Chapter Seventeen #2
I had always been on my mom’s team by default—as all of us kids were.
And my dad had always been all by himself.
I guess I’d thought that was where he preferred to be.
But looking at him right then reminded me of this morning—of how lonely it had felt to tell Cooper that he was the only person on my entire tragic team of one.
And then I realized that my dad didn’t even have that many.
He was just endlessly on his own.
So I joined him—even if only in my head.
If he wanted my mother back? If he wanted to change her mind?
He was going to need some serious help. It might already be too late.
It might take an actual miracle. But in case you missed it, the undisputed alpha of my childhood pack had just asked me out—on a date.
And if that didn’t qualify as a miracle, I wasn’t sure what would.
If I could make that happen, I could do anything.
I looked at my dad with compassion.
Poor guy. He’d screwed up the best thing in his life—and he seemed to have no idea how it happened. From my new vantage point of success, I decided to help him.
It was a heck of a role reversal—from him being the neglectful father who had created all my neuroses to me being the love savant who could share some of my wisdom with the less fortunate.
I’m not sure if this is how compassion always works, but something about that moment gave me strength.
My dad seemed to sense me watching him. He looked over, and I gave him a little salute, like he’d taught us when we were kids.
Finn was still waiting for my response to his invitation.
So I turned to Finn—not as the ten-year-old me he’d kissed, or the fourteen-year-old me who’d memorized his license plate number, or even the yesterday me who was so nervous she got a score of three hundred seventy-nine in mini golf.
Just as regular old me.
Regular me who was ready to take a good, hard look at her destiny, at last.
I met his eyes. Then I smiled with every tooth I had. Then I said, “Finn Turner! I thought you’d never ask.”
DID COOPER AVOID looking at me all through dinner?
I don’t know. Maybe.
Or maybe he had indigestion.
We were, of course, seated together at the same table with Finn. And we did, of course, sit three in a row—me in the middle again. This was all decreed on Ashley’s spreadsheet.
What wasn’t part of the spreadsheet—certainly not on our second night—was the sudden addition of Bridesmaid Two on Cooper’s other side.
What a fourth wheel.
The fact is, Cooper and I should’ve been celebrating.
His failed hickey hadn’t failed at all. In fact, it might be the most accomplished hickey in all of human history. Not to mention the lady he’d given it to might still have been experiencing a few aftershocks of delighted shivers, even all this time later.
I’d have to add that to my letter of recommendation.
But instead of getting to savor this triumph with my wingman, I had to spend all of dinner watching Bridesmaid Two leaning against Cooper’s shoulder and squeezing her boobs together to create a type of cleavage that felt aggressive, to say the least.
I had to actively look away to preserve my appetite.
Seriously.
She was leaning over so far, she had to bring her fork over from her plate at a 45-degree angle with every bite.
I think at one point she dropped a pea down there.
All to say: Maybe Cooper wasn’t avoiding me after all. Maybe Bridesmaid Two was just making him nauseous.
Finn, on my other side, kept getting texts that he had to respond to.
“I’m so sorry. I have to take this,” he kept saying, getting up to step away from the table.
But during those times, I couldn’t talk to Cooper because Bridesmaid Two was relentlessly hogging his attention, asking all about his life: What was the best thing about London (“the pubs”), could he do a British accent (“sometimes”), and what did he miss about Texas (“the sky”).
Bridesmaid Two was mostly asking Cooper all about his job like she was the first person to ever make vocational chitchat. It bugged me for many reasons, but I guess the biggest one was that she was getting answers even I didn’t have. And I’d always had all the answers about Cooper.
Yet somehow here I was, eavesdropping.
She forced Cooper to describe the studio where he worked, and list movies he’d done, and explain how he created all kinds of sounds.
And dammit, it was fascinating. He snapped stalks of celery, for example, to make the sound of breaking bones.
He recorded bacon frying to make the sound of rain.
He whooshed a stalk of bamboo past the mic to make the sound of an arrow.
“What about kissing?” Bridesmaid Two dared to ask.
“That’s easy,” Cooper said, “you just kiss your forearm.”
I side-glanced over to see him roll back his shirtsleeve to reveal his naked forearm underneath—and then lean forward to demonstrate what he meant.
I meant to look away. I really did. But my eyes got stuck.
At the sight of him bending down, parting his lips, and then pressing them against his own skin … things seemed to shift into slo-mo for a second.
Was Cooper Watts Frenching his own forearm at the dinner table?
Whatever was going on, I’ll be honest: My hickey might’ve tingled a bit at the sight of it.
That is, until Finn returned to his seat, patted me on the hand, and said, “Where were we?”
