When Katie Met Cassidy

by Camille Perri

  Cassidy untied the strap holding her shirtdress closed, and Emiliana wiggled it completely off. Her olive skin was suntanned and smoothed by warm coastal sands. She could have been an advertisement for the Italian Riviera or the island of Capri. But Cassidy’s own body went cold.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Yes,” Emiliana said. “This is why I came.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Cassidy climbed off her. “But this is a mistake. I can’t do this.” Cassidy swiveled around to standing. “You’ve got to go.”

  “Sei serio?”

  “Yes, serious,” Cassidy said. “I’m in love with someone else.”

  Emiliana made no move to put her dress back on, from either pure disbelief or confusion as to why loving someone else should matter.

  Cassidy gestured at the doorway. “You have to leave.”

  “Vaffanculo,” Emiliana said. She reached for her dress, finally.

  “Whatever that means, I’m sure you’re right.” Cassidy searched her pants pockets for some cash and stuffed a few bills into Emiliana’s hand. “Here’s cab fare.”

  Cassidy escorted her out of her apartment, to the hallway, into the elevator. She watched as Emiliana gave her the universal sign of the middle finger as the elevator doors closed on her like a curtain.

  Only when Emiliana was safely on her way down to the lobby could Cassidy breathe again.

  Why the hell did she have to bring someone home? She double-locked her apartment door and marched back into the bedroom, then stood there for a moment, unsure of what to do next.

  All her life Cassidy could give up on anyone. A switch got flipped and that was it. No looking back. Katie had hurt her deeply, and yet she still didn’t want to never talk to her again. Instead she wanted to forgive her. The difference wasn’t something Cassidy could put into words but something she could feel in her soul. She couldn’t let Katie go.

  Cassidy hunted the bedroom for her tuxedo jacket. She found it on the floor at the foot of her bed and felt around for her phone.

  They should have talked more. Katie might not have melted down at the opera if they’d simply addressed the fact that she hadn’t had the years of practice Cassidy did growing accustomed to being different, to looking different. Learning to disregard random disapproval and being stared at, and liking yourself anyway. And perhaps the most difficult at first—telling the world you’ve changed.

  Cassidy found her phone, scrolled to Katie’s name. She sat on the edge of her bed and pressed call.

  Katie couldn’t promise her anything—Cassidy understood that, and she couldn’t promise Katie anything either—but she still wanted to try. Even if it meant they would have to go slow, and do hard work, and overcome challenges, and talk about emotions, and do all that corny lesbian shit that Cassidy couldn’t stand.

  She waited for Katie’s phone to ring.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Katie stopped herself just in time from hurling open Cassidy’s closet door.

  “This is a mistake,” she heard. “I can’t do this. You’ve got to go.”

  Cassidy was damn right the girl had to go. What was she doing here in the first place? Could Cassidy not even take twenty-four hours to process what had happened between them? What the hell was up with that?

  “I’m in love with someone else,” Cassidy said.

  Katie heard it clear as day, as if she were right there in bed with them and not hiding among Cassidy’s neckties.

  Love was definitely the word Cassidy had used, and it made Katie feel a little less silly about the letter in her jacket pocket, the letter she’d run here with certain it would make a difference if only Cassidy would read it.

  There were a few minutes of silence now as Katie tried to figure out what was happening, but she was pretty sure the European was getting kicked to the curb. Then the apartment door slammed shut, followed by footsteps back in the bedroom.

  Cassidy was alone now and moving around, but what was she doing? Had Katie just blown her only chance to safely creep out of her hiding spot?

  A few more minutes passed, and Katie began to sweat. How long would she actually have to stay in here? It was only a matter of time before she would need to pee, and Cassidy worshipped her shoes way too much for Katie to defile one by using it as a makeshift Porta Potty. And could a shoe even contain a liquid without leaking all over the place? What about a boot? A galosh might do the trick.

  Just then Katie’s cell phone vibrated in her pocket.

