An Offer She Didn't Want To Refuse

Silence. No talking, no laughing, no radio; just silence. That was my car after I picked Cassie up from the address she had given me. I tried to get her to talk, I asked her whose house it was because I didn’t recognize it but she didn’t say anything.

It wasn’t until I had pulled away from the curb and happened to see Ben running down the street after us that I managed to get some thing from her. “Don’t stop!” She told me frantically. “I don’t want to see him; I wish I never met him!”

“Did you two have a fight?” I turned onto Main Street, heading to the highway that would take us home. “What happened?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she told me.

“Oh,” I didn’t push it because I knew if it was me, I probably wouldn’t want to talk about it either at that moment. Silence settled over the car again.

“Men are stupid!” Cassie snapped a couple minutes later. “Why is it that we even waste our time on them? I’m so done with men!”

A smiled played on my lips, I remembered many times when I muttered the same statement to one of my friends or to Mary but not even a week or so later, there was another guy that I thought was cute. Plus having male friends kind of didn’t help with the whole hating the entire male population thing.

“I mean really!” Cassie turned in her seat. “They are immature, petty, gross and probably the dumbest in the world.”

I nodded slowly. “And they are funny, cute, and…”

“Argh!” Cassie rolled her eyes at me. “You are missing the point! Why do we even care if we are with a guy or not? It doesn’t change who we are if we aren’t being used by a guy!”

I raised a brow at her. “Used? What do you mean?”

“I mean…” Cassie paused when she glanced out the front window. “Where are we going Aunt Anna?” She turned, wide eyed in my direction. “I don’t want to go home; please can we stay in town?”

“Ummm well…” I glanced at her. “Where did you want to go? To Chad’s?”

Cassie shook her head, “No I don’t want to go to uncle Chad’s! I want to hang out with you Aunt Anna but I don’t want to go home!”

“Where did you want to go?” I asked her and she shrugged her shoulders. I listed a couple places that we could go but they were all too public and she didn’t want to be around other people. “Well Cassie there isn’t anywhere else that we can go but home.”

“Fine,” Cassie said with a sigh. “Can you stop by Mira’s so I can grab my bag?”

“Sure.” I made a life hand turn at the next intersection and headed back towards town. Mira was one of Cassie’s closest friends; I found out later that she was supposed to be sleeping over at Mira’s house that night.

While I was waiting in the car for Cassie, Jordan called my cell. “Hey babe, how’s it going? How’s Cassie doing? Do I need to kick anyone’s ass?”

I smiled at the concern in Jordan’s voice, although it didn’t surprise me that he would be worried about Cassie, considering he thought of my family as his; like I did with his family. “It’s going ok,” I told him. “We are heading home, although Cass doesn’t want to go home; she wanted to hang out with me.”

“Of course she does,” he told me. “That was my plan tonight too but that didn’t work out.”

“Sorry about that,” I told him, thinking he was talking about me leaving because Cassie called me.

“Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “So what was wrong with…Jenna no! That’s daddy’s knife!” There was a little bit of static before I heard him again. “Sorry, Jenna thought it would be fun to put my steak knife into her mouth.”

“It’s ok,” I told him. “And I don’t really know what happened but I think Cass and Ben might have broken up.” I told him about Ben running after us and Cassie’s rant about the uselessness of men.

“I see,” was all he said.

“You see?” I frowned, “What do you see?” He didn’t answer me, he told me to hold on a minute and I heard Bella’s voice in the background. Cassie was coming down the walk when Jordan came back on the phone. “Listen,” I told him before he said anything. “I have to go, Cass is coming back.”

“Sure ok, I’ll talk to you later.” I was about to hang up when I heard him call out to me.

“Yeah?” I gave Cass a smile as she slumped in her seat.

“Do you still have your key? To my place?” He asked and when I said I did, he told me that if Cassie didn’t want to go home right away, we could go to his place and hang out. “She probably wants to talk to you without Zack or Mary butting in,” he told me.

“I don’t know Jordy…”

“Don’t argue,” he told me. “I have to go; I’ll see you two when I get home.” He hung up before I could tell him that we couldn’t be at his house.

When I got off the phone, Cass asked me what Jordan wanted, when I told her that he said we could go hang out at his place, she perked up. “Oh Aunt Anna that would be awesome! I don’t want to have to deal with everyone’s questions right now.” She leaned over and threw her arms around me. “You are the best!”

As I pulled away from Mira's house, I told her that we were calling her parents when we got to Jordan's. "And you are going to tell me everything that happened tonight."