Cooper looked straight into my eyes. “That was me.”
Twenty-Four
I FORGOT TObreathe for a second. The wind on our cabin balcony thrashed all around me.
But then I shook my head. “No. It was Finn.”
“It was me.”
What was Cooper doing right now? “It wasn’t.”
“How do you know?” Cooper demanded. “You had a blindfold on.”
“Because,” I said, digging in, “Finnwas the one who got the dare.”
Cooper squinted. “Why does that prove he’s the one who did it?”
“Because!” I said, like that was a legitimate answer.
Because this was a bedrock, unchangeable fact of my life. This was a basic cornerstone of my personality. This was what I’d believed for almost twenty years. Cooper couldn’t just go around changing facts! It was like he’d said my parents weren’t my parents. Or the sun rose in the west. Or the sky was made of water. Some things just were what they were—and you couldn’t alter them without altering everything else.
I like to think of myself as somewhat mentally nimble.
But in this moment, under these circumstances? I just wasn’t.
“Look,” I said. “You can’t tell me I’ve been wrong about that kiss my whole life.”
“Yes, I can,” Cooper said. “Because it’s true.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Cooper, this isn’t funny.”
“JoJo, I’m not kidding.”
Cooper was leaning in, studying my eyes, waiting for me to believe him.
But I couldn’t just rewrite my life story in twenty seconds like that.
“You don’t believe me?” he said then.
I frowned. I didn’t know what to believe.
The wind was relentless. Without breaking eye contact, Cooper brought his hand to one end of the open tie draped against his shirt and yanked until it slithered free from his collar.
Then he gathered the tie up in his hands and said, “Do I have to prove it to you?”
“What are you doing?”
“You said you’d know that kissanywhere. You said you could pick that kiss out of a lineup.”
“Cooper—”
“Let’s see you do it.”
He took a step closer, so I took a step back—and we kept going like that until I’d backed up against the separation wall between us and the next balcony.
