It's a summer afternoon when he first sees her.
"Excuse me?"
He's fixing up a '78 Camaro, and it takes him a few seconds to finish what he's doing and pull himself out from underneath the car. When he does, he finds himself looking up at a pretty redhead who's wringing her hands and glancing anxiously around the room. He clears his throat, and she focuses on him again. "What can I do for ya?" He asks, grabbing a rag and wiping his hands on it as he pulls himself to his feet.
"Well, um." She starts. "I - my car's been making weird noises, like weird weird noises, and I just moved into town so I have no idea where anything is, and this was the first automotive shop that I saw -"
"A'right, a'right." Shit, this chick is crazy. But for some reason, it amuses instead of annoys him. "You bring this car with you?"
"Yes." The redhead sighs with relief. "I parked it just outside."
"Tell you what, I'm just about finished this one here, so as long as it's not anything too difficult, I can probably fix yours up by tonight/tomorrow morning."
"Oh, thank you thank you thank you." She exclaims. She hands over her keys and writes down her phone number for him.
"Hey." He calls out as she turns to leave. She looks back at him questioningly. "I never got your name," he says, flashing her his trademark Jake Stone grin. She smiles cautiously back, and for some reason it makes his stomach clench up a little.
"Cassandra." She says softly. "Cassandra Cillian."
And then she glides off, all tiptoes and sunshine, and Jake's left with the feeling in his gut that this girl - she's something special.
He stays late, like he always does on the weeknights when the boys are too busy to go out, so it's nearly 11:30 by the time he finishes the car. He debates waiting until the morning to call Cassandra, but then he remembers how eager she looked to get her car back, so he grabs his cell and dials her number. She picks up on the second ring.
"Cassandra speaking," she answers, and Jake rolls his eyes because of course she would answer her phone like a damn politician.
"Hey Cassandra, this is Jake from the car shop."
"Is she finished?" She gasps out, and again Jake is hit by the amount of boundless enthusiasm she manages to fit into a single sentence.
"Yeah, uh, she is." He replies.
"Oh, perfect. I'll be over in 15 - no, 12 - no, 14 minutes."
"See ya." Jake remarks with some amusement before the line goes dead.
True to her word, exactly 14 minutes later (how did she do that?) Cassandra is skipping up to the doors.
"Did you walk here?" Jake asks, incredulous.
"Of course." She replies, like he's the strange one for being surprised. "Why?"
"It's almost midnight."
"...Yep."
"In a town known for its gangs and drug cartels."
This makes her stop. "Oh."
"Yeah, oh." He hands over the paperwork, which she reads quickly, signs, and hands back to him along with a cheque for the amount he'd written out. "Next time you need a ride, you call me. It's better than findin' you cut up by the side of a road somewhere."
She shudders. "Thanks."
Shit. Now he feels like an asshole. "Sorry." He amends in a gentler voice. "Just be careful, is all."
A smile slips its way onto her lips. "I will," she promises, taking her keys from the counter. "And thanks again for fixing Babette."
Babette? He thinks incredulously as he watches her leave. Of course it is.
He sighs, but as he's closing up, he can't stop thinking about the redheaded dash of sunshine, and the way her face lit up when she smiled.
She's just another pretty girl, he tells himself, but this time, he doesn't believe it.
It's only a few days before he sees her again. A town this size, you see half the people every time you walk over to the grocery store.
He finds her standing in front of the town's claim to fame, their "rocket that never was". It was supposedly drawn up before the first rocket was invented. It isn't much more than a preserved paper with complicated markings on it stuck behind a sheet of glass, but Cassandra is here, and she's glaring at it.
"It would never work." She says in lieu of hello, and Jake's a little started until he sees his reflection in the glass.
"What wouldn't work?"
"These plans." She gestures wildly with her hands and glares even harder. If looks could kill, this page would be dust in the wind. "It's a bunch of scribbles and nonsense. Someone wanted it to look complicated, but they had no idea what they were doing."
"So you're a rocket scientist?" Jake asks, and he meant it as a joke but she answers seriously.
"I was, for a while." She's still staring at the paper, so she doesn't see his eyes widen and his jaw drop a little. "A friend who works for NASA called me in for consulting a few times. Mostly I just stick to mathematics, though."
Jake's not really sure what to say to that. Hey, cool, I work in a car shop and write a little in my spare time? Even if it is writing on old art pieces. NASA. "This town is gonna love you." He mutters.
