26. Cass
CASS
PLAYLIST: ALL OF ME – JOHN LEGEND
Idon’t think I ever thought I’d wake up to California sun, let alone with Elise’s sister next to me in a bed after a good night’s sleep I hadn’t had in years.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey back,” I say as I stretch.
“Good to see you alive. You’ve been out for sixteen hours,” she says and laughs.
“Had some sleep to catch up on,” I say shortly. Even after sixteen hours of sleep, I won’t magically become a morning person.
And then she leans in to kiss me.
My chest flutters.
We’re in a bed together.
And there is the sensation—
I want her.
Want more of her.
I pull myself close.
The kiss gets heated.
My hand wanders under her shirt—
And then she stops.
I remove my hand immediately, pull back.
I went too far—
I didn’t think—
“There is something I need to show you first,” she says, in a tone that flushes all heat out of me.
“Show me?”
“Yeah,” she says, looks at her phone, and adds, “Let’s have breakfast dinner and then I will.”
“Ooookay,” I say, unconvinced.
She kisses me on my forehead and then gets up and into the bathroom. Meanwhile, I stare outside the huge window into nature. The sun is setting down again already.
I slept an entire day. In the nature of nothingness.
Being used to New York, the concrete jungle with just a park here and there, this is something entirely off. The air is too clean; there are birds chirping, and otherwise just so much silence. It’s so quiet that my own mind plays tricks on me.
I have thoughts.
So many thoughts I can hear in my mind.
Thoughts telling me I don’t fit in here.
And yet, I don’t feel entirely out of place.
Everything is just so…different.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks me, returning from the bathroom.
“Yeah,” I say hesitantly.
“Let me guess, it’s too bright and silent for you,” she says.
I snigger. “Guessed right.”
“It’s thirty minutes, and you’re in the middle of buzz,” she says.
“I’ve been to L.A.,” I say. “But that’s no buzz. That’s a colorful hole of too cheerful people with their visions and dreams locked away in their damn cars.”
“You have humor,” she says and laughs. “But fair enough. Won’t hold you hostage here so you can go back to inhaling lousy air.”
I stick my tongue out at her and get out of bed to get myself ready in the bathroom.
At least she has a normal shower, I think to myself as I get into the bathroom. On a sideboard next to it, she has placed a towel, everything I need from toothbrush to the exact hair products I use and clothes.
A smile steals its way onto my face, because it’s sweet.
I get out of the bathroom, only to find she’s not there.
I walk through the house to look for her—it’s not big.
I don’t find her in the kitchen either, so I check out the rest of the house.
It has a cute living room that’s half the size of the terrace outside, filled with books about cars, a small statue made from nuts and bolts, a Porsche model in a case—
This really is her.
“Hey, I’m out here,” she says from outside, and I lurk through the big open door.
She sits at a table where the outside kitchen is, filled with cereal and fruit. I sit down.
“Thanks,” I mumble, and she smiles at me broadly.
We eat breakfast in silence. The cat jumps next to me on the table next to my bowl and eyes my food.
“Watch him,” she says. “He thinks he can pull it off with you, because you’re new. Might be old, might not see and hear properly, but he’s a little fucker regarding food.”
I nod, not really listening, because the way she talks about that cat is the most real I have ever seen her.
Throttle lies down on the table; he looks like he’s falling asleep, as old as he is, and I feel safe to just watch her. Watching her not just exist, but be alive, even glow.
I know I have made a mistake the moment my fork lands on the floor with a loud clunk: Throttle lunged sideways onto my bowl and now inhales the rest of it.
I grab him by the neck, but he doesn’t give a fuck.
“I see what you mean,” I say, as she cracks into laughter while fighting Throttle and cursing at him.
“God damnit, you little fucker!” I say as I rip the bowl from his paws with the milk spilling all over the table.
“Told ya,” she says, taking another spoonful of her own cereal as if nothing has happened.
