In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

Chapter 18

November, senior year

I lined the vegetables in a neat row on the cutting board—mushrooms, green peppers, olives, all of Coop’s favorites—and placed his knife next to them. I took a step back and surveyed. Picture-perfect.

The door to the bedroom swung open and Coop stepped out, running a towel through his hair, wet and curled from the shower. His chest was bare, basketball shorts low on his hips. He looked up and jerked back, eyes wide.

“Holy shit, Jess.” He put a hand to his chest. “What are you doing here?”

I held out my arms like Vanna White. “Dinner. I brought pizza ingredients. Remember, you said you’d teach me?”

His face broke into a warm smile as he tossed his towel on the bathroom floor. I rolled my eyes at his insufferable sloppiness, which only made him grin wider.

“My girl comes bearing food.” He sauntered across his tiny studio and, ignoring my squeal of surprise, lifted me into his arms. “This is a good day.”

“You’re dirtying the counter,” I protested as he leaned me up against the countertop and pressed close between my legs.

“Come here,” he said, tilting my face and kissing me. Somewhere along the way, Coop’s kisses had changed from heated and urgent to tender. Weighty.

I pushed my hands into his hair, winding the wet curls around my fingers and opening my mouth so he could press inside. When it came to Coop, there was no such thing as too much.

I was addicted. Like father, like daughter.

“How long do I have you?” he whispered.

“All weekend.” I grinned against his mouth.

“All weekend?”

“Mint went to the Georgia game. Last-minute decision.”

Coop spun me in a circle. “A whole weekend.” He set me down. “This is perfect. I got you something.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

Coop produced a bottle of red wine from his pantry with a flourish. “Your favorite.”

“You remembered.” I’d discovered red wine this year, and it was like my entire palate changed overnight. Now, it was the only thing I wanted to drink. It left my lips and teeth stained crimson, like a vampire’s, but I didn’t care. Red wine was classy, sophisticated. A sign I was growing up.

Good wine was also expensive.

“You didn’t have to buy it,” I said as he twisted the cork with a small pop. I hated when Coop spent money on me, because I knew where it came from.

“I wanted to talk to you.” The wine, dark as blood, snaked out of the bottle and down the side of the glass. “About something important.”

My heartbeat picked up. This couldn’t be good.

“Here,” he said, handing me the glass. “Cheers.”

I clinked and downed half the wine, feeling it coat my lips. “So. Something important.”

Coop took a step closer. It took everything in me to keep my shoulders straight, not lean into him, bury my face in his chest. He smelled like things that came from the earth—wood and citrus and grass.

Panic gripped me, sudden and fierce. I didn’t want this to be over.

“Come on,” he said gruffly, picking me up again.

“Hey!” My feet kicked uselessly. “You’re so manhandley tonight.”

“Grab the bottle.”

I rolled my eyes but snagged the wine.

“And—set—it—down—right—there,” Coop took a few exaggerated steps to his bed and lowered me over his bedside table. The instant I placed the bottle down, he tossed me.

“Jesus, Coop!” I bounced high on his bed, but he reached for me, pulling me over so I lay against his chest, our legs tangled.

He rested his head on his hand. “Come home with me for Thanksgiving. Meet my mom.”

I drew back. “What?”

“Hear me out.” He raised a finger. “One. My mom really wants to meet you. Two. You could see my teenage bedroom, including all my emo band posters from high school. The blackmail material writes itself. Three. We’d get a whole week together without anyone else. Just you and me in the exotic town of Greenville, South Carolina. And four—I know you don’t want to go home.”

I didn’t. My dad’s latest stint in recovery had ended in flames when he got high and drove his car straight through the parking lot and into his office lobby. That made three unsuccessful admissions to rehab in three years. Three pointless family days, sitting in a little circle, waiting for my dad to do something—anything—different. Maybe look my mom full in the face without cutting his eyes away; maybe say something to me that wasn’t about school; maybe talk about those times when I was young and he reshaped me with his cruelty. Maybe he could admit to being sad, or lonely, or depressed. Or even mildly disappointed.

Yeah, yeah, we asked for so much.

The first stint in rehab, my mom and I had expected the impossible—waited for him to say something that let us know he recognized the pain underneath the fog of the pills. But he didn’t, of course, and after that we’d stopped expecting it.