"What do you mean?" Cassandra asks, finally tearing her gaze away from the page to look at him.
"Just that they love their gossip." He says, shrugging. "And a part-rocket scientist, part-mathematician is food for the wolves."
"Oh." She looks a little confused, like she isn't sure if that's a good or bad thing. Honestly, neither is he.
He runs into her a few more times, his casual heys colliding with her did you know that they proved the bounded gaps conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers' and have you ever heard of the Borsuk-Ulam Theorem because it's really really cools. He never knows exactly what she's talking about, but it doesn't stop him from smiling at whatever random exclamation bursts out of her mouth instead of a hello.
It's starting to get cold out, with snow verging on the horizon, and Jake's working late at the shop again when Cassandra appears in his doorway.
He doesn't notice her at first, but when he does he sees right away that something's off. She's holding two cups - one black coffee, two sugar for him (she's stopped by a few times, and she'd insisted on bringing him coffee while he listened to her talk), and an herbal tea for herself - but besides that she isn't moving, just standing in the doorway, shaking and drenched from the rain.
"Hey - Cassandra." He immediately stands up and walks over to her. She's whiter than he's ever seen her, and he's pretty sure this is the longest amount of time she's been silent since he met her. He glances out to the dark parking lot - no car. "Dammit, Cassie. What happened to you?"
"I - I didn't -" She stops, biting her lip, and now tears are welling up in her eyes.
"Hey, hey." He cautiously takes the cups and sets them on the counter, before he sits her down in a chair and wraps his jacket around her shivering shoulders. "Cassandra, it's alright, I'm here, okay? Just tell me what happened."
Cassandra sits. She clears her throat.
"I, um. Babette broke down again, and I knew you'd be working late, so I was just going to come see if you knew what it was, and I could try to fix it myself." Stupid, he thinks. Stupid, because she may be a genius with numbers but she's terrible with cars, and even more stupid because it was late and he'd told her not to walk alone at night, even though she thinks she's invincible.
"I was crossing the street and - and there were these guys, on the corner. I tried to avoid them, but they folowed me, and one of them pulled a knife and he cut me and he said he was going to do it again and again and again -" she's full-out sobbing now, and as he pulls her closer he thinks that he's going to kill whatever son of a bitch did this to her, he's going to tear them to pieces.
"I kicked him," she says finally, when she's composed herself. "I kicked him, and I ran and ran, until I got to Ray's." Ray's, the all-night cafe just half a block away.
"Jesus," he mutters, because Cassandra got mugged, and cut, and she still thought to bring him a coffee. Speaking of - "Where did he cut you?" He asks, cautiously assessing Cassandra for any obvious wounds. She hesitates, then lifts her shirt just enough for him to see the bleeding along the bottom of her left ribcage.
"Here." She says unnecessarily, and Jake feels himself go white because there's more than a small amount of blood draining from her body.
"Damn it." He mutters, grabbing the first aid kit he keeps behind the counter and taking out the first cloth dressing he sees. Cassandra gasps a little when he presses it to the would, and the sound runs through him like a physical pain. "Hold this." He tells her, and she obliges as he grabs a bandage and starts wrapping it around her. He hasn't taken a first aid course since he was 16, so he really hopes he's doing this right. When he's finished he gently pulls her shirt back down over the bandage and sits back. "Okay, we need to get you to a hospital right away."
"No!" She jumps, and it's the harshest thing he's ever heard come out of her mouth. "No hospitals."
"This ain't a negotiation, Cassie." He matches her tone. "Either we get you stitched up, or you bleed out sometime in the next hour."
"Just bring me home." She determinedly pushes herself to her feet, grabbing Jake's hands to steady herself.
"Cassandra -"
"No, I have - I have supplies there. I can do it myself." She looks terrified, not even of the people who attacked her but of a hospital, and so Jake caves.
He carries her out to his truck, and drives the few minutes it takes to get over to her house. When he shuts off the engine, he doesn't move right away. He's been thinking, on the ride over. About how she never talks about her past, how she used to jump when he called her 'Cassandra', how she moved to the smallest town in the state and now won't go to a hospital even when it might save her life.
"You're not really Cassandra Cillian." It isn't a question. She's avoiding his eyes, glaring holes at her miraculously-still hands that are curled in her lap.
"No." She finally admits, and then there's nothing but silence and the sound of the leftover rain falling from the sky.