  Shit. Shit. She was scrambling to silence it when she saw Cassidy’s name was lit up on its screen. It illuminated the entire dark closet.

  Katie looked from the phone to the door to the phone, and it vibrated again.

  Why did she click answer? She could have just as easily sent the call to voicemail and waited to see if Cassidy would leave a message, but it was too late now. Katie brought the phone to her ear.

  “Hello,” Cassidy said. “Katie?”

  Katie swallowed hard.

  “Are you there?” Cassidy’s voice came through in stereo.

  “I’m here,” Katie said into her phone, just as she opened the closet door.

  “Jesus Christ!” Cassidy flew off her bed, dropping her phone to the floor. “You scared the shit out of me!” She was still wearing half a tuxedo, black pants and white dress shirt untucked, its top two buttons undone.

  “I’m sorry.” Katie ended the call and returned her phone to her jacket pocket.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Cassidy was clutching her chest.

  “I came to talk to you,” Katie said. “I thought you’d be home, but then . . .”

  “This is so not okay.” Cassidy glanced at her bed as if to make sure the European was in fact gone, and then back at Katie. “You are literally breaking and entering right now.”

  “I heard you.” Katie stepped forward. “I heard that you love me.”

  “You only heard that because you were spying on me.”

  “The breaking-and-entering thing is a technicality. There wasn’t really any breaking. And I was only spying on you because you brought home a stranger to try to forget me.”

  Cassidy seemed to harden at the accusation. “Just so we’re clear, I haven’t done anything wrong. You’re the one who fucked up. Not me.”

  “You’re right,” Katie said. “I know that. I was just . . .” She paused. “But didn’t you just call me? Why did you do that?”

  “I have no idea.” Cassidy stared down at the floor. “Moment of weakness, I guess.”

  “You have every right to not forgive me if that’s what you choose,” Katie said. “But what happened at the opera was a mistake I won’t make twice.” She waited for Cassidy to say something, but she didn’t. “I want to be in this with you,” Katie continued. “I really do. Because I love you, too. That’s what I came here to tell you.”

  Some of the fight came out of Cassidy’s posture then, and Katie seized the opportunity to take a cautious step closer to her. “But I also have to start being honest about how I’m not as comfortable with myself as you are. And I’m definitely not excited about bringing you home to meet my family, and I don’t think they like gay people, and I never wanted to be gay, and I don’t even know if I am, but I do like having sex with you and I like you. I like everything about you. I’m in love with you even though it’s totally complicated.”

  “That’s kind of a lot,” Cassidy said, but she didn’t back away.

  “I want us to be together,” Katie said. “And I want everyone to know it.”

  “Everyone?” Cassidy eyed Katie with lawyerly suspicion.

  “Everyone. If you give me the chance, I’ll prove it to you.” Katie put out her hand.

  Cassidy just stared at it.

  “Do we have a deal?” Katie asked.

  Cassidy was quiet for a minute, and
Katie held her breath. The only sound came from the hallway outside, one of Cassidy’s neighbors cackling past her door. For a split second Katie feared it was the European back for more.

  Then Cassidy took Katie’s hand in hers and gave it a firm shake. “I think I might be able to agree to that,” she said, and pulled Katie closer.

  The sudden nearness of Cassidy’s body to hers, its heat—Katie had never been so sure of wanting anything in her life.

  She guided Cassidy by the hand toward the bed. “Great,” she said. “Moving on then.” She lay down, pulling Cassidy on top of her. “Want to get out of these clothes?”

  “Yes,” Cassidy said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Cassidy didn’t want to go to Metropolis’s last night. Sentimentality gave her the sweats and she preferred digesting her sadness quietly and alone, but Katie told her to stop being a pussy and to let herself feel some feelings, so that was that.

  As expected, the night was bathed in an in-memoriam-like nostalgia, but Dahlia mercifully drew the line at the music she allowed from the overhead speakers. No “Candle in the Wind.” No “Tears in Heaven.” No “Hallelujah.” Absolutely no Sarah McLachlan. Just the regular mix of never-too-earnest pop rock that usually soundtracked their nights at the Met, but at a slightly lower volume than normal.

