But I shook my head. “He kissed me, but I didn’t kiss him back.”
“That feels like semantics.”
“But it’s really not.”
“What were you doing, if not kissing him back?”
“I was standing there, tolerating it, waiting for it to be over.”
Cooper considered that.
“I allowed myselfto be kissed byFinn,” I specified. “But I knew I didn’t want that kiss even before it happened.”
“So why did you let it happen?” Cooper asked.
I shrugged. “I thought I needed closure.”
“And did you get it?”
How to explain it? “Even before I knew the truth about that kiss on the playground, even when I still thought everything had started because of Finn, that kiss he”—how to phrase it?—“conductedon me made one thing very clear.”
“What?”
“Finn doesn’t matter to me anymore.”
Cooper waited.
“I thought Finn was my unresolved issue,” I said. “But it turns out—it’s you.”
At that, Cooper closed the distance between us on the stairs. “JoJo, I need to tell you something.”
He was poised to say something big. That much was clear. The look on his face had that much intensity. He was about to say something that would change our lives.
But then I didn’t get a chance to hear it.
As soon as he reached me, we heard an impossibly loud, ship-clatteringBOOM—like an explosion that seemed to rattle everything.
And then all the light in the stairwell disappeared.
Bydisappeared, I mean the stairwell turned so dark that I couldn’t see Cooper right in front of me. As the light went, so went the sound. That comforting, constant 24–7 hum and churn of the ship’s engines just went… quiet.
The world became dark and still.
Not good.
“Did we just blow an engine or something?” I asked.
“We just lost power,” Cooper said. “That’s pretty clear.”
“Shouldn’t some emergency lighting be kicking on right about now?” I asked.
“That would be nice,” Cooper said.
Other questions I could’ve asked: Was the ship about to sink? Did we have enough lifeboats? Were these the last remaining minutes of our lives?
Also: Was Cooper about to have a cleithrophobia problem?
First things first. We needed to get out of this stairwell.
