The Shippers(48)

Had he really never done this before?

Liar.

He had to know what he was doing.

He was a musician, after all, and I was like a musical instrument that was being played just exactly right in every possible way.

And what do musical instruments do when you play them like that?

They … sigh erotically.

Wait—

Hold on—

But, yeah. That’s what happened.

I didn’t even realize at first the person sighing was me.

It could have been—anybody, I guess. Out in the world. Anybody who was having a very, very unexpectedly nice morning.

But then—it had to be me. Cooper must have realized it, too.

Next, everything stopped.

Cooper ceased all hickey-making, released me, and took a step away.

I stumbled back a little but grabbed on to the railing.

For a moment, the ship’s motor just kept humming, and the wind just kept whipping, and the wake behind us just kept churning.

I took one of those three-second breaths that are supposed to be so good for you.

Cooper regrouped first. He coughed, and nodded, and looked around.

And then—decisively—he dusted off his hands. “Well,” he said. “I hope that worked.” Then he checked his watch and said, “You wanted sixty seconds, but that was actually closer to two minutes. Hope that’s okay.”

That felt like too much math. And there was no such thing as too much math.

I kept clutching the railing and nodded.

Cooper peered in at my throat, all business, to check his work. “Looks good. Red and blotchy, for sure. That’ll bruise up great.”

I was still too melted to speak.

Then Cooper shoved his hands into his pockets and said, “Okay. Great teamwork. Got it done.”

I nodded liquidly.

Next, the hands came out of the pockets so Cooper could gesture over his shoulder at the staircase with his thumb. “Well, I’ve got—some things to do back at the—somewhere. So I’m just gonna—go—make that happen.”

Then he held out that same hand to me so we could shake.

Like business partners or something.

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. “I never forgot about you. And I never will. Even if you fucking marry Finn Turner.”





Sixteen


THE HICKEY DIDN’T work. Is that a spoiler?

I mean—it worked. 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 was so clearly a 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 just not 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’s baker’s dozen of hickeys—thought I’d been stung by a bee.

A bee! 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 doing whatever he’d just done to me wasn’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 a tattoo of a hickey?

That was it. Time to go find Cooper.