Chapter 8

Igave them a few hours alone while I checked out the venue with the rest of the band backing us up. Then we grabbed dinner. After, I headed back to the hotel and up to our suite. It was almost nine. I'd sent Frankie up almost seven hours earlier.

I needed a shower, a change of clothes, and just some downtime myself. Inside the suite, I found Coop on his phone, still in boxers. He held up a finger to me before motioning to the phone.

It had to be an emergency with one of his patients if he was on the phone, so I left him to it and headed toward the open doors to one of the bedrooms in the two bedroom suite. I dropped my bag on the bed and walked straight into the shower.

Twenty minutes later, and a hell of a lot more relaxed, I walked back out to find Coop staring at his phone. His expression was tight and his mouth compressed. I doubted he even realized I was there.

"Hey," I said quietly. The other bedroom door was closed and the whole place smelled like sex. Frankie was likely asleep and that was a good thing. "You good?"

"One of my kids died," he said, almost bewildered.

I dropped to sit on the chair to his left. "Shit." No wonder he looked wrecked. "What do you need?"

"I have no idea." He still stared down at his phone like he could get all the answers from it. "I—the call came in and Frankie was asleep. There's a code that Katie has the answering service send if it's an emergency."

"Makes sense." I kind of knew that. He'd gotten calls before on vacation or over the holidays. Emergencies were always answered even if he wasn't the psychologist on call. "So they called," I prompted after he went silent for several long minutes.

Surprise flickered over his expression and he frowned as he glanced up. It really seemed to take effort to focus on me. "Sorry…"

"No need to be sorry, man. I get it. You've had a shock. Let me help if I can." We'd all taken our knocks over the years. Coop was the first one to stand up and offer a hand, or a shoulder—fuck even just grabbed a beer and sat next to you.

"I just—I saw him last week. He was in group. He's been doing great. He started coming in to the community center about five years ago. Chip on his shoulder. Shitty attitude. Issues at home. Issues at school. Issues with his sexuality. He just—he was lost, you know?"

Yeah, I did.

"He didn't have a lot of friends, and his parents were always fighting. He didn't know how to ask for the help he needed. So he would pick fights in group. Anger he got. Abuse he got. A helping hand? Fuck." Coop shot to his feet, phone still in hand. For a moment, it looked like he was going to throw it but he just put it down and paced away.

There was still food on the table and the suite had a single cup coffee maker, so I headed for that while Coop moved. Agitation marked every step. Normally, I wouldn't make coffee in the room. Frankie always said she didn't mind. However, since my angel missed her real coffee, it didn't kill me to wait.

When the first hiss of the coffee echoed through the quiet room, he pivoted to face me. "He was really pissed off one day and he threw a chair. It broke one of the blackboards. Didn't break the chair."

"Good chair."

Coop stared at me for a moment, then let out a sharp half-laugh before he nodded. "Yeah, good chair. Anyway, I didn't say a word, just picked up his chair, put it back where it was and stood there until he sat back down again. After group, I asked him to stay."

Asked him to stay and got his problems out of him, I'd bet. That was what Coop did. He talked and got you to talk until you told him everything. I wanted to be that for him right now.

"Let me tell you, this kid didn't want to stay and he sure as shit didn't want to hear from me. I'm the rich white dude, with the big fancy car and the big fancy house and what could I know?" There were tears in his words. He rubbed a hand over his face carrying them away. "I told him—I didn't know squat. That was why I needed him to tell me."

"That sounds like you," I said, fixing the coffee the way he liked it before sliding the cup over to him. Then I started another for me. "I mean, if he was gonna have an attitude…"

"Reminded me of Jake. Jake does anger real well."

Yeah, he did. "But he's much more laid back these days." In high school? Jake never met a fight he wasn't willing to have. Fuck anyone who looked sideways at Frankie or tried to hurt her.

