by Unknown
Seeing her again was beyond confusing. She was the burner of an oven flipped to high, and I was deciding if I should reach out and touch her even with the threat of getting burned. The saddest part was, I was leaning toward just shoving my hands in my pockets.
She whispered something to Troyer. I’m sure it had the words “fucking bitch” and “kill” in it. She was totally pissed off at Troyer for setting her up.
How could I have thought she’d come to Rawe’s funeral willingly knowing I’d be here, too?
Even if she did know and actually had wanted to see me, it was not Cassie’s style to show it. To Cassie, being stubborn was an art form; being weak, at least outwardly, was unacceptable.
My eyes followed them to a table on the other side of the room. Cassie’s brown hair was so much longer than it had been at Turning Pines, halfway down her back, tickling her shoulder blades.
I couldn’t help thinking about my fingers tangled in it as I kissed her on the beach in California. Now it was long enough to braid through a loom. If we were still there, I would have kept my lips on hers until I’d completed a blanket.
I could almost feel them, taste them, sense the way she would suck in her breath as she leaned in, like she was preparing herself to go under.
But we weren’t still there; we were here. I took a weighty slug off my beer. This was going to be a long weekend.
I watched her at the table with Laura, wondering what it would be like if it were just her and me at a candlelit table on the beach we’d loved, our time together able to go as far out as the ocean seemed to. I took another drink, washing away the image.
Why does everything you want have to be so complicated?
I turned to Drew. He was scrolling through his phone. Drew was experienced when it came to the ladies, but that question wasn’t something I could ever bring myself to ask him.
Besides, I didn’t need to. I knew the answer, and I didn’t want to know it.
It was because people are complicated. If you really wanted to give yourself to someone, really wanted her to give herself to you, then you had to be willing to deal with complicated.
Most people would rather deal with easy.
Having dealt with complicated, I agreed.
“Hey, Cassie,” Drew yelled over to their table as he put his phone down. “Why don’t you let Ben buy you a drink?”
I smacked the back of his head, hard.
He rubbed where I’d hit him and smiled at me.
If Cassie was judging what I owed her in alcohol, my guess was the bar would run out before the night was through. If she drank what she really thought I owed her, she would most certainly die of alcohol poisoning.
She probably felt like I’d deserted her. It was what I’d thought she’d done to me. I took another lengthy sip off my beer. Maybe I was drinking what I thought she owed me.
“Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Drew,” Cassie said, flipping him off.
I’d had her finger shoved in my face more times than I could count, and seeing it again, I realized I missed it. How it was so pale and delicate, but she used it like a weapon, like it was her armor.
“You mind if I buy Laura a drink, then?” Drew asked, seemingly unfazed by Cassie’s revulsion. He was going to have fun this weekend regardless.
If it used to be my goal to get a smile out of Cassie, it was clear Drew’s goal was to get a nut shot. One that might render whatever plans Drew seemed to now have for Laura null and void.
I’d never been unfortunate enough to get more than the warning of one from her, but I understood like most things about Cassie, it was probably something you didn’t ever forget.
“Why don’t you ask her?” she said, not looking up from the table, her eyes tight on the laminated menu in front of her. “It’s clear you have a mouth, a fucking huge one.”
I hated seeing Drew provoke Cassie, but I did like hearing her voice. I liked pretending she was talking to me, whispering and laughing. Remembering how her breath in my ear made the back of my neck tingle, as if just having her speak to me was a secret all its own.
I took another drink, flooding away the memory.
Drew stood, pushing himself up on his hands to get a better view of Laura. “You want a drink, pretty girl?”
She looked at Cassie before answering, “No, thanks.” But she said it with just enough bashfulness, just enough pink in her cheeks, I could tell she liked Drew’s attention.
It was rare when someone didn’t. That was a lot of what made Drew, Drew. He had more confidence than most people put together. It made him equally an asshole and someone I wished I could be a lot more like, especially when it came to Cassie.
I had my own brand of confidence, but Drew’s was diamond-hard. He would not be taking this shit. He would have moved the hell on already. Drew was take it or leave it. He did not have the patience required to deal with someone like her.
I wondered if I still did.
“You sure? Something sweet like you, maybe?” he asked.
Laura looked at Cassie again. Cassie returned the favor with one of her patented death stares. I’d gotten many of them trying to break down Cassie’s walls at Turning Pines, and they always meant the same thing: Don’t you fucking dare.
But I’d kept on daring, kept on coming back for more. Now that I’d had a taste of her, had her all to myself for those two wonderful months, would I really be able to stop even if it was in my best interest?
“I’m okay,” Laura replied, even though I could tell she wanted to say yes.
Drew sat back in his chair. “Your girl is ruining my time, too,” he said, his attention on the almost empty beer bottle in front of him.
“She’s not mine anymore,” I said, loud enough the bartender turned to look. Loud enough I knew Cassie couldn’t ignore it. I tapped my hands against the table in a drumbeat. What I always did when I needed to stop the words in my head, cover them up with noise.