  Everyone sat in their regular places in the corner near the pool table, with the addition of Katie at Cassidy’s side, and the group relished having her fresh ears to listen to their favorite memories.

  Gina rolled a pool cue in her hands. “Remember the time I accidentally started that fire and no one noticed till like the whole bar was filled with smoke?”

  “Yeah,” Becky said. “I’m the one who put it out with my beer, and I never got a free refill.”

  “Here.” Dahlia handed over her pint glass of vodka soda. “For your heroism.”

  “Better late than never.” Becky tossed Dahlia’s straw onto the floor and took a sip.

  Gina stood up to take a shot at the pool game she was playing against herself. “What about the night that girl peed in the mop closet?”

  “That girl was crazy,” Cassidy said. “But that was hilarious.”

  “Not hilarious.” Dahlia, having given up her pint glass to Becky, sipped directly from the bottle of vodka she’d brought over from behind the bar. “We couldn’t even clean it up because it was all on the mops. And there was a bucket right there. She could have just as easily done her business into the bucket instead of all over the floor.”

  “It was hilarious,” Cassidy said into Katie’s ear.

  “What about whipped-cream wrestling nights?” Becky said.

  Cassidy grabbed hold of Dahlia’s vodka bottle and took a swig. “I remember how that shit smelled on everyone’s skin when it started to sour.”

  “Yeah, the dairy element hadn’t really been thought through,” Becky said. “Baby-oil wrestling nights were way better.”

  “But slipperier,” Cassidy said. “Who was that girl who slid across the floor and fell on her ass?”

  “Who knows?” Dahlia reclaimed the vodka. “We never saw her again after that night.”

  “Strip Twister, though,” Gina said.

  Strip Twister was the bomb, everyone agreed.

  Katie was amused, or at least it seemed that way to Cassidy in her increasingly inebriated state.

  At some point, Katie took Cassidy’s chin into her hand, turned her face left, then right.

  “You’re wasted,” she said.

  Cassidy closed one eye. “A bit, I think yes.”

  “A rare opportunity to take advantage of you.” Katie stood. “Come with me.”

  Cassidy followed. “Where are we going?”

  Katie led her across the bar, to the bathroom, where Cassidy tried to decipher if she might actually be too drunk to have sex.

  Inside the stall that hadn’t had a door since the night some girls swung on it till it fell off its hinges, Katie brought her lips to Cassidy’s and kissed her softly. The whole time, Cassidy was thinking, This’ll be the last time I ever kiss a girl in here. It was a strange and bittersweet realization to have while this woman she loved, the first she was willing to call girlfriend, had her tongue in her mouth.

  Katie pulled away then, and reached into her jeans pocket.

  Cassidy looked to see what she had in her hand: two markers.

  Katie pulled the cap off one of them. “Would you believe this is the first time I’ve ever done this?” She located an unclaimed section of mottled tile and in hot-pink ink wrote the words Katie loves Cassidy. Then she used the other marker to lasso this declaration in a bold red heart.

  Cassidy touched it with her hand, the ink already set. She imagined how this very tile would be demolished, immortalized from sordid ceramic to sacred dust. Which would have been the case if later in the night—it wasn’t clear to Cassidy exactly when—the looting hadn’t happened.

  It must have been nearing four a.m. when the night really went into overdrive. Nobody was sober, and nothing was off limits as a keepsake. People pocketed shot glasses and claimed favorite pool cues. They raided various tchotchkes on display behind the bar—a pair of rainbow handcuffs; an autographed DVD of season four of The L Word; a figurine of Scar, the evil gay lion from The Lion King. Becky took custody of the tattered magazine cover of Ellen DeGeneres declaring, “Yep, I’m Gay,” that had probably been taped to that spot on the wall since 1997.

