Good Girl Complex (25 page)

MACKENZIE

Even Daisy has given up on me. At first, she scampered around my feet as I paced the house, typing then deleting texts to Cooper. Next she sat with her chew rope beside the refrigerator when I compulsively cleaned the kitchen. Which is fucked up, because I’ve never been a stress cleaner. How could I? I grew up in a house full of maids. When the vacuum comes out, Daisy bolts. I don’t blame her. I’m terrible company at the moment anyway. But when spotless floors fail to ease my anxious mind, I end up in Evan’s room, where Daisy is curled up at his feet as he plays a video game.

“Hey,” I say, knocking on his open door.

He pauses the game. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

Evan answers the unspoken question in the air. “He hasn’t texted me back either.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Hugging the doorframe, I don’t know what I came here for, but I was bored of stewing alone. I’m a doer, not a waiter. I hate sitting still. If Cooper wanted to punish me for our fight, this is doing the trick.

“Come here.” Evan jerks his head and picks up the second controller for his console. It’s several iterations old and running on a flat screen that looks like it was pawned after getting tossed out on
someone’s lawn. There are dead spots on the picture and a crack in the frame held together by black tape.

My first instinct is that Evan needs a new one. As if he senses the thought, he gives me a knowing smirk that says not to bother.

Right. Boundaries. I need to work on that. Not everyone wants my help.

“You’re going to be this guy,” he informs me, then provides a rapid explanation of the game as we sit on the edge of his bed. “Got it?”

“Yep.” I grasp the gist of it, I think. I mean, my objective and how to move around. Basically. Sort of.

“Follow me,” he instructs, leaning forward.

It does not go well. We’re ambushed, and instead of shooting at the bad guys, I set off a grenade and kill us both.

Evan snorts loudly.

“I like the racing games better,” I confess with an apologetic shrug. “I’m good at those.”

“Yeah, princess. I’ve seen you drive.”

“Bullshit. I’m a great driver. I just prefer to go with a sense of urgency.”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

I nudge him with my elbow as the level resets for another try. This time, I attempt to focus. We make it a little further before I get blown up again.

“This isn’t helping, is it?”

I bite my lip. “Not really.”

I don’t know why I thought sitting next to the spitting image of Cooper would take my mind off him. It’s weird, but I almost never see Evan and Cooper as remotely similar, their personalities diverging in so many ways. Yet if I’m being honest, there are times where I imagine how everything might have been different if not for the whimsy of Bonnie’s indiscriminate libido.

Whatever he reads on my face, Evan exits out of the game
and sets our controllers aside. “Let’s have it, then. What’s on your mind?”

Though our rapport has evolved over the past couple months, Evan’s hardly the first person I’d turn to for a heart-to-heart. Most of the time he displays the emotional depth of Daisy’s water bowl. At this moment, though, he’s the next best thing to his brother.

“What if he doesn’t come back?” I ask in a small voice.

“He has to come back. He lives here.”

I let out a breath. “I mean, to
me
. What if he doesn’t come back to me?” My pulse quickens at that horrible notion. “I just … I can’t shake the feeling that it’s over this time. One fight too many and there’s no getting past it. What if Cooper’s fed up with me?”

“Okay.” Evan seems to ponder that for a second. It’s still eerie after all this time how his mannerisms exactly match Cooper’s, yet they’re like a recording where the audio doesn’t quite sync with the video. Everything’s a half second off. “So not to be a dick or anything, but that’s dumb.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. You remember my brother almost knocked my teeth out because I was an ass to you once, right?”

“Once?” I echo with a raised eyebrow.

Evan grins. “Yeah, well. Point is, it’ll take a lot more than a few arguments to run him off you. There was one summer Coop and I were at each other’s throats over I don’t know what, and we were beating the tar out of each other about every other day.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t mean shit. Fighting is how we worked things out.”

“But you’re brothers,” I remind him. “That’s a huge difference.”

“And what I’m saying is, Coop cares that much about you. You’re not staying here for the rent money or because he likes your cooking.”

He has a point. I don’t cook. At all. Ever. Not once. As for rent, every month I’ve been here I’ve left what I thought was a fair market
value of a rent check on Cooper’s dresser, but he keeps refusing to cash them. So I always leave a backup with Evan.

“But …” My teeth worry my bottom lip again. “You didn’t see the look on his face when he stormed off.”

“Um. I’ve seen every look on his face.” He mugs for me, seeking a laugh.

Fine. That was sort of funny.

“Look,” he says, “at some point, Cooper’s going to stumble in piss drunk and grovel for you to forgive him once he’s come to his senses. He’s got a process. You just gotta let him work through the steps.”

