Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
THE HICKEY DIDN’T work. Is that a spoiler?
I mean—it worked. Whatever Cooper had just done to me left a bruise on my neck that lasted for the rest of the cruise and beyond.
It’s just that nobody thought it was a hickey.
Even though it was so clearly a hickey.
And yet, as I spent the rest of that day at sea fully avoiding Cooper and staying out of our shared luxury cabin, people noticed my neck, and remarked on it, and asked about it … but all with comments like: “You’ve got a smear of strawberry jam on your neck.”
Really? Jam? People thought I could wander around smeared with jam and just not notice—like some kind of truffle pig?
Blackberry jelly was also suggested, for the record.
But it didn’t stop at condiments.
Pete wanted to know if I’d been punched in the throat. My mother worried I was breaking out in hives. Ashley thought it might be a smear of Tabasco. And Mrs. Vargas—who herself had just seen Harmony’s baker’s dozen of hickeys—thought I’d been stung by a bee.
A bee! On a cruise ship!
I also got asked if it was paint, ink, a rash, contact dermatitis, chocolate ice cream, sorbet, shampoo, hair gel, ketchup, or a very rare bruising disorder called Henoch-Schonlein purpura, which the Bishops’ grandson had recently recovered from. They showed me pictures.
The point is, nobody—not one person—thought it was a hickey.
Cooper and I went through all that for nothing.
Nothing, that is, unless you count the full-body intrusive reveries that kept washing over me all day afterward in waves of sudden 3D flashbacks: Cooper’s arms clamping me tight.
His mouth just consuming my neck. Not to mention …
the symphony of reactions he’d conducted in my body with that one mouth of his alone.
You know how they say the color black isn’t just one color, but all the colors put together?
The memory of Cooper doing whatever he’d just done to me wasn’t just one emotion.
It was all of them at once. It was … a lot.
It was so much that when a memory overtook me as I was helping my mom put up decorations in the cocktail lounge, I had to turn and put my head down on the bar until it passed.
If just thinking about Cooper could do all that to me, I wasn’t sure what seeing him in real life might do.
Nor was I in any hurry to find out.
But the total fail of the hickey solution was going to force a reckoning—sooner rather than later. We were going to need a new plan.
And when Bridesmaid Two dared to ask me if it was a tattoo of a hickey?
That was it. Time to go find Cooper.
But Cooper wasn’t in the room when I got there, and so, even though I was supposed to be folding flower decorations for my mother, I went looking for him instead.
I checked the promenade deck, and then the sports deck, and then the library—and I was on my way to the snack bar when I passed the empty side ballroom that would hold the wedding reception in a few nights’ time … And there he was.
With his mini banjo.
“What are you doing?” I called to him as I walked in.
He jumped a little at the sound of my voice like maybe he’d had a few intrusive reveries of his own. But then he recovered.
“I’m checking out the performance space,” he said.
I’d taken the virtual tour of this room with Ashley last week. “She’s putting the head table by the windows.” I pointed. “And the mic for toasts right next to it.”
“Are you busy now?” he asked.
“I’m supposed to be helping my mom decorate the bar for happy hour,” I said. “But I was looking for you instead.”
I walked to meet him.
As soon as I got close enough, Cooper leaned in to appraise my neck. “Nice,” he said, nodding. “No mistaking that.”
“Are you kidding me?” I said. “Nobody—not one person—has guessed what it is.”
Cooper frowned.
I started counting on my fingers. “I’ve gotten blueberry juice, and fruit smoothie, and food coloring. I’ve gotten poison ivy, and ‘allergic to shellfish,’ and bedbugs. Grandma Dodie insisted it was a mosquito bite. But a total of zero people have asked if it’s a hickey.”
“A mosquito bite?” Cooper demanded, like that affronted his masculinity.
I shook my head. “We went through all that for nothing.”
And then, like the memories of “all that” were playing in his head, Cooper said, “Yeah.”
“So that’s why I’m here,” I said, back to business. “The hickey thing was a total fail.”
“Did Finn see it?”
I flared my nostrils. “He thought it was eczema.”
Cooper scratched the back of his neck. “That is a total fail.”
“We need a new plan,” I said. “And before you storm off again and make me chase you around the boat, I want to make it clear that I am not about to propose that we fake date each other.”
“Didn’t know that was a possibility, but okay—”
I cut him off. “Just that we fake flirt.”
A pause. “Fake flirt?”
“Yes.”
“With who?”
I gave him a look. “With each other.”
But Cooper shook his head.
