In My Dreams I Hold a Knife by Ashley Winstead

Chapter 19

Now

The police. Years of being an outlaw, of skirting the cops, and now Coop was handing himself over. Tying himself to the stake. Going up in flames.

“I won’t let you.” I moved ahead of him and crossed my arms.

“You don’t get a vote. For about a thousand reasons.”

“Does Caro know?” I hated to bring her up, but I needed any ally I could get.

A rustling noise made Coop look past me into the trees. “I came clean about dealing. Told her all of it—the pot, the molly, the tweak. The whole thing.” His eyes found mine. “Well, I left you out. She doesn’t want me to go to Eric or the cops, either.”

“That’s because it’s an insane plan. The cops are not the answer.”

Just like that, we were twenty-two again, arguing a decade-old argument. My voice echoed back: Just go to the cops, Coop, and turn them in. They’re dangerous, and they’re going to hurt you. I bet you’ll get immunity or something. His voice: I can’t do that. I’d torpedo law school and kill my mom. It’s hypocritical, anyway. I’m not innocent.

How ironic that we’d now switched sides: Coop, running to the cops. Me, urging him not to.

Time, making fools of us all.

He schooled his face into a blank expression. “Jess, if you don’t agree with me, just walk away. It should feel pretty familiar by now.”

Like a knife to the heart.“I don’t want to.”

Coop moved around me. “Let me guess: you just want everything to go back to normal. You want to go back to the party and parade yourself in front of everyone, show the whole school how successful and glamorous you turned out. You want Mint to follow you around like a lovesick puppy. You want to pretend everything’s perfect and none of us are fucked up. Same old, same old.”

I seized him before he could walk away. “You’re wrong. I don’t want anything to stay the same. Don’t you see? I hate how things used to be. I hate it so much I want to scream.”

“Then scream, Jessica. Christ, be honest.”

When I moved, it was both surprising and inevitable. Like a gun going off in a movie you’ve already seen. I saw my hands move to Coop’s face, pull him down with a familiar roughness. Twenty-two or thirty-two, it didn’t matter: it was always going to happen like this. The movement echoed backward and forward through time, too quick for Coop to be anything but surprised. I kissed him and drowned in it.

If we were being self-destructive tonight, Coop had nothing on me.

There was a moment of perfect—his stubble rough against my fingers, his hair as soft as I remembered, his mouth moving against mine, breathing me in, my heart, untethered, lifting—and then he broke away with a sharp intake of breath.

Coop looked at me with such wonder that I knew, for all his provocations, he’d never expected me to do this. Then the wonder turned to hunger—that old, private look, like he was a man starving for me, and no amount would ever be enough.

“I’ve got to admit, I didn’t see this coming.”

I wrenched myself out of Coop’s arms.

Eric. He stepped out of the dark trees, where there wasn’t even a path.

“It’s not…” I fumbled the words. “We were just…”

Coop moved in front of me. “I have something to tell you.”

Still cloaked in shadow, away from the circle of light cast by one of the old-fashioned lamps, Eric crossed his arms. “It would seem so.”

“Don’t—” Before I could finish, there was a slapping sound—footsteps on the stone path.

Oh god. My heart seized. Caro ran toward us, Mint and Courtney close behind.

Ground, swallow me whole.This was it. Eric would tell them.

“Coop, I told you no!” Caro’s perfectly curled dark hair was now loose and stringy over her shoulders, a sheen to her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed. She looked terrible.

Caro, who didn’t deserve any of it. Caro, who would hate me if she knew.

“Will someone please explain what’s going on?” Mint clutched his chest. “And why Caro made us run out of the party?”

Courtney swayed on her feet. “You took us back to him.”

“It’s past time this came out,” Coop said. He looked at Caro apologetically, and I hated myself for feeling wounded by it. “Eric, I know why the toxicology report showed tweak in Heather’s system.”

The shadow that was Eric didn’t move.

“I sold pot and molly in college. Party drugs. I needed fast money, and I’ve never thought those kinds of drugs should be illegal in the first place. I’m not proud of it now, because of everything that happened, but I swear, until senior year, I wasn’t hurting anybody.”

