Walking and Talking and Telling Stories

We walked the Peccole trail for a good hour, shifting from the topic of our therapy sessions for the moment to what the next few days were going to look like. I needed to give a little time to each of the girls - girlfriend or not - when we got home to explain about going super low on communication for the weekend, and I needed to set up some plans for what I was going to do on my ‘dude time.’

Which was surprisingly difficult to do. I could make plans with Thomas and Teddy, and I could get a few good sessions in at the gym and pool that Cass and I had a membership to, but other than that… I wasn’t sure how I was going to fill my weekend. The girls had suggestions along the lines of Doctor Samson’s suggestions, like going to the YMCA and looking for a pickup basketball game. I ended up assuring them that I’d ask Teddy if he knew any physical activity things I could drop in on since he was a lot more plugged into the athletic scene in the city.

“I’m just saying, a pole dancing class sounds like it would be pretty physical,” Cattie laughed at one point. “And I bet you’d be good at it.”

“Yeah, but that’s how we end up with another hot babe interested in him,” Cass grinned at me, almost like she was daring me. “Probably the instructor.”

“Truuue,” Cattie snorted, not seeing Cassidy’s expression. “OK, that and ballroom dancing are out. And hot yoga. Actually, any yoga. Yoga bitches can be like cats in heat for a good-looking guy in their class.”

“Consider Robbie in tights, though,” Cass laughed.

“Hah!” Cattie laughed, taking her turn to grin a little lasciviously at me. “New plan for the future house - we need a yoga studio. One where we can all be in the second row watching Robbie’s butt as he does yoga stretches.”

“Jesus, you two,” I sighed, rolling my eyes and laughing along with them.

I also had work going on and all the stresses there. I didn’t need to be at the big wedding on Friday night, but part of me felt like I couldn’t leave Dayana to clean up whatever extra messes got dropped in her lap by Jonas and Tan.

Of course, that got me some mild berating because, for one, I wasn’t supposed to bury my head in work. And for two, while both my fiancee and my girlfriend liked Dayana, she wasn’t a dude. And I was supposed to be getting dude time.

I didn’t bother arguing that Dayana was my friend because while we hadn’t dug into it in my therapy session, I was keenly aware of how I’d been starting to see her. Or wonder how she saw me. Panic Attack aside, it would probably be good to have a touch more distance this weekend from her, too.

“Vanessa you can hang out with though,” Cassidy said.

“Wait, who’s Vanessa?” Cattie asked.

“Another co-worker and friend,” I said, then frowned at Cassidy. “Why Vanessa?”

“Because she’s basically a dude in a skinny blonde’s body,” Cass said, then turned to Cattie since she was still in between me and her best friend on our walk. “She’s super pretty in like an elegant-severe sort of way. Like competition cheerleader skinny. Honestly, she could stand to put on a pound or two. Sometimes I worry she’s got an eating disorder, she’s so thin. But she’s like, super masculine in all her mannerisms and stuff. Disagreeable, a little aggressive, work-a-holic, strongly opinionated.”

“Gee, she sounds super great to hang out with,” Cattie said sarcastically.

“She wasn’t until Robbie saved her life, then she mellowed out with him,” Cass smirked, then shrugged. “Kind of.”

“OK, hold on,” Cattie said. “That isn’t a story to glaze over.”

Cass looked back to me expectantly, grinning because she knew I felt awkward telling the story, but she loved me telling it. I sighed, shaking my head and smirking at her. “It was the staff Christmas party at the hotel, not this past one but the one before,” I said. “Long story short is we were all out at the poolside bar and one of the VPs got pretty drunk and started hitting on her. He’s unhappily married, and even when he’s drunk he knows our owners would look poorly on any suggestion of adultery happening at the party, so he tries to do it quietly. Well, Vanessa being Vanessa, she’s trying to decide how far she lets this go as she figures out what she can get out of it. I don’t think she would actually sleep her way to the top, but using the attempt as **** over the VP would probably be in her playbook. Well, he takes her lack of a firm No as permission, and he grabs her ass-”

“She has a great ass,” Cass interrupted. “Think Terra, but skinnier.”

“Anyway,” I said, giving her a look. “Vanessa doesn’t like that so she shouts and pulls back, splashing her drink in his face. That would have been a big enough scene already for everyone to know what was going on, but the drunk idiot gets mad because his wife is across the party and sees it happen. He tries the shoulder his way passed Vanessa, but he’s a decent sized guy and he gives her a bit of a shove with it - she goes flying back and bounces off the bar with her shoulder and head, then the heel of one of her shoes snaps and she goes ass over teakettle into the pool deep end. Everyone’s shouting and panicking, but I mean - I was a trained lifeguard, so I took off my jacket, handed it to Dayana, and jumped in.”

“From the other end of the pool,” Cass chipped in.

