Chapter 11
FELIX
“Are you sure I shouldn’t err on the side of a little more formal?” I asked, looking myself over in the mirror for the hundredth time.
Avery had me in the same jeans again, and now we were debating the rest of the outfit. I had them on speaker, and my phone lying in the middle of the bed. If I closed my eyes, I could pretend they were right here in the room with me. I wished, more than ever, that they were.
They’d teased me about coming here, but they would’ve loved it. Maybe not forever—Avery’s blood was half Hudson river water, I was fairly sure—but they would have gotten a kick out of a week or two of quaint small-town living.
It was ten minutes to eight, and I was… not as calm as I might have been.
The thing was, I’d never, exactly, dated. Before I met Piotr I’d really only had time for the occasional hookup when the opportunity came my way. After…
It’d been a secret. An open secret, everyone had known, but… we were never seen together in public unless there were other people with us. His rule. His rule that made all the sense in the world, because if it’d ever been confirmed…
Well. It wouldn’t have looked good for either of us.
So aside from my high school prom, where I’d taken a girl I barely knew because the school had assigned us partners to promote student body harmony, I’d never been on a date before.
“Are there literally any restaurants with tablecloths in town?” Avery asked.
They were perfectly calm—which they had every right to be, because they weren’t going on their first-ever date at 29.
Avery dated widely and enthusiastically.
It was more a hobby for them than a method of finding a life partner.
Not that I was looking for a life partner right now. This was for fun. I was just nervous because I didn’t know how to have fun on a date.
“Uh. Not that I’ve seen?”
“So probably this is not a suit and tie event. You want to get laid again, right?”
“… yes,” I admitted. I wanted…
I wanted Cooper. I liked being around him. I liked the way I felt when his hands were on me, the way my body felt. He didn’t make me feel broken. He made me feel… desirable.
I hadn’t felt that since before…
“So you’re putting on that beautiful emerald green cashmere sweater that brings out your eyes and is so unbelievably soft that no one would be able to help themselves touching you,” Avery insisted.
I picked up the sweater in question, running the soft fabric through my fingers. It was very touchable.
And I so wanted to be touched. I wanted Cooper to touch me.
That was about the one thing in my entire life I was certain of right now. It was like wanting water after a rehearsal, or wanting coffee first thing in the morning. A craving. Always somewhere in my mind, no matter what I was doing.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt like that before. Piotr, I’d wanted to impress. I’d wanted his praise and his guidance and I was beginning to think I’d been trading myself for that.
What I had with Cooper didn’t feel like a trade. It felt…
“Are you putting it on?” Avery’s voice dragged me back to the room.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, pulling the sweater over my head. The fabric felt good against my skin, and I paused to let myself imagine how much better it’d feel if Cooper’s big, warm, gentle hands were laid over it. “How did you even know I had this?”
“Packed it for you while you weren’t looking,” Avery said. “It looks amazing on you. I always want you to look amazing. But if it was up to you, you’d always look like you didn’t own a mirror.”
I huffed, shooting a glare at my phone. My lock screen showed four minutes to eight. Cooper was always late, though, so I probably had longer than that.
“Picture,” Avery demanded. I took a handful—my selfies were never good enough for Avery, but I figured if I sent a selection, the volume would make up for it.
My phone vibrated in my hand. Avery’s name and contact photo—where they were sticking their tongue out at the camera—flashed on the screen.
“You hung up on me,” they complained when I answered. “Have I mentioned lately that I love you?”
I huffed. “But…?”
“But you use your phone like a geriatric patient. Actually, no, my grandma uses her phone to call her representatives and make complaints, like, three times a day, so she’s using it better than anyone.”
“Is there a particular representative you’d like me to call?” I asked, smiling to myself. I wasn’t sure if Avery was distracting me on purpose or not, but it was settling my nerves. A little, anyway.
It was only Cooper. He’d been nothing but kind to me. Kinder to me than most people, aside from the one I was on the phone with, had been in my life.
“Tousle your hair for me. So that one strand that never behaves flops down over your forehead.”
I put the phone on speaker again—without accidentally hanging up—and did as I was told, pulling out the one strand Avery was talking about.
“How does this help?” I asked.
“Makes it irresistible to tuck it out of the way,” Avery said. “And if he’s that close, he’ll want to be closer. You can make prolonged eye contact. It’ll be a whole thing. Trust me.”
