The Funny Thing Is - 10. ...The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same

The Funny Thing Is… The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.

Things are constantly evolving around us. Every second, we take one step further away from the person we used to be. Every day is a learning experience, and never once do we stop. I felt as though I had stopped for twenty years, and that things were finally starting to change again. And the more things changed, the more I changed, the more I realized that after twenty years, I was exactly where I used to be.

When I rolled into Sebastian’s manicured neighborhood in Southlake, a solid forty minute drive outside of the city, every possible scenario had run through my head.

Chase had been understanding about the emergency, if not visibly disappointed. To appease him the best I could, I told him to go on to my place with all of the food and I’d meet him there after if everything was okay. He was fine with that plan well enough, and sent me off with his car while he road the chauffeured town car to my place.

Sebastian let me in almost as soon as I knocked on the door.

“What the fuck happened?” I asked him. He led me through the opulent foyer and down the two stairs to the open area living room.

Everyone I had expected to see there was seated around, each person looking more morose than the one before. I took a seat next to Sebastian and Liz and waited for someone to explain to me what had happened.

“You look great Dad,” Liz whispered in my ear. I barely heard it.

“Okay, Bass, why did you call me over here?”

“I think I’ll let my son answer that question for you, Coop,” my friend said in his trademark voice of agitation.

“Dad,” Mike replied, offering up the most pathetic puppy dog eyes I’d ever seen. The more the scene unraveled, the more I knew my worst fears were about to be realized.

“Oh no,” Bass retorted. “You want to act like a big man, well big men own up to their mistakes. Now own.” Mike hesitated. “Now!”

“Okay, okay,” Mike said, turning his head away from his father. He tilted his head in my direction, but never lifted his head up enough for me to see his face.

“Michael Fitzpatrick Kennedy, you will explain to Cooper and Devon why we dragged each of them out here on such a lovely holiday evening,” Sebastian said, his voice sounding deep but thin. I’d never, in the twenty years I had known him, ever seen him sound so angry. “Go ahead!”

Mike cleared his throat and lifted his head up at me just a little.

“Uncle Cooper and Aunt Devon, I um… my mom came home and found me and Liz… um… in bed together.”

He didn’t finish the sentence before I started seeing red. I heard Devon breathe in audibly and from the corner of my eye, I could see both her and Britney shaking their heads.

“You little shit,” I snarled.

“We weren’t doing anything!” Michael said in a voice that was an octave higher than he normally spoke.

“Bullshit…” I started to say as I scooted up. Bass held out a hand for me.

“Let him finish,” Sebastian said.

“There’s no fucking need,” I replied, ready to spring up again. I wasn’t sure where it was written in the parenting handbook, but there was no way this little kumquat was getting away with sleeping with my daughter. “You little fucking shit…”

“Cooper, let him finish,” Sebastian said. I took a deep breath. Bass turned to Mike and gave him a look.

“Uncle Cooper, we weren’t doing anything… sexual or anything. We were just kissing. I swear on theBible.”

Britney snapped next. “Do you think we’re idiots? We know what you kids are like at this age.”

The woman was loud and shrill. For such a little lady, she packed quite a verbal punch.

“Mom, you’re overreacting,” Mike said. Several of the adults spoke out at the same time, but my voice carried about the rest.

“How the hell would you have us act, son?” I rang above everyone else. “Because right now, my natural reaction is to take you out back and kick the shit out of you.”

“Cooper,” Dev interrupted. I knew I was straddling the line between appropriate and not. And I never would have laid a hand on Mike, but he was sleeping with my daughter. There was no way in hell there was an overreaction for something like that.

“He wants to be a big man, Dev,” I continued without skipping a beat. “Let him prove he’s a man before he touches my daughter.”

“Dad!” Liz shouted.

“This is enough,” Devon chimed in, standing. She grabbed Liz’s arm. “Brit and Sebastian thank you both for calling us over. We will deal with all of this. Young lady, I’ll see you outside.”

The efficiency with which she moved was remarkable. Devon was a ball buster and that was certain. She didn’t take shit from anyone, especially her fifteen year old pubescent daughter.

