When Katie Met Cassidy

by Camille Perri

  “Yeah,” Cassidy said. “I’ve had that.”

  “What happens when all of that gets rolled up into the same person you’re sleeping with?”

  “So you’re obsessed with me,” Cassidy said.

  “I think so.” Katie let herself laugh. “Like schoolgirl, batshit-crazy obsessed.”

  “See?” Cassidy reached out to rest her hand on Katie’s heart. “You do feel what I feel for you.”

  * * *

  On the drive back into the city Katie’s cell phone rang.

  She had to rummage all the way to the bottom of her purse to find it—that’s how much time had passed since she’d last checked for messages, enough that her Kleenex soft pack and travel-size Aveeno had overtaken her phone in the purse hierarchy.

  “Good lord. It’s my mother. I didn’t return her last call, and she’s been really nervous since I’ve been living alone again.”

  Cassidy switched off the radio. “Pick it up.”

  Katie pressed answer and turned toward the passenger-side window. “Hey, Mama. I can’t really talk. I’m driving in a car.”

  “Where are you, Katie?” Her mother’s tone was, as usual, equal parts suspicion and anxiety. “You didn’t return my call from yesterday.”

  “I’m just heading back into the city from upstate.” Katie made her voice extra upbeat. “A friend and I went riding.”

  “In New York you went riding?”

  “That’s right,” Katie said, hearing her own overzealous twang sneaking its way back into her diction. “It’s like farm country up there. But I’m going to call you later once I’m back home tonight, okay?”

  “Who are you with?” her mother asked.

  “Just a friend,” Katie said. “No one you know.”

  “I haven’t gotten a letter from you all month and now you’re not answering my calls. How do you expect me not to worry?”

  “I know and I’m sorry, but with everything that’s been going on—”

  “Every day I go to the mailbox.”

  “I know, Mama. I’m sorry. But you’re breaking up something terrible, I can barely hear you, so I’ll call you later when I’m home, okay? Bye now.” Katie ended the call and turned her phone screen-side-down on her lap.

  Cassidy kept her eyes on the road ahead.

  “Sorry,” Katie said.

  “For what?”

  Katie wasn’t entirely sure. “I shouldn’t have answered.”

  “Of course you should have,” Cassidy said, like all was good, but the euphoria they’d been enjoying had come to a crashing halt.

  Katie had the sudden urge to throw open the truck door and run—similar to how she’d run off after going home with that random guy she met online, when she found herself in a puddle of her own tears at an abandoned construction site, when she called Cassidy that first time. When this whole thing really got started.

  “You okay?” Cassidy asked.

  “Yeah.” Katie shoved her cell phone back into her bag. “My mom just gets to me sometimes.”

  Cassidy nodded. “That’s what mothers do.”

  Katie reached for the water bottle rolling around at her feet, opened it, and drank. She tried to imagine, just for a minute, what it would be like to take Cassidy home to meet her family. Instead she recalled the first time she brought home Paul Michael—how hard she’d worked to prepare her family beforehand for Paul Michael’s erudition, the way he wore only black or gray, his habit of interrupting others. How he didn’t eat animals or anything that came from an animal, and that this was called vegan. She’d worked equally hard to prepare Paul Michael for her grandmother’s saltiness and her mother’s mistrust of outsiders, her father’s rugged pride in being a “straight shooter” and her brothers’ tendency to be outright gross.

  Katie remembered how she felt when they pulled up to the modest brick house she’d grown up in, how she took comfort in its impeccably manicured lawn and welcoming front porch. She knocked on the familiar screen door, confident that she’d laid the proper foundation for all parties—that everyone would play nice and be respectful. After all, her family and Paul Michael shared one major thing in common, and that was Katie.

  Didn’t they all want to see her happy?

  And yet the moment her father pointed a forkful of pulled pork at Paul Michael over the dinner table, Katie knew it was hopeless. “So it’s not that you can’t eat this,” her father said. “It’s that you won’t.”

  Her grandmother lit a fresh cigarette with the butt of her spent one. “What are you, Gandhi on a hunger strike?”

  Her mother ignored Paul Michael for the entire visit, and consistently for the next four years. She waited until Katie called home to announce their engagement to finally speak up. “I just don’t know about this boy, Katie. He makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I love him,” Katie had said. “And I trust him. He can give me a good stable life, and he isn’t one to stray.”

  Katie had highlighted those aspects of Paul Michael’s character because she knew they would speak directly to her mother’s fears, but also because they were true—Katie was sure of it. But her mother had turned out to be right about Paul Michael, hadn’t she? What if Katie had simply listened to her mother from the start? How much heartache and wasted time could have been saved?

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on in your head right now?” Cassidy asked. “Did your mother say something to upset you?”

  Katie loved her family. Her parents were decent, wholehearted people. They just weren’t the best about others who were different from them. How could Katie express that to Cassidy without her misunderstanding it as a personal attack? How could she put into words that even now, after years of living in New York and evolving into a fully capable independent woman, she still struggled with where her parents’ beliefs ended and hers began?

  “I’m fine.” Katie switched the radio back on. “Just tired.”

