Cooper

by Lagomarsino, Giulia

  “So, you walked out?”

  “Oh, I did more than walk out. I owned that hallway and shit all over his illusions that I would continue to be his doormat.”

  She chuckled, brushing the hair out of her face. “You definitely know how to make an exit. So, now what?”

  “Now, I use my skills for myself. I’m starting my own business. I don’t know why I thought I needed someone to employ me. I’m smart and I’ve been doing this for so long that I could do it blindfolded.”

  “So, what’s your plan for the next two hours? World domination?”

  “Don’t be silly. That would take me at least until tomorrow.”

  “Well, I think we should go out and celebrate tonight. I’m thinking a club and lots of liquor.”

  “Isn’t that what you did last night?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not like they won’t admit me because I was there last night.”

  “Then clubbing it is.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Coop

  “Dude,” Tacos laughed. “What the fuck just happened?”

  I shook my head, still dazed from sleep and tried to figure that out myself. “I don’t know.”

  “How could you not know?” Storm asked. “Did you do something weird in bed?”

  “Of course not. I’m not you,” I shot back.

  “So, why did she storm out of here so pissed?” Tacos asked.

  I scrubbed a hand down my face and tried to figure out what I had done that was so different from any other time we had been together. “I just keep fucking up. I snap at her when she’s trying to help. I fucking hate her touching me-”

  “Sounds like you have bigger issues. How exactly does sex work if you don’t let her touch you?” Storm snorted.

  “I don’t know. How do you come back from telling a woman you’re going to stick your pus in her?”

  That shut him up.

  “What’s the deal with her touching you?”

  I was saved from any more questions when my phone rang. It was Cap. “Yeah.”

  “I’ve decided that since your woman wants to help out that garage, you can take your team over there to help out. I’m sending Cazzo’s team along also.”

  I was irritated as hell now. When I said I thought we should help, I had been assuming that it would win me some favors with Becky, but now she had walked out and that ship had sailed. Now I had to actually go through with this and go work on rebuilding a site for people I didn’t even fucking know.

  “You know, that job will take a long time. Maybe we should have a few more teams join us over there.”

  “I’ve already got that all worked out. I’ve talked with Ryan and he has agreed to donate the materials and some workers, you know, so you don’t fuck it up. He’ll meet you at the garage at nine o’clock. Don’t be late.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered, angry that I was going to have to go out on a job instead of figuring out what the fuck had just happened with Becky and how to fix it.

  “What’s going on?”

  “We have a job.”

  “Cool,” Tony said, moving for the tunnels. “I’ll start packing up the SUV.”

  “Not that kind of job. It’s a construction job.”

  “A what?” Storm asked. “Did you say construction? Like, we’re securing a construction site?”

  “No,” I sighed. “We’re helping a mechanic rebuild his garage. It was burned to the ground, so we’re meeting Cazzo’s team and a crew from Jackson Walker Construction over there.”

  “Since when do we get involved in community projects?” Tony asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe this is something they did before all that shit went down,” I lied. For all I knew, maybe they did get involved in the community and this was just the first time since we had come here.

  “Don’t you think that’s something Cap would have told us about when he hired us on?” Tony asked. “Hey, by the way, if you’re employed here, you’ll be asked to work on community projects from time to time.”

  “What the fuck do you care? You’re still getting paid.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t do construction. Shit, I have delicate hands,” Tony griped.

  “Delicate hands to make all those delicate tacos,” Storm laughed.

  “Okay, delicate is the wrong word. I’m just not cut out for construction.”

  “Right,” I snorted. “Just killing.”

  “That’s different. Killing is cathartic. It’s like…”

  “Building a really good taco,” I cut in, grinning as he snarled at me.

  “I worked there for a week. Give me a fucking break.”

  “Come on,” I said, slapping him on the arm. “Let’s get ready to head to Pittsburgh. We need to leave in a half hour.”

  “Fuck, I really hate this job sometimes,” Storm groaned.

