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.”
“Okay, I’ll try to remember,” I murmured as we walked into the house.
It smelled delicious, and I was hungrier than I could remember being in a long time. I had always eaten well in my life, but there wasn’t anything greater than a home-cooked meal. Especially a mother’s home-cooked meal.
Katherine at pulled a beautiful turkey out of the oven, and she already had about six side dishes on the table. There was no way the four of us would come close to eating all the food that she had prepared, but I sure as hell was going to give it a try.
“Katherine, this dinner smells amazing. Is there anything I can help with?”
“You can cut the turkey if you’d like. Bob hates doing it, but I make him do it every year.”
I didn’t know how to cut a turkey, but I certainly didn’t want to look like a rich, spoiled kid in front of Cassidy. Every grown man should at least know how to cut a turkey, or so I thought to myself as I grabbed the giant knife that Katherine handed me.
Cassidy stayed with me in the kitchen while her mother made her way to the other room to wait for us to serve the cut up turkey. Slowly, I let the knife saw into the side of the turkey and it returned me a large chunk of white meat. This didn’t seem all that hard after all. I just needed to saw down each side of the cooked bird and put the pieces of turkey onto the platter that was set out.
Cassidy seemed amused as she watched me cut through the first few pieces of meat. Her smile was brilliantly white and her giggles just as distracting to me as I tried to look professional in my turkey-cutting skills.
Even though I was technically a vegan, I didn’t have moral obligations that kept me from eating meat, or cutting it up for that matter. I really just couldn’t do it because I hadn’t ever seen someone cut a turkey before, and I had no frame of reference for where to start with the process.
“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” she finally asked me.
“I know what I’m doing. Just slice the meat off of the bone.”
“There’s a little more to it than that. You’ve got to make the pieces small enough that people can actually eat them. If you leave just large pieces, we will likely need to turn into barbarians and eat that meat with our hands.”
“I’m good with my hands.” I laughed as I held up a disproportionally sized slice of turkey.