Ripped back to reality, I turned and said, “You were telling me about how you review contracts.”
Was I jealous that I was listening to Finn use legal terms like mutual covenants and agreements while Bridesmaid Two got to watch Cooper passionately smooching his own arm?
Yes. Yes, I was.
Bridesmaid Two was having so much fun, she wasn’t even interrupting.
Which felt massively unfair.
Even though, technically, I was getting what I wanted.
I forced myself to notice that Operation Conquest was starting to work.
Wasn’t that what I was here for, after all?
I needed to refocus!
Whenever Finn was at the table, I doubled down on my How to Make a Man Fall in Love with You research and asked him all about himself.
My plan was to launch endless searching questions about his interests and talents.
According to the book, asking people about themselves makes them think that you are fascinating.
But now, inspired in part by Bridesmaid Two’s cleavage, I added some physicality to my conversation with Finn.
When I asked him about his class ring, I made sure to reach out and brush his fingers with mine.
When I laughed, I touched him on the shoulder.
And once, when I stood up to go to the ladies’ room, I pretended to lose my balance so I could fall sideways onto his lap and let him catch me.
I won’t confirm or deny if I tried to use my own cleavage as a weapon, but let’s just say Bridesmaid Two wasn’t the only person in the dining room who could lean toward a man at a 45-degree angle.
I might have lost a pea or two myself.
I’d started out the meal intending to laugh uproariously at every funny thing Finn said.
But then it turned out that Finn didn’t say funny things.
Instead, he seriously told me about his life as a litigator.
He seriously explained how golf had become a “real passion” for him.
And then he seriously described his new BMW to me like he was doing a Consumer Reports performance review, including in-depth assessments of its turbo, torque, and thrust.
I listened intently, like we were discussing world affairs.
Like nothing on earth could be more fascinating.
Like my oldest friend wasn’t eighteen inches away, making out with his own arm.
I was just visualizing my soul-sucking boredom as a pinhole leak in a pool float, and I was feeling quite deflated, when Cooper rescued me again.
He interrupted a soliloquy of Finn’s on the perils of tax law to turn all attention to me and ask, “Tell us about your amazing job, JoJo.”
Everyone stopped talking. Even Finn.
“My amazing job?” I asked, like I’d forgotten all about it.
“JoJo teaches art to middle schoolers,” Cooper said. “But that’s not the coolest part.”
I frowned at him, like What’s the coolest part?
“It’s not just any old art,” Cooper said. “It’s math art.”
“What’s math art?” Bridesmaid Two wanted to know.
I narrowed my eyes at Cooper, like he had once again forgotten how supremely uninterested most of the world was in math.
But then I said, “Well, it’s mostly trying to find ways to bring mathematical principles to life using art.
So the kids can see and feel how these patterns exist in the world all around us.
So, like, I have them draw seashells using Fibonacci numbers, so they can see how that sequence works in nature.
And I help them visualize hyperbolic geometry by showing them crochet patterns that follow the geometric formulas of nonlinear shapes.
One of my favorite activities is to blow their minds by having them make Mobius strips. ”
“What’s a Mobius strip?” the ever-eager Bridesmaid Two asked.
“It’s a non-orientable, non-Euclidean infinite loop,” I said.
I admit it was a bit of a flex to lose her for a second.
“You make it with a strip of paper,” I explained next, “like you would if you were making a paper chain. But instead of taping the two ends directly together, you twist the strip once before connecting the ends. Doing that one thing—twisting the strip—changes it from a shape with two sides, an inside and an outside, to a shape that has only one side. If you run a pencil along it, it will draw on both sides before you ever get back to where you started.”
I wasn’t sure Bridesmaid Two was following—or Finn for that matter. But Cooper was leaning back in his chair, enjoying every sentence I uttered, like he was responsible for sparking the best conversation topic of the night.
But I’m not sure anyone but me agreed.
Before long, Bridesmaid Two had Cooper talking about London again, and Finn was sharing his thoughts on the municipal court system—but I appreciated Cooper’s attempt.
As time wore on, to be brutally honest, I did find myself absently touching the little hickey that had made all this triumphing possible. And yes—my mind kept trying to drift back to the moment it had happened.
That was Cooper’s fault. A random bridesmaid asks you about kissing and then you just volunteer to demonstrate—for hours? Set some boundaries, Cooper!
But I stayed focused on my goals.
Through it all, I kept wanting to get a minute alone with Cooper to celebrate our massive victory and thank him for his service—a moment that never came. But I took comfort in the fact that as stuck as I was with Finn … Cooper was equally stuck with Bridesmaid Two.