"Yeah." Coop gave me a half-smile. It had elements of sadness in it. "Sometimes I miss those stupid kids we were. Fucking around all summer, not realizing we were about to lose the best thing that ever happened to us."

"I don't." It came out harsher than intended. "Being a teenager sucked. Losing Frankie cause we were stupid? That would have been a thousand times worse."

"But we didn't—that's the part I kind of miss. It was easier sometimes. We knew who was bad and who our friends were."

"Frankie's mom tried to kill Archie and damn near killed Frankie when she screwed with his car. She lied to Eddie and told him that Frankie was his kid and it almost killed Archie thinking they were blood-related. Are you sure we knew all of that?"

Coop stared at me for a long moment. "I had you guys. We had Frankie. She had us. Y'all had me. I knew who was on my side. Even when we were disagreeing—I knew you'd be there if I needed you. Michael didn't have that."

Michael. We'd circled back to the kid. I nodded. "I'm sorry to hear that. You're right, you guys were as much my lifeline as she was. Hell, still are."

He saluted me with his coffee. "Michael didn't have that. He was—alone and a loner. He didn't want friends. He didn't want ties or connections. He was counting down the years to graduation and then he wanted to leave and go—you know out in the world."

Coop downed a third of his coffee with a grimace.

"This is shit."

"Well, we're in Seattle. There are like a billion coffee shops out there."

He gave me a faint smile. "That means leaving Frankie."

"Yeah, I didn't think you wanted to do that. So—keep talking, I know the story doesn't end with him not wanting to be friends with anyone or cutting people off."

"No, it was a lot of attitude. Mostly what I got out of that conversation was he wasn't comfortable anywhere. Not even at the community center. Then he took off. Didn't see him for two weeks. One of the things we try to do is just make it a safe space for the kids."

He blew out a breath, another faint smile creased his mouth.

"Then he walks in, two weeks later, like it was the next day. He takes a seat in the group and he says nothing. He's there every day for the next week. I shifted my schedule around cause I worried if I wasn't there…"

"He might leave again." It wasn't a question.

"That was my thought. At the same time, we can't cater to every single kid all the time. We need them to trust the process, but?—"

"But the process can fail." Which had happened in the past.

"Yeah." Coop downed the rest of the coffee, then flopped back on the sofa. "I started posting my schedule where the kids could see it and not just in the office. Then I gradually resumed only coming a couple of times a week. Michael was coming to group, he still wasn't talking—but he came. That was a big step.

"Eventually, he talked. It started when one of the girls confessed to being jumped in the bathroom at school. She was scared to go back to one. She'd rather hold it all day or go across the street to the convenience store, or whatever. She couldn't go back in the bathroom. She went to Michael's school. He told her if she needed to go to the bathroom, text him. He'd make sure she could."

There was an element of pride in Coop's words.

"She was scared to take him up on the offer. But he was scared to make it. They both looked at me and I asked them what they wanted to do… It was a first step of him reaching out. She could have blown him off or dismissed it, maybe undoing all that work. But—she didn't. She hesitated, but she asked him how could she know she could trust him?"

That made me curious but I waited him out as Coop smiled for real, for the first time since I came in.

"He said, ‘I don't know. I just—think you should be able to go to the bathroom when you want. I don't like bullies and bitches. So…you want to piss, I'm your guy.' Then he pauses and they both look at each other and then laugh. She said she'd think about it. Couple of weeks went by, and she mentions she can go to the bathroom at school again. It helped build her confidence and his."

He scrubbed both hands over his face and then sat forward again. The grief was raw and visceral.

"It was such a small but huge step for both of them. They tried to reach out and someone was listening. Friendship followed. No romance or anything just—good friends. He was still trying to figure himself out. It wasn't that he liked guys or girls, he just—he didn't like either. Thought it was weird or made him freaky. The day he finally told me that, I said, ‘you're probably asexual. Or you haven't met the person you want. There's nothing wrong with it.'"