I want to believe him. That despite all the ways we have absolutely nothing in common, Cooper and I somehow developed a connection stronger than what separates us, deeper than the scars that keep him up at night. The alternative is too painful. Because I can’t change where I come from any more than he can. If this is the distance our relationship can’t span, I’m not ready to consider what my new life would be without him.

Evan throws his arm around my shoulder. “I know Coop better than anyone. Trust me when I say he’s crazy about you. And I’ve got no reason to lie.”

Evan’s pep talk digs my mood out of the gutter at least marginally. Enough that when a yawn slams into me, I’m motivated to get ready for bed.

“Promise you’ll wake me up if he calls you?” I fret.

“I promise.” Evan’s voice is surprisingly gentle. “Don’t stress too hard, Mac. He’ll be home in no time, okay?”

I give a weak nod. “Okay.”

“No time” ends up being a quarter past midnight, as I’m woken from a restless sleep when the bed dips beside me. I feel Cooper
slide under the covers. He’s still warm from a shower and smells of toothpaste and shampoo.

“You awake?” he asks in a whisper.

I roll over to lie on my back, rubbing my eyes. It’s pitch black in the bedroom but for the pale glow of the floodlight on the side of the house, filtering in through the blinds.

“Yeah.”

Cooper lets out a long breath through his nose. “I talked to Levi.”

That’s what he’s leading with? I’m not sure what relevance it has to our situation or our fight, and part of me wants him to stop stalling and tell me if we’re going to be all right. But I keep my impatience at bay. Evan said his brother has a process. Maybe this is part of it.

So I say, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” A long beat. “I’m going to press charges against Shelley. For stealing the money.”

“Wow.” It hadn’t occurred to me that would even be an option. But it makes sense. Mother or not, she stole more than ten thousand dollars from him. “How do you feel about it?”

“Honestly? Fucked up. She’s my mom, you know?” I’m startled to hear his voice crack. “I don’t want to think about her getting thrown in jail. At the same time, what kind of person steals from their own kid? If I didn’t need the money, I’d say whatever. To hell with it. But that was every cent I had saved up. Took me years.”

He’s talking to me. That’s a good sign.

Except then, he falls silent, and the two of us lie there, not touching, both seemingly afraid to disturb the air too much. After several seconds tick by, I realize there’s nothing stopping me from going first.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I was out of line earlier. I got defensive and lashed out. It was mean and you didn’t deserve that.”

“Well …” he says, and I think I detect a hint of a smile in his voice. “I had it coming a little. Shelley gets under my skin, you know? I just want to throw shit when she’s around. And then she goes and steals my money …” I can feel the tension building up in him, the effort it’s taking to stay calm. Then on a deep breath, he relaxes again. “A lot of what I said came out at you because I was mad at her. You were right. I’ve got some bullshit that was there way before you came along.”

“I get it.” Turning on my side, I find his silhouette in the dark. “I thought offering you the money was helpful, but I see now how in that moment it hit a nerve. I wasn’t trying to throw money at the problem or emasculate you, I promise you that. It’s just … that’s how my brain works. I go into problem-solving mode—
Money stolen? Here’s money
. You know? It wasn’t meant to be a statement about our respective bank accounts.” I swallow a rush of guilt. “In the future, when it comes to that kind of thing—family stuff, money stuff—I’m here if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll butt out.”

“I’m not saying I don’t want you involved.” He shifts, rolling over to face me too. “I don’t want all these lines and rules and shit.” Cooper finds my hand in the dark and brings it against his chest. He’s shirtless, in only his boxers. His skin is warm to the touch. “The money thing is always going to be there, and I’ve gotta stop getting bent outta shape about it. I know you’re not trying to make me feel any sort of way.”

“I was afraid you weren’t coming back.” I swallow again. Harder. “As long as I was here, I mean.”

“Gonna take more than that to get rid of me.” He tangles his fingers in my hair, rubbing his thumb against the back of my neck. It’s a sweet, soothing gesture, practically putting me right back to sleep. “I figured something out tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“I was sitting in this grimy little bar with Levi and a bunch of
sad old bastards hiding from their wives or avoiding their sad old houses. Guys only twice my age but who’ve already done everything that’s ever going to happen to them. And I thought, fuck me, man, I’ve got this crazy hot girl at home and our biggest problem is she’s always trying to buy me shit.”

I smile against my pillow. When he puts it that way, we sound like a couple of dumbasses.

“And this jolt kind of hit me suddenly. I thought, what if she isn’t there when I get back? I was glaring into the bottom of a glass feeling sorry for myself. What if I’d run off the best thing that ever happened to me?”

“That’s sweet, but I wouldn’t go that far.”