And now this. He was finally unemployed, and spiraling. No one knew what to do next.

“What about Mint?” I asked, pushing thoughts of home aside. “He’s going to think it’s weird if I go home with you.”

“I was thinking,” Coop said slowly, studying my face. “What if you ended things?”

My mouth opened, but no sound came out.

“We could tell him together. I mean, I’ll do it if you want. We could come clean, and then after a little while…we could be together. For real. In public.”

My brain was having trouble processing. Coop, scorner of all things traditional, earnest, wanted to be my boyfriend?

“You want to date?” I asked dubiously.

He took my face in his hands and looked me in the eyes. How terrifying, to be truly looked at.

“Coop—” I started, wanting him to turn that gaze away, unsure where this was going. There was a charge building in the air, a feeling: Today, something starts that will never end.

“Jessica Marie Miller. You have to know by now I love you.”

I made a sound of surprise.

He smiled. “I feel like I’ve worn it on my sleeve since the day I met you.”

“The fortune,” I said, three years too late.

“Of course. The first week of class, you and I left East House at the same time. You didn’t notice me, but I watched you the entire time we were walking. You were so beautiful. But the thing that really fascinated me was that I could read everything you were thinking.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was so easy to tell what you were feeling. It was right there on your face for everyone to see. Longing when you passed other students, happiness when you saw Blackwell Tower, worry when you got close to Perkins Hall, where your class was. I remember thinking how innocent that was, or brave, how much I wanted to know you.”

Coop leaned down and kissed my nose. “Now I can never tell what you’re thinking.”

“I—”

“I wanted to ask you out, freshman year,” he said in a rush. “You taped the fortune on your door, and I thought there was hope. But then Bid Day, when I walked into my room and you and Mint were on the bed… Mint was my roommate. And you obviously liked him. So I told myself to forget you. But I never could.”

“You could have,” I said quietly. “You could’ve been with anyone. They all wonder why you don’t date.”

He shook his head. “Tell them I’ve been out of my mind for you since we were eighteen. There’s no one else for me. I thought I could handle being with you in secret, because at least I’d get part of you. I told you when we started that I wanted more—”

I could still hear those words: I’m telling you upfront. I need more. I need you over and over. Even remembering them brought heat to my face.

“But more’s not enough.”

“What do you want, then?” My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it rattling my rib cage.

He looked at me, green eyes serious. “I want everything.”

The words were like a spell. The weight of what I’d been holding back for a year hit me—meeting in secret, stealing time, wanting him so badly I ached with it, alone in my bed, trying not to think about what it meant that all I thought about was Coop, Coop, Coop. The truth was there, yet I hadn’t let myself look until now. Because I was afraid.

I knew what could happen if you loved someone with your whole heart.

“But Mint—” I started.

“You don’t love Mint,” Coop answered, so confident I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been scared. Coop didn’t understand what it felt like to walk across campus with Mint, arrive at parties holding his hand. The way people looked at me: appraising, envious, wistful. The rush of being valuable. What it meant to me. I did love it.

“The drugs,” I said instead. It was my ace card, the only thing we ever fought about. Coop insisted it was low-level dealing, mostly pot and molly to college students, just to keep a cheap roof over his head and shield his mom from debt. He refused to sell the hard stuff, which nowadays meant tweak, sometimes heroin. He’d never sell that, he insisted, no matter how pissed it made the people above him. He wouldn’t mess with real addicts.

I’d never told him about my father.

“I quit,” Coop said, and waited for my reaction.

“What—when?”

“Yesterday. I told them I was out. It’s senior year, so I’ll be gone by May anyway, and I’ve saved up enough money. It’s time.”

I kissed the corner of his mouth. “I’m really happy to hear that.”

Coop turned his head, finding my lips, and kissed me hungrily. Still as urgent as the first day, a starved man.

“Jess,” he said roughly.

“What?” It was hard to talk, or breathe, when all I wanted was to kiss him.

“Say it.” He wrapped his arms around me and crushed me to him, pushing a leg between mine. Warmth bloomed where his leg rubbed me, and spread. I arched into the bed and he kissed me harder, pushing hands through my hair, lowering his body over mine. I ran my fingers over his shoulders, the hard planes of his back, feeling the dip at his waist, pressing him against me, wanting to feel his weight.

