“Let’s go out back for a little bit and sit on the covered porch; it’s fun to watch the skiers wipe out.” Cassidy laughed.
To get away from the anxiety of worrying about everything I said to her parents, I would have done just about anything. I followed her out back to regroup for a little bit before dinner. It was exhausting meeting someone’s parents. I felt ready to take a nap and would have if I had been given a room to sleep in.
“Thanks, I felt like I was failing out there.”
“They aren’t an audience. You don’t have to worry if they like you or not. You’re only visiting for the night.”
“About that…” I started to say and then couldn’t keep my laugh in as Cassidy looked at me with a serious face.
“What did you do?” she replied.
Cassidy was really cute when she was angry. She wrinkled her nose up and had her hands on her hips like she was about to scold me. She wasn’t actually angry with me; I could tell that much. It was hard not to laugh at her as she tried to be stern with me and get me to answer the question about what I did.
“I sort of told them that I was going to be gone for two nights.”
“Two nights!” she exclaimed. “I only told my parents you’d be here for one night.”
“Sorry, I got flustered. You can just send me back when you’re done with me,” I teased her.
“It’s all right. We’ll figure it out. By the way, I told them you were in town visiting a cousin and you were from New York.”
“Why didn’t you just say I was from San Francisco?”
“I don’t know. I got flustered.” She laughed. “I’m not all that great at lying.
The funny thing was that Cassidy didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who could lie very well. Maybe she had done it well while she was drinking, but now I saw every emotion on her face. She couldn’t even hide the desire she felt for me, and I knew she was trying really hard to do that. Not that lying was a particularly good skill to have – I was much happier that she sucked at telling lies.
It had been a long time since I had actually felt an interest in a girl like I felt toward Cassidy. I wasn’t even sure what it was that I was feeling. All I knew was that I wanted something more than to just sleep with her, and that was totally new territory for me. I wanted to have her in my life long after treatment was done and if that was going to happen, I really needed to behave myself.
Relationships didn’t last in my world, but I might be able to make a friendship last. Especially since Cassidy would know what I was going through after treatment. I really liked that she had been in treatment before and that she was clean and sober. It dawned on me that when I returned home, I wouldn’t know a single person who was openly clean and sober. Maybe there were people in my life who didn’t do drugs or drink, but I didn’t know who they were.
It was a sad realization that all of my friends and acquaintances were drinkers and drug takers. Even my friend Spencer enjoyed a few too many drinks sometimes. But the difference between Spencer and I was that he had never almost killed himself because of his alcohol use. I had rationalized that all my friends drank alcohol so it was okay if I did, but it had taken me this long at treatment to realize they weren’t me. My friends might all drink, but none of them had consequences like I had.
Jarrod had helped me also realize that I couldn’t control other people in my life. I couldn’t control how Cassidy viewed me. I couldn’t control how my family wanted to treat me. The only thing in life I could control was myself, and even that was going to take a lot of work to get it right.
“Thank you for inviting me. I really hope you won’t get in trouble for this.”
“I don’t think I will. Mr. March loves me. The worst that will happen will be that he tells me not to do it again. Anyways, I’m not planning on working there much longer. I applied to nursing schools.”
“Oh, God. You’re going to be a nurse?” I said as I tried to hide the wide grin that made its way across my face.
“Why does it sound like you’re already thinking of something dirty?”
“Because you in a tight, little white nurse’s dress sounds amazing.”
“Since when have you ever seen a real nurse in a tight, white dress?” She laughed at me. “The nurses at Paradise Peak wear baggy and comfortable scrubs.”
“Cassidy, just give a guy his fantasies, please,” I said.
“I’m sure you have plenty of fantasies already and don’t really need me to add to them.”
It was probably time that we changed the subject, since I felt my body as it started to get hard thinking about Cassidy in a nurse’s uniform. I didn’t care if the nurses now didn’t wear those outfits anymore; I was going to keep the fantasy in my head and come back to it later that evening when I was alone in my bed.
“Dinner time, kids,” Cassidy’s mother said as she opened the sliding door.
“What was your mom’s name again?” I asked.
“Katherine, and my dad goes by Bob, but it’s really Robert.”