25 - Perception

Jon threw back the covers and climbed into bed, bringing his phone with him. 

Saturday night and you’re climbing in bed at ten o’clock.  Livin’ the rock star life there, old man.

Jake was spending the night with a friend, so that had left Jon to entertain Romeo for most of the evening.  Not that he required much, but they’d gone out for dinner and then Jon had been drafted into several rounds of video games.  He was horrible at those things and, if it weren’t for his boys, he would never touch them.  Dave was the overgrown kid that loved to play shoot ‘em up, also known as “Call of Duty”.

The blankets settled around Jon’s waist as he got comfortable against the pillows.  Leaning back against the headboard, he prepared to reap the delayed gratification of his Cassidy fix.  

[10:07 PM]JON: How’s the weekend treating you?

He hadn’t been in touch with her since the plane yesterday, and that was mostly by design.  The cryptic exchange with Dorothea had prompted him to invest time in mulling over the status his marriage.  He hadn't uncovered any clear-cut feelings on the situation but, seeing as he and his wife could very well be on the same page in the book of extramarital affairs, guilt had been chucked out the window.  If pressed, he'd say that simple restlessness covered it most effectively, joined by uncertainty as to how the situation would play out when they finally talked.  

He’d also been curious to see how the songwriting would go without Cassidy.  There hadn’t been a lot of time to devote to it, but the occasions where he tried were okay.  He was only finishing up things that he’d already started and, apparently, he didn’t need her presence to tweak words or chord progressions.  Since there hadn’t been any attempt at new material, her long-term effect had yet to be determined.

A frown tugged at his mouth.  Ten minutes and she hadn’t responded.  Did he text again to get her attention, or did he let that one stand on its own?  Alone, it was simply casually polite interest in how she was doing.  Multiple messages without response wasn’t casual, it was needy.

Just one more.

[10:19 PM]JON: FYI, couldn’t get studio before Tues.  Obie’s coming then. 

Jon was grateful for that.  Dodging his friends’ presences and adhering to their timetables was a huge pain.  Dave’s presence might be tolerable now that he sort of knew what was going on, but Obie not so much.  The only saving grace there was that Obie was generally in his own hyper little world and oblivious to a lot of things around him. 

[10:22 PM]CASSIDY: Hi.  Was touching up my hair.  Tuesday is fine.  Are you coming with him?

No, and hell no.  He wanted time alone with her before Obie got there and screwed it up.

[10:23 PM]JON:  No.  Should be there Monday abt noon.

[10:24 PM]CASSIDY:  Ok.  How are your boys?

[10:26 PM]JON:  Good.  Typical boys. 

Of course she may not know anything about boys.  Did she have kids?  He didn’t even know if she’d been married.

[10:27 PM]CASSIDY:  I have 2 nephews 10 & 13.  They’re a handful.

[10:28 PM]JON: Mine are 11 & almost 13.  Handful is right.  You have kids?

Kids were easier to ask about than husbands.  Besides, Jon wasn’t interested in mental pictures of another guy groping Cassidy’s curves.  He was even less interested in acknowledging how possessive he felt of those curves. 

[10:29 PM]CASSIDY:  One.  Calliope is in her 3^rd year of med school at Duke.

Holy shit. 

His brain completely fritzed for a second, almost unable to process her response.  Was he so superficial that he didn’t think a bartender could have a daughter in medical school?  Cassidy certainly wasn’t the typical bartender and she seemed to be intelligent.  Why did this surprise him so much?

Because unless the kid is a prodigy, she’s twenty-four or twenty-five years old.

There was no way in hell Cassidy had a daughter that old.

Jon completely bypassed the little electronic keyboard, dismissing it in favor of the “Call” button.

“Hi there,” she laughed in that soft drawl of hers.  “You get tired of typin’?”

“Takes too long to cover everything I want to say,” he informed her shortly before spitting out what was foremost in his mind.  “Medical school? Third year?  I realize I’m about to commit the unpardonable sin, but how old are you?”

The sultry chuckle reminded him of the first day he’d met her, when she’d laughed at Obie asking where she learned to sing.  It carried the same punch now as it had then and he had a passing, yet fierce, desire to have her curled up in his lap laughing like that. 

“I will be forty-two on my birthday.”

“Which is on August fifteenth,” he confirmed, remembering exactly when it was.  He was very good with dates, even without cue cards.

