“***** me.”  Alice said to the empty apartment, and she
zipped the dress bag up again, and saw the tag on the bag of the dress.  Her mouth dropped and she wondered how Quin
could afford a designer dress, in the middle of the night no less.  There was so much to learn about the
mystifying Quin. 

            Alice smiled to herself, thinking she was
going to have a blast learning, if she let her in long enough to get just a
fingernail into that sealed shut shell of hers. 
Alice was determined to get into Quin, in more
ways than one.

~*~*~*~*~*

            Cassandra began to cook
breakfast, it was barely 5 a.m., but she was flying out on a plane today
to start her semester early.  The other
teacher/counselor had fallen sick and Cassandra had offered to start early.  It wasn’t like she had anything to keep her
here in Seattle.  The
two employees she had at the music store were trustworthy, and she was alone
here. 

            Alone.  Cass flipped the pancake and pushed the thought of Tina Kennard from her mind, but it was a fruitless
effort, her face drifted into the eye of her mind.  Cute and *****, with that naive smile that
seemed to come from an inner place that no one could touch. 

            No one but her, and she missed
that place, the conversations, the laughter, the jokes and even the tears about
Tina‘s crumbling relationship.  Cassandra was sure that their one night, (two
night) stand hadn’t help in that area.  She
tossed the second pancake onto the plate, and then scrambled eggs already
there, and the bacon still sizzling as she sat down with a glass of freshly
squeezed orange juice.

            She’d been harboring thoughts
of adopting Daisy for the last year; she was a foster kid that really had
falling into a bad element.  Her sharp
tongue hadn’t help matters either, having been sent to New Dawn as part of her
punishment.  Shelby Pryde, Cassandra’s employer and owner of the
school, had fought to keep Daisy at Dawn instead of shipping her off to juvie hall.