  Cassidy tilted her head at Katie in a way that indicated she knew she was lying. Her dark sunglasses shielded the eye roll that Katie was certain accompanied the motion.

  Katie already knew Cassidy well enough to understand her every tick and gesture for what it really meant. How she scratched the back of her head when she was nervous, snickered when she felt threatened, touched her lips when she was lost in thought. How her eyes got big and round when she let her guard down, and how she blushed when she was caught being kind.

  The head tilt/eye roll combo meant Cassidy was disappointed in Katie’s failure to speak her mind but that she would let it go—and Katie was fine with that.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” Katie said. “What’s going on with the Met getting shut down?”

  Cassidy thought for a minute. “Nothing’s going on with it; it just is.”

  “Are you freaking out?” Katie asked.

  “What’s there to freak out over?” Cassidy kept her eyes on the road ahead. “Places close all the time.”

  “But you must be sad. Isn’t that bar like your Cheers?”

  Cassidy let out a laugh. “It’s where I learned to be gay. I’ve been going there since I was nineteen, on a fake ID everyone knew was fake.”

  “It was the very first bathroom you had sex in . . . ,” Katie said, only half joking.

  “Actually no.” Cassidy smirked. “But probably the second.”

  “I guess I set myself up for that one.” Katie unscrewed the cap on her water bottle and took a sip. “What do you mean it’s where you learned to be gay?”

  “Why, you interested in getting lessons?”

  “Fuck off,” Katie said.

  “I’m just playing.” Cassidy tapped the top of Katie’s knee and then got quiet for a second. She stared straight ahead, trying to give Katie a real answer to her question. “I guess going there as an awkward kid and getting hit on, like,
almost immediately upon stepping foot in the door. It was kind of life altering.”

  A hint of astonishment came into Cassidy’s voice, but her eyes remained unmoved. “I guess it struck me,” she said, “that I might not fit quite right into the world at large, but in this filthy little bar I was something. I was considered hot. I had power.”

  Katie got the feeling Cassidy hadn’t let this all properly sink in till right now. “So you must be upset about it closing,” she said. “Even I’m kind of sad about it and I’ve only been there a couple of times.”

  Cassidy shrugged.

  “Is there anything we can do?” Katie wouldn’t be deterred. “Have you looked into the nature of the sale? Is it still pending? Did you check with the register’s office?”

  Cassidy turned to look at Katie straight on then. She held her gaze for a split second longer than was comfortable considering she was driving a vehicle. “I appreciate your solidarity,” she said. “But yes, I did all those things. And it’s a lost cause.”

  Katie felt herself deflate in a way that she wasn’t sure she was entitled to. This was Cassidy’s loss, not hers. The Met didn’t belong to her the way it belonged to Cassidy and her friends.

  And yet, the way Cassidy described her first time entering the bar, how life altering it was—that was kind of what had happened to Katie, too. She remembered how her initial fear of the place had quickly dissolved into a sense of comfort and camaraderie that she had never experienced in a bar before. So maybe Katie belonged more than she thought.

  Either way, she was taking it personally—how the Met had come to her and was now being taken away. Whether or not she’d earned her membership, Katie wanted to keep going back, and she would miss the place as her own.

  Just then, some renegade SUV cut them off and Cassidy palmed the horn. Her attention was diverted to bypassing some slow-moving traffic ahead. She weaved their rented pickup around elderly Buicks and wavering Toyotas, impatient, confident, tailgating up to the very edge of obnoxious.

  “Sometimes I think you’re more boy than any boy I’ve ever dated,” Katie said.

  Cassidy smirked. “I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Cassidy clicked buy and waited for her confirmation number to appear on-screen. She wasn’t ballsy enough to make this online purchase using her work computer, so she had her personal laptop out on her desk.

  In the days since her and Katie’s trip to the ranch they had spent most of their time together indoors, either in bed or on the couch. On the floor or the kitchen table. A few times in the shower.

  In the middle of last week, Cassidy had even snuck out of work early—which she had never done before under any circumstances. Usually she was among the first to arrive in the morning, already neck-deep in documents at her desk while her associates, junior and senior, filed in. Hours later she’d watch them file out, texting on their way to the elevators, while she remained at her desk. She knew all the night-shift cleaners by name. Sometimes they’d ask about her life as she dumped the contents of her own trash can into the bin. With no kids, no spouse, not much in the way of personal responsibility, she was often at a loss as to what to tell them.

  “I like to work hard,” she’d say.

  She didn’t tell them that this was her edge—her single-minded focus, no one and nothing else slowing her down, that it was her guarantee of making partner, maybe before she turned forty. In her five years with the firm, Cassidy had stayed at work with fevers, toothaches, even food poisoning. The time her father had a heart attack scare, she’d headed to the hospital only after she sent her last round of comments to her client.

  But there she’d been on a random, nothing-special night in the middle of last week plotting an early escape from her desk. The weather outside was perfect—she knew because she’d checked the weather app on her phone. It was an ideal night for a long walk on the High Line, followed by dinner nearby at Santina or Cookshop or anyplace with a cluster of outdoor tables.

