razorblade | sebastian vettel ✓

chapter 6 | romance isn't dead

«Strategy sets the scene for the tale.»

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The thing about being alone, unemployed — or she was employed but by normal standards she wasn't — and feeling like she was a decaying living being was that every time Cassandra wasn't distracting herself with something, whether good or bad, she allowed herself to think too much. And when she meant thinking, it wasn't just the casual intrusive thoughts one could have while being alone.

She meant thoughts about her father, her mother, Matteo, Abigail, and Gareth. And for some reason, she would even add Sebastian to that mix now. Because he had successfully crawled his way into her brain. What a surprise.

When Cassandra thought about her parents, about her dad being dead and her mother abandoning her, she felt hollow inside. Like there was some kind of hole there where all the parental love was supposed to be. She loved her dad, but there was no way to express or use that love anymore so it just felt overwhelming. When all of it was too much, Cassandra usually ended up taking a bunch of antidepressants, not exactly the recommended number of pills anyway. She hadn't been to a proper therapist appointment since her father died, but it was fairly easy to find Prozac and Zoloft without a signed prescription from a registered doctor. She liked those meds. They made her feel alright and not like she would regret her entire existence the following day. Ambien and Klonopin were good too if she got into too much detail.

Then it was Matteo. When she thought about him — even when in denial that she did — Cassandra's mind drifted to the reminders of a sexual relationship. It had always been like that with him, and even though she constantly denied he groomed her, Cassandra was aware there had been an imbalanced power dynamic between them. At least for the first three years of the entanglement. She was eighteen when they met, he was twenty-six, and they started sleeping together six months after the first encounter. She never felt manipulated into being with someone far older than her who also happened to be an educational authority for her, she was always free to sleep with other people as well, guys or girls her age, and that helped her understand how different her dynamic with Matteo was from others. Maybe Abigail was right, and she did have a weird attachment to the guy.

When it came to Abigail and Gareth, especially Abigail, she realised these were people who were nice to her, who gave her a friendship and an emotional place to rest, without expecting anything in return. With her parents, or more so her father, she assumed the love was unconditional but she was always obliged to do things that would gain her dad's approval, it would've been the same with her mother if she had stuck around. With her romantic partners, they always expected something sexual in return, that didn't even need that much analysis. But Abigail and Gareth, they were nice to her even knowing they wouldn't get many benefits from befriending her.

The day Cassandra met Abigail she felt like the girl had taken upon herself the job to fix something that was broken, which seemed like an Abigail trait because Cassandra had always believed her friend had some sort of saviour complex. She later understood that Abigail just cared for her because she liked her, what a surprise. Gareth had been her nicest coworker, the one who didn't believe she had sucked Hans' dick to go from an intern to a full-time writer for the magazine. He had shut down jokes about her that other people made during work, and Cassandra fully believed he was the reason working at the magazine became bearable. They had empathy for her even when sometimes she felt like she did nothing for them because they always did everything for her.

Now there was Sebastian, who strangely made it to the list of people occupying her thoughts. He didn't know her the way Abigail and Gareth did, not even the same way Matteo did, but he was there. His blue eyes reminded her of her mother's — from the pictures she wished she would've burned when her dad passed away — and his passion reminded her of her father's. It was a weird combination. So perhaps she liked to believe he was in her mind because there was familiarity within him, but Cassandra also knew she hated that kind of familiarity. Sebastian liked blondes, something Cassandra found out during her initial research for the interview because when someone was famous all their information was scattered across the internet no matter how private they wanted to be, and Cassandra wasn't blonde, not even if she tried to be, but he had called her beautiful and she knew that because she had embarrassingly tried to translate the German bits in the recording from the interview. Maybe he just wanted to sleep with her, which would be a logical thing to do. Most men expected that from her, and that simple thing frustrated her because she shouldn't think that much about a guy who probably wanted the same things others did.