The Shippers(92)

A beat. Then, like he was getting a vivid flash memory of me calling Bridesmaid Two “Sock Girl” in our hallway that morning we fought, Cooper said, “That’s right. You saw that.”

“And then,” I went on, letting my voice calibrate to full bitterness, “I had to go around, cabinless, looking for someone to take me in. And just when I thought I’d have to sleep outside on one of the deck chairs, Finn came along, and felt sorry for me, and offered me his room. And since he was on his way to a last-minute booty call, I took it.”

Cooper closed his eyes. “I can’t believe you saw that sock.”

I started down the stairs again, calling back, “Wasn’t I supposed to see it? Wasn’t that the whole point? You don’t put a sock on a doorknob for your roommate unless you want your roommate to know exactly what’s going on inside. And don’t even think about telling me who you were in there with. I don’t ever want to know.”

“JoJo—slow the hell down.”

“No.”

“JoJo, I need to tell you something.”

“Nope.”

“JoJo—I wasn’t in there with anybody.”

At that, I stopped.

Cooper stopped on his step, too, but he’d been catching up. Now he was just a few steps behind me.

“I saw Finn kiss you,” Cooper said then, his voice quieter. “On the deck. Our deck. And I was so jealous—you have no idea. Plus angry. And miserable. For a minute there, I wanted you to be miserable, too. So I went back to the room and did the sock thing—thinking if you could go off and mess around with people, I could do the same. I wasn’t doing the same. But I figured you’d come back at some point and see it there and, if nothing else, leave me alone. I wanted to lock you out. I wanted to make us even. Or maybe make you jealous. Even though, of course, if you were off madly in love with Finn, you wouldn’t even care. I wasn’t thinking things through. My mind was just—short-circuiting.

“But as soon as I closed the door, I thought about how you’d feel if you saw it. Maybe you wouldn’t care. But this would be the first time in my life I’d ever lied to you on purpose. Or tried to hurt you on purpose. And I got very clear very fast that I just didn’t want to ever do that. Period. For any reason. Not if I could help it.”

I took that in.

“So I went back out—and took it off.”

He went back out. And took it off …

Cooper went on. “Your timing’s incredible, by the way. It couldn’t have been there longer than five minutes.”

I turned back to meet his eyes. “You were there alone—all night?”

“I was there alone all night,” Cooper confirmed, “waiting for you to come back.”

“And you thought I was with Finn that whole time?”

Cooper nodded.

“And so when you said you didn’t sleep at all…?”

“I was just—pacing the room.”

“And so by the time you saw us in the morning…?”

He shook his head at himself. “I was not well.”

I took a couple of calming breaths. There was no Sock Girl.

Which meant I didn’t have to run away anymore.

I turned back to meet Cooper’s eyes. “I didn’t kiss Finn,” I said.

“Pretty sure you did.”

“It wasn’t what it looked like, is what I’m saying.”

“It looked like you and Finn smooching.”

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 myself to be kissed by Finn,” 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?—“conducted on 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-clattering BOOM—like an explosion that seemed to rattle everything.

And then all the light in the stairwell disappeared.

By disappeared, 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.