Page 20 of You Can Make Me

“Need anything?”

He stood in the doorway, shirtless but back in his jeans. I pulled the covers up higher so he wouldn’t have to look at my awful body. It was the elephant in the room we only discussed from a clinical perspective, never about how the state of my body would forever keep us apart. I feared he’d only ever see me as wounded. How could I be intimate with a man ever again looking like this?

The killer hadn’t succeeded in ending my life that night all those months ago, but he had taken it. The life I’d had. What the hell was I supposed to do now?

Five

Denny

So close.I’d been so close to making progress with Cooper, but then I’d pushed too far.

Or maybe I was fooling myself, and Cooper was never going to come back to me. I’d still help him if that was the case, but perhaps I needed to temper my expectations.

Perhaps I needed to stop letting him call all the shots.

Perhaps it was time for an intervention.

The next morning, I sent off two texts before serving Cooper breakfast.

I’m out of ideas. It’s time.

He’d gone back to one-word answers throughout most of the day and night. The time in the hot spring had seemed like such a breakthrough, but I should have expected this.

Cooper thought he was unlovable, now that he was scarred. That would never be true in my eyes, but he had to negate this notion himself if he was ever going to get better, regardless of how I felt.

The following day, I made my usual rounds of breakfast, cleaning, preparing lunch, feeding him, cleaning again, and by the time he got frustrated with his brain and the internet and went to his room for a nap, I was panicking.

Was I about to fuck everything up?

Two RVs pulled up to the cabin around three that afternoon. I went out to greet them, my nerves shot after pacing for two hours.

“I’m sorry we’re meeting like this,” I said to Mr. and Mrs. Harris. This wasn’t at all how I’d hoped to meet Cooper’s parents. My father had been gone for twenty years, and I’d lost my mom not long before I met Cooper. I’d never been close to any of my ex in-laws, and I’d never thought I’d have another set, but after Austin? I’d seriously thought it was a possibility.

“Thank you, Detective,” Mr. Harris said as he shook my hand. “Thanks for calling.”

“I’m retired. Call me Dennis.”

He nodded, a slight frown marring his mostly unlined face. The man did not look old enough to be the father of a thirty-five-year-old.

Deb Harris didn’t smile. She ignored my handshake and pulled me in for a tight hug before doing the man-pound on my back. She had a little power behind it too. I was impressed. She was tall, close to my six feet, and built like Cooper, with the same golden-blond hair expertly highlighted to look natural. Mr. Harris was at least six foot six, and he had Cooper’s movie-star good looks. They both looked battle-worn, as if this situation had aged them as much as it had me. They weren’t much older than me, maybe in their early sixties, but with my nearly full-silver head of hair going on, we looked like contemporaries.

And I had been dating their son.Awkward.

“Did you tell him?” Sam asked as she pulled me in for a hug.

“No,” I said in her ear. “I’m so sorry, Sam?—”

“Cut it out,” she said, fisting my crewneck. “I’m trying to be strong right now and if you get mushy on me, I’m going to cry, and that’s the last thing Cooper needs.”

I nodded and then gave my best friend a look of contrition.

He wasn’t having it.

“Fuck off, Hamilton. Get over here.”

He squeezed me tight, and we breathed together for a minute. I was so grateful he was here, that I wasn’t on my own anymore, that I nearly broke.

“How could I be mad?” he whispered, and I exhaled, relieved.