He tilted my head back. “Tell me you love me.”

There was a sharp crack behind us, and the glass shattered on the French doors leading to Coop’s backyard.

I screamed, scrambling to sit up, and Coop rolled quickly to his bedside table, groping for something.

A hand snaked through the broken pane on the door and untwisted the lock, swinging the door open.

“Fuck,” Coop hissed, tearing open his bedside drawer.

Two men walked into the apartment, glass crunching under their shoes. Though my instincts screamed not to, I couldn’t help it—I looked at their faces.

They were both tall. The one with long hair had a scar running diagonally across his pale face, so deep it changed the shape of his mouth. The one with a buzzed scalp had eyes so dark the pupils were drowned.

I froze, heart thundering. These were not good men. I could see the evil in their faces.

“Cooper,” said the one with the scar. “Bad time for company.”

Coop reached an arm across me like a shield, his other hand still rooting in his drawer.

The one with the buzzed scalp stalked to him and wrenched his hand from the drawer. He reached in himself and pulled out a long knife—a machete. “Nice try.”

Coop had a machete? Next to his bed, this whole time? That meant he knew he was in danger, no matter how much he insisted he wasn’t.

The man with the buzzed scalp pointed the tip of the knife at Coop. “I told you you’d regret trying to leave.”

“Fuck off,” Coop said. “I have neighbors. Cops are probably already on their way.”

The man with the scar smiled a jagged smile. “In this neighborhood? Nah. I’m sure we have plenty of time.”

My attention had narrowed to one place: The machete in the man’s hand. My body was so tense, so still, it was like I was dead already, suffering rigor mortis, head to foot.

“I’m not changing my mind,” Coop said, brave and stupid as ever.

The man with the scar walked closer, shaking his head. “Not only are you changing your mind, but you’re going to level up. From now on, weed’s for high schoolers. You’re on tweak, making us some real money.”

“I don’t know what I have to say to get this through your thick skulls—”

The man with the scar seized me, and I screamed, the rigor mortis broken. I scrambled in the bedsheets, trying to wrench my arm from his grasp.

He pulled a gun out of his jacket with his free arm and flipped the safety. He held it to my head, and my entire existence became a ring of cold metal pressed against my temple.

“Watch your mouth, or I’ll put something through her skull.”

Coop lunged at him, moving so fast I didn’t have time to react, knocking the gun out of his hand and shoving him to the floor.

“Coop!” My scream was gutteral. But Coop wasn’t listening to me; he was punching the man, over and over, blood flying.

The man with the buzzed scalp shoved Coop off his partner and thrust the machete under his chin. “Don’t move.” His voice was ice. His eyes dilated, making him look mad, and his veins twisted like dark tree branches under his pale skin.

Coop froze. The man with the scar scrambled to his feet and wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand. “You’re going to regret that.”

I leapt from the bed to the kitchen, where I’d left my phone.

“Hey!” barked the man with the machete. “Move one more inch and I slit his throat.”

I stopped and turned.

The man with the scar seized Coop’s wrist. “You’re not quitting. You’re coming back and you’re recommitting.”

“Go to hell,” insisted Coop.

The man grinned and pulled Coop’s arm straight. For a second, I was confused, because it looked like a dance move. Then the man struck like a viper, snapping Coop’s arm at the joint.

For a split second, it was the worst sound I’d ever heard—bone shattering, ligaments tearing—until Coop’s bloodcurdling scream.

He dropped to his knees. I rushed forward, barely able to see past my tears, knowing I had to protect him. But the man with the machete pointed it at me, and I halted before I ran into the blade.

“Coop,” I sobbed.

“If you don’t come back,” said the man with the scar, “we will hunt you down.” His eyes shifted to me. “We’ll hunt her down. And we’ll kill you both.”

“You don’t get to walk away,” the man with the knife said. “Remember that.”

Waiting in the emergency room that night, alone and shaking, all I could see was Coop’s face when the glass door first shattered, his lack of surprise. The way he reached automatically for the machete in his bedside table—the movement quick and fluid. Practiced.

I’d known, but I’d forgotten: Coop was dark, wrong, the opposite of perfect. What was I playing at?

It would never be right between us. Not after this.

He may not be able to walk away, but I—I still could.