“I’m serious.” His voice is soft yet insistent. “Mac, things around here were never good. Then my dad died, and it was confirmation that nothing would get any better. Shelley split. We made do. Never complained. And then you showed up and I started getting ideas. Maybe I didn’t have to settle for slightly better than nothing. Maybe I could even be happy.”

He breaks my heart. Living without joy, without anticipation that tomorrow can still be extraordinary, will suck the soul right out of a person. It’s the cold, dark, strangling infinity of nothingness, of being swallowed up by despair. Nothing can grow in the empty places where we resign ourselves to the numbness. Never really alive. It’s the same long tunnel into complacency that I saw closing in around me the harder I looked at the future Preston and my parents imagined for me.

Cooper saved me from that. Not because he whisked me away, but because meeting him finally revealed the possibilities I’d been missing. The exhilaration of uncertainty. Passion and curiosity.

I was half asleep until I met him.

“I thought I was happy,” I tell him, gliding my fingers up and down his ribs. “For a long time. What was there to complain about,
right? I’d been given everything I could ever ask for—except purpose. A choice. The potential to fail, to get hurt. To ever love something so much the thought of losing it tears me open. Tonight, when I thought you and I might really be over, all sorts of things ran through my head. I was making myself crazy.”

Cooper tilts my chin toward him and presses his lips to mine with the lightest touch. Enough to make me seek him out for another taste.

His breath is a warm whisper against my lips. “I might just be falling in love with you, Cabot.”

My heart jumps. “Uh-oh.”

“You have no idea.”

He drags his fingers down my spine, setting every nerve alight. I bite his bottom lip, tug a little, in our wordless language that says I need him. Now. Take this ache away. But he’s methodically, frustratingly patient in removing my tank top before he palms one breast while licking at the other. He pushes his boxers down. I wiggle out of my underwear as he puts on a condom. A shiver of anticipation skitters through me when he drags the hot length of him over my core.

He holds me tight as he moves inside me. Unhurried. Slow, languid strokes. I cling to him, muffling my moans against his shoulder.

“I love you too,” I say, shaking in his arms while I come.

COOPER

A few days after filing charges against Shelley, I receive a call to come to the police station. On the phone with the sheriff, I learn that the cops picked her up in Louisiana, where she must have forgotten about all the unpaid parking tickets she’d left behind after her “fella” kicked her to the curb. When the South Carolina warrant popped up, the sheriff in Baton Rouge had her transferred back up to the Bay.

Mac and my brother come to the station with me, but I make Evan wait outside while we go in to speak to Sheriff Nixon. Evan was equally furious to learn that Shelley robbed me blind, but I know my brother—he’ll always have a soft spot for that woman. And right now I need to keep a clear head, not allow anything to cloud my judgment.

“Cooper, have a seat.” Sheriff Nixon shakes my hand, then settles behind his desk and gets right down to business. “Your mother had about ten grand in cash on her when the Baton Rouge boys brought her in.”

Relief slams into me like a gust of wind. Ten grand. It’s a couple thousand short of what she stole, but it’s better than nothing. Hell, it’s more than I expected. She was gone four days. Shelley is more than capable of blowing twelve grand in that amount of time.

“However, it could be a while before you get the money back,” Nixon adds.

I frown at him. “Why’s that?”

He starts rambling on about evidence procedures and what not, as my brain tries to keep up with all the information he’s spitting out. First things first, Shelley will be arraigned in front of a judge. Mac asks a lot of questions because I’m kind of in a stupor about the whole thing now. All I keep thinking about is Shelley in an orange jumpsuit, her wrists shackled. I despise everything that woman’s ever done to us, but the thought of her behind bars doesn’t sit right. What kind of son sends his own mother to jail?

“She’s here now?” I ask Nixon.

“In holding, yes.” He rubs a hand over his thick mustache, looking every inch the part of a small-town sheriff. He’s new to town, so I doubt he knows much about me and my family. His predecessor, Sheriff Stone, hated our guts. Spent his afternoons tailing Evan and me around the Bay all summer, looking for a reason to glare at us from his unmarked cruiser.

“What would happen if I changed my mind?”

Beside me, Mac looks startled.

“You want to withdraw the charges?” he says, eyeing me closely.

I hesitate. “Will I get my money back today?”

“There’d be no reason to hold it in evidence. So, yes.”

Which is all I wanted in the first place.

“What would happen to her after that?”

“It’s your prerogative as the victim. If you’re not interested in prosecuting, she’ll be released. Mrs. Hartley was only held in Louisiana at the request of this department. Whatever fines she faces there are a separate matter. We aren’t aware of another warrant for her at this time.”