“The other side of the pool,” I sighed. “Not that far. I get to Vanessa, and she isn’t thrashing or anything, so she’s **** or worse. I get her to the side and we get her up onto the pool deck, and I get someone to keep her head as stable as I can as I start doing CPR to get her breathing again. She gagged up pool water right into my mouth as I was doing puffs, which is exactly the kind of thing why they changed from doing puffs in CPR courses now and I forgot in the moment, and then she threw up all over my pants as the rest of her stomach contents went with it.”

“Eugh, gross,” Cattie said sympathetically, laughing and grinning at me at the same time.

“It was, but I didn’t care too much at the time,” I shrugged. “By that point Dayana and Cass had both gotten to me, and I covered Vanessa up with my jacket since her dress wasn’t doing as good a job as it was before. And Cass threw someone’s phone in the pool because they were filming Vanessa in a **** situation.”

“Girl,” Cattie cackled, giving my fiancee a high five.

“Gotta watch out,” Cass grinned.

“So that’s how I liplocked the super-hot, super ice queen of the back office,” I said. “And saved her life.”

“And we became her friends,” Cass said. “Not that she wants to hang out much - I would have introduced you to her too after Dayana, but there’s no way she’d meet us for lunch on a work day, and everything else… yeah.”

That got us distracted, and another round of apologies circled about the secret-keeping and not thinking things through.

The other half of our conversation about the future was about what their plans were. Tomorrow morning, I’d be kissing them both goodbye, and Cass would be bringing Cattie to the airport around noon for her flight back to Portland. Catherine had all the regular stuff to decompress after a week (and a half) away from home - she’d had a friend coming in to water her plants, so that wasn’t a worry, and decompressing the work stuff would be easy. Her and Cass had already been back on the social media grind while I’d been at work, but she had lots of content to edit and get ready for posting to her monetization channels.

And then there was the personal stuff.

Cattie wasn’t sure what had made it to her parents yet because she hadn’t heard from them - the big question was if her sister Sherry had started spinning stories or if she was just as scared to reach out and start things moving as Cattie was. My girlfriend had been dating Heather for a few years - their lives, their social circles, everything except their businesses and finances were entangled. The fact that no one had reached out was either a good sign, because Heather and Sherry realised how bad a look they were wearing, or a bad one because people were believing some total Bullshit. The only good news on that front was that Heather’s roommate was quietly on Cattie’s side and would give her a heads-up if he heard anything coming down the pipe.

Meanwhile, Cass would drive her car back to our place, and she’d arranged for Teddy to come pick her up and bring her to the airport. She could have Ubered pretty easily, but I suspected she wanted to connect with the gay bodybuilders both to give him the chance to ask questions about Cattie since his boyfriend would have told him about her, and now she’d probably also put a bug in his ear about me needing more ‘guy time.’ I had a feeling I’d probably be getting an uptick in invites to work out with him soon.

She was going to fly to New Orleans, and Terra was going to pick her up at the airport and drive her back out to Lafayette, where she’d been living with JC. It was going to be a shitty three and a bit hours of flying on a cheap airline, but flying there was about a third of the price of flying right into Lafayette regional for a one-way ticket. Terra was going to make sure Cass got to see a couple sights - mostly a quick look at Bourbon Street and a bite of a proper beignet - and they’d be at Terra’s place before midnight. Then Cass would help Terra with packing for a couple of days, not to mention an emotional sounding board, and they would start the drive with the rented uHaul truck towing Terra’s car behind it on Sunday. Extending their drive time to Wednesday would cut their daily driving by a nice amount, make sure they weren’t gassing up in sketchy places late at night, and would give me the ‘me time’ prescribed by my therapist. As long as they made it back in time for mine and Cassidy’s first therapy appointment, we’d be good.

I still wasn’t happy about not being able to go help, though - both for the driving and the packing. I was sure I would speed up the process significantly by sheer dint of being able to lift bigger, heavier things into the truck. And I was worried about the driving…

“You’re OK with the plan, right, Tiger?” Cass asked me as we were heading back to the car. “You trust me with Terra?”

That one caught me a little.

“Um,” I said. The problem was that my instinctual reaction was, ‘Yes, because Terra is straight.’ She’d already turned down chances to join us for ‘fun’ together on the trip. But based on Cassidy’s explanation of her earlier years with the App, that may not really matter. She’d turned more than one straight girl a little bendy based on curiosity because of the magic of the App. And the fact that my first reaction was because I trusted Terra to have a reason to resist rather than Cass not to do anything was a little frustrating. I took a breath and nodded. “You’re going to be Terra’s friend, baby,” I said. “I trust you to be completely focused on her well-being and getting the job done out there. I don’t think you’re going to suddenly fall face-first into her cooch and start cheating.”

“OK,” Cass nodded, still giving me a bit of an eye because I’d hesitated.

It was going to take time more than anything, I knew. And maybe ‘me bro dude time.’ Or something.

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