Cooper’s mom had baked oatmeal raisin cookies. My experience of kids was that they’d normally feel betrayed when they realized the raisins weren’t chocolate chips, but Benji’s enthusiasm for them turned out to be infectious. They disappeared like a field of grain under siege by a swarm of locusts. As did most of the other snacks.
The kids all sat down along the back wall of the studio, setting up their own little snack bartering system now that they’d grabbed them.
Cooper pulled something wrapped in a napkin out of his shirt pocket.
“Here,” he said, offering it to me.
Inside the napkin was one of the oatmeal raisin cookies, the scent of cinnamon rising from it as soon as I opened it up. My mouth started watering immediately, and my stomach reminded me that I’d been in too much of a rush this morning to eat breakfast.
“Saved it for you.” Cooper shrugged as I looked at him in surprise. “Figured you could use it.”
“You don’t want it?”
Cooper smiled as he shook his head, looking down at the remaining snacks. “No, I absolutely love… celery sticks with peanut butter.”
“Uh huh,” I said, watching him pick one up as though it might bite him.
“Favorite snack,” he insisted, biting the end off one of the sticks. He wrinkled his nose as he chewed, licking the inside of his mouth once he’d swallowed. “It’s even that peanut butter you buy powdered and make up with water. The best kind.”
I laughed, taking a bite of my cookie. I’d come to expect that anything Cooper deliberately gave me would taste incredible by now, so I wasn’t surprised by the way it melted in my mouth, cinnamon and nutmeg and sweet bursts of raisin balancing out crumbly, toasted oats.
“You think your mom would adopt me?” I asked, taking another bite. I ought to have savored it, but I was currently learning about the concept of stress eating. If Cooper didn’t get through the celery sticks before I was finished with this, I’d be tempted to eat them, too.
“I made those, actually,” Cooper said, keeping his focus on the remainder of his celery stick instead of looking at me, a hint of darker color at the tips of his ears.
I licked delicious crumbs off my lips, staring down at the remainder of the cookie in my hand. “Really?”
Cooper cleared his throat. “Couldn’t sleep last night. Figured I might as well do something productive.”
Couldn’t sleep last night.
Because he’dintendedto spend the night with me. That hadn’t gone according to plan.
“Well, they’re good,” I said, taking another nibble. Now that I knew Cooper made them, I wanted to savor the experience. I wasn’t sure they werebetterthan the sex I’d missed out on, but they were probably a pretty close second.
“Glad you think so.” Cooper smiled one of his gorgeous shy smiles.
He was the most beautiful man I’d ever known.
The squeal of a microphone being switched on made me wince. The attention of the entire room turned back toward the stage in a wave. Kids crowded around my knees as one of the judges stood with a sheet of paper in her hand, looking between it and the assembled crowd. She flashed a row of perfectly white teeth framed with blood red lips.
“Congratulations to everyone who showed up today,” she began.
Cooper stepped up behind me, standing close enough to my shoulder that I could feel his warmth seeping into my back. Benji stood in front of him, beside me. I glanced down to see he was holding Sarah and Aisha’s hands, and they were each holding Kayla and Ye-jin’s.
“—to have come this far,” the judge continued. “You should all be very proud of yourselves, whether you place or not today.”
My fingers itched to take Cooper’s hand again, but the one closest to me was on Benji’s head, stroking his hair.
“So without further ado: placing third today is Barre None studio, choreographed by instructor Olivia Lu.”
Polite applause erupted from the whole audience, and adorable giggles from the kids who’d performed second. They’d been disciplined, and their routine had relied on simplicity to display perfect form. Exactly the opposite approach I’d taken.
I’d been aiming at making itfun, figuring that if the kids were enjoying themselves, they’d be more motivated. It’d worked, in the sense that they’d all learned their parts and I couldn’t have been happier with how they executed them.
But now that I thought back over the performance, I could see the cracks the way an impartial judge would. Kayla had wobbled. Ye-jin had been a fraction of a beat off. Even Benji, my star pupil, hadn’t landed his assemblé with the perfection I’d expect in an older dancer.
Maybe I’d made a mistake.
