that I do, but I-but I'm just…I'm wrong, because I don't. I don't."

"You're just making yourself miserable, you know that?" Tori's voice sounded a thousand times calmer than she felt, but she knew that if she sounded nervous, Jade would never relax. "If you keep denying it, you're just going to have to keep doing that. You're never going to be happy."

"I'm not miserable, I'm just… I'm crazy. I'm going crazy, and you made me this way."

"I didn't make you kiss me."

"Would you just stop? It was just a stupid kiss!" She shrieked, and while Tori couldn't see Jade's face very well anymore, she knew from the sound of the girl's voice that she was crying. "It didn't mean anything! It was stupid and it was just…it was just a heat of the moment kind of thing, like…like this!"

Tori's heart jumped for the thousandth time that night when Jade grabbed her and pulled her into an unexpected kiss for the second time. The tears on Jade's cheeks rubbed off onto Tori's, and her hands involuntarily moved up to rub them off, only instead of doing that, her fingers found their way to the back of Jade's neck, as if they could pull her any closer than she already was. This time it lasted quite a bit longer, but when they separated Jade had the same horrified look on her face as she had after the first kiss. This expression slowly faded though, as she took a step back. She started pulling on a strand of her hair, looking at anything but Tori as she mumbled something hardly comprehensible.

"See, it was just…It was just…" Her eyes met Tori's once more, just as the other girl reached out and grabbed Jade's arm, pulling her back into a kiss ten times as passionate as the other two combined. Everything Jade had said before this had suggested that she would resist, but she didn't. This time she fell into the kiss as if it had been done a thousand times before.

"Does this feel like a heat of the moment kind of thing to you?" Tori whispered into her ear before immediately moving her mouth back to Jade's.

"No it doesn't." Jade breathed in response as the two of them stumbled backward off the path.

Tori had planned on wandering around in this spooky forest for an hour, telling the others her story when she returned, and sleeping until they could all get the hell out of there, but she'd obviously veered far off course, as she was now falling to the ground in the middle of some bushes with her mouth attached to a girl who'd poured coffee on her the first time they'd met. Tori could now forgive every single insult, injury, and inconvenience this girl had caused, because Jade had finally quit fighting.

Hey I just finished something. :o Seriously though I haven't finished a story in so long, so even though this one was super short, I'm proud of myself right now. :D Thank you thank you thank you for sticking with me until the end. I love you all for that. Let me know what you thought. Or not. I'm not gonna force you if you don't want to. That'd be hypocritical, because I'm super lazy that way as well. :p