Page 40 of Well, Actually
“As much as I love spending time with you and listening to all the creative ways you bully me, I did have a motive for asking you for coffee.”
“You’ve decided to preserve the remainder of your dignity and call this whole thing off?” I’m speaking from a wayhigher horse than I deserve to be on as my eyes continue to water.
“Not a chance, sweetheart. I’m having way too much fun, and dignity is overrated.” He winks at me. My grumpy reflexes aren’t quick enough, and I flash a smile. He stares at my lips, gray eyes sparking, and it feels like he’s trying to memorize the shape of them.
I clear my throat, and he comes back to himself, shifting in his seat. But he’s still quiet, toying with his discarded straw wrapper. His face is clouded, and he twists the white paper around his finger so many times the tip starts to turn purple.
I don’t register the decision, but my hand darts out, stilling his fidgeting. With a flick of a manicured nail, I slice the vise of paper, my palm settling over his knuckles.
We both stare at where I touch him, and, with a delayed reaction, I pull my hand away, toying with my rings as I mumble, “What’s wrong with you?”
Cooper rakes his teeth over his bottom lip, watching—entranced—bymyfidgeting now.
“There are things I need to tell you,” he says at last, eyes dragging up from my hands to my face. “Things I need to tell you without an audience or the pressure of me trying to win you over. Things I spent six years sorting through and agonizing over that I finally have words for.”
My throat is tight, but my face must display all the questions bouncing through my head that I can’t manage to verbalize.
“I owe you an explanation, Eva,” he says in a rush, his body deflating with the force of it. “Will you hear me out?”
A voice in my head breathlessly whispers,Finally. Ismother it down, scolding it with a scream that this is a trap, that getting my hopes up with Cooper—withanyone—is a parable I’ve repeated way too many times for it to be acceptable or cute. But, like the fool I am, I feel myself nodding in agreement.
Cooper looks at me—really looks, like he’s seeing every alarm-bell fire in my brain, like he’s wading through the swamp of my worry and dismay to find something to say that will satisfy me.
“I met you at one of the worst times in my life,” he finally says.
I’m incapable of not taking things personally, and I feel my expression sour.
Cooper shakes his head, holding his palms up and giving me a pleading look. “Nothing to do with you, Kitten. You were a bright spot.”
I shouldn’t bask in the praise like it’s sunlight on winter skin, but I do. “Please, continue telling me how great I was and how you screwed everything up,” I deadpan, fixing my face back into an unimpressed mask. His smile is all-knowing like he can see his words glowing in me and his gray eyes linger for a moment longer before he sinks back into a steady seriousness.
“The spring of my junior year, my younger sister died in a car accident.” He says it simply, voice crystalline and free of emotion, but pain flashes across his face, his entire body flinching like the words cut him just to say.
Sympathy slices through me, chilling my blood. I am, quite simply, the world’s biggest dick, making jokes while he was getting ready to tell me something like that.
“Don’t give me that look, Kitten,” Cooper says, voice strained with an attempt at levity.
“What look?” I say, feeling tears well up in the corners of my eyes.
“That look that says you feel guilty for negging me two seconds ago.”
I open my mouth to protest, but he shakes his head, offering me a strained smile as he reaches out and places his hand over mine. I let him keep it there.
“You didn’t know, and I wouldn’t want you to hold your tongue on my behalf.” The world pauses, shrinking down to where it’s just me and him, those gunpowder eyes of his seeing right through me. There’s a pulse where our skin meets, and I can’t tell if it’s the jagged thump of my heartbeat or his. I’m not sure it matters.
With a slow movement, like I’m trying not to spook a skittish animal, I rotate my wrist until my palm rests against his, my fingers curling around his warm skin.
Cooper stares at our hands, teeth working against his lower lip. He clears his throat and then continues. “It was a Thursday night and she was hit by a drunk driver when she was heading home from practice. She was eighteen, a senior in high school, with a track scholarship to Columbia and a beautiful fucking life ahead of her.” I watch his throat work as he swallows, jaw tight and lines of tension etched around his eyes.
His breath rattles, ripping the air from my lungs like a moment of my discomfort can do anything to match his years’ worth.
“My world fell apart, Eva,” he continues, voice grating like sandpaper. “It fell apart in a way that’s hard to comprehend even now, let alone for a dumbass twenty-something-year-old who doesn’t have a clue. Like I said, this was the year before I met you, but that year, I was a wreck.”
Even feeling like an outsider with my step and half siblings, it would absolutely destroy me to lose one them. I couldn’t imagine not seeing Serena’s smile or never hearing Derek’s laugh again. I grip Cooper’s hand tighter, pulling his sad eyes up to mine. I’m not sure what my expression looks like right now—probably some paltry, useless show of sadness that will never be enough—but whatever he sees there has his shoulders relaxing, his hand holding mine back with gentle strength.
“I had another younger sister at home who I still couldn’t talk to without breaking down or feeling anger over the sister I lost,” he says, keeping his voice low. “My parents’ marriage fell apart, and they were fighting nonstop. I was drinking and smoking a ton of weed and hating who I was and doing everything I could to dull myself into a husk. Someone who could tell a joke or throw a good party that didn’t have to feel anything real.”
His confession sits heavily between us, the air thick. I have the urge to look away, hide behind a veneer of competent but distant understanding instead of looking directly at the raw honesty he’s handing me. Run away so I don’t feel the urge to hand him something real in return.
