19
Later that night I sat alone in our room while Cooper tinkered downstairs. We’d spent the rest of the afternoon at that Oldest Schoolhouse place, and truthfully it was kind of boring. We’d pretty much grasped the whole concept – that it was, indeed, a really old school – within the first five minutes, and then we’d spent the rest of the hour listening to some weird guy in a pirate costume talking about the history of the building. After all the Oak Tree of Love intensity I may have even dozed off once or twice, actually, as it was getting harder to stay awake even on the most exciting of days.
Suddenly Cooper sauntered into the room wearing only a towel, which hung deliciously from his torso. He had a Heineken in his hand and held it out, offering me a sip, and I shook my head. He smirked, tossed his backpack onto the bed, and turned into the bathroom, and suddenly an evil idea came to me regarding the Mystery of the Jewelry Box. I leaned over, reached into his bag, and rooted around while he brushed his teeth. Finally I found the jewelry box and lightly pushed it open, and what was inside flummoxed me.
It was a pen. It hadn’t been a jewelry box at all, but a case for a fancy fountain pen. A notebook was in the bag, too, a battered one with a black cover. What on Earth was Cooper writing? Was it that book he’d mentioned? And if so, why would he be covering it up?
“Check your phone,” Cooper said over his shoulder, cutting my surveillance mission short.
“What?” I asked as I snapped the box shut and dropped the bag.
“Check your phone. By the way, did you ever post that oak tree photo?”
“Nah, I decided to keep it to myself – some things are just better left unshared, in my opinion.”
“Atta girl.”
I reached into the pocket of my wheelchair for my phone, which somehow I hadn’t checked since the schoolhouse – guess I’d been too tired. In between Facebook messages from cousins and coworkers about the surgery – thanks to Shelly’s big mouth, the cat was fully out of the bag now – there was a longish text from Cooper from three hours ago. I held my breath and opened it:
We’re sitting here in the oldest schoolhouse in America and I’m in love with you. You just nodded off a little and got yelled at by the weird tour guide for not paying attention and now we’re both laughing like crazy under our breaths and I’m in love with you. I don’t really know how to put all this into words, the fact that you’re golden and dazzling and triumphant and that you’re the best person I’ve ever met and that you sank into my being and scraped my dirty soul clean and that you make me smile all day like a total fucking maniac, so I’m just gonna text you this: I’m in love with you.
I looked up at him. I didn’t care about marriages or proposals or rings anymore. I wanted him, exactly as he was, immediately.
“Come here,” I said as the oldest feeling in the world rose up into my chest.
“What?”
“Come here.”
He padded back into the room in a pair of basketball shorts and nothing else, looking delicious. Raising an eyebrow, he sank onto the bed next to me, and I sang a silent hymn of thanks that I was at least wearing cute-ish pajamas – it seemed that not even a death sentence could curb my vanity.
Cooper blushed when he saw my phone, the rosy glint giving his dark eyes this wonderful boyish quality. “Sorry for not just telling you all that in person,” he said, “but I was already wiped out from that stupid tree. And besides, what kind of millennial would I be if I had social skills?”
“Touché.”
Suddenly the intensity of my feelings for him (along with the mild painkillers Steinberg had prescribed for my throat, probably) started messing with my brain, and I didn’t know why, but I started feeling really turned on. Sure, I acted Spunky and Upbeat and Plucky and all those other things that Sick People were supposed to be, but the truth was that I was a human just like anyone else, and I had needs. And sitting a foot away from Cooper for days on end, watching the muscles in his forearms flex and unflex, had made me experience those needs more than ever.
I put my hand on his thigh and squeezed, and it was just as firm and delicious as I’d imagined. He peered down, eyes expanding, and I could tell he knew just what I wanted.
He looked at me, and I looked at him. This was it. Just us. No phones or texts or Facebook statuses or tangled headphones to drown out the pain and mask the quietly aching voices in our minds – just the humming silence of humanity filtering in, sinking into the shallow pools in our souls to remind us that we were alive and human and hurting and reaching for more.