“Yessir.”

“So is she a child prodigy?”

This time the laughter was dry instead of sultry.  “I’ll save you from doin’ the math.  Calliope was born a couple days after my sixteenth birthday.  If you can, please refrain from the redneck and/or hillbilly references that I know are dyin’ to be spoken.  I’ve heard ‘em all.”

Damn if that didn’t beckon a host of other questions that were totally inappropriate to ask.  Why so young?  Who was the dad?  High school sweetheart?  Where was he now?  Or was Calliope the result of something not quite so pretty as young love? 

He was exceedingly curious about all of those things, but didn’t have the right to be a busybody.  Or maybe he just didn’t want to be.  If she wanted to fill him on those personal details, she would offer, and he would prefer that information of that nature be offered instead of extracted.  Until she did offer, he would respectfully choose another subject.

“You must be proud of her.”

Was that a sigh of relief he heard?

“I am.  Very much so.  When she chose my alma mater instead of Johns Hopkins, I cried.  I’m such a girl.”

Holy shit again.  Two or three more times.

The woman he affectionately thought of as Dixie was determined to shock the hell out of him tonight.  It was a toss-up as to which of those statements he wanted to pursue first.  The fact that her daughter had turned down Johns Hopkins, been offered Johns Hopkins in the first place or that Cassidy went to Duke.

There you go stereotyping again. 

“What was your major?”

She snorted softly.  “Why am I tellin’ you all this?  More importantly, why are you interested?”

“I seem to recall saying that you were more than a plaything to me.  That wasn’t bullshit.  I like you.  I’d like to get to know you better.”

“In the interest of there bein’ no misunderstandin’,” the familiar phrase was almost ridiculously drawled out.  “If we were in the same room, you wouldn’t give a tinker’s damn about my college education.”

He didn’t bother denying the accusation.  If they were in the same room, he would likely be more interested in her sexy body and how it felt next to his.  But they weren’t in the same room, so….

“Maybe not, but since you’re not seducing me with curves that never quit…”  He couldn’t help but envision her ass and smiled when his dick stirred the tiniest bit. “I can use some of my blood supply for the big head and have a conversation with you that doesn’t revolve around music or my inability to write it.”

“You can write music, honey.”  Her soft, sincere endorsement was an unexpectedly satisfying stroke to his ego. 

“I wasn’t fishing for compliments.”

“And I wasn’t givin’ ‘em.  Just statin’ facts.”

“Then I guess I’ll say thank you and move on.  So what was your major?”

Cassidy let her head fall back against the headboard, contemplating how much to share with Jon.  While she wasn’t a secretive person by nature, she also didn’t make a point of revealing a lot of personal details to the men who shared her bed.  Add in the fact that her personal details didn’t belong to Cassidy Starr and it was an even more compelling case for keeping her trap shut.

The thing was, Jon had become more than an impersonal lover.  Maybe it made her delusional to consider him a friend, but she did and, if he was curious enough to ask the question, then she wanted to tell him.   

“If you really wanna know, I’ll tell ya,” she relented.  “Just between friends.”

 “Just between friends.”

That delusional part of her thought she heard a smile when he agreed, and it had her a little happier than she had a right to be.   She gave herself a mental kick in the pants and offered up the short version of her educational history. 

 “Originally, I majored in accounting at the junior college. Didn’t quite finish before I went to beauty school and got a cosmetology license.  After that, I decided I wanted more for me and my little girl than bookkeepin’ and hairdressin’ jobs, so I packed us up and moved to Durham, North Carolina.  I got my nursin’ degree from Duke when I was twenty-eight.”

“Holy shit.”  He sounded utterly shell-shocked, and Cassidy bubbled over with laughter.  Considering what he knew of her, he had every right to be shell-shocked.  “What the fuck are you doing at that damn bar?”

Oh, you know.  Just hidin’ out until I can prove my uncle is a lyin’, schemin’ bastard.

“Well, honey,” she sighed, stifling the true answer.  “Yanno how sometimes things go haywire with your phone or computer service, and you can’t use ‘em until somebody figures out how to fix ‘em?  Let’s just say I’m experiencin’ a slight disruption in service right now.”