  Twenty-five minutes later we were pulling out of Reed Security and heading for the outskirts of Pittsburgh. I was still kicking myself for having suggested we help out, even though Becky probably would have gotten Cap to go along with the whole thing no matter what. She just had a way about her. Storm pulled out his phone and started scrolling through his contacts.

  “Who are you calling?” I asked.

  “Cap. I want to know how often we’re going to be doing these little side projects. Jessica was pissed at me. She had a whole fucking day planned for us.”

  “Uh…you should probably just leave him alone,” I said, hoping he would put down the phone. If he got on the phone with Cap, they would all know that they had to go out on this job because of me and my big mouth. They would know it was because of a woman and I would get teased relentlessly.

  “No, this is an unscheduled job. I think we all deserve to know how many of these we’re going to have to do throughout the year. Don’t you want to know?”

  I squeezed the steering wheel tight as I tried to come up with an answer that wouldn’t be suspicious, but also stop him from calling Cap. “You know, he’s been busy with Maggie lately. I bet he just forgot to mention it. It’s probably a one off.”

  “Yeah, well, I still want to know,” he said, pushing the damn button for Cap’s number. I reached across the seat without thinking and tried to snatch the phone out of his hands, but Storm was too quick and I couldn’t exactly jump out of the driver’s seat and tackle him. He looked at me funny as he swatted my hand away from him.

  “Yeah, Cap, how many of these jobs are we gonna be doing? You know, you didn’t even give us a head’s up that we’d be doing this kind of shit…” His eyes moved to mine and then he grinned. “Really… Uh-huh… No, I get it. Gotta help a man out when he’s trying to impress his lady.”

  He hung up and stared at me, but I refused to look over at him. He already knew. What was the point in engaging at this point?

  “So, what did he say?” TacoMan asked.

  “He said that Coop set this whole thing up. Apparently, he met Becky in the office and the reception was…chilly. He said Coop needed this to win over Becky.”

  Tony laughed from the backseat and Storm continued to stare me down. The more he stared, the more uncomfortable I got. Why couldn’t he just let it drop? Was it really the end of the world? He could do this one thing for me without being a total douchebag about it.

  “Look, I fucked up at dinner. I was just trying to get on her good side.”

  He didn’t say anything, but continued to stare.

  “It’s not like you’ve never done anything to impress your woman before. I freaked out on her and I was trying to win back her approval.”

  He still didn’t say anything, and it made me talk even faster for some reason.

  “Not that it matters now. You obviously saw that she walked out on me this morning.”

  I glanced over at him, but he just sat there with a shit-eating grin on his face. I cleared my throat and stared out the windshield, trying to ignore the hard stares coming at me. It was unnerving, which was the whole fucking point of all this shit.
r />   “Fuck you. I was trying to impress my woman and it fucking failed, alright?”

  I glanced over at him, but he just smiled and turned to look out the windshield. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You didn’t have to, asshole,” I muttered.

  Tony leaned forward between the two seats and tapped me on the shoulder. “So, if you and Becky are on the outs, can I say that this was my suggestion so I have a shot with her?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Becky

  My phone pinged with a text from Cap.

  The guys got a lot done yesterday at the garage. It looks like they can get the place up and running soon.

  That’s great! I typed out. Thanks so much for doing this for me.

  I’ll be collecting soon.

  I laughed out loud because I knew he was serious. Cap would never stop trying to get me back. Even when he wasn’t hounding me to come back to work, he would drop subtle hints that he had a really good job coming up. I knew it was only a matter of time before he put Coop on the job again.

  I took a break from working and stood to stretch my legs. Grabbing my coffee, I stared out at the neighborhood. I had never really done this before, just took the chance to check things out. I knew that there was a family right across the street from us. They had two kids that were maybe around nine years old. Most of the other houses on the street were older couples with kids that were about to go off to college, or had already gone.