Real emotion ripped through his expression and he was fighting to hold onto it. I moved to put a hand on his shoulder. He didn't need me to press him or force him to do or say more. He just needed to know he wasn't alone.

"He cried. This big, buff fifteen year old kid who looked like a linebacker, sat down and fucking cried. Cause he didn't know it was a thing. Why do we always have to put labels on everything? High school is so damn tough to begin with then you throw all that social shit into it."

"You're the expert," I reminded him and he snorted, giving me a misty-eyed glare before he stood and I let my hand fall away. I got the need to move, so I reclaimed my coffee cup and watched as he picked up one of the water glasses on the table, then filled it up with water from one of the silver pitchers.

"She ate, by the way," he told me. "Not a lot at first, but the appetite hit around the second or third round. Then she was starving."

I nodded. Sex and food, two ways guaranteed to take care of our wife. "Good."

"Anyway… Michael's spent the last three years busting his ass to graduate. He was gonna go into the military. He weighed all his options and he was thinking about the Army. Get the training and the experience, get out of his home where he wasn't happy and build a future. Then maybe college after…"

"He didn't graduate until the end of this year, did he?"

"Yep, he was gonna graduate before Christmas… he didn't care about walking, just wanted the diploma." He was a million miles away.

"What happened?"

"Car accident." Coop didn't look away from the water. "He was waiting for the bus. Car jumped the curb. Plowed right into him and three other people. He and an older man died at the scene. The other two were taken to local hospitals. Driver was arrested, probably already out on bail and Michael's just gone."

"I'm really fucking sorry, Coop."

"Yeah… Me too."

He didn't say much after that. Instead, we sat out there drinking piss poor coffee. If he was going to be up, I'd stick it out with him. He didn't tell me to fuck off.

We were still sitting there at three in the morning when Frankie opened the bedroom door. Naked, hair mussed and tangled from sleep and the imprint of a pillow on her cheek, she looked at us with confusion.

Then the sleep vanished from her eyes as she laser focused on Coop. I didn't have to say a word. She just walked across the room to crawl onto his lap. I rescued the coffee cup as she wrapped her arms around him.

At the first choked sound of his sob, I moved to wrap them both up into a hug. He clung to Frankie and I held onto both of them. It took time, but eventually, she coaxed him back into the bedroom.

I'd have left them to it, but she caught my hand and Coop gave me a faint smile. "Stay, Bubba. I think we'll all feel better."

I could do that. "Come on then, both of you. In bed." Frankie vanished into the bathroom to pee, when she came back out, she had a washcloth. She used it to clean Coop's face and I gave them a beat while I made sure the hotel room door had the safety bar on, then I shut down the lights.

Back in the bedroom, I climbed in on one side of Frankie as Coop curled up on her other side.

"I'm here," she whispered to him.

"I know you are," he said. "I'll tell you tomorrow…or maybe the next day. Right now I just—I just want to hold you and the babies. Is that okay?"

"It's always okay."

She stroked her hand through his hair as he lay there, one hand on her stomach. I kept a hand on her hip, just being there for both of them. Eventually, Coop's breathing evened out. It was a little nasally from his tears, but Frankie didn't go back to sleep.

"He'll be okay, Angel," I said, rubbing my hand up and down her side. "Go back to sleep."

"I—"

"I know," I said, then nuzzled a kiss to her cheek. "We only have rehearsals tonight so I can afford to be awake. You sleep. I'll keep watch."

If he had bad dreams, I'd wake his ass up. But I'd be here.

"I love you, Ian," she said and I gave her hip a squeeze.

"I know you do, now be a good girl for me, and sleep." I dropped another kiss to her lips and she sighed.

It didn't take her long to drop off and while I could probably sleep, I stayed awake and read on my phone while I kept an eye on both of them. One luxury I had on the road, I could catch sleep when I needed it. Right now, they needed me to be on watch.

I could do that too.