“If I let go of you,” Cooper said, “will you stop trying to turn around?”
Like a hostage, I nodded.
“Okay,” Cooper said, slowly loosening his clamped arms. “Stay.”
I stayed.
Next, I felt some air between us, and then I heard a rustle of fabric. And then, from behind, he reached for my hand, threading it into the sleeve of his suit jacket before shifting sides to do the same thing to the other.
This dress really must have been short—and Cooper must have been taller than I realized—because Cooper’s jacket grazed my mid-thighs as he turned me around to button it.
“There,” he said, looking pleased, like everything was fixed.
But nothing was fixed.
He read my face as it all started hitting me.
“No, no,” Cooper said, clamping me into a hug.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m distracting you,” Cooper said. “So you don’t start crying.”
“I’m not about to start—” I started. But then I realized he was right.
“And now I’m giving you a pep talk,” he went on, still hugging.
“I don’t need a pep talk,” I said. “I just need to go back to your fancy cabin and not leave for the rest of the cruise.”
“You’re not doing that,” Cooper said. “You’re coming with me to the welcome lunch.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s your sister’s wedding,” Cooper said. “But also because you are unstoppable.”
At that, my head shook itself. “I’m pretty stoppable, actually.”
But Cooper disagreed. “Maybe you just took the most humiliating pratfall I’ve ever seen in real life. Maybe this day hasn’t gone at all how you planned. Maybe Brody and his Michael Jackson glove were total douchebags all through the game. But… you’reJoJo. You’re thebest person here. You look genuinely hot in that dress—and those underpants are the sexiest thing about it, by the way. You’re not going to scuttle away and hide. You’re going to come eat lunch, and sit with me, and I’m going to bring you all the desserts until you completely forget to be unhappy.”
Forgetting to be unhappy sounded okay.
Then I asked, like this might be the deciding factor, “Do you actually think I look ‘genuinely hot,’ or are you just saying that to cheer me up?”
At that, Cooper pulled back to look me over and make an official assessment.
Was it my imagination, or could I feel the sweep of his eyes over my skin?
“I actually think you look genuinely hot,” Cooper said.
“Even in this jacket?”
“Especiallyin that jacket.”
That helped. A little. I turned to face the lunch buffet like I might start walking.
But then I hesitated.
“Today was a disaster,” I said. “I’m worse off than I was before.”
