Just barely, though.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked for probably the fifteenth time in as many minutes. “The rain isn’t letting up at all like we hoped.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Cooper gave me a half-shrug without looking at me. “But what else are we going to do? This beats standing around back there with our thumbs up our asses.”
Did it?
Accidentally wrecking Cooper’s pickup in a torrential downpour sure wasn’t high on my list of the best possible ways to pass the time.
“I guess,” I muttered. “But do you have any plan for when we show up wherever she’s going? I assume it’s to her parents’ house, but who the hell knows? She might be on her way right now to meet her long-distance boyfriend. Then what do we do?”
“Man, you’ve gotta stop leaving the TV on while you sleep,” Cooper smirked. “Those soap operas they play in the middle of the night must be seeping into your brain.”
“At least I’m using my mind,” I shoot back. “I don’t have shit for brains, and I don’t watch soap operas.”
“Maybe.” His smirk turned to a full-fledged grin as he continued. “But your brain can still hear what’s going on around you while you sleep. It’s probably picking up all that weird bullshit and crazy drama if you leave the TV on. That’s science.”
“Thanks, Professor,” I grunt. “I’ll tell you when I’m ready to start splitting atoms and whatnot, okay?”
He shook his head but didn’t say anything else. He also didn’t try too hard to wipe that smile off his face.
After a couple more minutes had passed, he spoke up again as if we hadn’t lived through the awkward silence that stretched out between us for way too long. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure they’re heading back to their parents’ house. We’ll follow them there to make sure they make it through the storm in one piece.”
“And then what?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking the obvious question. “I doubt you’re gonna wanna turn around and drive away once we’ve made sure she’s okay.”
“That depends on Poppy,” Cooper confessed as his smile finally started to fade. “We can’t force her to listen. All I can do is keep asking and keep hoping that she’ll say yes.”
For the first time that night, he faced reality.
He’d seemed so sure of his idea from the minute we’d left his family ranch—we’d see Poppy at the rehearsal dinner, and she would suddenly realize everything she’s been missing over the past few years.
The details had been sort of murky after that, but Coop had been so sure that she’d be dying to hear our side of things if she had the chance. So certain that he’d actually made me believe it, too, for a while.
But it had only taken a few minutes of getting the cold shoulder from Poppy at the dinner to realize Cooper’s plan had been way off base.
She wasn’t dying to hear from us.
Just the opposite, it seemed. She wouldn’t even look at us except for when she thought neither of us would notice. She certainly didn’t want to acknowledge us.
And we went from that frustrating situation to somehow chasing after Poppy through the dark in the pouring rain.
We’d eventually catch up to her—no doubt about that unless we got swept off the road first. And that also still seemed to be a very real possibility as the rain seemed to get heavier by the minute.
Once my brain had accepted that the next time we saw her was likely to be at her parents’ house, another question occurred to me. “Should we try to talk to her parents, too? About what happened?”
“Eventually,” Coop nodded. “But not tonight. Poppy is the only person who needs to hear what we want to say first. We’ll figure out the rest after we’ve sat down with her.”
“What if she won’t come out and talk to us? Are we going to camp out in their front yard for the night?”
“Jesus, Nolan,” Cooper hit the steering wheel with the palm of his hand. “You sure are overthinking this and asking a lot of fucking questions. You’re never this nervous about anything else we do, ever.”
“And you aren’t brimming over with many fucking answers,” I snap. “Not any good ones, anyway.” I shove a hand back through my hair and try to unclench my jaw.
And my fist. I didn’t want to fight with my best friend about this. Not about Poppy or any other girl. But damn, he made it difficult to have his back right now.
“All I’m saying is that if there’s a chance to set things straight with her, I don’t want to fuck it up all because we haven’t thought through the details. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable.”
Several long seconds of silence stretched out between us before he finally grunted with the barest of head nods. “Yeah, I guess that’s fair. I don’t want to fuck things up either. I didn’t expect it to be this hard to talk to her. We’ve all had six years to grow up, and everything that happened back then is far behind us—or at least, it should be.”