“What’s with all this negativity?” I demanded.
Cooper just kept shaking.
“Fake dating doesn’t help either of us, see? Because then we’re not available to other people.”
Cooper sighed.
“But fake flirting,” I went on, “has all of the upsides and none of the downsides.”
Cooper squinted. “Does it?”
I stood firm. “Social signaling! It shows the world that we are fun, and playful, and attractive—right? Because if we pretend to be attracted to each other, then we are both attractive by definition. And! It ramps everything up because nothing fans the flames of longing like a little competition.”
Cooper just frowned.
I shrugged. “I read that on the internet.”
Cooper didn’t fight me.
“And don’t think this plan is all for me, by the way. Ashley has a plan to set you up with Bridesmaid Two after we get the Finn thing done. So this is a win-win all around.”
“Bridesmaid Two?”
“That’s the girl who asked you about your cool job at breakfast. Which is a lot more than I’ve done for you on this trip, by the way.”
“That’s debatable.”
“The point is, Bridesmaid Two can be yours. And fake flirting with me is a surefire way to make that happen.”
But Cooper was wrinkling his nose. “I don’t like her.”
“I don’t like her, either,” I said. “But it’s already on Ashley’s spreadsheet, so I’m not sure either of us has much say in the matter.”
Cooper was still trying to catch up. “So, by ‘fake flirting,’ you mean—?”
“I mean, we hang out all the time, and goof around, and laugh at each other’s jokes.”
“We already do that.”
“Yes. But we ramp it way up. Make it loud and public. Get noticed.”
“And then what happens?”
“Then other people get interested in us. And then they’re ensnared in our love trap.”
“Don’t say love trap.”
“But you’ll do it, right?” I pressed. “Out of guilt, if nothing else? Since Finn thought your weak-ass hickey was eczema?”
There were those blue eyes again. “I’ll think about it,” Cooper said. Then he added, “If you do something for me.”
“What’s that?”
Cooper said, “Let’s practice our song.”
I DIDN’T WANT to. Of course.
It was one thing to sing again for the first time in years quietly, in Cooper’s private cabin, in bed, in the dark, with rustling insomnia as the only other option.
It was another thing to sing in a ballroom.
Even if it was empty.
“Is there anything else I could do for you?” I asked.
Cooper shook his head.
I eyed the stage area.
“The fact that you don’t want to is the exact reason why you should,” Cooper said.
I looked around the small ballroom. Had it gotten bigger?
“You agreed to practice,” Cooper urged.
“Fine. Yes. Okay,” I said. “I agreed to practice.”
And so we got arranged on an imaginary stage and stood in front of an imaginary mic stand—but then Cooper started strumming real music on that mini banjo, and after the intro, when he nodded a cue at me to jump in and start, I looked around at the cavernous room, and I felt a little squeeze in my chest, and I just … stood there.
Cooper stopped strumming. “That was your cue.”
“I know.”
“Try again,” Cooper said, and started over.
But the squeeze happened again.
“You know what?” Cooper said. “Let’s just do the melody together. No harmony.”
This time, Cooper jumped in at the cue, too—but instead of joining him, I just listened.
He did two verses, hoping he might get me in the mood, but then he petered out.
I looked over at him. “I think it’s the ballroom,” I said. “It’s so … big.”
“How about you close your eyes,” he suggested, “and pretend it’s ten years ago—and we’re up on your roof?”
I looked at him doubtfully.
“Just for now. Just until you get comfortable.”
So I did it. I closed my eyes, and I imagined that we were still in high school, that Cooper and I had never given up on each other, and that we were up on the roof just like we had been the night before, and the night before that …
and that I was still a person who could stand under the moonlight with her best friend and just belt out a song without any hesitation.
And guess what? It worked pretty well.
Once I closed my eyes, there was nothing but imaginary moonlight, and Cooper’s familiar voice, and the mini banjo I’d heard him play a million times … and that lovely little song that I knew so well by heart.
I just fell into it.
We sang it three times, in the end, and it was easy.
“Next time, we’ll do it with your eyes open,” Cooper said as he walked me back to find my mother before I got in too much trouble. But as we passed the gift shop, Cooper stopped to examine something on a spinning rack.
When I turned back to look, Cooper had put on a pair of red heart-shaped sunglasses.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think those look weirdly great on you.”
“Not for me,” he said. “For you. To wear onstage.”
“At the reception?”
He nodded. “So you can close your eyes if you need to.”
But I shook my head. “I’ll be okay.”
And then he nodded and said, “Yeah. You will.”