Chapter 10
CASSIE
“Fucking hell, girls!” Martin bellows as we walk into the studio. “An hour and a half late. What the fuck are you thinking?”
“Morning, Martin,” Pia says breezily, completely unbothered by his angry stare. She crosses the room to the couch in one corner, dumps her bag and lights a cigarette.
“I hope you’re not picking up her bad habits.” Martin points a finger at me.
“Oh, she’s picked up all sorts from me,” Pia says from the sofa. I flash her a look, but all I get in return is a wink and an air-kiss.
“Don’t get comfortable.” Martin’s wielding that finger at Pia now. “We need to start recording immediately.”
“But I need coffee,” Pia pouts at him, and I smother my giggle.
“Don’t they have coffee at your hotel? God knows you’ve drunk them dry of pretty much everything else, according to the last minibar bill I saw.”
“We didn’t get up in time,” she says, far too nonchalantly.
“We?” Martin stops shuffling around the room. I freeze in place, every single hair on my body standing to attention.
“Cassie and me,” Pia says as if she isn’t just sharing our secret with Martin and everyone else in the room, which includes four men at the sound deck who seem too busy to be paying attention, but who knows? Men have been known to multi-task on occasion.
There’s also a woman I don’t recognise in the corner, scribbling into a notebook, and I panic; is she writing down this conversation?
I scan everybody’s faces, looking for recognition of what happened between us, but when my eyes land on Pia, she gives me another wink and a gentle nod of what seems to be reassurance. “We had a little sleepover last night.”
“A sleepover?” Martin says slowly in his Scottish accent that seems to add even more suspicion to his tone.
Jesus Christ. I close my eyes and pray to my father’s God that he can miracle a sinkhole underneath me.
“You know. Just us girls. Face masks. Pillow fights. Talking about boys all night long.”
Martin rolls his eyes at Pia’s petulant tone.
Something tells me he’s heard it more times than he can count.
“I don’t want to know what really happened last night, who was really in your bed.
” He points at Pia again. “Just don’t go corrupting Haven’s golden girl in the process. Kevin will never forgive me.”
Pia shoots me a very knowing look. I can tell she’s thinking about this morning when I was the one corrupting her, waking her up by kissing her clit until she was halfway to an orgasm before her eyes had even opened.
Or maybe she’s recalling last night when I used my fingers to fuck her to three orgasms, then used her thigh to get myself off while she sucked on my tits.
Fuck. Sucked. Tits. Who am I?
I don’t know, but I think I like her. So much so that I have been thinking about what she said. About us owning the real song. About us sharing our truths. About me being as brave as Pia for once in my life.
Maybe I could do it. Maybe I could be that person. And maybe Pia would see it and she would feel something close to what I feel for her.
“Cassie?” a voice interrupts my daydreaming. It’s Martin again, but this time he’s talking only to me.
“Sorry, yes?”
He opens his mouth and then closes it. He looks up and down my body with nothing but confusion. “Is that…?”
“Oh, yeah, I borrowed one of Pia’s T-shirts,” I say, adjusting the torn grey T-shirt that I suspect was once white, but I don’t care because it smells like her – spice and cigarettes and the warmth of her body.
“I, err, got ketchup on my blouse, and there wasn’t time to go back to my house for a change of clothes. ”
“Right. Okay. Well, this is Ramona McKenzie, from Rhythm & News.” Martin indicates the woman with the notebook who’s now standing next to him. “She’s here to interview you and Pia.”
“Oh. Why?” I ask before I can stop myself.
“To make as much noise about the single, of course. She’ll publish the interview the same week ‘What I Want’ gets airtime.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s a big pleasure to meet you both,” Ramona says, holding out a hand for me to take, which I do.
I flash a quick glance over at Pia and see she’s examining her nails like there may be flecks of gold buried under the tips.
She clearly doesn’t give a shit about this interview.
I am both envious and horrified at how easily she lets this show.
Maybe she doesn’t give a shit about anything. Including me.
Even if it didn’t feel that way last night. Or this morning.
“It won’t take too long, I promise. And we can work closely on making sure the final piece is something you’re happy with,” Ramona explains, pushing her round glasses up her nose. She’s cute in a bookish, mousey way. Her plaid skirt suit and pussy-bow blouse combo is very sexy librarian.
Sexy librarian. Wow. I fuck one woman and I think I know it all.
Much to Ramona’s surprise, I start to giggle at that thought. She withdraws her hand and touches her face, like there might be something there that I’m laughing at.
“Oh, it’s not you.” I touch her forearm and reassure her. “It’s me. I’m just a bit … tired.”
“Because of our sleepover,” Pia adds as she approaches me, and my cheeks immediately heat.
“Well, we’ll have our sit-down after you’ve finished recording, if that’s okay?” Ramona says.
“Sounds good,” Pia says, stubbing her cigarette out on her boot heel. “But could you be a darl’ and go and see if you can find some coffee while we warm up?”
“Coffee?” Ramona looks as affronted as she has a right to.
“Yes, black, one sugar for me. Cassie?”
“Err, no, thank you,” I mumble, and then Pia has a firm grip on my wrist and I’m yanked towards the door by the sound desk, leaving poor Ramona with nothing but her coffee order.
Once we’re inside the recording area, Pia pushes me into a recording booth and has me face her, my back to the wall that stands between us and the control room window.
“Pia, what—”
“What do you think you’re doing?” she cuts me off.
“Me? What are you talking about?”
“You. In there. With her.”
“Ramona? The journalist?”
“Yes, her. You were flirting with her. Right in front of me.”
Realisation dawns on me like the warm sun rising on a summer morning. “You’re jealous,” I state as I cross my arms.
“I am not.” She mirrors my pose.
“You are!”
“I’m … Fine. Maybe I am. So what? You still have my arousal in your mouth, my teeth marks all over your breasts. Aren’t I allowed to be a little pissed when I see you flirting with another woman right in front of me?”
“I was not flirting,” I say, hoping she doesn’t see how her wicked words and the mental images they vividly create have made my nipples very hard.
I lean in a little closer. “I was … I was laughing because I was thinking about how much you’ve changed me.
You’ve made me … fucking feral. Sex is all I can think about right now. Sex with you.”
This has her scowl melting away. She loosens her arms, and I see them lift but then lower again. We’re not completely in view of everyone in the other room, but we’re also not invisible either.
“You want more sex with me?” There’s something about the lift in her tone that has me able to immediately imagine what she looked like as a child: big brown eyes that glow with flecks of gold in the right light, lips that turn upward at the corner, thick eyelashes that flutter with excitement.
I smile at her, and surely she must see it too. How much I want this. But then one of the sound techs walks in and I step back.
“I want us to be careful,” I tell her in a low whisper after I see him busying himself with equipment on the other side of the room.
“You can’t keep dropping all those hints.
You can’t play around like that so … blatantly.
Let the song do the talking. Remember? The song is for us and all the women like us. ”
Pia stares at me for a long time. Her playful smile blends into a more searching and then confused expression, and then something shutters behind her eyes and she’s back to the scowling woman who dragged me into this room.
“Well, let’s get this song recorded then,” she finally says, and she reaches the headphones hanging on their hook.
“Yes, let’s record the song,” I repeat, wondering why I don’t feel pleased that we’re on the same page about this.