I glance at Mac, knowing it isn’t a decision she would make for me one way or the other, but wanting the confirmation that I’m
doing the right thing. I guess in this situation, it’s all degrees of shitty either way.

She studies my face, then offers a slight nod. “Do what you feel is right,” she murmurs.

I shift my gaze back to the sheriff. “Yeah, I want to drop the charges. Let’s get this over with.”

It still takes about an hour to sign the paperwork and wait around for an officer to appear with a plastic bag of my cash. He counts out every bill, then has me sign some more papers. Another huge wave of relief hits me when I hand Mac the cash to stuff in her purse. The very next thing I’m doing is sucking it up and depositing the money in the bank, the taxman be damned.

Outside, Evan’s waiting for us by the truck. “All good?” he says.

I nod. “All good.”

We’re about to leave when Shelley walks out of the building rubbing her wrists.

Shit.

She lights up a cigarette. As she exhales, her gaze lands on us, catching our attempted escape.

“I’ll get rid of her,” Mac offers, squeezing my hand.

“It’s fine,” I say. “Wait in the truck.”

In typical Shelley fashion, my mother strides over with a cheerful smile. “Well, what a day, huh? Someone sure screwed up, didn’t they? I don’t know where they got their wires crossed. I told them, I said, call my boys. They’ll tell you I didn’t take anything that didn’t belong to me.”

“Jesus, give it a rest, would you?” I snap.

She blinks. “Baby—”

“No, don’t
baby
me.” I can’t take another second of her bullshit, her smiley evasions. I’ve been choking on them since I was five, and I’m fucking full. “You found my stash and stole from me, and
that’s
why you skipped town. Hope it was worth it.” I stare at her. “
Mom
.”

“Baby, no.” She reaches for my arm. I take a step back. “I was only borrowing a little to get set up. I was going to send it right back after I got on my feet. You know that. I didn’t think you’d mind, right?”

Amazed laughter trickles out of my mouth. “Sure. Whatever. I don’t want to hear it anymore. This is the last time we’re gonna do this. I don’t want to see you anymore. Far as I’m concerned, you don’t ever need to come back here. You have no sons, Shelley.”

She flinches. “Now, Cooper, I get you’re upset, but I’m still your mother. You’re still my boys. You don’t turn your back on family.” She looks at Evan, who has remained silent, lingering behind me. “Right, baby?”

“Not this time,” he says, gazing off at the passing traffic. Emphatic. Stoic. “I’m with Coop. I think it’s better if you didn’t come around anymore.”

I fight the urge to throw my arm around my brother. Not here. Not in front of her. But I know the pain he’s feeling. The loneliness. Evan lost his mom today.

I lost mine a long time ago.

Shelley makes one last attempt to get us in line until she realizes we aren’t budging. Then the act falls apart. Her smile recedes to flat indifference. Her eyes grow dull and mean. Voice bitter. In the end, she has little in the way of parting words. Barely a glance as she blows smoke in our faces and walks to a waiting cab that carries her off to be someone else’s problem. We’re all better for it.

Even if it doesn’t feel that way right now.

Later, as Mac orders us a pizza for dinner, Evan and I take Daisy for a walk. We don’t talk about Shelley. Hell, we don’t talk much at all. We’re in somber spirits. Each of us is lost in our own thoughts, and yet I know we’re thinking the exact same things.

When we return to the house, we find Levi on the back deck, sipping a beer. “Hey,” he calls at our approach. “I came by to see how it went at the police station.”

Evan heads inside to grab two beers for us, while I stand at the railing and fill our uncle in. When I reach the part where Shelley disappeared in a taxi without so much as a goodbye, Levi nods in grim satisfaction.

“Think she got the message this time?” he asks.

“Maybe? She looked pretty defeated.”

“Can’t say I’m sorry for her.” Levi never got along with Shelley, even when she was around. I don’t blame him. The only redeeming quality about either of my parents was giving us a decent uncle.

“We’re orphans now,” Evan remarks, staring at the waves.

“Shit, guys, I know this ain’t easy. But you’re not alone in this. If you ever need anything…”

He trails off. But he doesn’t need to finish the sentence. Levi’s tried his damnedest to make us feel like a family despite all the missing pieces, and he’s done a pretty good job considering what he had to work with.

“Hey, I know we don’t say it enough,” I tell our uncle, “but we’re only standing here because you were there for us. You always are. If it weren’t for you, we would’ve ended up in the system. Shipped off to foster care. Probably separated.”

“We love you,” Evan adds, his voice lined with emotion.

It gets Levi a little choked up. He coughs, his way of covering it up. “You’re good boys,” is his gruff response. He’s not a man of sentiment or many words. Still, we know how he feels about us.

Maybe we never got the family we deserved, but we ended up with the one we needed.