“I do,” I said. I didn’t trust many people—not anymore—but I trusted Avery with my life.
Cooper…
Well, I probably would have trusted him with my life, but more because I thought he could be trusted with anyone’s life. He was capital-R Responsible, more than most people. So much more that he couldn’t even see it himself.
“I really like him, Ave,” I said as the thought came to me, stomach swooping at the admission. When had I last really liked someone?
Maybe never, aside from teenage crushes. That was what this felt like.
It was terrifying.
But it was terrifying in the way that a grande jeté I wasn’t sure I could land was terrifying. In the run-up, I was always scared I’d miss my footing and fall flat on my face—even after over twenty years. The pain would be one thing, but the humiliation was the thing I was really scared of.
The only thing that got me over that was the moment in the air. I’d never been able to describe how that felt, except that it made me feel free.
Cooper…
Well…
“Aww,” Avery cooed on the other end of the line. “This is adorable.”
“Shut up,” I said, heat rising to my cheeks.
“Seriously,” Avery said, their voice softening. “You deserve this. You’ve been through so much shit. The least the universe could offer you is a big, uncomplicated sweetheart to fuck your brains out.”
Uncomplicated.
Was he?
“He’s unbelievably sweet,” I said, because that part was definitely true. I couldn’t stop thinking about how sweet Cooper was—not just with me, but with Benji, and his parents, and by all accounts everyone else he ran into.
“Well, if you get tired of him, you can pass him along to me. I could use some of that.”
“Jamal didn’t work out?” I asked, hoping that was actually Avery’s most recent partner’s name and not two or three previous.
“Xie moved to Toronto to teach transcendental meditation,” they said. “I dunno. The first energy cleansing was cute, after that it started to feel a little judgmental. I don’t think my energy’s all that dirty.”
“I plead the fifth,” I teased. I didn’t need Avery in the room to clearly picture them giving me the finger for that remark.
“They never work out for me,” Avery said.
“Because I don’t really want them to. I’m happy dicking around and seeing what’s out there.
But I don’t think you’re like me. I think…
I just think this is good for you. He sounds nice.
You sound like you’re smiling when you talk about him.
I never once saw you smile when you talked about Piotr. ”
Hadn’t I?
It sounded ridiculous—we’d been together six—but I couldn’t dispute it. I couldn’t remember ever telling Avery about anything sweet or kind Piotr had done for me. He’d pushed me to be better. Always, always better.
I’d never been good enough for him, had I?
Cooper thought I was beautiful. He said so.
Even now, he thought I was beautiful.
The doorbell ringing startled me, making a second strand of hair flop over my forehead.
“That’s him,” I said, grabbing my phone. “Gotta go, bye.”
Eight o’clock on the dot. He wasn’t late.
My heart pounded in my ears as I raced down the stairs, ignoring the jolt to my leg with each step. I should have made a point of finding somewhere that had less of them, but I hadn’t thought of it when I’d agreed to come here.
When I opened the door, all I could see was an enormous bunch of flowers—peonies, huge and fluffy and delicately pink, with little sprigs of tiny white blossoms I couldn’t identify poking out between them.
Flowers. Cooper…
“Are those for me?” I asked.
I’d spent my entire life watching the women in the company coo over enough flowers to start their own florist on opening and final nights without ever getting flowers of my own.
Cooper peered around the bouquet, a sweet, shy little smile tugging at his lips. “Is that okay? I wasn’t sure what you liked, but the peonies kind of reminded me of a tutu. I know you don’t wear a tutu, but—”
“They’re perfect.”
“Did he bring you flowers?” Avery’s voice asked from my pocket.
Shit.
Cooper looked down at the sound, eyebrow raised. I struggled to fish my phone out, silently cursing Avery for convincing me to wear jeans so tight.
“Don’t hang up on me, I wanna meet Cooper,” Avery insisted.
I glanced at him, brow raised, and he answered me with a shrug that seemed to say something like how bad could it be?
He couldn’t know, and I couldn’t warn him.
“Hello,” he said. “Who’s this?”
Avery gasped theatrically on the other end of the line. “You haven’t told him about me? Shame on you.”
Cooper looked at me in wide-eyed alarm, lips parted but no words coming out.
“It’s Avery,” I said, coming to his rescue.
“Oh!” Cooper broke into a smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle. God he was gorgeous. Every time I saw him he was handsomer than the last time, somehow. “You, I have heard about.”