I followed them out after saying bye to Bass and giving Mike one more intense glare. By the time I stepped onto the driveway, they were already at each other’s throats.

“Do you have any clue how embarrassing it is to get a call while I’m at work that my daughter is in bed with a boy? You are fifteen, young lady.”

“Mom, I get it, I messed up.”

“You don’t get it! You can get pregnant, do you get that? Were you two careful? You can get an STD, do you get that?”

“We weren’t having sex!”

“Okay,” I said stepping next to Devon’s car. If I could have physically stepped between them, I would have, but the hunk of metal was a sufficient enough barrier. “Liz, get in my car.”

“Dad…”

“Get in the car,” I said. It wasn’t negotiable. Devon bit her bottom lip and stared me down.

“Let me take a stab at this,” I told her after Liz had stalked over to my vehicle.

“I really don’t think you know what to say to a promiscuous little girl, Cooper.”

“Let me try,” I said. “I know I haven’t been there, but come on. I was there. For a very long time, I was the only one there. Let me try to talk to her.”

Devon looked at me for quite a while without saying anything. I could see the wheels turning in her head. If nothing else, I was sparing her a dreadfully awkward ride home.

“Fine!” she said. “Fine, you deal with this. And I’ll talk to you later.”

I watched Devon get in her car, slam her door and speed off, leaving faint tire treads on the Kennedy driveway.

I stepped into Chase’s Audi, turned the key, and without saying a word, sped off towards the highway. The silence continued as we approached Dallas from the northern suburbs. I didn’t quite know what to say. What do you say in such an instance? I’m sure there was a chapter on how to parent a hormonal teenager out there somewhere, but the hormones had snuck up on me and I hadn’t read the book.

Finally, just as we approached the Mockingbird exit that would lead us off Highway 75 and straight to the Highland Park house that was no longer my home, I said the first words in almost forty minutes.

“Elizabeth, are you being sexually active?”

“Dad…” she said, startled.

“It’s not a trick question,” I said. “Answer it honestly and we’ll go from there.”

“No.” Her tone was much mousier than I was used to. “I’m not being sexually active. We were just making out and talking, honest. It looked a lot worse than it was, trust me.”

“Okay, I believe you.”

“Clearly mom doesn’t,” she said with a hint of bitterness only found between a girl and her mother. “She thinks I’m a big whore.”

“She doesn’t think that at all, sweetie,” I replied, stopping at a red light and looking at her. “She worries about you. And she’s worried even more because of everything this family is going through, and the fact that you won’t talk about it.”

“What is there to say?” she said, her voice louder than I expected. “You’re gone. You’re living with some guy. Mom is moody all the time. Literally, all the time. It’s no wonder I don’t want to spend any time at home.”

“So you spend it in bed with Mike?” I asked, aware that the question had slightly too much bite to it.

“Do we have to have this conversation right now? I really just want to go home,” Liz said. She pulled her face tight and stared ahead, looking exactly like her mother did.

“No we don’t, sweetie,” I said, pulling ahead through the green light. I had approximately three blocks to say something fatherly, and I was at a loss. I got paid to come up with the right thing to say; right then, however, I couldn’t have come up with anything if someone had given me a million bucks.

“But we are going to have to have it sometime.” I turned and made eye contact.

I pulled into the driveway and noticed Devon’s car wasn’t parked inside. I turned off the car, and turned to my silent daughter.

“Listen to me.” My voice was even and calm. “I want you to talk to me. I want you to feel free to ask me anything. Ask me about boys. Ask me about sex.”

“Dad!”

“No, listen. Ask me anything, sweetheart. I might not live here anymore, but I’m still your dad and I love you. If you and Mike are moving this relationship forward, I want you to be safe, do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“And I want you to do these sort of things for the right reasons. If he’s pressuring you,” I began. My voice faltered for just a split second; enough time for Liz to slip in.

“He’s not pressuring me. Believe it or not, I’m one of the only ones in my class not having sex, Dad.”

