Path of Destruction (24 page)

And then all hell had broken loose.

One minute, she had been drowning her body weight in whiskey, and the next, Hayden had been there yelling and punching people. Where Cooper had factored in, she wasn’t sure. But her grand plan of remaining blissfully numb had been shot to hell, so she’d left. Apparently, Hayden hadn’t followed, but Cooper had.

Livid and confused, she swerved off the road once they’d crossed back into Hope’s Grove. Gravel flew beneath the truck’s tires and she hopped out and stepped down into the dust.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” The words were muffled by his truck engine, but she heard them clear enough.

“Me? What’s the matter with
me?”
She waited to make sure that was what he’d actually said. “Oh, I don’t know, Coop. Maybe I’m pissed. Maybe I’m grieving the death of my brother and our friendship. Maybe I’m so damn sick and tired of
everyone
treating me like a fragile mental patient. You want to go to prom with Cameron Nickelson? Fine. Go to prom with her. But the least you could’ve done was been honest with me when I asked you about it.”

He yanked his tie loose and threw his hands up in exasperation. “Don’t act like that’s your only issue right now. You were drinking before I even got there. Nice choice in company, by the way.”

“I could say the same to you,” she bit back at him.

Cooper took a deep breath and stepped closer to her, close enough to touch. Ella Jane’s line of sight blurred slightly. Reaching out to steady herself, she was relieved when he caught her.

“Hey, easy there, party girl. Since when do you drink the hard stuff, anyway?”

She narrowed her eyes up at him. “You’ve been sneaking me beers since I was thirteen. Or did you forget that? Does none of that count anymore since Kyle’s gone?”

His name produced the same throat lump it always did. EJ swallowed it down the best she could.

“Sneaking a beer or two every now and then is not the same thing and you know it. So how about you tell me what’s really going on with you. What’s
been
going on with you? This about Kyle? Or someone else?”

For a long time, she was quiet. Because the truth was she didn’t know why she felt this way all the time. She just did.

Angry. Sad. Lost. Alone. Empty.

It wasn’t getting better. It wasn’t easing up or going away. If anything, it was worse.

Cooper settled in to wait, leaning against his truck and pulling her against him. It was nice, being with him this way. Familiar. Comfortable.

Once upon a time being this close to Brantley Cooper would’ve sent her heart into dangerous palpitations. So much had happened…so much had changed.

“I feel like…like I’m fighting a battle. Against someone I can’t see. And I’m losing. Every day. Every day, I wake up and I lose him all over again. And I lose you a little more. And…I’m losing me.”

Her confession broke the dam inside—the one she’d boarded and nailed shut the past few months.

“Hey,” Cooper said gently, pulling her around to face him. “Look at me.”

She didn’t comply immediately, so he used his fingers to tilt her chin upward until their gazes connected.

“Listen to me. You will never lose me. I promise. Okay?” He waited for a response, but she said nothing. “You couldn’t get rid of me if you tried.”

“We don’t talk anymore,” she said finally.

“We talk all the time,” Cooper argued. “We sit together at lunch every day.”

Ella Jane shook her head and frowned at him. A slight tingle began beneath her skin where he still gripped her face. “We talk, but we don’t
say
anything. Not really. You don’t tell me what’s going on with your family, what’s happening with the farm… You haven’t said one word about whether or not you miss racing, and you lied to my face when I asked you about prom. Since when do we lie to each other, Coop?”

Cooper opened his mouth, but she placed a finger over his lips.

“I had sex with Hayden last summer. I get high with Kent or with whoever is feeling generous at the moment. I miss Kyle so much I can’t breathe when I let myself really think about him, about the night he died. I want out of this town, out of this life, and I don’t know how to escape. I’ve missed you. I’ve wanted to tell you everything, but…I couldn’t. We used to have this…I don’t know.
Connection
. Or at least, I thought we did. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was all in my head.”

Cooper didn’t argue. “It wasn’t.”

“What happened to us? Did our connection die with my brother? Am I too much of a mess for you to be friends with?”

Cooper opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. She watched his lips, waiting for him to answer. The moment turned heavy, hot, and thick with heat and mixed emotions.

“Tell me. Whatever it is, just say it, Cooper. I can’t stand not saying things anymore.”

His warm eyes clouded with confusion. She felt his answer, could see it all over his face.

“Forget it. You don’t have to say it. It’s him. Kyle. You’re just like everyone else. You look at me, but you see him.” She jerked roughly away from him.

Cooper reached for her and held her in place. “It’s just… That’s not it. Damn it, Ellie May, I don’t know what the hell I see anymore. I just want to look out for you like I promised him I would. Why do you have to make that so damn hard on me? Why can’t you just help me keep my promise?”

Why do have to make that so damn hard on me?

Hayden had said the same thing. So had her dad. More than once.

She answered his question with a few questions of her own. “Do you really care about her?
Cami?
Is she why you don’t say much anymore? Why you’re so closed off? If you start dating her, is our friendship done for?”

She could see him struggling with the non sequitur and debating on which question to answer first.

“You hooked up with Prescott this summer and our friendship didn’t end, did it?”

Touché.

“That’s the part I don’t quite know about.” Ella Jane took a few long seconds to refocus. “Things did change between us when I started dating Hayden this summer. Why is that, Coop?”

His eyes widened and his breath came noticeably faster. “Because I didn’t like him. I didn’t like what he represented, or that someone I didn’t even remember existed was suddenly…”

“Suddenly what?” she demanded, glancing up at him from underneath her eyelashes.

“Moving in on my girl,” he said on a sigh. At the moment he admitted she was his, he released her. Raking a hand through his hair, he took a step backward.

