"I need help, Kris. Would you come help me?" The voice on that end of the phone was quiet and tentative.
Kris couldn't hide her anger at the question and didn't bother trying. "
Now
you want help? All your friends have tried to help you for how long now? Six months? Eight?" Months of frustration burst forth in that instant that she had never had a chance to vent with anyone but their mutual friends who were also finally blown off and ghosted. "Are you still with Ted?"
There was a pause on the phone long enough to answer the question without another sound.
"Of course you are, Cassandra. All anybody ever did was try to help you see what a mistake you were making with that guy. He's a loser and a mooch. He treats you like shit and you lap it up. We only tried to help you realize you could do better, but he's got you so wrapped up in him you basically tell us all to go to hell and then nothing at all from you. So, message received, Casandra. Bye."
"Wait," she said quickly. "You might be right, okay?"
Silence again lingered for a time and Kris thought of it and the speed at which the words came forth as something like the sudden pain of pulling a band-aid free. She repeated the words more slowly sounding defeated on the other end of the phone. "You might be right. Don't rub it in, okay?"
Part of her wanted to gloat, but she was bigger than that. Now, she wouldn't mind hearing a, "All of you guys were right and I was wrong," at some point down the road, but now wasn't the time for that. "What happened?"
She sighed. "I thought he just needed someone to help him up, you know? I was happy to do that and I still love him like crazy and always will but it's just too much now. I've realized I can't do it myself anymore, but I can't just leave."
There was a new cause for concern. None of them ever saw him as anything more than a dumb, crass, lazy, leech, but there never had been any cause to think that he'd ever been physically violent with her. Some guilt resurfaced for her, realizing that maybe all bets are off now that she'd cut herself off from everyone she knew before he came into her life and that they'd all let her.
"Do you feel unsafe?" She was already thinking about which of their mutual friends she could call that would come and help. If nothing else, she had several male friends on the big and burly side that would help her if she called.
"No, no, nothing like that. You know Ted, that's not his style. There would just be so much drama at this point if I tried to just walk out and leave him alone. There will be less of that if I have someone here with me, but I'm sure it won't be bad. We'll visit and you can help me out. Then I'll tell him I'm going to work, then that'll be the end of it. He gets so busy with his games and things I'm sure he won't notice anything for hours."
That sounded about right knowing Ted to the small extent she did and 's way was probably the best all the way around. They'd be long gone by the time he started whining for his dinner. "Do you have a place to stay after we leave?"
"You don't have to worry about me there," she assured Kris, sounding a little more like the woman she remembered. "How soon can you make it?"
She took her phone from her ear to check the time. "Twenty minutes?"
"That sounds perfect, I'll see you then." A bit of that rapid fire speech returned. "Oh, come in through the back door, okay. No reason to disturb him and cause an extra fuss."
Kris nodded out of reflex because that made sense, too. "I'll see you then." Even though Cassandra took the step on her own, Kris knew that it couldn't have been easy for her. "You're doing the right thing, you know, for him and for yourself." Maybe with no one to take care of him, Ted would finally find some motivation to get his life together, and starvation, coupled with the elements were usually pretty damn good motivators. "You'll see."
"I know I am, Kris, thanks. See you in a little while."
* * *
It wasn't a long trip to Cassandra's home and she spent that fifteen minutes imagining the best and the worst scenarios and what she would do in response. In the best case, she would get in and they would get out and he would be none the wiser, ideally until she'd relocated, found a decent guy, and had a couple of kids. The worst was going to be that Kris was going to have let herself get suckered into this bullshit again after she had been thrown out of it by Cassandra herself, and finally finding peace with all of it. She saw Ted grovelling to Cassandra in her mind's eye with, "Oh, baby, oh, baby, please, I'll change, I swear."
Cassandra would melt sooner or later, Kris was sure. The only potential counter to that was to seize the moment that was now. Seeing this as a positive step, Kris knew that their other friends would rally around her and run active interference for as long as it took for Cassandra to find her footing. She hoped that it would be enough, but she was heartened by the call. That she had made it at all was a sign that some glimmer of the confident, strong woman that was was still there.
She saw Cassandra's little powder blue house at the end of the block. Nothing looked unusual. The yard looked taken care of and always had because, while she was still trying to reason with her, she'd drive past the house and see Cassandra doing it, which disappointed and annoyed the hell out of her to the point that she'd stopped doing the drive-bys before Cassandra blew them off.
Kris swung around and parked on the street around back and her heart started to race on the walk up to the door, thoughts of the worst case sneaking their way back into her brain. Fight or flight was in play now and she hoped she wouldn't need either one, though she did double check that her phone was unlocked and the signal was good.