“Summer,” he asked, “really? Now?”
I nodded.
“But how do you, like, feel? Are you well enough to…?”
“Yes. I want to.”
He set his jaw, and the light in his eyes changed. “Good. Because I want that, too. Badly. You have no idea how badly, actually. I used to be afraid of hurting you, but not anymore.”
“You do, really?” I asked, my resolve melting for a moment. “You want me?”
He put a hand on my leg. “I do.”
For one last time, I wanted to wreck this for myself. “But I, I look terrible,” I said, “and I don’t know if I can give you what you want, and…”
“Oh, Summer.” A desperate, animalistic sheen came to his brown eyes, and he scoffed up at the ceiling. “Just like Saviour said in Strange Fiction, enough with the fucking sunshine and rainbows and happy endings. I want what you’re hiding from me,” he growled, loosely quoting her again. “I know there’s more. Give it to me. Give it all to me. I want your ugly, your broken, your twisted; I want the monsters that pick away at your soul while you lie awake at night thinking of us. Let’s burn each other to the ground in all the best ways, until there’s nothing left but you and me and love and the future.”
Something deep within me coiled up and then lit aflame. I was ready.
Finally I looked him in the eye one last time, brown to hazel, heart to heart. A girl who didn’t deserve love, asking a boy for it nonetheless. Don’t break me down, I silently quoted Saviour as I tried to look past his eyes, at whatever was underneath. Don’t let me down now.
“Cooper?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“You might want to take off your shorts now.”
“I want to see you, too,” he said after I laid myself out, his ab muscles resplendent in the soft light from the lamp in the corner. “Take off your dress.”
I reached underneath and wiped at my stomach tube. Thankfully it was clean of the bile that sometimes leaked out of it and dried into a brownish film that caked around the plastic tube, and so I lifted off my dress and tried not think about what a skinny, bony, pale mess I must’ve looked like. Sure enough, he was staring at me like I was an apparition.
“What is it?” I asked. “I look bad, I know, and-”
“No,” he said. “You’re just beautiful.”
“I am?”
“Yes, Summer. I like you, immensely, as the You that you are, the You that I see right now, the You that you hide away because you think the world wants you to be someone else. Just…you, without a filter. That’s the You that I like.”
“I…I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything, then. Just feel. And you’re sure you’re okay?”
“Yes. Maybe a little tired.”
“Well I’m about to change that.” He licked his bottom lip, making some delicious feeling sink into me and then heat me from within.
“Shall we?” he asked with a dirty grin.
“We shall, Coop.”
“Oh, babe.” He smiled a dazzlingly crooked smile and then got going. “I love when you call me Coop.”
Part of me knew he would always be like this, in this setting. There was this intensity, this wildness swimming beneath his dark eyes that spoke of some beautiful inner turmoil, and I’d seen it rise to the surface and flash a few times – but never like this. It was clear that he was somewhat experienced, and although I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, I enjoyed the effects of that experience nonetheless. It was like getting to know a completely different Cooper – a Cooper that I wanted to continue to get to know as often as possible, for the rest of my life, actually.
“You know, I love every bit of you,” he said as he kissed his way down my stomach a minute or two later, veering a bit around my feeding tube. “Even the plastic parts,” he laughed, making me giggle a little.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes it’s our imperfections that bring us to the next level. Would Amy Winehouse have been half as interesting without the crack?”
“Hmm,” I breathed. “I guess not. But why are we talking about crack right now, anyway?”
He placed another kiss on my stomach. “Because you’re mine.”
I giggled again, but the look in his eyes made me stop short.
“What is it?”
“Don’t laugh,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because I want you still for when I do this.”
He pushed two fingers forward, and I gasped. His mouth followed the same trajectory, and I leaned back and clawed at my bed sheets as the attack began. I had both looked forward to and dreaded this moment for weeks, but it was more than living up to my expectations.
This was clearly going to be a long night.
“Our neighbors are probably terrified,” he panted after a minute, breaking a hole in my own euphoria.