“And if I could, I’d keep it that way forever.” I blinked, unsure how to finish my speech in a way that would reach her. I knew I couldn’t keep her from doing what she wanted. Hell, at fifteen, I had already lost my virginity in a big and sloppy way. If I could just get her to be smart on sex, I would have done better than my parents did with my siblings and me.

“The point is, talk to me. Talk to your mom. We might be a thousand years old, but you can trust us. We understand what you’re going through, believe us when we say that, okay?”

Liz swallowed, bit her bottom lip, and nodded.

“Okay,” she said with much less attitude than before.

“And watch out for your little brother,” I called as she got out of the car. I watched her walk up the drive to the door, wondering how I’d missed this. In the three weeks since I’d been gone, how had I missed her grow up so fucking fast? It was like I was entitled to only a snapshot of her life now. Just a month ago, I had been there, every day, watching her and her friends sweat tears over dance routines. Now, she was running around town with my best friend’s son and now I was the sweating about having the talk with her? I leaned my head back, closed my eyes, and shook my head at the fear that my little girl wasn’t exactly little anymore.

By the time I got back to the apartment, I was tired, physically and emotionally. I had all but forgotten that I’d sent Chase over before me to set up the food we’d missed out on at the restaurant.

“Hey,” he said, getting up and meeting me as I walked into the apartment. “How is everything? Is everyone okay?”

“Yeah.” I kicked off my shoes and followed him into the living room, where he’d set up food and two candles on a blanket on the floor. Chase had already changed into a pair of my sweats and a muscle shirt. When I went into my bedroom to change too, I noticed that he’d draped his suit across the right side of the bed. It was the side that he always slept on when we’d slept together. I took my suit off slowly and laid it parallel to his on the left side and smiled down at them.

I walked back into the living room dressed in shorts and a wife beater, and was immediately taken over by hunger.

“Here.” Chase handed me a glass of wine and sat down, sprawling all six feet of himself across half my living room. “So is it something you can talk about?”

He handed me a fork and take out cart and we proceeded to eat three hundred dollars worth of food on a hardwood floor.

“Yeah,” I said trying not to sound as drained as I felt. “So it turns out that my daughter is dating Sebastian’s son.”

“Oh, wow,” he replied with wide eyes.

“Yeah. And Britney found them in bed together this evening. It was a giant mess.”

“Were they messing around?”

“I don’t know. I mean, she says they were kissing, but who lies in bed with someone and only kisses, you know? I was a sophomore in high school once; I know how the drill goes.”

“I’d hate to see what a fifteen year old Cooper was like,” Chase smiled.

“Shy, believe it or not.”

“I don’t. Not at all.”

“Shut up.” I smiled. It was an easy smile. It was an easy conversation. “I wasn’t the most confident kid until my brother sat me down right before I turned sixteen. He said ‘Coop, I’m not even playing with you on this one.’ I remember it like it was yesterday. A Kelly Clarkson song was playing on on 106.1. He goes ‘I’m only going to say this once. If you don’t grow a pair and ask Missy Thompson out right now, I will disown you as a brother.’” I laughed. Chase’s smile was infectious as I continued the story.

“She was this girl that lived down the street from us and we had this weird… I dunno… thing. Peter Parker, Mary Jane kind of relationship. I was smart, she was sexy. We were really good friends, but she was so out of my league.”

“Did you ask her out?” he asked.

“After the pep talk, I put on an entire bottle of cologne and I walked over to her house. Her grandma got her for me and we sat on her porch swing and I told her that I loved her. Can you believe it?”

“Absolutely,” Chase grinned. I laughed and almost spilled Wagyu beef on my lap.

“She goes: ‘Cooper. I think it’s really sweet that you think you’re in love with me. But let’s be honest.’ And then she broke my heart.”

“Ouch. Baby’s first break up.”

I chuckled. “Exactly. But you know, after that, I was fearless. Still shy and nervous, but I knew I’d never face a rejection as bad as Missy Thompson ever again. So I threw myself out there. That was Dylan’s plan from the get go, I feel like.”

