Epilogue
Cooper
I close the door to Nate’s pickup truck and give him a quick goodbye after our weekly “date night” before heading up the sidewalk to Sutton’s and my house. It’s been two months since Sutton tried to end things with me and I refused. Two months since we decided to give up my apartment permanently. One month since we decided we wanted to find a place not haunted by the ghost of Dillon Oak.
At least once a week since Dillon moved out, we had a random woman or groups of partiers show up looking for him at all hours of the day. At first, it was funny. But after a particularly long day with a visitor pounding on our door at 3 a.m., we stopped finding it so funny and knew we needed to get away from that house and Dillon’s groupies.
It took us about three weeks to find the perfect house. And it was in walking distance from Nate and Viv.
With a bag of greasy street tacos from a random food truck in hand, I unlock the front door to find Sutton drinking straight from a bottle of wine as she sits on the kitchen floor, organizing our Tupperware into the cabinets. Boxes upon boxes fill the space. We moved in last week, only unpacking the essentials, and haven’t touched a box since.
Her creepy-as-hell murder podcast is playing because my dumbass was so excited about getting home to feed her these tacos that I forgot to text her. A shiver runs down my spine at the memory of me walking in on her shaving her legs to the gruesome details of a woman’s murder filling the bathroom. I wanted to puke at the information the host shared as Sutton tilted her head thoughtfully, hanging on to their every word.
Luckily for me this time, the hosts are talking about the police and their search efforts instead of going into gory details.
“Baby, I’m home,” I call out, and Sutton lifts her head, blond hair spilling over her shoulders as a smile plays on her lips when she sees me.
I walk over to her, bending to kiss her.
She pauses her podcast. “What’s wrong with your face?”
“Excuse me?” I ask my wonderfully kind and definitely not rude girlfriend.
Her face contorts in disgust as she gestures with her fingers at my face. “I asked what’s wrong with your face.”
I frown. “I don’t think you’re supposed to talk to people you love like that.”
“No, I’m serious. Something is different.” She taps her chin. “Perhaps one might say it’s wrong.”
I sigh because here we go again . “Listen, I know you aren’t a fan of my new glasses, but you can’t continue to act like I’m hideous.”
“You aren’t hideous,” she clarifies, grabbing my shoulders to lean back and look me in the eye. “Those ridiculous frames are.”
The frames in question are midnight blue at the top and lined with gunmetal gray around the lenses. They’re the same shape as my old pair, which Sutton accidentally broke, much to her sadness, when she tossed them off my face in a lust-filled haze. Something she likes to completely forget about when it comes to trashing my new pair.
“Well, the frames that you have a weird attachment to are no longer being manufactured. So it’s these or I force myself to wear my contacts every day.”
“No,” she squeaks out. “I like you in glasses.”
“Then stop making me question your attraction to me.”
Her bottom lip juts out. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to stop, but are you sure you can’t—”
“I’m sure. The company said they are no longer in production. So kiss your fantasies of seeing me in those particular glasses goodbye.”
“But I met you in those glasses. Our first kiss was in those glasses. I fell in love with you in those glasses.”
This woman actually has my chest squeezing at the memories we shared in that particular pair of glasses.
I throw my head back with a groan. “Fine, I will keep looking for them.”
She beams up at me before grabbing my chin in her hand and pulling me back down to her lips for a loud, smacking kiss. “You are the best boyfriend ever.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I take off my jacket, throwing it onto the kitchen table.
“You’re home early.”
“It was a short but eventful night,” I say, handing the bag to her.
“For me?” she asks, already opening the bag and pulling out a tinfoil-wrapped taco.
“Of course.”
She moans with the first bite. “You are too good to me.”
“Me or the taco?”
Mid-bite, she gives me a toothy smile. “You.”
“See, that still didn’t answer my question,” I say, sitting beside her and pulling another box over to me before opening it. “You started to unpack without me?”
“Did you want me to wait for you?”
When I give her the side-eye, she laughs around another bite as I begin to pull the contents of the box out, setting them in front of me.
“You don’t have to help.”
“Like hell, I don’t. This is our home. Which means I’m helping. Besides, I like spending time with you, no matter what we’re doing. I just want to be with you.”
She stares at me for a few moments, taking bite after bite while I place pots and pans into the cabinets. “This is why I love you.”
“Because I’m doing the bare minimum in my home?”
“Because you care, too. You don’t make it into a chore. You love me in the way I’ve always dreamed of being loved.”
“And I always will.”
We sit side by side, unpacking box after box with only the sound of Sutton’s chewing and the clinking of pots and pans filling the space.
“What did you end up doing while I was gone?”
“Oh, you know. I just had some solid much-needed me time.”
“Does that me time include your favorite pastime?” I waggle my eyebrows at her suggestively.
“If you mean masturbation, maybe. If you mean painting my nails, no. I prefer to have you do it now that I have trained you so masterfully.”
Paint a woman’s nails once when she’s in a cast, and she never lets it go.
“Then what?”
“What do you think, Cooper?” She glances around the room.
I run my gaze over the stuffed room and wince. “I’m sorry I left you to go out with Nate.”
She waves me off with a flick of her wrist. “Eh, it’s fine. It needs to be done, and the sooner we get it done, the sooner you can fuck me on every surface.”
“Ah yes, a house is not a home until every inch of it is covered in sex sweat.”