“Why?”
“Listen – the heartbeat. It’s probably making the pictures rattle in their frames in the other rooms.”
I listened: sure enough, a bumb-bump filled the room. “Yeah. Sorry. I guess I get kinda excited.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “you’re not understanding. It’s mine. I’ve been waiting so long to work up the nerve to do this, I think I might just explode. You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted this.”
“Oh.”
He pushed me back on the bed and continued. “I love you, Summer,” he whispered into my scarred chest. “Every second of seeing you in the hospital was torture for me. I am so grateful I downloaded that stupid dating app.”
“Me too,” is all I could say, and then it blew into me, the grand and startling and soul-stirring realization that no matter what happened between us, whether we would last six weeks or six decades, I would never ever be the same. This love had rearranged me.
You know what happened next. The sex happened. And I say “sex” because it was sort of halfway between making love and fucking. It wasn’t perfect, and avoiding the feeding tube took some getting used to, and since I was so thin and bony, there were some maneuvers that were more awkward than I would’ve preferred. But God, it was beautiful. And it was hot. It was everything I’d wanted and so much more, stupid feeding tube notwithstanding. When I clutched him by the shoulders and breathed in his perfect scent and started crying and said “thank you for loving me on my way down,” he cried, too, and that’s when I knew it was real and true and good and right.
Twenty minutes after the big bang, we were both trying to avoid a wet spot on the bed while simultaneously trying to pretend like we weren’t avoiding the wet spot on the bed. I rolled onto my side and rested my head on my elbow on the rustled-up sheets between us. Getting to know him in this way, seeing this new side of him, had made me want to know even more about him. I was a cannibal with an endless appetite for Nichols.
I studied his arms, his hair raised like blades of grass as he breathed in and out, luxuriating in his beautiful silence. I noticed a birthmark on his right forearm that I’d never seen before: pretty large, but so faint you could barely see it. This was what I’d wanted with him, this quiet observant time away from Shelly and Steinberg and the nurses and whoever else, when I could study him and notice all these craggy little human details about him. I wanted to know all of him, every birthmark, every cell, every mitochondria, right now, and I never wanted it to end. Unfortunately I could already sense him transitioning from Sex Animal Cooper back to Normal Cooper, and I could feel the magic slipping away.
I looked into the darkness, and my eyes fell on my wheelchair.
“Thank you for loving me,” I said as I put my head on his shoulder, sounding sadder than I’d meant to. “Like, that sounds cheesy, but whatever. I don’t care. You know, this story never happens. It’s always, like, the hunky bad boy who becomes disabled during a motorcycle crash while trying to save a kidnapped nun or something, and then his alluring nurse falls in love with him in the hospital and dedicates the rest of her life to pushing him around and loving him. But it never happens like this. Boys like you don’t fall for wheelchair girls. I don’t deserve you and I know that. So thanks for, you know, loving me like this.”
“And thank you for being so lovable,” Cooper said as he kissed my sweaty forehead, his voice scratchier than normal. The casual touch was a bit awkward after his aggressive display before, but I tried not to break eye contact. Fleetingly I wondered if my hair smelled good. “And it’s not cheesy,” he said with a sad smile. “You stuck with me through my weird meltdown thing in the garage. I will stick with you through anything. Even if you are a frustrating little knucklehead sometimes.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I just tried to catch my breath.
“You know something?” he asked after a moment, lost in wonder. “Remember when we met, and I didn’t text you for a few days after that?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I was trying to save you from me. From my…situation. But I failed. It was useless, because I couldn’t turn off my feelings for you even if I’d wanted to.”
“I know what you mean. Trust me. This whole summer has been one long exercise in trying to save you from myself.”
He smirked into the darkness.
“What is it?” I asked, and he rolled over and rested his head on his bicep, a twinkle in his eye.
“There was another reason I called Last Great Hope, you know.”
Oh no, I thought. Elopement. Cheesy ring. Shotgun wedding in someone’s backyard the day before the surgery. I wanted love, sure, but not that kind of love, the kind I knew Shelly would try to force onto Cooper’s shoulders.