“Of course,” Chase chimed. “He wanted you to get over it. Grow up. Be confident. Make yourself vulnerable.”

When Chase said the words, his eyes making lightning hot contact with mine, I felt the deeper layers of meaning. I felt him searching my soul for a sign that I would let him back in. The fact that he was there was as much sign as I could give. If he wanted more, if he wanted to be closer, we’d need to clear a few things out of the air.

“Your turn in the hot seat,” I said, scooting in and turning my entire upper body to face him. I knew it wasn’t the ideal date he was looking for, but we were talking, and that’s all he could have hoped to achieve.

“Okay,” he answered with confidence. “Ask away.”

“Tell me about Morgan.” My voice was stronger; much stronger than it had been following his most recent proposal. Then, my mind was filled with options and scenarios and confusion. Now, I knew I needed to get past it. I had asked Missy Thompson out, and she’d gone off and gotten engaged to a man named Winston Smith. It was time to move on from Missy Thompson.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive,” I replied.

“Okay,” Chase treaded lightly, putting his take out down and squaring off to face me. “I met Morgan in Rio during the second week of competition. He ran the same leg of the same relay as I did, only he was on the South African team. I don’t know what you want me to tell you, gamin. He was electric, and I… was celibate.” He smiled, disarming me. By the time Chase went to Rio, we had been over for four years. I was married and he was gone.

“What do you mean celibate?”

“I just… I never quite hit it off with anyone once I got back to the States after London. I tried to date in LA but everything was so superficial and everyone was so fake. My handlers were always on my case about being careful who I trusted. It was just easier not to trust anyone. So I kind of gave up on the whole thing.”

Hearing him say he’d given up on love broke my heart just a tad. There I was, unable to forgive him for not telling me about this bond he’d forged when he had spent four years in self-deprivation mode. All while I had already moved on. It put things into perspective quite a bit.

“When I met him, it was easy. We weren’t teammates, so I could tell him things that I didn’t want these other guys to know. It was like, for the first time in a long time, I could feel for someone again.”

I took the mature approach and stopped myself from saying one of the dozen passive-aggressive things that crossed my mind. I was the one who’d opened up this line of communication. It was part of the purge, and it was necessary. It was something we should have done as soon as he came back. Still, a dime short and three weeks late wasn’t so bad.

“When did you decide to marry him?”

Chase sighed. “You won’t believe me if I tell you.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“When we came back to the States from Rio, we were roommates. And then we broke up after a little while, it was… he was impressed by the LA social scene. He ate it up. It reminded him so much of Cape Town and there wasn’t a guy in West Hollywood that he wouldn’t have fucked. And I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like that at all. I stayed home and I… I didn’t have as much fun as he did. But when he OD-ed twice in one month and needed to go to rehab, he didn’t have health insurance. I did.

“It was a stupid little thing. We didn’t tell anyone we were doing it. My publicist would have flipped her shit if she knew that I was doing a shotgun wedding for a guy who was literally cracked out.”

He paused for a minute and the vulnerability separating us could have been sliced with a butter knife. I almost told him it was okay not to continue, but he went on anyway.

“He needed me in a pinch, and he never stopped. And we grew up. We stayed friends, of course. He still gets into trouble every once in a while and asks me for a bailout.”

He flicked the bottom of his eye, pushing what I knew was a tear out of the way. He smiled a painful smile.

“When I told him I was moving back to Dallas to find you, his only question was what would happen to his health insurance and his cell phone bill and I told him I would continue to handle both.”

“Why did you wait so long to divorce him?” I asked, searching for a reason not to feel like a jackass. Had I heard him out two weeks before, had I sat down and listened, things would be completely different. This story changed things. It returned things almost to the place where they once were.

“Gamin, being with someone like that, I just… I never knew what to expect. If he were to relapse today, I would feel guilty and I would want to help. He’s a grown man, I know that, but I would feel obligated to help him.”