She winks and gives me a look that screams exactly . “Anyway, you still haven’t told me what you and Nate did tonight?”
“Oh, Nate and I went to some dingy hole-in-the-wall bar across town… to see a secret Muzzle Velocity concert.” I smirk as I pull potholders and dish towels out of a box.
She places the bag of food on the floor, pushing it away near the pots and pans she was organizing, and stands. “Come on.” She holds her bottle of wine in one hand and grabs my hand with the other, dragging me behind her around the mess of boxes to the living room before pushing me onto the couch and straddling my hips. Once she is comfortable, she says, “Okay, spill.”
“So, Nate and I might have gotten wind that MV was playing a secret show for a special guest. A music producer.”
Rumor has it that he and the band wanted to go under the radar tonight because things can get a little wild when their fans come out in the masses, and they wanted to wow the producer with their music and not the sheer number of screaming women.
Dillon gets a little sloppy when he sees women fawning over him. So none of their usual antics are ideal.
It was a solid plan.
They didn’t advertise that they were playing tonight; it was hush-hush.
The only reason I found out was because Audra frequents this bar often, and one of the bartenders asked if she had ever heard of them.
Normally, I’d never do anything to screw with someone’s career or livelihood, like Dillon did with me. But he had this one coming to him. And besides, this one last prank should be the universe righting some wrongs via my pettiness.
Day after day, Dillon’s visitors would leave their numbers in hopes that Sutton and I would pass them on to him.
Obviously, we didn’t.
We did, however, throw all the numbers into a pile of junk he left at the house, planning to throw it out while moving.
“Okay…” She tilts her head to the side, waiting patiently for me to tell her the rest.
“I might have taken all of those numbers the groupies had left and texted them about a top-secret show and how they would need to keep it all under wraps, but Dillon was excited to have them there.”
Her mouth drops open as a laugh bubbles out of her, causing her shoulders to shake and her ass to bounce against my crotch. “You didn’t. You really called the groupies.”
I place my hands on her hips to still her movement because I really don’t feel like popping a boner while talking about her ex. “I did. And you can only imagine the shit show that went down. The music producer looked very unimpressed from what I could see.”
The man in question, a small bald man with sunglasses, was tucked into a dark corner, sitting at a small table with a reserved sign. He didn’t look like anything special, but what do I know.
“I—” She wheezes between laughs. “Was—” Another wheeze. “The music producer.”
“What?”
She clutches her chest as she pulls a rubbery-looking thing from her hoodie pocket and throws it at me.
I unfold the flesh-colored item to discover it’s a bald cap. It takes me a moment to piece together what it means, but then it’s like a light goes off. “Shut the fuck up. You were there?”
Tears fill her eyes as she explains how she called Dillon, pretending to be a famous music producer interested in Muzzle Velocity as one last prank. She also goes into detail on how she rushed out of the house the moment I left to assume the role of a balding man at the bar.
I’m in tears by the end of her story, clutching my sides as pain lances up my stomach.
“Did you see the woman with the knife?” She wipes away the moisture from under her eyes.
“Baby, I had a front-row seat to it.”
The moment Dillon stepped onto the stage, women and men swarmed him. And much to my delight, more than a few were wearing the merch Sutton and I created.
At first, he smiled, welcoming their eager touches. But that all changed when they tugged at him. Dillon was jerked to the left before another fan pulled him to the right. Then someone got a hold of his shirt collar, and he was yanked backward.
His arms flailed, windmilling before he crashed to the ground.
Pieces of fabric went flying into the air as his fans screamed with joy. They circled around him, enclosing him as he pleaded for them to stop.
On stage, the band continued to play.
I enjoyed every second of it until I saw the knife. Nate and I had jumped up, ready to defend the man I hate.
Until I saw the unhinged smile on the woman’s face as she raised a lock of hair up in triumph before walking away like she had won the lottery.
Nate and I had taken that moment as a sign that we needed to leave.
Sutton cackles. “That was my favorite part of the night.”
“You’re so twisted.”
She circles the lip of the bottle of wine sitting between us. “I think I like the new glasses.”
I quirk an eyebrow at her suspiciously. “Really? Because just a few minutes ago, you hated them. Said they were wrong.”
She shrugs her shoulder, licking her lips in a motion that has my dick twitching. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe they’re growing on me.”
“I think maybe you had a little too much wine,” I tease, pulling the half-empty bottle from her grasp and placing it on the floor.
“Nah, I want to show you how much I love you, like you show me.”
“You do. You show me every single day by being by my side. By being mine.”
“And you’re mine.”
“Always.”
She rolls her hip against mine. “Then let me show you how much I appreciate you in my favorite way.”
I squeeze her ass just as her lips come crashing down on mine.
Her kiss is heaven. She is heaven. A piece that I never thought I would find.
I thank God every day that she struck that damn bargain with me. I can’t imagine my life without her anymore. I can’t imagine a future that isn’t filled with her. And I hope I never have to. Fuck, I’ll do everything in my power to ensure it.
“I love you. I love you. I fucking love you,” I pant between each kiss.
She pulls her lips from mine and trails kisses down my jaw to my neck as her hands slip under my shirt, leaving my skin on fire in every place she touches. “I love you too, baby. But if you don’t shut up and fuck me already, we’re going to have a problem.”
So I do.