“Yes.”
“That’s better,” Cassie says with a soft smile.
I should feel relieved that I’m cleaned up, that I may no longer look like the troll I feel, but I don’t. I feel sad that I am now expected to move from sitting on the closed toilet lid. I don’t want to. It’s been medicine enough to just sit here and look up at Cassie as she wipes away blood, mascara and God knows what else from my face.
“Thank you,” I say, but I don’t move.
She also doesn’t take her hand away from under my chin.
“You don’t even seem that drunk,” she says.
I shrug and regret it instantly because it prompts her to take her hand away. “I sobered up pretty quickly after I was pushed down a flight of stairs.”
Cassie steps back and leans against the vast vanity in this ridiculously opulent bathroom. “One day you’re going to get seriously hurt. You need to be more careful.”
“Okay,Mom,” I snort and stand up, messing with my hair in the reflection behind her.
“I don’t get it,” she says. “You have all this talent. So much potential. A whole brilliant future ahead of you. And you choose to get in bar brawls and build this reputation for yourself as some rebel with, actually, not much of a cause.”
I pin my gaze on her, defensiveness sparking to life in the pit of my stomach. “What would you rather I do? Sing love songs about men who treat me like shit? Live in the shadow of religious trauma? Let others define me and decide who I am?”
Cassie’s head rears back like I’ve hit her. “I don’t … That’s not who I am,” she says with far too little authority.
“I didn’t say it was,” I say, and I catch the smirk on my face in the mirror’s reflection, and fuck, it’s ugly. “Anyway, it was our last hurrah. We fly to Europe tomorrow.”
“Right,” Cassie says, and she starts tidying up the things she was using to clean me up.
“Which means I won’t see you again for a long time,” I add. It’s a test of her reaction, and also mine.
She stops moving. “I suppose not,” she replies without looking at me.
“How does that make you feel?” I ask.
When she finds my gaze in the mirror, it almost feels like answer enough. Her blue eyes on me are almost all the answer I need to any question, but then I notice there’s no sparkle there.
“What do you want from me?” she asks so softly, it’s like a line in a song she’s humming to herself as she tries to put a verse together.
I blink. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“And you didn’t answer mine.”
I turn to the side so I can look her right in her eyes. For real this time. “Tonight, last night, whatever, was the first time I drank in weeks,” I tell her. She may not know it, but it’s an answer to her question.
“Oh,” is all she says in return.
“I didn’t even want to. Definitely didn’t enjoy it. I … I’m writing the best songs of my life at the moment,” I say, and Cassie frowns at the change in direction of the conversation. “And each one is about you.”
“Oh,” she says again, but there’s so much more depth in it, just like there’s so much more colour in her cheeks now.
“It’s cute and all,” I tell her, revelling in how I have her full attention. “But it’s also getting kind of annoying. I don’t want to only be writing unrequited love songs for the rest of my life.”
“Pia, I…” she begins with clear determination, but then the words disappear and so does the light in her eyes again. “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“The truth.” I tuck her hair behind her ear. “Tell me the truth.”
“I think about you all the time,” she says on an exhale, like it’s a great relief to push the words out of her body. “And I don’t know what that means.”
“I think,” I say, stepping closer and tucking another strand behind her other ear. “It means that we’re fucked.”