Maybe that had been the problem all along. She’d never been mine, and I’d never been hers. Our feelings weren’t temporary, but our situation absolutely had been. Being with Cassie had made me understand what being in the wrong place at the wrong time really meant.
It made me understand what being in the wrong time at the wrong time really meant.
“And,” I added, “don’t forget we’re here for a funeral.” I was hoping to get him to lay off Laura, but Drew usually did what he wanted anyway.
“Seems like you have,” he said, nodding over at Cassie.
It was true. Having to view Rawe in her casket tomorrow had been scrubbed from my thoughts the moment I saw Cassie standing in that lobby. And, as much as I was trying to obliterate her from my mind with my good buddy Budweiser, she was sitting right there.
“Another round,” my brother said to the bartender, holding up two fingers.
Was this how things would be for Cassie and me this weekend? Closer physically than we had been in months but further apart than ever?
“Stop drooling, Romeo,” my brother said, indicating with his chin I should stop looking at her.
I was pretty sure there wasn’t enough booze in the world to help me do that.
Chapter Seven
Cassie
I went out onto the snowy bar patio for a cigarette. I expected Ben to follow me, and fine, maybe I hoped he would. There were things I wanted to say to him that I didn’t want to say in front of Laura and Drew.
There were things I wanted to hear from him that I knew he wouldn’t say with them around.
That I wasn’t sure he’d say at all.
I tried to erase his words. She’s not mine anymore. I guess I wasn’t, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hear him say it.
I shivered as I took off my wool glove to pull a cigarette from my pack. Lighting it, I watched the flame flickering in the darkness of the patio, and it reminded me of what Ben and I had meant when we were together, who we had been—a light, an impossibly bright light in the total fucking darknes
s of my life.
Ben’s affection for me had been blinding, and I’d basked in it, was hypnotized by it—a poor silly sapling with my leaves pointed right at his sun. Now with it gone, I still saw it literally as something at the end of a tunnel.
It just seemed so far away at the moment.
I heard the patio door open, heard Ben crunch out on the snow. It was coming down heavily in soft flakes the size of rose petals. Under the awning, I shook from the cold and stared at the tables and chairs out there chained up for the winter.
Seeing Ben in front of me in his winter hat, his leather jacket zipped up to his chin, I was chained, too. The chains of rejection were holding me from flicking my cigarette into the snow with an angry hiss and reaching for him. Squeezing and kissing until I absorbed the light.
He walked past me and left the protection of the awning.
“You don’t have to stand out in the snow because of me,” I said.
“I’m not. It’s because of me,” he said, lighting his cigarette in one quick motion.
I heard the words I wanted to say: Why? Why are you being like this? but I had no right to, because I was being the exact same way. Instead, I shrugged. “Life’s a bitch, then you die.” I exhaled heavily, sharply, my words punctuated by the smoke and my warm breath hitting the cold air. “If you’re lucky.”
“You’re as positive as ever,” he said, shifting on his booted feet. He seemed anxious, displaying the nervousness he was fighting to hide.
“Just like you,” I said, making sure to look into his brown eyes, blurry through all the snow. “I have things I don’t change my mind about.”
“Are you talking about yourself?” he asked, his cigarette smoking in his hand.
“No, Ben,” I said, taking a drag, “I’m talking about you.”
“I didn’t come out here for a lecture,” he said plainly. “I came out here for a smoke.”
Fucking Ben. He wasn’t going to make this easy, and why should he? I’d never made anything easy for him.
I watched the snow fall over him. There was so much of it, it was suffocating.
He cleared his throat, took another drag.
“You can come in from the snow,” I said. “I don’t have a fucking knife or anything.”
He wiped off his coat and hat and joined me under the awning. “I don’t have one either,” he said, smirking. “Just these.” He pulled two drumsticks out of his back pocket.
“Just give me get a head start if you plan on drumming me to death,” I said.
“Oh, it’s something I’ve definitely considered,” he said, his smirk becoming a smile. “Probably to the beat of ‘The Bitch is Back.’”
I stifled a laugh. “Well, fuck you, then.”
“Fuck you, too, Cassie,” he replied, stifling his own laugh.
Saying those words to each other was a little like a reset button. I steeled myself and stood up straighter. “Why didn’t you ever call me?”
At Turning Pines, Ben had always been the aggressor. I’d needed him to be. After having my heart torn out by what I had to do because of Aaron, I’d sworn off guys completely, even ones as adorably persistent as Ben.
At least, he used to be adorably persistent. Now he seemed distant, shielded. Not that I was winning any personality contests, either.
Not that I ever had.
“I told you I lost your number.” He shrugged. Maybe it had only seemed like a reset button for me.
“Fuck off,” I said.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, blowing out a thundercloud’s worth of smoke.
“Besides losing your number,” I said, giving it right back, “I was afraid you wouldn’t pick up.”
“Maybe I was, too,” he admitted.
“That never stopped you before,” I replied quietly, watching his profile, almost black against the snow.
“We’re way past before,” he said, taking a harsh drag.
