“Okay,” I agreed. I’d been all kinds of tense since discovering what had been done to my car. The fact I’d ended up leaving her with Coop while Archie got me home and then to work had thrown me all evening. Behind the wheel of my baby again, though, I was more me. The stiffness in my muscles bled away even as the aches in my feet became more pronounced. We really had been busy as hell.
“You didn’t want to tell me about the comment on the essay thing earlier. It really upset you. And don’t try to tell me it didn’t. I’ve known you a long time, I know when something is off.” He paused for a beat. “It bothers me that you didn’t want to tell me. I thought—yeah, Frankie doesn’t like to make waves. You never have. You always go along to get along. It’s one of the things that is sometimes adorable about you, and utterly frustrating.”
Glad we were clear on that.
It was dark so that even when I glanced at him, I couldn’t quite make out his full expression.
“But the thing is… someone hurt you, and you were just going to let them hurt you and not let any of us help. I had to basically coerce it out of you, and then you didn’t want to talk about it. I get that you have that right, but, Frankie, there’s so many times someone has hurt you that you shut down and you won’t let me help.”
There weren’t that many times.
“Usually it’s about your mom.”
Okay, he might have a point there.
“But this is different… this is happening because of choices I made, choices the guys made.”
I opened my mouth to protest, and he clucked his tongue.
“Listen, please. Listen to all of it, then think about it before you tell me to shove it.”
I didn’t mean to laugh, but I couldn’t help it. While I hadn’t necessarily intended to tell him to shove it, that had occurred previously.
“The point is—the post on Instagram, the thing with your car—those are big things that we see. The note on the essay in class? If you don’t tell us, if you don’t tell me, I can’t help you and, Frankie, the very last thing I want is for you to be in pain or to be hurting in some way and I am not helping you. That’s already happened once. You cut us all off because we were hurting you, and you didn’t tell us we were. While, yes, we deserve some of that blame, I don’t want to wake up one day and find out I could have done something but you didn’t let me.”
With that, he exhaled.
“Friend or boyfriend, I’m on your side,” he said, twisting in the seat. “I need to know you know that.”
We were almost to the apartment turn. “Is it okay for me to answer now?”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for letting me say that.”
A reluctant smile tugged at my lips. Coop was so sweet when he wanted to be. “I do know you’re on my side. I know I was stubborn this summer, and my choices hurt all of us.”
“Our choices hurt all of us,” he corrected. “You might have made the call, but we definitely pushed you.”
“Okay, so our choices weren’t great.”
“Accepted,” he murmured, and slid a hand to my thigh.
“The thing with the note today…” I really didn’t want to think about the note or what it said. It had stung. “There was another one.”
“On the essay?”
“In my locker.”
He tightened his grip, his hand flexing before it relaxed again as I turned into the complex and followed the parking lot down to where I usually parked.
“It was just a piece of notebook paper with the question, did I know who all you did this summer.”
“Son of a bitch,” Coop swore.
“So I crumpled it up, grabbed my books, and just went on to Mr. G’s class.”
“Crumpled it up—did you throw it away?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him yes, I did. But we had all had enough half-truths and lies between us. “No, I just tossed it back into the locker under some of the books.”