  This part Cassidy was certain of—it was Dahlia herself who retrieved her security hammer from its shelf beneath the cash register. The one they all called MC Hammer, that normally made an appearance only when someone, usually a drunk dude or two, got overly aggressive and needed to be asked to leave. Over the years, the hammer itself had become a verb. As in, “Hey, Dahlia, I think those guys over there need to be MC Hammered out of here.”

  What prompted Dahlia to raise the mighty MC high in the air with enough fury that more than one person ducked? Who knew?

  She handed it off to Gina. “Go, little one,” she said. “I beseech you . . . Leave no tile in place!”

  Gina lunged for the thing, swung it around with a two-handed grip like it was the sword from Braveheart. A throng of drunken madwomen abetted her with war cries, while marching en masse toward the bathroom.

  The sound of the first smash was thrilling. It was followed by cheers, and more smashing.

  The Best Fucks List fell from the wall in fragments. A scrum of girls scuffled for its scraps as if they were candy from a piñata. Years’ worth of arguments, debates, rivalries, love lost, and worries forgotten—the tangible proof they had been there, they existed, they mattered—all of it got MC Hammered.

  Everyone left with a piece. A broken, irregular part of something that forevermore would remain incomplete.

  That was the moment that it finally sunk in for Cassidy—that the Met, her Met, her wild youth, was truly over. She forced herself to see it, the image of the place shuttered, metal gates rolled down, green plywood affixed to its façade, its ending. And she bid it a fond and gracious goodbye.

  Cassidy managed to save the tile encompassing Katie’s heart. The way Gina took the hammer to it, it had split in two, but Cassidy was able to retrieve both halves.

  It hung on Cassidy’s bathroom wall at home now, both sides joined, a crooked line down its middle, with jagged, sharp edges.

  EPILOGUE

  Katie and Cassidy were walking along Macdougal Street with their hands dug deep into their winter coats when they halted at the sight of a new empty storefront.

  “I don’t believe it,” Cassidy said.

  Katie eyed the vacated space, all plywood and papered-over windows. “What closed now?”

  “The luxury soap store.” Cassidy cracked a smile. “Remember? The one Gina licked a soap cupcake in that time.”

  “The one that used to be
the wine bar.” Katie’s face lit up with recognition. “And now it’s . . .” She trailed off.

  “This is where we met,” Cassidy said. “Kind of. Right in this spot is where we bumped into each other by accident that first night.”

  “You’re so cute when you get romantic.” Katie pulled Cassidy toward the For Rent sign in the window. “You know what this space would be perfect for?”

  “Not overpriced soap, that’s for sure.”

  “Seriously?” Katie gestured at the vacant storefront, which occupied the ground floor of a late-nineteenth-century triplex. “Are you not thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Cassidy was quiet for a few seconds. “You think I should—”

  “We should,” Katie said.

  Cassidy raised an eyebrow. “Most lesbians opt for a U-Haul after a few weeks of dating. This would be different.”

  “Since when do you do anything the way other people do it?” Katie said.

  Cassidy looked up and down the street, a strip half transformed by acai bowls and avocado toast, the other half choking to hold on to the artistic grit of a bygone era. “It would be a terrible financial decision.”

  Katie wrapped her arm around Cassidy’s elbow. “I’ve been meaning to hawk my engagement ring and do something special with the money. Plus I’ve got this dumb painting that sort of looks like the face of a melting Keith Richards that Paul Michael gave me for our one-year anniversary—because that was just what I wanted. Anyway, it’s turned out to be worth a small fortune.”

  Cassidy let that sink in for a minute. “Dahlia’s been looking for a place to run. And Becky would probably throw in with us. She’d make us sell pork sandwiches or something, but I suppose there are worse things than a little pulled pork to keep a crowd happy.”

  “Spoken like a true Southerner.” Katie drew Cassidy in closer.

  Arm in arm, they let the air of possibility settle over them, each of them picturing their future shared history.