“There was?”
“Yep,” he smiled. “The nurses told me to get laid.”
“Cooper! That’s why we came here? Are you serious?”
“Hell to the no,” he said. “I still wanted to bust you out of the hospital, remember? I didn’t want you to spend your only days before surgery locked up in that room.” He smirked that patented Nichols Smirk. I’d seen his mom do it a few times, too, and it seemed like they’d gotten the whole business down to an art form. “But honestly, it was in the back of my mind. I think the nurses felt sorry for me and wanted to help out.”
“You dick,” I said, and his smirk grew into a full-on smile.
“Tell me something else, Sum: was I your first?”
I looked away. What did he think this was, some cheesy college-aged romance novel starring an impossibly naïve heroine who’d never even been kissed before? I’d never been able to lock anyone down into a relationship, sure, but still, Autumn had lots of guy friends, and she’d been stealing bottles of vodka from her oblivious grandpa and arranging backyard get-togethers since we were seventeen – get-togethers involving hammocks that were far away from any scar-revealing fluorescent lights, might I add.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you,” I said, “but no. Don’t worry, though, the previous guy was completely awful, and I barely knew him. He didn’t know my elbow from my kneecap, and I ended the whole thing and put it out of its misery before twenty minutes had passed. Maybe I should’ve stayed with him out of punishment and made him deal with this summer instead of you, actually, since he was so bad.”
Now Cooper was the one looking away. “Please don’t say things like that anymore, Summer. Seriously.”
“You are mad, though,” I told him. “You can admit it. It’s okay.”
He stared into the bathroom, his eyes impassive. “Fine. I am. But I’m not that mad, and I don’t want you to think I’m that mad, or that I regret this in any way. God knows I had nothing else to do this summer. You know, that’s why I’ve started writing-”
Out of nowhere I started choking on my spit, since sometimes it had nowhere to go but out of my mouth.
“What is it?” he asked, propping himself up and scooting closer. “Don’t cry, it’s fine, let me just-”
“No,” I said, “I’m not crying, I just have to vomit.”
“Oh.”
He jumped up, grabbed a plastic grocery bag from the bathroom, and held it under me as I emptied the contents of my throat and stomach into it. He did his best to try to act like he wasn’t grossed out, but he was. Anyone would have been. Soon I was crying, the tears mixing in with the bile dripping from my lips.
“Stop it,” he said after he threw away the bag and gave me some paper towels for my mouth. “I can deal with a little vomit.”
There was something else in his eyes, something he couldn’t say.
“Do you want to know what it feels like, not having a throat?” I asked after I cleaned myself, and he nodded.
“I guess. It would help me understand.”
“Okay. Remember those little straw tubes you’d get out of candy machines or at the fair or whatever, those Chinese Finger Traps, where you’d put in your fingers and it would contract and they’d get stuck? That’s the only way I know how to describe it. It’s just…too tight. Things come up, but nothing goes down.”
He bit his lip, his eyes full of thunderheads I had never seen in them. “I’m very sorry you have to deal with that, Summer. Do you want to sleep?”
I nodded and put my head against the inside of his leg so I could feel his pulse. Within minutes I had started to drift away, accompanied by the cruelest irony I had ever known: only now that I knew my life was probably finite was I truly enjoying it. Here I was, gallivanting around town with the hot boy of my dreams, and I was fine. I really could live normally. If only I could go back, armed with the knowledge and the bravery and the love I had now. How differently things could have turned out…how happy the scarred girl with the hole in her throat could have been…
Another thought came to me, and I slowly sat up again. “And one last thing. Remember today at the Kissing Tree or whatever? This is crazy, but I thought you were going to-”
That’s when Cooper’s eyes got very large and he told me I was bleeding.
“What?” I asked with a smile, his words not registering.
“You’re…you’re bleeding, Summer.”
I looked down and gasped at the trail of bloody bile that was seeping out of my feeding tube.