I throw him—kindly—off the table. He’s back two seconds later. I push him off the table, but he seems not to take no for an answer, like most males, and jumps back up, licking off what we just spilled.
“You gotta handle him. He needs a strong hand,” she says, sucking in her lips to stop the girn.
“He’s old and way too cute,” I say, caressing him.
“Cass,” she says. “Get a hint.”
It takes me a second to catch up to what she meant.
This place is doing something to me. Normally it wouldn’t take me that long.
“Oh,” I say—and when it finally clicks, it turns into an “Ohhhh.”
She laughs. This laugh that’s so unique to her and vibrates straight into my chest.
“Let’s go,” she says and pushes herself carefully off the table.
She’s still in loads of pain, even if she denies it.
We walk out of the house, where she leads me to an old rusty truck I saw yesterday. Its baby blue color has its best years behind it, with some of it flaking off, bearing the rust of years, adding to the bumps and bulges. A truck that’s lived a whole life.
“You’re driving,” she says and walks over to the passenger seat.
The truck is something so normal.
It’s not the Hollywood star, not the billionaire daughter—she is none of that here.
Here, she is just a girl in a truck, so normal.
Well, normal if I forget about how we got here and that this house must have cost some millions, even if it’s not Hollywood Hills chic.
I sit in the truck with an old radio and a gearshift next to the steering wheel. It takes several turns of the key and a lot of gas to get her going.
“She’s a bit picky,” Addy says as she manually rolls down the window. “She’s an old lady.”
“She’s wonderful,” I say as I put the truck in reverse.
Addy tells me where to drive and turn; I just follow her lead. I have been to Los Angeles, but not that much to know my way around.
And then we stand in front of a closed gate with a trazillion warning signs on it, all telling the gate must not be opened and any trespassing will be punished.
She gets out without hesitation and breaks the chain closing the gate, opening it so I can drive through.
I shake my head and grin, because I love everything about it.
“You are a little lawbreaker, aren't you?” I ask when she’s back in the truck after closing the gate.
“Mhhhhhhm, maybe,” she says. “Maybe I love the thrill.”
We drive through serpentines, turning up a trail with a view onto L.A., a fence in front of us.
“Stop there,” she says, pointing at a stone to the right.
I do as told, and she gets out. She walks to a waste bin and climbs onto it, hopping over the fence way too graciously for being just six weeks post nearly dying.
“Are you coming?” she asks me.
“Yeah,” I say and follow her over the fence.
“Follow me, otherwise the camera will catch you,” she says as she slides down a hill, some dry soil loosening under her feet.
“The fucking Hollywood sign,” I say as I stand next to the massive, white sign, overlooking the lights of illuminated L.A.
“Yeah,” she says as she stands next to the H.
She leans against one line of the H, and I lean on the other.
Her eyes are fixed into the distance, and I follow her gaze onto L.A.
“When I came here first, I met someone,” she says.
“Hailey. We auditioned for a movie together. We got high here that night,” she begins, and a strange sensation rushes through me.
“She became my best friend, my first love, the person I call the one,” she continues, and I swallow hard.
Because of all the things I expected this to go, this wasn’t it.
“Hailey was one of the most beautiful souls I ever met. She loved life even though she came from nothing and went through crap. She had this radiant laughter—”
A weak smile appears on Addy’s face.
“You know, that laughter that just affects you?” she asks me without really asking. “We did four films together. We raced. We laughed. Cried. Went through everything together. I asked her to marry me, right here.”
My stomach sinks.
She brought me where she proposed to another woman?
“She said yes. Happiest moment of my life. I was building a life here. After all I escaped with my father, I had this glimpse of freedom. We swore to each other we’d go, leave everything behind. Run away to where no one would find us, start a new life.”
Whatever happiness it was, it doesn’t show on her face. On her face is only a single thing. Pain. Even a cold numbness.
“And then we started filming Princess Anna,” she says, audibly swallowing hard. “One of the producers, he—“
She stops.
Swallows.
Starts again.
