Chapter 13
FELIX
Not that I normally had a problem with crowds, but stepping out of the ice cream parlor and into the cooling night air was a relief. Less than two weeks of small-town living and I’d forgotten how to handle being among more than a handful of people at once, apparently.
“There’s a nice walk along the shore here, if you’re game,” Cooper said, gesturing vaguely ahead. He hadn’t taken my hand again—probably because he needed both for what I was fairly sure was an entire pint of ice cream piled on top of our cones.
I missed the touch.
“I’ll trust you,” I said, falling into step beside him as we walked. My thigh twinged, but it wasn’t too bad yet. I’d gone a little hard on myself earlier today, working on the choreography for the competition again, and I was paying for it.
Nothing I wasn’t used to. Performance had always equaled pain.
It was just more pain for less work now. And it never went away. That was all.
“What’s it like?” Cooper asked as we walked away from the glow of the ice cream parlor and along the darkened boardwalk. I’d never seen an honest-to-God boardwalk before. Otter Bay was full of surprises.
“Don’t know yet,” I said, looking at my ice cream—well, sorbet, but I wasn’t clear on the difference. I’d gone with Seth’s recommendation, because… “This is the first ice cream I’ve had since I was twelve.”
I didn’t have to look at Cooper to feel him staring at me.
“Mom took me out to celebrate when I got the scholarship to the performing arts school in New York,” I continued. “And told me I ought to enjoy it, because I wouldn’t get to have it again until I retired. Guess she was right.”
“Wow,” Cooper said. It was the same wow as when I’d told him about Piotr. Disbelieving. A little offended on, I assumed, my behalf.
“She wanted me to succeed.” I shrugged.
“You did.”
This time, I did look at Cooper. In the dark, I couldn’t make out much of his expression, but the soft way he spoke was enough to make something tender and fragile shift under my ribs.
“You did,” he repeated. “You heard Seth, if Benji’s enthusiasm isn’t good enough for you. There must be hundreds, thousands of people out there like him. People who remember seeing you on stage just once as one of the highlights of their life. If that’s not success…”
I licked my ice cream. The citrus was tart enough to make my jaw tighten, but then it mellowed out into sweetness as it coated my palate, with a warm tingle from the chili playing off against the numbing sensation of the cold.
I began to understand the crowd.
Cooper was still waiting for me to say something.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The truth was, I didn’t know what I could possibly say to that.
Objectively, Cooper was right. I’d been one of the principle dancers of a major company for years. Lots of people got through a whole ballet career without that ever happening for them.
The hard work had paid off.
It was just…
We’d stepped onto the sand now, and as I put my foot down, it shifted under it and sent a spike of pain from my thigh to my hip. I stumbled on the next step, fear rising in the pit of my stomach as I anticipated a fall.
Cooper caught me. Again.
This time, it was by the elbow. Slightly less humiliating, but just as steady.
“Okay?” he asked, keeping his grip on my arm.
I let out another harsh breath. “Fine. I should be using a cane,” I said, repeating what my doctor had told me. Better to have the support than hurt myself. “But…”
“But that makes it real,” Cooper said.
That took me by surprise. I hadn’t even thought it in those terms, but as soon as Cooper said it, I knew he was right.
I looked at him, wishing I could see his face properly. He shrugged.
“I didn’t want to move back here, at first,” Cooper went on. “Because if I moved back, if I made a permanent change… my big sister was really gone, y’know? It wasn’t temporary anymore. She really wasn’t coming back.”
I nodded slowly. Of course he understood. I’d been so focused on Benji that I hadn’t given nearly enough thought to the fact that Cooper had lost someone, too. Someone who’d been part of his life much longer than Benji had been alive.
“I must seem ridiculous to you,” I said as the thought occurred to me. I didn’t have a kid to take care of all of a sudden, and no one I loved had died.
“No, you don’t,” Cooper said. “And I know that’s what I’m supposed to say, but you really don’t. Grief is…” He gestured with his own ice cream. “Weird.”
Despite the subject, my lips twitched. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it is.”
“What I mean is,” Cooper began again. “Your grief is real. You lost something that mattered to you. Something that was your life. I’ve been thinking about this.
You,” he added. “And… I dunno. I think if you curled up under a blanket forever, that’d be understandable.