I thought of my father, bent over the steering wheel of his smoking car, the office lobby in shambles around him.

“Yeah, we all know,” Mint said. “Everyone bought from you.”

“I didn’t know,” Caro said.

“Neither did Eric,” Coop said. “He was too young. I didn’t fully realize until I tried to stop selling, but the guys I worked for were territorial and violent. I brought in a lot of money selling on campus, and they didn’t want to lose it. After I quit, they broke into my apartment and broke my arm as a warning.”

The terrible scream. The machete, the gun, the evil pulsing underneath their skin. Those dark eyes.

“Wait, that’s how you broke your arm?” Mint looked stunned. “Not playing basketball?”

“I lied,” Coop said. “In reality, a hulking man snapped it while I watched.”

“I can’t…” Caro shivered.

“They told me if I refused to sell—and if I refused to sell tweak, specifically, which was hot back then, profitable but dangerous—they’d kill me. And…” Coop looked at me, then looked away quickly. “My friends. To teach me a lesson.”

“It was you,” Courtney breathed, a strange look on her face. “Are the rest of you hearing this? It was his fault.”

“Shut up, Courtney,” Caro snapped, to everyone’s surprise.

Coop turned to face Eric. “No, Courtney’s right. It is my fault. The guys tracked me on campus, and I led them right to Heather’s suite. I was trying to hide and I wasn’t thinking straight. I told them I’d sell tweak just to get them off my back, and the day Heather died, I was supposed to start. But I didn’t want to. They went searching for me. They knew what my friends looked like. I think there’s a strong chance they went back to the suite looking to hurt someone close to me and found Heather. And then they…” His voice faltered, but he straightened his shoulders and drew a breath. “Killed her. Making me responsible.”

“You’re not,” I said quickly.

“I can’t believe you kept this secret for ten years.” Coop’s news seemed to act like a splash of cold water to Courtney. She was no longer wobbling, her face now lucid. “You’re a bigger liar than Frankie.”

Caro whirled on Courtney. “I have been nothing but nice to you since college, defended you despite everything you’ve done, and you have the nerve—”

“No one broke into the suite,” Eric said. “And it wasn’t tweak.”

Everyone turned to stare.

“What?” Coop asked.

Eric finally stepped out of the shadow, into the light. “The cops found no evidence of a break-in. They suspect whoever killed Heather knew the code to the suite.”

Someone close to her.

“And you’re forgetting what I said. I told you the cops found a drug like tweak in Heather’s system. It looked like the street drug, but it wasn’t tweak itself. The cops checked.”

Coop blinked. “What was it, then?”

“It was a weight-loss drug,” Eric said, his eyes leaving Coop to travel over the rest of us. “Illegal in the States because it was basically speed. Ridiculous, toxic side effects. It baffled the cops, because we told them Heather didn’t take things like that. You could only buy the drug in China, and the cops could never find the purchase transactions in any students’ or professors’ accounts.”

My stomach dropped. Coop had been right—the drug in Heather’s system was a smoking gun, a virtual fingerprint, but it didn’t point to him.

I spun, but Caro beat me to it.

“You!” she yelled, pointing at Courtney. “You did it!”

Courtney looked like a deer caught in headlights. All of a sudden she turned to bolt, but Caro—tiny Caro—sprang and knocked her to the ground.

“Caro, Jesus!” Mint knelt and pulled Caro off his wife.

Caro thrust her finger in Courtney’s face. “She’s guilty.”

“Give her a chance to defend herself.” Mint looked at his wife. “Babe?”

Courtney blinked at him, then turned to look around the circle of faces, searching for an ally, a single measure of sympathy. That day freshman year echoed back—the one where she’d tried to humiliate me but Heather had stepped in to stop it. Heather wasn’t here anymore.

Courtney’s eyes found mine. Her stare was murderous. A chill crept up my neck.

“Fine,” she said, taking me by surprise. “I drugged Heather. Are you happy?”