Page 3 of Final Girls

Two mugs are already on the table. Earl Grey with milk and extra sugar for me. Coffee for Coop. Black. Unsweetened.

“Quincy,” he says, nodding.

There’s always a nod. It’s Coop’s version of a handshake. We never hug. Not since the desperate one I gave him the night we first met. No matter how many times I see him, that moment is always there, playing on a loop until I push it away.

They’re dead, I had choked out while clutching him, the words gurgling thickly in the back of my throat.They’re all dead. And he’s still out here.

Ten seconds later, he saved my life.

“This is certainly a surprise,” I say as I take a seat. There’s a tremor in my voice that I try to tamp down. I don’t know why Coop’s called me, but if it’s bad news, I want to be calm when I hear it.

“You’re looking well,” Coop says while giving me the quick, concerned once-over I’m now accustomed to. “But you’ve lost some weight.”

There’s worry in his voice too. He’s thinking about six months after Pine Cottage, when my appetite had left me so completely that I ended up back in the hospital, force-fed through a tube. I remember waking to find Coop standing by my bed, staring at the plastic hose slithered up my nostril.

Don’t disappoint me, Quincy, he said then.You didn’t survive that night just to die like this.

“It’s nothing,” I say. “I’ve finally learned I don’t have to eat everything I bake.”

“And how’s that going? The baking thing?”

“Great, actually. I gained five thousand followers last quarter and got another corporate advertiser.”

“That’s great,” Coop says. “Glad everything is going well. One of these days, you should actually bake something for me.”

Like the nod, this is another of Coop’s constants. He always says it, never means it.

“How’s Jefferson?” he asks.

“He’s good. The Public Defender’s Office just made him the lead attorney on a big, juicy case.”

I leave out how the case involves a man accused of killing a narcotics detective in a bust gone wrong. Coop already looks down on Jeff’s job. There’s no need to toss more fuel onto that particular fire.

“Good for him,” he says.

“He’s been gone the past two days. Had to fly to Chicago to get statements from family members. Says it’ll make a jury more sympathetic.”

“Hmm,” Coop replies, not quite listening. “I guess he hasn’t proposed yet.”

I shake my head. I told Coop I thought Jeff was going to propose on our August vacation to the Outer Banks, but no ring so far. That’s the real reason I’ve recently lost weight. I’ve become the kind of girlfriend who takes up jogging just to fit into a hypothetical wedding dress.

“Still waiting,” I say.

“It’ll happen.”

“And what about you?” I ask, only half teasing. “Have you finally found a girlfriend?”

“Nope.”

I arch a brow. “A boyfriend?”

“This visit is about you, Quincy,” Coop says, not even cracking a smile.

“Of course. You ask. I answer.”

That’s how things go between us when we meet once, twice, maybe three times a year.

More often than not, the visits resemble therapy sessions, with me never getting a chance to ask Coop questions of my own. I’m only privy to the basics of his life. He’s forty-one, spent time in the Marines before becoming a cop, and had barely shed his rookie status before finding me screaming among the trees. And while I know he still patrols the same town where all those horrible things happened, I have no idea if he’s happy. Or satisfied. Or lonely. I never hear from him on holidays. Never once got a Christmas card. Nine years earlier, at my father’s funeral, he sat in the back row and slipped out of the church before I could even thank him for coming. The closest he gets to showing affection is on my birthday, when he sends the same text:Another year you almost didn’t get. Live it.

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