  She texted Katie. It’s beautiful outside. Let’s make the most of it. Can you sneak out early?

  Katie wrote back, How early?

  Now?

  Now?? It’s not even 7.

  This was the problem with Katie’s being a fellow workaholic. She could be even more of a challenge to persuade than Cassidy herself.

  The sun’s about to set, Cassidy wrote. Meet me at the High Line. I’ll make it worth your while.

  Katie didn’t write back immediately—a hopeful sign. She was considering it.

  A full two minutes went by before Cassidy received her reply: You’re becoming a terrible influence.

  Ha. She had her.

  Cassidy jumped to standing and pushed in her chair, then pulled her chair back out. She decided to leave her briefcase wide open on the floor and her overcoat hanging on its hanger. It was worth being chilly in order to leave the appearance that she’d stepped away for only a moment.

  She tried to look busy as she fled from her office, down the hall, and around the corner—where she bumped right into Hamlin. Of course. Who else would be lurking about the elevators like an insect spy drone?

  He stood back and stuck his thumbs into his suspenders. “Already heading out?”

  “No. No.” Cassidy pushed past him. She would not be deterred. “Just for a second. I’ll be right back.”

  She cursed his name all the way downtown but forgot he existed the instant she found Katie waiting for her on the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Tenth Avenue. They ascended the stairs to the repurposed rail line side by side, two dark suits in a narrow parade of jeans and sneakers.

  When they reached a stretch of green lawn Katie took off her heels and carried them at her side, hooked from her fingers. In bare feet she was three inches shorter than Cassidy, which for some reason only made it harder for Cassidy to not reach for her, draw her in, wrap her arms around her.

  They missed the sunset, but the sky had turned an electric blue that set everything aglow. As they continued along a winding sweet-scented path of shrubs and trees, the light deepened and they soon found themselves alone, secluded in what felt like a magical forest.

  Katie stopped and turned to Cassidy. Her eyes were bright with twilight, and Cassidy could feel the pull of her.

  How did this happen? This impossible, hysterical, hopeless need.

  Cassidy could almost see them from above, watching herself from the moon or an overhead branch as she leaned in, slowly.

  “Let’s go to your place,” Katie said.

  Cassidy came to a halt, shaken from the moment. “What about dinner?”

  “Let’s go to your place,” Katie said again.

  So they were off, rushing through the night, back through the teeming city streets, through the entrance to Cassidy’s building and across its watchful lobby, past Frank, then up and into her apartment, door slamming behind them—where finally, at last, they could press together and fuse into one.

  The rest of the week Cassidy was a no-show at Metropolis, dodging texts from Gina. Where are u? Stop being avoidant. You can’t pretend this bar isn’t closing!!!

  Over the weekend, she and Katie gave up on leaving the apartment altogether. Monday morning arrived and it occurred to Cassidy that she hadn’t worn shoes since Friday.

  Which was why here, now, seated at her work desk with her laptop open before her, Cassidy felt the need for a grand gesture. She wanted to take Katie somewhere special that not only required shoes but also was an event—an experience that would create a new shared memory.

  This gala at the Metropolitan Opera House seemed like just the thing.

  Ticket purchase confirmed, Cassidy shut her laptop and slid it into her briefcase. She could breathe again, ready now to return her undivided attention to her work.

  NINETEEN

  The moment Katie settled int
o Vivienne’s salon chair and was covered in that familiar black cape, she felt safe in the way she imagined some people must feel at their therapist’s office. But Vivienne had to be better than any psychoanalyst. She was wise beyond her twenty-six years, wild enough to never be judgmental, and the lazy d’s and dropped r’s of her southern Louisiana drawl always put Katie at ease. Katie felt silly for putting off this haircut for so long out of fear.

  Today Vivienne’s hair was brown, parted in the middle, and fell past her shoulders in beachy waves. It was different every time Katie saw her, and she seemed to never repeat the same look twice, which was an antsy creativity she also applied to her dating life. Katie had been living vicariously through Vivienne’s storied adventures for years.

  “Same as usual?” Vivienne swung Katie’s chair around so she was facing herself in the mirror.

  No, Katie wanted to say, everything is different. But Vivienne didn’t wait for an answer to begin Katie’s usual cut.

  “So how are the wedding plans coming along?” she asked.

  Katie let the question hang in the air for a few seconds. She had sat like this and talked to Vivienne every six weeks for the past five years—which made her, to date, Katie’s most lasting and consistent relationship—but she had yet to ever match the shock value of one of Vivienne’s scandal-ridden stories with her own.

  “We broke up,” Katie said. After all the anxiety leading to this moment, Katie was surprised by how the words left her mouth now like an easy breath.

  Vivienne laughed.

  “I’m totally serious.”

  Vivienne’s comb went still. She studied Katie’s face in the mirror. “Oh my goodness, you’re not joking.” Her scissors came down at her side. “Are you okay?”

  Katie nodded. “I’m great, actually.”

  Vivienne brought her usually untamed voice down to a Southern-comfort whisper. “Was it another man?”