I leaned my head on my hand and looked deep into Chase’s eyes. I could have gone swimming in the deep blueness of those eyes that once had an enormous power over me. Now it was time to harness that power and use it to build a strong and stable relationship together. That was my decision. That was what I wanted, and I was confident I wasn’t going to flip-flop on that.

“Thirty days,” I said.

“For what?”

“I’m not sleeping with you for thirty days. Until… October eight. Thirty days.”

“Okay,” he said simply. No argument. That was it. “Is there a reason?”

I smiled at him. “Because I’m not the NATO of sex,” I replied, aware that he wouldn’t get the reference.

“Thirty days is an awful long time for me to sleep on the couch, gamin,” he said with a wicked smile. He knew his beauty had a temptation over me that would make the thirty days grueling. But I knew if it was something I didn’t do, we’d never reach a healthy place.

“You’re going to make this hard for me, aren’t you?”

He leaned over and picked up my take out carton, brushing his arm against mine as he did. His skin was on fire, and the heat between us could have cause a spontaneous combustion. As he leaned back, his face close enough to kiss, he whispered.

“I waited twenty years. I can handle thirty days.”

Two hours, two bottles of wine and several cartons of take out later, I went to sleep on my California King while my California King went to sleep on my couch.

As I drifted off, I thought about how comfortable I was with Chase. I reminded myself how easy it was to be around him. We’d fallen in together, and having such special chemistry with someone couldn’t be taken for granted. Going to sleep that night, if there had been a pie chart of how much I was re-falling for him, it would have been ninety percent colored in; however, a small sliver of me still couldn’t forget, and that wedge was enough to make me hesitant.

“He still hasn’t called?” she asked. It was mid-September, about three weeks into my junior year, and I’d spent almost every night sitting at home and watching my phone not ring. I had it with me constantly. It was in my pocket when I went to volleyball, in my backpack in class, on the ledge in the shower every morning. And still, it never rang.

“He has not called,” I replied. I bit my bottom lip and shrugged.

“When was he supposed to be back?”

“Last week,” I replied. He should have called, I thought. There was no way he hadn’t. I kept wondering if I’d missed the call somehow, but that was impossible. My phone was literally attached to my person at all times.

“Cooper,” she said, looking me straight in the eye in that no-nonsense way that she did. “He’ll call.”

It was the hope I’d been holding onto. The hope that he would, in fact, pick up his new phone with his new number and call the boy he left behind.

He did call. Only the call came twenty years later.

I spent most of Tuesday morning fending off emails from my office. The folks at Knowles were glad I finally got the manuscript back to them, and everything was going through final review. They had a tentative schedule planned for publicity that would take me away from Dallas for the majority of the Christmas holiday.

Now that the ball was rolling faster than ever, I knew I needed to give my department head and dean the heads up that I had a second book going through the printers. They knew it was a possibility when they signed me, and I had been mostly open about the nature of the story. Now that the date and time were approaching, I decided to set up a couple of meetings for the following week to hammer everything out.

I planned a few weeks worth of lessons and made headway on grading my students’ second reading responses. There weren’t any cheaters yet in that batch, but I only made it halfway through the stack before I called it a night, shortly after five.

I called Bass before I left the office to see if he wanted to meet up for a quick drink before he drove across the country to the suburbs.

“We should probably talk about yesterday, no?” I asked when he answered and asked me what was up.

“Yeah, I agree. I’m actually about to go look for Mike’s birthday present if you want to come with me,” he said.

“You’re still getting him a gift after what happened?”

“He’s turning sixteen, Cooper, of course I’m getting him something. I’ll probably make him sweat it out a little, but the kiddo gets a gift.”

“Yeah, I’ll tag along,” I replied. “Where are you going?”

“I was going to go to the Ewing Autohaus.”

“In Plano?”

I was already searching for the address online when he said yes, indeed, he was going to Plano. I told him I’d meet him there at six, printed the directions and locked up for the night.

As I drove up Highway 75 towards the Plano Parkway, I spent most of my time thinking about Chase. I’d debated two or three different times whether I should call him and invite him over for dinner. Part of me felt like a harmless dinner to kick off the thirty days of celibacy would be great. The other part of me thought seeing him two nights in a row would be overkill. There had to be more to our relationship than just candlelit dinners and I needed to find out what it was. I decided to take advantage of my friend who knew the most about sustaining relationships while we shopped for his son’s birthday present.