On the other side of the door Cassandra appeared, waving, then waving Kris forward with a warm smile. Those events conspired to put her more at ease and she found herself moving more casually up the walkway. When she was upon the door, she saw that her friend looked much the same as she saw her last, which was as disheartening now as it was then. In her prime, Cassandra was a young engineer with nowhere to go but up. She excelled at her job and she handled people almost as well as her work projects, so her future was assured. She dressed professionally and behaved that way.
Even when relaxed with her friends, she never went overboard with the drinking or partying, shunning both because she had goals and throwing too much caution to the wind could get in the way and she didn't like the notion of altering a consciousness she'd worked too hard to cultivate.
This Cassandra was something else entirely. She'd given up on herself as much as Ted had, though there was no hint that Ted ever tried to begin with. She'd quit her job because 'too much work', 'too hard', 'no fun,' and 'Ted didn't like it.' She stood with her straight blond hair and brown eyes with too much mascara and too much makeup in general. It wasn't openly clownish so much as it just made her look like a cheap whore. Her thin, white tank left nothing to the imagination, nipples visible. As Cassandra held the door open for her with one hand as she stepped through Kris looked at the rest of her and figured there was no way she was wearing panties under black shorts that tight. She looked like the poster girl for
White Trash Slut Quarterly
.
At least that's over now. I hope.
"Hi," Cassandra said. "Let's keep it down a little bit. He's playing his games and we don't wanna disturb him." Even quieted, her voice still carried with it a bit of airy fluff.
Wanting to stall any confrontation for as long as possible she gave the other a nod. "Yeah, you're right."
"I've got some stuff in my room that needs to be taken care of. Come with?"
Kris nodded and stepped softly behind her down the hall and to her bedroom. Coming from the end of the hall she could hear the clanging of swords and the unusual sounds that served as the effects in whatever game he was playing and she could hear it loudly enough that she wasn't too worried about being overheard.
Kris turned into the bedroom which was neater than she expected it to be. The floor was clean enough except for a few good-sized laundry baskets of clothes in front of the bed, which itself was a little mussed, and the room smelled faintly of sex and the latter made Kris a little uncomfortable. The idea of literally anyone being with Ted was uncomfortable because the mind's eye couldn't unsee the things it constructed from imagination. And there was a hissing sound from the fist-sized grey voice-assisstant. She decided to try some small talk as brain bleach. "I think your Cube-y is broken."
"Yeah, they've been weird ever since Teddy bought them. It's not bad though when you have them on like this. It's nice pink noise to sleep with. She picked up a basket and put it on the corner of the bed. "Can you get some hangers and the suitcase from the closet? I need to do this stuff so it's done before I feel right about leaving."
Kris was happy to help, as, the sooner she could help Cassandra check off whatever she felt the need to, the sooner they could be off. She put the suitcase on the bed, leaving it open as she grabbed a handful of hangers and tossed them in the other's direction before taking another of the baskets containing a mix of their clothes, not that most of what Cassandra wore these days could be considered clothing.
More like just enough covering to keep her out of jail if she goes out in public.
There was nothing to be found but cheap lace bras, shorts, and leggings. There wasn't even a decent blouse to be had. And almost all the t-shirts, halter tops, and tanks had one vulgarity or other on them. "Don't worry ," Kris assured her, "Get you out of here and you can stay with me while you get yourself back on your feet."
Kris was focused on sorting and folding, so she didn't see a wince brush over Cassandra's features before the happy settled in again. "It'll be nice to be with a girlfriend again."
"No doubt. Everybody still thinks about you. We talk about you. We wondered if you were okay."
Cassandra hung his shirts carefully on each hanger in turn, "Oh, I'm fine. It's just been difficult taking care of everything by myself, you know. It just got to be too much, so I decided to do something about it."
"Well, I'm certainly glad that you found your limit before it was too late," she said as she finished folding a batch of Ted's jeans. "Where do you want these?"
"Just put them in the second drawer." She seemed to delight in sharing the dirty secret, "The bottom one has all sorts of sex toys and lube and stuff in it that I like to use and teddy likes to watch me play with."
More brain bleach required,
Kris thought as she went to the drawer while Cassandra walked behind her for another batch of clothes hangers. On the way back, a well-manicured and brightly painted finger pressed down to up the volume and fill the room with more of the pink noise. With that, any worry or apprehension on her part floated away like leaves in the wind.
"The guys I cam for love them, too."
She noticed the greater presence of the background noise, but didn't think much of it. It just helped them talk without being overheard. "Cam for? You mean you..."
Cassandra giggled. "Sure. We need a place to live and Teddy needs the things he loves to have. And regular jobs suck. I can't wear what I like to wear to them and people want things that are too hard to do most of the time. Camming makes good money. And I can be home. And nobody asks me to do stuff that I don't wanna do anyhow." She sighed, floating on that wind with the leaves. "All they want me to do is be naked and fuck myself silly how they say to. It's way easy."
