Chapter 19
FELIX
I’d had my first ever panic attack ten weeks after I’d broken my leg, the first time I’d been walking outside in the street.
I’d come to an intersection I had to cross, seen a vision of a car failing to stop, and the next thing I knew a total stranger was making me take small sips of water and offering to call someone for me.
I still remembered her Barbie pink stiletto nails and matching lipstick.
This morning, I was on the verge of my fourth ever panic attack.
The bus hadn’t come. It was twenty minutes late. The competition started in two and a half hours, and we were two hours’ drive away. I’d checked half a dozen times already, willing the timing to change.
It hadn’t.
If we were late to the competition, they wouldn’t let us register. All this would’ve been for nothing. Amelia would go out of business, my kids wouldn’t even get the chance at an early opportunity to make their careers, and I—
“Felix.”
A familiar hand landed on my shoulder. Cooper squeezed, just hard enough for me to feel. In the cool breeze of the overcast morning, the warmth of it came as enough of a shock to interrupt my spiraling.
Deep breaths. Name five things I can see.
The empty space where the bus should have been. A dozen assorted parents looking to me to solve this problem.
All five of my kids looking confused and worried.
Cooper’s chest, suddenly in front of me. His face, when I looked up, soft and concerned.
“Felix,” he repeated, ducking his head to catch my gaze. I stared into his warm brown eyes, breathing much harder than I should have been. “It’s okay.”
I bit my tongue to stop myself snapping at him.
Ever since he’d left last night, all I’d wanted was for him to come back. I’d wanted to curl up beside him again, talking about nothing important, listening to his heartbeat and soaking in his body heat.
But I’d known I couldn’t give him what he really wanted.
A man has needs, Felix. You can’t be angry with me for finding someone else to fulfil them when you aren’t.
What I wanted right now was to collapse against Cooper’s chest and let him tell me everything was going to be fine.
I wanted him, and all the warmth and comfort and safety he’d made me feel over the past few weeks.
I wanted to cling to him like an anchor and let him promise me that he wouldn’t let me get swept away.
“It’s broken down,” Amelia called out.
My stomach plummeted. She’d been calling the hire company.
“How far out?” Cooper called back, turning his face to her, standing up a little straighter.
“Forty minutes out of town,” Amelia said, approaching the two of us. “Do you think…?”
“Any clues what’s wrong with it?”
Hope fluttered somewhere in my chest. Cooper was a mechanic. He knew how to fix buses, probably. Were they all that different from cars?
“None.”
Cooper sighed. “Forty minutes to get to ‘em, forty minutes back. Even if it’s a quick repair, another half hour added to that. Throw in the risk that it’s not something I can fix roadside…”
The fluttering stopped dead. Almost two hours.
Registration closed in two hours.
“I do have another idea,” Cooper said.
I looked up at him again. One tiny butterfly wing beat faintly against my ribs.
“But, uh,” he continued, looking between me and Amelia and scratching the back of his neck. “You’re not gonna love it.”
“Is this legal?” I asked, craning my neck to look over my shoulder at the kids squished into the back of a people mover which might have been generously described as a fixer-upper.
Very generously.
It was the same one I’d seen Cooper working on the first time I’d gone to see him at the shop. His, apparently. He’d been working on it so he’d be able to take Benji and all his friends wherever they wanted to go.
He was still working on it.
Cooper cleared his throat. “Sure.”
“Uh huh,” I said, turning back to him as he adjusted the rearview mirror.
“It’s only illegal if we get pulled over,” Cooper said. “Which we won’t, because I’m an extremely safe and conscientious driver.”
That, I believed. Cooper wouldn’t have offered this if he wasn’t sure it was safe.
It meant leaving all the other parents and Amelia behind—she’d insisted I should go, since I’d been the one teaching the kids the last few weeks.
Every one of them had agreed without hesitation. They trusted Cooper.
I didn’t need their confirmation. I trusted him, would have trusted him with my life and the lives of everyone I cared about.
“We’re getting to this competition on time,” Cooper said, turning the key in the ignition with his tongue poking out between his lips, as though he had to hold it at just the right angle to make it work.
It chugged a few times, which I suspected it wasn’t supposed to, but then roared into life. Cooper broke into the biggest grin I’d ever seen on him. The resemblance between him and Benji was suddenly so clear I couldn’t believe it’d taken me this long to be struck by it.
He was amazing.
“It’s… alive!” Cooper held his hands up like a mad scientist in a Hammer horror—Avery loved those, too, so I’d seen my share—and cackled, setting off the kids in the back.
“You guys ready to go on an adventure?” he asked, turning to look at them.
A chorus of yeahs erupted, tiny cheers filling the people mover. Cooper gave the waiting parents a wave, and they all waved back in turn, some of them blowing kisses as we took off down Main Street, heading for the freeway.
Once we’d turned onto it and were going relatively straight, Cooper took one hand off the wheel and laid it over mine where it was resting on my thigh.
“Okay?” he asked, squeezing lightly.
You’re incredible and I am so sucking your dick for this later, I didn’t say, on account of the presence of tiny ears.
“I’m okay,” I said, letting out a breath I hadn’t meant to hold. “Thank you.”
Cooper smiled at the road ahead. “Anytime.”