When I got to Plano, Bass was there, jacket off and being given the general spiel by a salesman in a gray suit. He waved me over and I got there just in time to hear him give us the go-ahead to look around and consult him with any questions we might have.

“You’re buying Mike a new Benz for his sixteenth birthday?”

“Are you joking? Do you know me at all?” he asked with a raised eyebrow. “He’s getting my old Benz and I’m getting myself a new car.”

That made more sense coming from the fiscally savvy Sebastian. It baffled me in college and it continued to baffle me now how someone with so much money could be so non-materialistic.

“When I was sixteen, I got my dad’s car. It lasted me all through college, you remember,” he said as we walked into the lot.

“I do remember. It’s why you never wanted to drive your car anywhere. That’s how it stayed in such good condition.”

“Whatever,” he replied. “I think I want something sleek and black.”

We passed a sleek black car with tinted windows and a leather interior that would have made my 41 year-old friend look as though his penis was the smallest on the block.

“I think you should err away from something so… youthful.”

“You’re right. So let’s talk about last night and get it out of the way.” His normally easy-going voice had a little edge to it. “What’d you tell Liz when y’all went home?”

He hesitated briefly on the word home, but I cut off his thought.

“My thinking is this. They’re kids, Bass. And they’re going to mess around, that much is a given.”

“Okay.”

“So I talked to her about knowing her boundaries and demanding that they be respected. If she’s in love with your son, I don’t know how we go about stopping them from seeing each other.”

Sebastian nodded. “I told Mike pretty much the same thing. You know, Britney wanted us to forbid him from seeing Liz. She was adamant, and I just… we can’t do that. I pray to God they’re responsible and I told Mike that sex isn’t going anywhere and I think he got it. I dunno. We’re old, Coop.”

“We are,” I nodded. He stopped next to a silver midsized model that had a beautiful gray leather interior and dark wood paneling. It channeled the old school models in its classic design and was very Bass. “I felt ancient warning my offspring about pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. When did this happen?”

Bass shrugged and wrote something down on his research pad. I had no doubt he’d look that model up with serious consideration to purchase it. We continued weaving through the cars, and I finally got the courage to ask him.

“So I had dinner with Chase last night.”

He stopped mid-step.

“I know what you’re thinking, but no. It wasn’t like that at all. He wanted to talk and explain the marriage situation. I want to trust him, Sebastian, I do. But there’s something blocking me.”

“Is this something 5’9’’? Does it weigh a healthy 155, drive a black Beemer and work for one of the most prestigious law firms in Dallas?”

“This something isn’t Kyle,” I replied with a bite to my voice.

“Cooper, two nights ago you were lamenting over him for marrying Winston and now you’re having dinner with your ex? What the fuck do you want?”

“You said I needed to let Kyle go. Spencer said I needed to let Kyle go. I’m letting him go.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to jump into someone else. Fly solo for a minute. Jesus.”

“It was just dinner,” I said.

“It’s never just dinner with you.”

“I want to treat this like we’re starting over,” I explained. “Like we have a clean slate and our messy history is just that: history. I told him I wouldn’t sleep with him for a month.”

“That’s a start.”

“The reason I’m asking you, is because I want this relationship to work this time. If I’m going to say that Chase is the next thing to happen to me, then I want him to be the last thing to happen to me. But considering everything, I don’t know how to make it work.”

“You obviously love him,” Bass replied. “I’m not entirely sure why, but you do.”

“Of course I do.”

“And if you two survive this month, there are still a million questions that have nothing to do with sex that still need to be answered. Can you live with him every day? Can you two communicate when he’s not apologizing and groveling? Can you stand to look at his face when you wake up? How do you two do in a fight? How is he with your kids? Can you bring him around your friends? I know the answer to the last one.”

“No fair.”