I think it’s incredible that you’re not doing that. ”
“I was, for a while.”
“So was I.” Cooper shrugged. “Is it okay if I ask…?”
“What happened?” I finished for him. Cooper gave a tiny nod, eyes glinting as he looked over my face.
I sighed, nodding to a bench a few paces ahead. “Can we sit?”
Cooper nodded again, this time more enthusiastically. When we reached the bench he sat on my bad side, close enough that our thighs pressed together. I wasn’t sure if he was intentionally offering me his warmth or if he hadn’t thought about it at all, but I appreciated it all the same.
“It’s a stupid story,” I said. “I was crossing the street late after a performance, running to catch up to Piotr. We’d just had a fight, can’t even remember what it was about.
Anyway, apparently I should’ve failed preschool, because I did not look both ways before crossing the street.
One second I was shouting after him, the next thing I knew I was splayed over the road and in more pain than I’d thought possible.
I remember seeing Avery’s face, how pale it was as they called my name.
The rest is a blur until I woke up in the hospital. ”
Cooper was silent. I could feel him staring at me, but I wasn’t quite ready to look at him. To see someone else looking at me in horror. Or worse, pity.
“I’d been hit by a car, and the middle of my right femur had taken more or less all of the impact.
It completely shattered and some of the shards broke the skin from the inside.
Avery tells me they could see bits of bone sticking out, which I’m glad I didn’t see.
” I wrinkled my nose, genuinely grateful that I’d only just been hanging onto consciousness at the time.
“I’m not sure if the surgeon who put me back together was joking when he said there was more titanium than bone in there now and I don’t think I want to know.
There was a lot of surgery. Feels like he put it back together with lead, although I’m sure he did his best. I’m told he’s the best surgeon I could’ve had. ”
I looked down at my feet, wiggling them to feel the movement of the wrecked muscle in my thigh.
To remember I could feel it. That after months and months of work, I could walk, I could sit and stand without aid, and that was more than they’d ever expected of me. That I’d made such incredible progress.
I was a model patient. I’d worked so hard to get back on my feet.
Nothing I could have done would have meant I could take the stage again.
I still couldn’t look at Cooper, but I liked being able to feel him next to me.
“You’re the first person I’ve had to actually tell,” I said when the silence stretched out far enough to make me squirm. “Everyone else knew what had happened before I did.”
“Shit,” Cooper said.
Despite everything, I laughed. It was a strange, startled sound, but as it escaped me it took a weight I hadn’t realized I’d been carrying with it. Not the whole weight of everything, but something.
That was the thing about Cooper. I knew from experience that he could take my weight physically. I was learning he could maybe take the other weight, too.
No one else had quite been able to do that for me. Or maybe I hadn’t trusted anyone enough to let them try.
“Do you want to tell me about your sister?” I asked.
Cooper sighed, crunching down on his ice cream cone. I took a bite out of mine, giving him space to decide. I wanted to know, I wanted to listen, but I didn’t want to push.
“She was my hero,” he began, licking his lips. “She was only a couple of years older than me, so I had her to look up to my whole life. She was smart and funny and she loved me in a way only siblings can, y’know?”
“I don’t, actually,” I said. “Only child.”
Cooper smiled wryly. “Probably could’ve guessed that.”
I batted him lightly on the leg. “Rude.”
His lips quirked another few degrees before the smile fell again. He licked his fingers, then sighed, stretching his arms out along the back of the bench. His fingers brushed my shoulder, the tips drawing circles over the bony corner of it.
“She died of an aneurysm,” Cooper said after a moment, looking out at the water. “You know how you hear about young, healthy people just collapsing without any sign beforehand? She was one of them.”
“Jesus,” I said without thinking. Cooper’s lips twitched again.
“When I got the call from Mom, I didn’t believe her at first. Called the hospital myself.
Insisted that there had to be a mistake.
She couldn’t just be gone. But she was, and there was nothing to be done about it.
No opportunity to say goodbye. Just… I had a sister one minute, and I didn’t the next. ”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “God, that always sounds so inadequate, but I really am sorry. I wish that hadn’t happened to you.”
Cooper’s hand curled over my shoulder. I gave into the temptation to lean against him, shifting closer to rest my head against his chest.
He nuzzled the top of my head, then pressed a kiss right at the edge of my hairline, the faintest brush of dry, cool lips.