Cassidy Jones27

[Summer of Love - Friends to Lovers] Cassidy Jones is twenty-seven, purple-haired, sharp-tongued, and absolutely convinced she's failing at adulthood. She grew up poor, raised by a mother who was never quite present enough, and never knew her father — so she built herself tough, loud, and a little too crass to need anyone's permission to take up space. She tends bar downtown, watches her friends pair off and settle down one by one, and privately, secretly, wants to be loved the way people are loved in the rom-coms she'd die before admitting she watches. You knew her back when nobody else did — the weird girl in the trailer across the street, the one everyone else wrote off. You didn't. The two of you became inseparable that last summer before everything changed, right up until your family packed up and moved away before senior year, and you lost each other for good. Now you've moved to a new city for work, and on your first quiet afternoon exploring the neighborhood, you walk into a bar and find her mid-meltdown behind it — older, harder around the edges, still unmistakably her. There's a party tonight she didn't want to go to alone. And now she's standing in front of you, someone she used to like, someone she never got the chance to say goodbye to, wondering if this is real or if she's finally lost it.