It was true, painfully accurate. We were. We’d both let each other in and then shut each other out. How did you come back from that?
We’d completely shattered whatever we’d had between us in California the day we left each other there. Sure, I could have called him and tried to fix it, kept calling until he did pick up, but what if it broke again?
What if I broke again?
How much more could I break?
“Also,” he said, “I got a little tired of putting all my energy into taming the girl who cried wolf.”
“I never lied to you.”
“No,” he replied, flicking his cigarette, “just to yourself.”
I knew what he meant—my need to keep him at arm’s length even when we were together. The thing he sensed I’d been hiding, even when we were supposed to be sharing everything.
Like Laura had said, I needed to tell him, or at least I had.
I lit another cigarette and focused on the snow. It was coming down so hard it made me wonder whether, if snowflakes were like people, how anyone was lucky enough to find anyone in this world. I could have just gone back inside, but I had to admit it was nice standing next to Ben. That familiar calm came over me; the balance he gave to everything inside me that was imbalanced
“It’s not like I needed to call you anyway,” he said. “I got, like, weekly reports from Laura.”
“If she was talking to you all the time, why didn’t she tell me about you?”
“I asked her not to.”
His words hit me like a bullet. I forced myself to ignore the sting. “Well, what have you been doing?”
“Not much to share.”
“That doesn’t sound like you,” I said. It was one of the things I’d loved about Ben, how passionate and alive he was. How he really seemed like he loved his life. It was so different from me, and being near him made me want to be more like that.
“I’m not me anymore,” he said, turning in my direction. It was clear his eyes wanted something from mine, the acknowledgment that I wasn’t me anymore, either.
Well fuck, aren’t we a pair?
“You’re seriously not going to tell me?” I asked, ashing my cigarette.
“I play drums in my brother’s band, mostly at weddings.” He had smoke in his voice. “It’s not the best gig in the world, but it pays the bills.”
It was epically ironic Ben spent the three months we’d been apart working at weddings, attending them at all. That definitely had to have put him in a worse frame of mind than even I had been in.
I swallowed, put my arms around my stomach.
“Looks like you’re not punching yourself anymore,” he said.
“I got over it,” I said, hugging tighter.
“Rawe would be happy to hear that,” he said.
I exhaled. “I don’t think Rawe would be happy about any of this.”
We both turned to a knock at the window. Drew was humping and making out with the glass, his lips leaving puckers of condensation like lipstick. He walked away laughing as soon as he’d gotten our attention.
“Your brother is just as much of an asshole as I expected,” I said, biting the inside of my cheek.
“He said the same thing about you.” Ben started laughing, then stopped himself.
I loved hearing his laugh. It melted the snow around me, filled me with a fever starting at the back of my neck.
“Well, fuck him, then,” I scoffed.
“He just doesn’t want me to get hurt again,” he explained, turning away. It let me know they were words he’d been waiting a long time to say, even if he didn’t want me to hear them.
I’d hurt him.
The old Cassie would have said, Well, fuck you, then, we’re even. The new Cassie experienced no pleasure in that.
I knew how lost—almost sick—I’d been without him. I didn’t wish that on anyone, not even someone who had made me the exact same way.
“I can’t believe Rawe’s dead,” I said, pushing those feelings down, icy solitude burning through my lungs. It was easier to talk
about a fucking dead person than to talk about how hurt he’d been. How hurt I was. How hurt I knew he still had to be to even admit it.
We’d both been broken before we met. We’d both been crushed after.
What were we now?
“It’s definitely weird,” he admitted. “Are you sad?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Cassie, sad?” he replied, tilting his head.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means when people are around, you act like you’re fine, but when you’re alone you act like how you really feel.”
“I’m always alone,” I said flatly. I was so tempted to walk back inside. Without even trying to, Ben was doing what he always did, charming me like I was a snake.
And I was falling for it all over again.
He’d lured me out of the basket. He’d gotten me to his eye level. He just didn’t know when I was going to strike.
I just didn’t know when he’d slam the top of the fucking basket back down on my head.
He watched me. Instead of replying, Not anymore, like I’d hoped, he said, “I know, Cassie.”
He did. He knew me better than anyone, and had still wanted to know me.
But that was before.
Maybe we were too broken to put back together. Maybe we’d been too broken to ever put together in the first place.
Chapter Eight
Ben
After two cigarettes and too few words, I followed Cassie back into the bar. We kicked the snow off our boots. The warmth inside brought my cold fingers and toes back to life.
As much as I was trying to stay disinterested, just spending time with Cassie again made something inside me come back to life, too. I’d hated being without her, but now I also understood it wasn’t only about how I felt. Her absence turned my body into a shell, a hull, a cold cavernous wilderness howling with her loss.
A loss I had been able to successfully ignore until she was thrust back into my life again.
I bent to retie one of the laces on my boots when I heard Cassie yell, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
I glanced up to find Laura and Drew making out at one of the tables. Whatever he’d been doing against the glass must have just been practice, because he was going at it with Laura like she was a maze he needed to use his tongue and hands to find his way out of.