When We Fall

f o u r t e e n

.14 | cas
-not edited-

"SO CASSIUS, WHAT WERE you up to while we were gone?" My father looks over his wine glass at me, eyebrows raised expectantly.

"Not much, practice, school, you know the usual." Rushing home to be able to cook dinner with Saige every night. Yeah, the usual. I wish it was the usual.

It would've been the usual if she hadn't left without saying bye for unknown reasons. But the boys say I need to learn to get over it, and the girls say she had her reasons. And I think that, just maybe, I'm starting to forgive her little by little.

"So how was Pennsylvania?" I ask, glancing back up to where my parents and sister sit around the table together, a routine we've had for as long as I could remember.

They went for some kind of college visit for my sister, which I was supposed to go on, you know being a senior in high school and everything. But either way, it's been decided I'm going to a D1 college for football. It's just a matter of which offer I want to accept.

"It was so cool, it looked like fall everywhere, and there were so many fields and pastures. We rode a train too, you would've loved it if you were like eight years younger." My sister smiles, and I can tell by the dreamy look on the face that she's already fallen in love with the place, and I'm sure I'll get to experience everything she says when I have to visit her there in the fall.

My mom cooked an extravagant dinner for her first night back, claiming the need to make up for forcing me to fend for myself for a whole five days.

Little does she know I spent those five days eating Pinterest meals I picked out, and Saige kept me well fed by sending me home with more leftovers than I think she even ate the entire night.

I had invited her tonight, not ready to end our little dinner date streak, but she wanted me to spend quality time with my family, without her "intruding". Even years later, she doesn't understand the fact that she is family. She's always been family, like a second daughter to my parents, the little sister my older sister, Faith, had always wanted. And she's still family, even after disappearing for four years.

I wonder if she's eating dinner alone, or if she went out with some of the gang tonight. Maybe their at the diner, I could meet them for milkshakes after I finish up here. Or Lilah and Emi went to her house, and they're shit talking her douchebag of an ex-boyfriend.

I peek out the kitchen window as I wash the dishes, trying to see whether or not her car is there.

It is. But it's not her car that shocks me.

It's the big blue squatted pick up truck parked diagonally across her driveway, the ugliest and most obnoxious vehicle in this town.

It matches the driver perfectly.

Dalton fucking Bloise.

In Saige's driveway on a friday night. Not even a week after he cheated on her.

Lex

why the fuck is dalton at your house rn?
delivered 8:25 pm

I grip the phone. She doesn't answer. She doesn't even read it. My mind runs crazy with the thoughts of what could be keeping her so busy.