AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Love you, too, Kaysh.”
Acacia wasn’t finished. “I’m always going to have your back. I’m just not sure this is the best decision you’ve ever made.”
“Maybe not.” Cassie shrugged. “But it’s sure not the worst.”
“No, yeah, the worst was definitely jumping off the roof of your trailer after you’d made yourself wings you thought would work.”
“Okay, I was gonna say dating Seth but I like yours better.”
“Ugh, don’t make me think of that earthworm.”
Cassie cackled. As soon as she and Seth broke up, Acacia started referring to him only as the earthworm, maintaining that he had a little pinhead that made him look like one. Cassie loved it every time.
Over the week, the group text quieted down, Acacia and Cassie keeping up most of the conversation. One time, three days after they’d eaten dinner in a group and two days after Parker skipped breakfast for the second week in a row, Cassie asked, “So, Parker, am I just not gonna see you anymore?”
She sent it right before chem lab when she’d be too busy to hover over her phone, worrying if she’d get a response. When she got out of lab, there were fourteen new messages in the group chat.
They were all Acacia and Parker talking about Parker’s latest art project.
Cassie’s question went unanswered. She didn’t ask it again.
Instead, while Acacia was sitting on the couch in Cassie’s apartment, one foot propped on the coffee table as she painted her toes bright red, Cassie asked, “Is Parker pissed at me?”
“Why would she be?”
There was really no reason, except: “’Cause I’m fucking her mom?”
Acacia’s head whipped around. Her eyes were wide. “Do you think she knows?”
“No.” How the hell could she know? Acacia obviously wouldn’t tell, and it wasn’t like Erin would, either. “But I don’t know what else I did.”
Acacia went back to painting her nails. “Why do you even think she’s mad at you?”
“We never hang out anymore.”
Kaysh shrugged. “She’s got a lot of projects going on, and so do you. Things will settle down eventually.”
Cassie tried to believe her.
But Parker had just… disappeared off the face of the earth. Cassie would’ve been pissed if she weren’t determined not to let it bother her. If anything, she was embarrassed. She’d never used the termbest friendlightly, and to have used it on Parker only to be dropped as soon as Parker got a girlfriend didn’t feel great. In fact, the last time she’d used it on Parker, the other girl had joked that Acacia was Cassie’s best friend. Maybe she’d been trying to tell her something.
Any sense of regret Cassie had been feeling about the whole fucking her friend’s mom thing faded to the background. Parker was basically not even her friend right now. It’d been two weeks since Parker and Sam officially got together, and Cassie could count the number of times she’d hung out with Parker on one hand—hell, on one finger. And even that had been in a group.
Cassie should’ve known better. She barely knew Parker. Parker was just a freshman who roomed with Cassie’s best friend. Yeah, sheand Cassie had gotten along for a while there, but apparently that was it.
But whatever. Cassie didn’t need Parker. She’d had to fend for herself for pretty much as long as she could remember.
It wasn’t like she was short on ways to spend her time. She had homework and classes, Acacia and work in the shop.
She had Erin.
Not that they weredating,or anything. That would be ridiculous.
Seth had been Cassie’s first relationship. Not her first anything else, but her first actual relationship. Cassie knew from experience that sleeping with someone did not mean you were dating. People could get what they needed from each other without it being anything other than the physical. Admittedly, itwasmore than that with Erin—Cassie actually liked her, which was a lot more than she could say for most of the people she’d fooled around with.
But liking someone as a person didn’t mean you were dating them any more than sleeping with them did. Nor did texting every day. They weren’t texting each othergood morningandgood nightor anything, but it wasn’t unusual for Erin to be the first and last person Cassie talked to each day. Acacia could only take so much engineering talk, but Erin seemed to have endless interest. They spent an entire day texting about grad school—Cassie admitted to applying at MIT, plus Georgia and Virginia Tech, even though she was dead set on Caltech. She was confident—cocky, maybe—but not dumb enough not to have a backup.
Erin [11:23 AM]
