His breath hitched. He didn’t look at me, but his fingers curled into fists on his jeans.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Guess we’re both kind of wrecked today.”
Wrecked didn’t even begin to cover it.
But hearing him say it—hearing him admit the cracks—made something in my chest loosen, just barely. Not enough to stop the ache. But enough that I didn’t feel completely alone in it.
Somehow, in the mess of secrets I wasn’t ready to tell, in the knots I couldn’t unravel, in the quiet between us…
I didn’t feel like I had to. Not yet. Not alone.
Coop’s words hung between us—quiet, bruised, honest in a way that felt like being handed something fragile and breakable.
The car rolled along the last stretch of street toward the school, tires whispering over the pavement. And because he’d given me that piece of truth—because he’d offered a sliver of himself—I found my voice again.
“Do you need to talk about it?” I asked softly.
He let out a tiny huff of laughter, the kind that wasn’t really a laugh at all. More like air escaping something dented.
“Not sure it would be fair to you,” he muttered, gaze fixed out the window.
“I didn’t ask if it was fair,” I said. “I asked if you needed to talk about it.”
His jaw worked once before he said, “I did try to talk to you. I told you what I did. I took responsibility. But now it feels like who we were—” He stopped, swallowing. “We’re not going to be those friends again.”
The words punched straight through me.
I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how to. My heartbeat crawled up into my throat as I pulled into the student lot, the school looming bigger and more monotonous in the daylight.
We eased past a row of trucks and battered sedans until I slid into my usual spot. The engine gave a little cough as I shifted the car into park.
“Do you remember,” I asked quietly, staring through the windshield, “when you got mad that Jake was also going to be my friend?”
Coop blinked, surprised. “Yeah. We were in second grade. You were my friend first.”
There was something almost defensive in his tone, this faint echo of the little boy who’d scowled across a playground because someone else wanted to sit with me at lunch.
I turned the key and the engine cut off, leaving us in a bubble of warm silence.
“Do you remember what I said to you then?” I asked.
Coop scrunched his face, the expression almost comically dramatic. “I’m sure it was something like, yes, Coop, you’re my bestest buddy and no one is as good as you. So, yes, I’ll just be your friend.”
I stared at him.
He cracked, grinning in this crooked, sheepish way that tugged at something deep inside me. My lips twitched despite everything.
“Try again,” I said.
His smile softened—faded, really—into something quieter. More real. He exhaled slowly.
“You told me that you can be friends with more than one person,” he said, voice lower. “And that maybe he could be my friend too so he wouldn’t just be your friend, but our friend. That just being friends with him wouldn’t mean I wasn’t still your friend first.”
A beat passed. The morning heat pressed gently through the windshield. Someone slammed a car door two rows away, but it felt a world off.
“Coop?” I said.
He raised his eyebrows in question, the tiniest thread of worry returning to his eyes.