He follows her into her house, watches her triple check the locks. "I'm really - I'm fine." She says with a forced smile. "You don't have to -"
"Cassie." He cuts her off. He doesn't know what else to call her, anyways. "I'm staying."
"Okay." She mutters, then darts off into a room. When she comes out she's holding hydrogen peroxide and a needle and thread. "My mom's a nurse," she says by way of explanation. She sits down on the couch, setting the supplies on the glass coffee table. She hesitantly lifts her shirt and starts unwrapping the blood soaked bandage. When she starts to sew it together, she lets out a small gasp of pain, so Jake gently takes it from her and continues it himself.
"So." He says, once he's finished and the wound is all wrapped up again.
"So." She replies in a small voice. She ducks her head into her hands, pushing back her hair.
"How 'bout we start with your name," Jake offers gently. She raises her head to shoot him a grateful look.
"Cassie - from Cassiopeia." She says, a brief smile lighting her features. "Guess you got it right after all. I wanted something similar enough to my real name that I would respond to it."
"Where did you move here from?" He's trying to be cautious, gauging her response, but he still wants to know. Needs to know, for some indiscernible reason.
"Nova Scotia." She says, looking away again. He tries not to react - so, whatever this is, it's big enough that she had to get out of the country.
"What's it like?" He asks, and it's so obviously not what she was expecting that she jerks her head up.
"It's beautiful. We lived just a two minute walk away from the ocean, which had all of these gorgeous cliffs, and every June we'd have hundreds of lupins - they're these big clusters of purple and pink flowers - growing beside the road in the red soil, and we'd eat so much lobster that I hated it by the time I was 10..."
She goes on and on, and Jake just smiles as he watches her glow when she talks about her home. He wishes he could have a place like that - a place that isn't just the town where he grew up, it's home. He's not really expecting it to happen - his life is here. But still, it's a nice thought.
"So." He says, when it's beyond late and Cassie's nestled under blankets and he's stopped worrying that she's going to pass out from blood loss. "What happened?"
She fiddles with the blanket for a minute, not looking at him. Finally, she takes a deep breath and laces her fingers together.
"Last year, my dad - he got fired from his job. Things were pretty hard for him and mom, so he started...taking on other kinds of work. He'd been in with the mob before he met my mom, and some of his buddies started showing up, asking him to get back in - when I found out, he told me it was just for a few months. Just a little something to pay the bills, until he could get back on his feet." She wipes tears away viciously with the backs of her hands. "I told him it was stupid, I told him - but I didn't do anything. And then something happened - I don't know what. He tried to back out, or something - and so they killed him." She stops, taking a shaky breath in. Jake can't even begin to process what's happening. Cassie - sweet, gentle, couldn't-hurt-a-fly Cassie - is in trouble with the mob.
"He left us a voicemail, right before they killed him - he must've known what was going to happen. He told me and my mom to leave, get out of the country right away. But my mom - she didn't want to leave. She said that her friends were there, her life was there - no matter what I said, she wouldn't budge." She lets out a choking gasp. "So, I left."
"And your mom?" Jake doesn't know if he wants to hear the answer.
"I don't know." Cassie whispers. "I wanted to stay, but she told me - she told me she wouldn't let me put myself in danger for her. She told me to go, not to call her ever, and I did. I left my mother, Jake. I left her. She's probably dead, or worse, and I don't even know -" She breaks off, and then she's crying again, and Jake's pulling her closer and thinking that if there was any way he could hurt instead of her, he'd take it.
It's probably the closest thing to love he's ever felt.
He wakes up the next morning to Cassie's head on his chest and the sunshine peering through the blinds, and before everything hits him he feels irreparably, incandescently happy.
And then she winces, and one of her hands shoots to her cut, and everything that happened last night crashes over him like a tidal wave.
"How're you feeling?" He asks, and her eyes peel open slowly.
"Better." She mutters with a yawn, flushing when she realizes that she's lying on top of him. She pushes herself up quickly, running a hand through her hair. She looks like she's just starting to realize everything she told him last night, so Jake gets up to make her some tea and give her space to process.
When he comes back a few minutes later, she cups her hands around the hot mug and sits there, breathing in the steam.
"What are we going to do, Jake?" She asks, desperately. He sits beside her, covers her hands in his.
"We'll get through it." He promises. "We'll figure it out. Together."
It might not be good enough for forever, but for today? For today, it'll do just fine.