If only there was a qualified technician working on the problem, she might feel better about that analogy.  She was without a Geek Squad and, subsequently, there was no estimated time for restoration of that service.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

His immediate and seemingly sincere offer touched Cassidy.  There was always a chance that she wasn’t fully delusion and he considered her a friend, too.

He might actually be able to help, you know.

He might at that.  Cassidy had blisters from figuratively knocking on every lawyer’s office door in town for the past two days, and she still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Beauregard Beasley.  Nor could she find anyone who had.  Mr. Beasley was her only hope at resuming a normal life and she was quickly running out of ideas on how to find him.

“Nah,” she declined with deliberate nonchalance as she decided to take a chance.  “But I do have a question for ya.  You ever try to find somebody?”

“What do you mean ‘find somebody’?”

“When you have somebody’s name or general location and want to look ‘em up to say hello.”

“Stalking isn’t my area of expertise,” he confessed.  “But I guess online would be your best bet.  Have you tried Google, Facebook and all that?”

She had.  It was the first thing she’d tried, in fact.  What she discovered was that Mr. Beasley was roughly the right age to be God Himself and evidently eschewed anything as new-fangled as technology.   She was reliant strictly upon word of mouth for this needle-in-a-haystack search.

“I did, but no luck.”

“Dave might know of something more technologically sophisticated than Google or Facebook, but I choose to remain ignorant of it.  That’s all I’ve got.”

The pang of disappointment that she felt wasn’t even remotely justified.  Cassidy had known it was a stretch but would’ve kicked herself for not asking. 

“You and me both,” she agreed with a light laugh.

“Who is it you’re looking for?”

Huh.  You probably should’ve planned for that one.  You’d best channel your inner Libby.

“Nobody really.  Just someone who knew my grandmother.”

That wasn’t really a fabrication since it was supposedly true.  Cassidy couldn’t confirm or deny it until she actually found the damn man, though.

“If you really want to find them, I’ve got a guy I know who’s a private investigator.  My brother’s also pretty good at that stuff.”

“Oh heavens, no.”  She didn’t feel right asking him to go out of his way for this, even if it would be incredibly helpful.  “Maybe I’ll just take your suggestion and ask David.”

David had told her to consider him a friend, but screwing up enough gumption to ask for his help was going to be a challenge.  He was helping enough by pretending not to know she was sleeping with his married friend.

“Suit yourself.  He’s got a weird knack for internet shit, so maybe he’ll find something you missed.  You have his number right?  If not I’ll send it to you.”

“If you don’t mind sendin’ it to me that would be great.”  Who knew?  Maybe she’d actually use it. 

If you get desperate enough, you’ll utilize whatever resources you can find.  You must not be desperate enough yet.

“As soon as we hang up, I will,” Jon promised.

“Thank ya.  If I hadn’t already kept you talkin’ so long, I’d ask about your kids.  Seems only fair since you heard all about mine.”

“Next time.  Hey, do you know any Bon Jovi songs?”

He didn’t want to tell her about his kids.  Okay.  She was fine with that.   He’d said there would be a next time and that made her happy.  She’d just go with that.

“I know some, why?”

“Since you don’t have me in your hair this weekend, maybe you could brush up on them.  I want us to try a couple in the studio on Tuesday.”

He was doing another duet with her.  He was pushing her potential music career forward.  Yeah, if he didn’t want to talk about his kids, who was she to say or think squat about it?

“Alright.  Anything in particular?”

He paused for a moment, probably doing a mental perusal of his catalog.  “I’ll text you the short list that comes to mind.  That is, if you still want to do this.  Sorry, I should’ve asked that first.  I mean now that I know a little more about you...”

Funny how people’s perception of you could change based solely on their own knowledge.  Now that he knew she could have a “real” job if she wanted, he was concerned that music was beneath her?  Silly man. 

“You knowin’ I can color my own hair, stitch up a cut, and balance a checkbook doesn’t make me any different than I was before you called.” 

“Fair enough,” he granted with a laugh.  “Does that fortune cookie answer mean you still want to do this?”

“Yes, smarty pants, it does.”  Even if it wasn’t the best idea in the world, she still wanted to do it.  “Text me the list and David’s number.  Please and thank you.”

“Yes ma’am.”  The line went quiet for a minute.  “I really do like you, Dixie.  I’m looking forward to seeing you again.”

Cassidy scooted down in the bed, snuggling herself into “his” pillow with a secret smile.  “Ditto for me.”