I draped my hand over his like a silk scarf, and he pumped it up and down for a while. Then he looked down at his shoes before nodding a couple of times, like he’d decided to say something.
Then he said, to his shoes, “I’m sorry I made you cry.”
Then he added, to the deck, “I hope this hickey solves all your problems.”
And then he looked up to say one last thing. “And just for the record?” He met my eyes. “Ineverforgot about you. And I never will. Even if youfucking marryFinn Turner.”
Sixteen
THE HICKEY DIDN’Twork. Is that a spoiler?
I mean—itworked. Whatever Cooper had just done to me left a bruise on my neck that lasted for the rest of the cruise and beyond.
It’s just that nobody thought it was a hickey.
Even though it wasso clearlya hickey.
And yet, as I spent the rest of that day at sea fully avoiding Cooper and staying out of our shared luxury cabin, people noticed my neck, and remarked on it, and asked about it… but all with comments like: “You’ve got a smear of strawberry jam on your neck.”
Really?Jam?People thought I could wander around smeared with jam and justnot notice—like some kind of truffle pig?
Blackberry jelly was also suggested, for the record.
But it didn’t stop at condiments.
Pete wanted to know if I’d been punched in the throat. My mother worried I was breaking out in hives. Ashley thought it might be a smear of Tabasco. And Mrs. Vargas—who herself had just seen Harmony’sbaker’s dozen of hickeys—thought I’d been stung by a bee.
Abee! On a cruise ship!
I also got asked if it was paint, ink, a rash, contact dermatitis, chocolate ice cream, sorbet, shampoo, hair gel, ketchup, or a very rare bruising disorder called Henoch-Schonlein purpura, which the Bishops’ grandson had recently recovered from. They showed me pictures.
The point is, nobody—not one person—thought it was a hickey.
Cooper and I went through all that for nothing.
Nothing, that is, unless you count the full-body intrusive reveries that kept washing over me all day afterward in waves of sudden 3D flashbacks: Cooper’s arms clamping me tight. His mouth just consuming my neck. Not to mention… the symphony of reactions he’d conducted in my body with that one mouth of his alone.
You know how they say the color black isn’t just one color, but all the colors put together?
The memory of Cooper doingwhatever he’d just done to mewasn’t just one emotion. It was all of them at once. It was… a lot. It was so much that when a memory overtook me as I was helping my mom put up decorations in the cocktail lounge, I had to turn and put my head down on the bar until it passed.
If just thinking about Cooper could do all that to me, I wasn’t sure what seeing him in real life might do.
Nor was I in any hurry to find out.
But the total fail of the hickey solution was going to force a reckoning—sooner rather than later. We were going to need a new plan.
And when Bridesmaid Two dared to ask me if it was atattoo of a hickey?
That was it. Time to go find Cooper.
But Cooper wasn’t in the room when I got there, and so, even though I was supposed to be folding flower decorations for my mother, I went looking for him instead. I checked the promenade deck, and then the sports deck, and then the library—and I was on my way to the snack bar when I passed the empty side ballroom that would hold the wedding reception in a few nights’ time… And there he was.
With his mini banjo.
“What are you doing?” I called to him as I walked in.
He jumped a little at the sound of my voice like maybe he’d had a few intrusive reveries of his own. But then he recovered.
