“No,” Cooper said.
“No?”
“You’re no stranger to dumb things. You’ve done some Guinness Book–level dumb things. But you’re not doing this.”
This really was a first. In my whole life, Cooper had never, ever, tried to tell me what I could or couldn’t do.
“Look,” he said. “I told you all about my dad last night.”
“I remember,” I said.
“So you know for sure that I make it a policy not to tell other people what to do.”
“That sounds like a great policy.”
“So it really takes a lot for me to say this to you…”
I waited.
Cooper crossed his arms over his chest. “But you’re not going anywhere.”
Wow.
“You need to stay here and drink water and rest. I did not stay up all night taking care of you just to watch you give yourself sun poisoning again today.”
“Did you stay up all night taking care of me?”
“Yes,” he said, his face grumpy. “I did.”
“Thank you,” I said—and I meant it.
It wasn’t a hard sell. If I had to stay in Cooper’s luxury cabin all day for health reasons, then I had to. And if Cooper had to stay, too, as my primary caregiver? Fine.
He opened his sliding glass doors to let the fresh breeze in. He kept me hydrated and slathered me with more aloe. We ordered room servicegrilled cheeses. We watched bad TV. We practiced our song. We talked about old times.
By midday, I felt better enough to slip on a light cotton cover-up and sit out on Cooper’s balcony in the shade.
The big excitement of the day was when we realized the cruise ship parked in the slip next to ours was the MSDecadence—the ship we’d been docked next to back in Galveston. And as we stood on our balcony, looking at all the other folks across the way who were looking at us fromtheirbalconies, we spotted the cruise dudes from before.
The ones who had ogled me on the wharf.
“Look,” I said to Cooper. “It’s the ship-faced guys.”
“It can’t be,” Cooper said.
But then we read their T-shirts. One of them readBEER MODE ACTIVATED, another readPOWERED BY BEER, and the third one kept it simple and just saidBEER LIFE.
“Those guys really love beer,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Cooper agreed as we openly stared at them.
And then, I guess in that way that you can sometimes just sense when people are looking at you, the guys noticed us—and started elbowing each other. And just as Cooper and I were about to wave hello like we were friendly acquaintances from across the Gulf, all three men turned around at once, pulled down their pants, and pressed their butts up against the glass of their balcony railing.
I TEXTED ASHLEY—WITHa selfie for proof—about my sunburn, and she gave me a pass for the day to recover, but she also replied that she fully expected me to be in attendance at tonight’s variety-show-slash-dance-contest, looking, and I quote, “gorgeous.”
She even sent Pete down with a baby-blue sundress she wanted me to wear to offset the “broiled neon” color of my skin.
“Bruh,” Pete said when he saw me. “You really messed yourself up.”