Ella Jane felt her own eyes widen. “When was I your girl, Coop? Because all I remember is pining after you for years only to hear you tell my brother dating me would be like incest.”

Cooper didn’t answer right away. The two of them stared hard, facing off, trying to figure out where they stood.

“In my head, you kind of always were I guess. Sometimes I had brotherly protective feelings for you, and sometimes I had…
other
feelings.”

Her heart raced behind her ribs. Of all the nights to be half in the wind on Jack Daniels.

Apparently Cooper realized this was going to turn into a serious discussion, because he walked around his truck and lowered the tailgate. Ella Jane accepted his help when he offered a hand to boost her onto it. He scooted beside her, both of them looking up at the stars instead of at each other.

“I think I’d like to know more about these
other
feelings,” Ella Jane whispered. “If you don’t mind telling me, that is.”

She heard him breathing beside her, heavily, as if a weight had settled onto his lungs. Clearly he didn’t want to talk about this, and she knew it was probably a bad idea to push him if he didn’t want to.

“You know what? Forget it. It’s late and we should probably get home and—”

Cooper cut her off with a hand on her bare knee. His fingers wrapped around toward her inner thigh, and she couldn’t form a coherent thought to save her life.

“I care about you, EJ. Ellie May. Ella Jane Mason.” Cooper cleared his throat. “Whoever you are and whoever you decide to be, I will always care about you. I’m pretty sure I love you. I wish I could give you some specific clarification on that, because that’s a heavy damn statement if ever there was one. But all I know is that for most of my life I have loved you in one way or another.”

Everything inside her felt as if it had seized up and stopped functioning. Her chest rose and fell—pretty much the only indicator that she was still breathing.

“That night…the night of the storm, I told him. I told Kyle how I felt, that it was more for me than just friendship or brotherly concern. I hated Prescott because I felt like he’d taken something that was mine. But looking back, the truth was, I’m the one who waited too long. I waited and I missed out, and then Kyle was gone and how I felt about you—about us—took a backseat. And this entire year, I’ve been off in my head, trying to figure out the mechanics of me and you, and I think I’m supposed to stand in for him now, you know? He basically made me promise that I would. But those are some seriously impossible shoes to fill.”

Ella Jane didn’t know why, but she felt like crying. His words stirred an innocent young girl with a crush that still lived somewhere deep inside of her. But that girl had seen and done so much, had grown and become jaded when it came to love and crushes and life. It all felt so tragic and sad and…hopeless.

“Cooper, I…”

“You don’t have to say anything.” He gave her thigh a squeeze. “I didn’t tell you because I expect anything to change. I told you because you deserved to know and because I’d never want you to think I was distancing myself because I didn’t care about you. I care about you more than anyone.”

“More than Cameron Nickelson?” She would’ve taken the question back if she could’ve. It was the wrong thing to ask, petty and immature. But still…she couldn’t help but want to know. Cooper opening up like this was rare and not taking advantage of it would be something she would regret later.

Cooper patted her knee and removed his hand. “You the jealous one now, Ellie May?”

She rolled her eyes. “Not so much jealous as…” She paused to think of the right term that would accurately describe how she felt. “Confused,” she finally finished. “I mean—why
her
? Specifically.”

Cooper sighed loudly and hopped down from the tailgate. “If I knew, I would tell you.” He shrugged then reached out to help her down. “Your brother said something to me once, about it not being as black and white as we all thought—not us and them, rich and rural. He was right. If he hadn’t ever said those words to me, I don’t know that I would’ve seen Cameron, like,
really
seen the person she was inside, but that stuck with me and I did. And now…”

“And now you’re falling for her?”

Ella Jane knew he could hear it, the disapproval and the hurt lacing her words, but tonight seemed to be the night for honesty. She hoped she could blame it on the drinking tomorrow.

Cooper opened his truck door for her, making it clear he wasn’t going to let her drive home. “I danced at prom tonight. Me. Danced. Prom. So…yeah. I guess I could be.”

C
ooper hadn’t called or texted or sent any smoke signals that she knew of since his grand gesture at prom. She’d thought about texting him, but after the way he’d come into the dance, swept her off her feet, and then practically tossed her aside like yesterday’s garbage when he had to tend to Ella Jane, she was putting off the conversation she knew that they’d be having when they finally did see each other again. He’d feed her some line about Ella Jane needing him and she’d have to deal with it. The tightness in her chest every time she thought about him led her to believe she might not be able to handle that conversation just yet.

Maybe she should have been understanding, but it seemed like that girl was out to ruin every good memory she had—first with her threats of revealing her relationship with Kyle and now snuffing out whatever was going on with Brantley.

The other subject of the inevitable conversation was walking down the hallway toward her looking as if he’d just been told the world was ending. Hayden’s dark hair was a bit disheveled and his SBHS falcons T-shirt and wrinkled jeans said that he hadn’t put much effort into getting ready for school that morning.

“Hey,” Cami called out when he walked right by her without so much as a hello.

Hayden may have been labeled a snotty rich kid, but he usually didn’t snub his friends. And she sure hadn’t thought he’d snub her after they’d spent all night pouring their hearts out to each other after prom.

“Oh, hey,” he said, when he finally pulled himself from whatever it was that was distracting him.

“Everything okay?”

“I guess,” he said with a shrug. The lack of conviction in his words made it clear that everything was far from okay.

Cami side-eyed him as they continued to walk down the hall towards their lockers. She waited for him to elaborate.

“Things with Gran are not getting any better,” he finally confessed. “My parents are hell-bent on sending her to a home and nothing I say makes a difference anymore. They were going to send her when I left for college anyway. It just... It sucks.”