“Cooper, a relationship isn’t all candlelit proposals and white table cloth dinners. These are real things and you’ve had twenty years to forget what Chase would be like in these real situations. It might be time to take things slow until you remember.”

It was something to think about, I admitted. The agenda of the month shouldn’t have been to simply put Chase off and prove I could make this decision without my mind being clouded by hormones. The point of the month should be to see if Chase and I still had the interwoven fiber between us that would allow us to build something together. Could he be in my life the way that it was? And if not, what was I willing to change to include him?

I changed the subject after that, returning it to the topic of which car Bass should purchase so that his son could drive around in the old car, most likely picking my daughter up for teenage dates.

I had a long drive ahead of me from Plano back to the city, and along the way, I thought a lot about what Sebastian had said. He was spot on, there was no denying that. Now it was time to put that into practice.

I decided to yield on Chase. I wasn’t going to put the brakes on completely, but they needed to be pumped considerably. There was no reason to fall right back into him. Sebastian was right: dinner was never just dinner with the two of us. So I decided I’d hold off on calling him until I could have dinner with him and not want to fall right back into our old routine. I needed to fly solo, at least until I got a better handle on my feelings.

In between lectures the next morning, I met with Mason about the rollout schedule that Knowles had in mind for The List.

“Ideally, they’d want to do a November launch with all of the press being sprawled out from the first of November to the fifteenth of January,” he said, scrolling through his calendar on his electronic tablet.

“That won’t work,” I said, leaning back. “I’m not missing the holidays to pimp this thing; come up with a better plan.”

“Coop, they’ve waited long enough. They don’t want to miss out on the holiday draw of something like this.”

“I said, it won’t work,” I replied. I was testy, but not specifically at Mason. The whole thing was beginning to feel high pressure and I would have rather done it on my own time. “This is my first holiday without my family; I’m not spending it driving around the country on some jacked up book tour. What’s wrong with next summer? Tote it as a beach read. We’ll do a Fort Lauderdale launch or something.”

“That was supposed to happen this summer. And then there was supposed to be the launch this fall. I can’t go back to Knowles and ask them to push it back another six months just so that you can play daddy and hoe, hoe, hoe down the chimney.”

I stood up and handed him back his tablet.

“Great, well this meeting is over.”

“Cooper!”

“You have one job, and that’s to assist me in getting this done. Tell them I want a summer launch and if they disagree, tell them to pull the deal and shove it,” I said. The threat was two pronged in that if they pulled the deal and I lost my back end profits, Mason would lose his commission. “The last thing I’m willing to do is miss Thanksgiving and Christmas with my kids over some stupid novel, do you understand?”

The stare down was an intense one, even by Mason and my standards. He sat at the edge of my desk looking deep into my eyes with a glare that could have melted ice. Two months before, we would have tossed the manuscript to the sided, kissed and made up. That afternoon, he left, and I sincerely wished the door to my office would have hit him in the ass on his way out.

As I was freshening up before my last class of the day, I got an email from Kyle saying the family court clerk had messengered over a stack of documents I needed to sign in order to amend the divorce order they had on file. I was confused as to why the documents I’d signed for Devon wouldn’t suffice, but I replied that I’d come to his office after work.

To Cooper: Working from home this afternoon. Meet me there.

I thought it was a bit odd for him to want to meet at his house, but I brushed it off and went to my lecture. I sat around and waited for the excuses from students who weren’t finished with their third reading response that I’d set to be due on Friday at five. I got only one doozy, a boy who said he was in final consideration for a reality show and that he’d been auditioning all weekend, and therefore hadn’t started his response yet.

“Well, I suggest you buckle down, finish the reading and try your very best to have it turned in at five,” I said.

“But you aren’t going to come to campus and pick them up exactly at five are you?”

I smiled the same smile my tough professors had given me in college and simply said: “I might be here at five; I might be here at ten. Hell, I might be here at ten till five and if your paper isn’t in the stack, I’ll just assume it was late.”

He got my point, nodded, and retreated before he made an even bigger fool of himself.