“He found a liking in her. She didn’t want him, of course not. So he took what he wanted.”
The hair on my arms stands up because I know what’s coming.
“I tried,” she says as she closes her eyes. “Hailey got pregnant from him. She always wanted to be a mother; I told her to abort it. We got into a huge fight that overshadowed everything after.”
She sucks in her lips, trying to fight the tears she was never good at fighting at all. I want to hug her. Hold her. But I don’t dare interrupt her.
“I tried to save her. That one night—we hadn’t been talking, she called me—I wasn’t fast enough. I just wasn’t—I should have never left, but I just couldn’t deal with the fact that she could love a child that came from—from—”
She breaks off and rubs underneath her eyes, wiping away the tears.
“The doctors could save the baby,” she says. “The baby that was—“ Addy says, and her jaw clenches. “And she, she bled out next to me. Stabbed seven times, because she refused him access to the baby.”
I cover my mouth with my hands.
“Hailey told me she was supposed to be named after her grandmother, Annie. Begged me to take good care of her if she survives.”
Annie.
Responsibilities.
And suddenly, I am crying too, as I understand why Addy did everything she could to get away from any responsibility.
“Hailey never got to see her girl,” Addy says in a trembling voice from all the tears. “I promised her to take care of her girl. I promised her again standing here when we gave Hailey her last rest at the place she loved most.”
Addy's sobs are so bitter they make my chest clench while I feel sick to my stomach.
“I had to get Annie away,” she then says.
“She would’ve been put in foster care, emergency placement; worst case, her rapist father could’ve claimed her—“ Her voice breaks off.
“So I stole her. I got her out of the hospital, and smuggled her to Italy, where her grandmother lives, and takes care of her.”
At this point I am just crying with her. Never in my life have I been this emotional. I want to run away, do everything not to feel any of this. But I don’t. Because she trusts me with her story. And I will never walk out on her again, least of all because of my own discomfort.
“My father helped me,” she says, her voice turning to ice. “It was the only way I could pull it off. And it is the reason why I couldn’t get out. He knew. And he shamelessly used it. He used me in ways I will never repeat.”
My breathing flattens.
The horrors she has gone through.
I feel so bad. So bad for all the judgment I had.
Nikki was right.
And I am so stupid.
“I wanted to die,” she says. “Because every day was a reminder of all my failures. Of all the things I have lost. Of all that was taken from me. I was drowning. I am drowning. Except for those ten seconds of acceleration where nothing else matters.”
I know, I tell her in my mind.
“We planted her these poppies here,” she says and sinks to the ground, brushing over the orange blossoms next to her. “They were her favorite.”
“They are very beautiful,” I say as I slide down to the ground with my back against the sign.
A weak smile appears on her face as she turns her head to me; just a bit. Her eyes meet mine. We stare at each other for a very long time. So long, the tears on my cheeks dry, leaving the skin feeling tight.
“And then, I met you,” she says after a while. “I met you after I promised myself to never love again, because the pain of losing Hailey, of everything that happened—”
Her hand wanders on mine.
“And you understood. You knew. You felt the pain of losing someone you loved yourself. You were just as fucked up as me. And then I got hope. Hope that I might not be doomed. Might not be alone—“
“And I left.”
“You left because it’s all you ever knew.”
“Still, I left,” I say, a heavy rock blocking my throat. “I left when you needed me most.”
“I left you first,” she says. “I run, I hunt the thrill, I push everyone away, because it saves me from breaking into a million pieces. And I’d rather die than break again.”
A sinking feeling rushes through me.
She’s pushing me away.
She’s—
“I wanted to die with you,” she says and falls silent, grasps around my hand.
“And then I heard you scream. It was so…alive. So real. Not the pain of the past. Not a ghost hunting me at night. You were right there. Fighting for me. And suddenly the hope for a life with you was stronger than the desire to meet the ghost of my past again.”
Warmth radiates through me.
“I love you, Cass,” she says. “And it scares the shit out of me.”