She swallows and slowly nods her head.
“That better be your word, but just in case you get any other ideas, I’ll be making a call to my agent and then the next is to your father. This is done. It’s fucking done.”
“Cooper,” I hear her, my angel, the light. “It’s finished,” she says, taking my hand, threading her fingers through them.
“Cooper, why don’t you take your woman away from here, yeah?” Marky says, his eyes on Monica.
I bend to pick up Parker’s bag, grabbing her hand again and walking away to the elevator.
“Cooper,” she whispers, but I just nod my head no. I need a second. I don’t want to do this here. She doesn’t know what else to do, so she does the only thing she can do. She puts her hands around my waist, and we wait for the elevator to open.
We don’t say anything till we get to my room. It’s a simple room with one king-sized bed. The covers are a mess. It shows that I tossed and turned all night long.
Once the door closes behind me, she turns around, looking at me.
“You’re here.” I lean down to smell her neck. Her scent is forever imbedded in my nose. “I missed you.” I kiss her neck. She starts grabbing my face, kissing my lips lightly. “We need to talk,” I tell her, making her follow me to the bed.
I sit down with my back against the headboard. I watch her as she takes off her sweater and shoes.
“I’ve been traveling since three a.m. to get here this morning,” she tells me while climbing on the bed, sitting right next to me, crossing her legs.
She doesn’t know the right thing to say right now. She’s never seen me this mad. I’ve never been on the edge like this, my body shaking with anger.
She does what I know her heart tells her to. She comes to me slowly, crawling onto my lap and straddling me. She finally takes off my hat, running her fingers through my hair. It’s probably still wet from the shower I took before going down.
She grabs my face and kisses me. Lips closed. Just a kiss. I sigh deeply, then lean in, hugging her. Breathing her. Smelling her. Always her.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” I whisper.
“I needed to stage an intervention. For the sake of the team.” She tries to make me laugh and make light of the situation. I smile, hugging her closer to me.
“I felt lost,” I say in barely a whisper.
She backs away from me to look in my eyes.
“I’ve never had attachments. I’m an only child. My parents were good parents. Gave me everything I could possibly need. I was really good at hockey, like really good even at an early age. So good that I got scholarships early on, as of grade seven. I practically lived on my own.”
She puts her hands on my chest, feeling my heart beating under it. Pounding.
“I would go home on holidays. That’s it. Summer would be spent training for bigger and better things. So, I never had a relationship with anyone really. I was always just my own person. Only thinking about me, myself, and I.” My hair falls forward onto my forehead, making her hand brush it back. “Never had anything to go home to or miss. Then I go and meet this smartass, sassy woman, and she knocks me on my ass. She takes my heart. She owns it. She gives me a family, she makes me a home, and I just want to be there. I want to cherish it.”
A tear rolls down her cheek, sadness passing over her eyes. She will never know how much that little boy wanted a mom who would be dragging him to practice, washing his equipment, nagging him to do homework.
“Baby.”
I catch her tear with my thumb. “Being away from you guys, I can’t explain it. It was like you guys were living without me. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t fucking cope.” I finally shake my head like I’m shaking the thoughts away from my mind.
“We weren’t living without you, baby, we were coping. It’s what we needed to do. It’s your job. You can’t change this, and I won’t let you. We won’t let you. Does it suck? Yeah, it does. Do we like it? Fuck no. I’ve never heard Allison complain more in my life. Matthew looks almost lost without you there to do whatever it is that you do downstairs in that dungeon.”
“I just didn’t want you guys to forget me,” I say.
“Forget? Babe, we PVR the games and rewatch them. True, they haven’t been your best games. And we have to talk about the camera and Allison learning how to read lips. Needless to say, she said the word fuck a lot.” I laugh, so she continues. “Do you know that she sleeps with me when you’re gone? In one of your shirts. It’s kind of sad really. Both of us in clothes that smell like you. Matthew is starting to get scared that we might start collecting your hair so we can start the cloning process.”