Twenty minutes and twelve city blocks later, I pulled into a visitor spot next to Kyle’s building, and hustled up to his front door.

“Hey,” he said, letting me in. I followed him to his bar that separated the kitchen from the living room. All of the documents I needed to sign were laid out with small green tabs next to the signature lines.

Kyle was dressed in a pair of khakis and his polo shirt was pressed tight and tucked in.

“What, are they doing casual Wednesdays now?” I asked, taking the beer he was handing to me.

“I didn’t go into the office today,” he replied. “I had a golf meeting with the police commissioner and his son, who happens to be a sophomore at SMU this fall.”

“Sigma pressure?”

“Precisely,” he replied, sitting down next to me and taking out his own pen to sign the representation box. “The politicking has already begun and I haven’t even announced yet.”

“It’s the life of a civil servant,” I replied, scribbling away anywhere I saw a green tab.

“So these papers make it official with the court,” Kyle said blankly as the two of us signed away. “Once they’re filed tomorrow, no one can arrest you for showing up in Highland Park, granted you call Devon first.”

“Got it,” I answered with the preoccupied blankness of someone who just wanted to get the task done.

As I signed, I tried not to think about the close proximity between Kyle and I. I tried not to think about the how familiarly good he smelled, leaning in to me and scribbling like a child. I tried not to think about the annoying clicking he did any time he turned a page, or how he bit his bottom lip as he wrote Kyle Montgomery Wriggs over the lines that required a full signature. These were all things I had told Spencer and Bass I would stop thinking about, so I tried. But I couldn’t.

When I finally signed my name across the bottom line, I put my pen down, picked up my beer and turned in my stool to face Kyle.

“Where’s the fiancé?” I asked casually, trying not to put any affection in my voice.

“He is at the office,” Kyle replied. He checked his watch. “I’m actually supposed to meet him at Victory Tavern for dinner in about an hour.”

“That’s cute.”

“It is. He called me when I was finishing the back nine and said he wanted to do something special.” Kyle wasn’t the ‘let’s do something special’ type, I thought. I finished my beer.

“Well I should get out of your hair then,” I said, standing and circling the bar to throw my glass away.

“Yeah, um… I’ll get these filed and you’re one step closer,” he said. I nodded, turned, and headed for the front door.

“Cooper,” he called just before I reached it. “Are we okay? You and me? Are we fine?”

I thought about the tons of snarky comments that went through my brain.

Fuck no.

What do you think?

Is Winston still coming over?

As fine as we can be!

Each would have been a dagger, placed right into Kyle in a place I knew was sensitive to him. I knew he was only trying to move on, and like Spencer had begged me, I knew I needed to let him. Jabbing at him and making him feel guilty, making this whole thing difficult for him, wouldn’t have helped either of us.

“We’re great,” I replied with a forced smile. I was lucky to have been far enough away that Kyle couldn’t recognize how fake it was. It would take me a while to develop a real smile towards the situation, but for now, the forced one worked.

“Good.” His voice was sincere. “I’ll see you later, then.”

I nodded, closed his door behind me, and leaned back on it with a sigh.

Feeling alone and sad, I made the call shortly after I crossed from Downtown to Uptown. I decided on the short drive home that I couldn’t possibly spend the night alone. It would be too hard lying there wondering what cute and romantic things Kyle and Winston were going to get in to. It would have been torture twiddling my thumbs and trying not to call Chase in attempt to relieve the anxiety over Kyle. I had to take things slow.

So I called the one person I could think to call.

“I’m coming over with frozen pizza and wine, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” I said into the phone as I pulled into Ace’s for a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “I’m calling in that first circle jerk.”

“Well then you’d probably better pick up some Quaaludes on the way too,” Spencer replied. “I’m fresh out.”

“Very funny. Can I come over?”

“Of course you can, single man,” he said.

Half an hour, one trip to Ace’s, and zero Quaaludes later, I pulled into Spencer’s lot, walked up to his historic loft, and spent the rest of the night like so many nights freshman year: sitting with Spencer, drinking incessantly and trying not to think of either Chase or Kyle.