  I took a sip of my coffee as I caught sight of someone watching me from a window in the house diagonal to us. It looked like old man Marley. The man was the biggest grouch I had ever seen. He swore at the mailman every day and yelled at the kids next door constantly when they were out. He was one of the few neighbors that I actually took notice of because he was always such a bastard. Right now, he looked like he was glaring at me, but it was hard to tell through the slats of his blinds. He jerked the cord and the blinds closed suddenly.

  “Cranky old bastard,” I muttered.

  “Who’s cranky?” Delaney asked, walking up behind me.

  “Old man Marley.”

  “What’d he do now?”

  “He was staring at me and then shut his blinds, like I was a creeper watching him.”

  “He’s odd. You know, before you moved in, the neighbors across the street had a dog. He was always yelling that the dog was shitting on his lawn, even though the dog wore one of those shock collars to keep him from wandering off the property. Well, this went on for about six months and then one day, the dog was gone.”

  “Did anyone find out what happened?”

  She shook her head. “No, but everyone in the neighborhood suspects that the old man lost it and killed the dog.”

  I gasped in shock. “He wouldn’t!”

  “I’m pretty sure he would. There’s something strange about that man.”

  “Yeah, but he’s got that more of a…retired man that hates young people vibe. Not killer.”

  She turned to me with a quirked eyebrow. “Last year, one of the teenage kids down the road walked on his lawn. He pulled out his shotgun and threatened to shoot the kid if he ever walked on his grass again.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. That man has some serious issues.”

  I watched the house for a few more minutes after she walked away. He kept his car nice and his house was always in tip top shape. Maybe he was just like that man from Gran Torino. Maybe he just didn’t like anyone. Still, I found myself going to my computer and running a background check on him and digging into his past. By the time an hour passed, I knew more about the man than I ever cared to know. And he was clean. He worked in a factory until it shut down in the nineties, and then he drove a bus for the school district up until a few years ago. There was nothing weird about him in any way. He just didn’t like people.

  The doorbell rang and since Delaney was in her bedroom with the music cranked, I walked to the door and opened it. A man in black glasses and a suit stood on the other side. He was skinny and tall, and he looked like something out of the fifties. His hair was slicked to one side and he had this geeky look to him that I found oddly charming.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Uh, yes, you’re parked in my driveway.”

  “What?”

  “Your car is parked behind mine and I need to leave.”

  I glanced around him to our empty driveway and then pushed him aside to look in the driveway next to ours. Sure enough, my car was parked in his driveway.

  “I’m so sorry.” God, this was embarrassing. We must have drank more than I thought at the club last night. “I didn’t even realize that I had done that. I even remember walking right up to the house last night.”

  “It’s okay,” he said with a small smile. “But I do need to leave.”

  “Right,” I said, turning for my keys. I slipped on my boots and followed him outside. “I’ll have to look at my security footage. I could swear that I parked in the right driveway.”

  He gave me a strange look that I couldn’t decipher and stepped back for me to get in my car. He looked back at his house and then went to his own car. He politely waited for me to back out before he got in his own and backed down the driveway, giving me a small wave as he left. When I got back inside, Delaney was waiting for me in the living room.

  “What was that about?”

  “Apparently, we parked in the wrong driveway last night.”

  “No,” she said, eyeing me like she didn’t believe me. “We weren’t drunk. There’s no way that we parked in the wrong driveway.”

  “That’s what I thought. I even remember walking right to our door. But how else do you explain my car being in a driveway other than our own?”

  Her eyes scrunched up in thought, but she shook her head. “I can’t explain it. That’s weird, right?”

  I nodded and headed for the computer. “I’ll check the feed.”

  I sat down and scrolled through the footage. Sure enough, I had parked in our driveway last night. Someone walked up to the car, but I couldn’t get a face because whoever it was wore a hat with an infrared sensor that blocked out his face.

  “Shit.”

  “Why can’t we see his face? What’s with the light?”

  “He’s blocking his face from the camera. I can get height and build, but other than that, I’ve got nothing.”

  “Well, can’t you houdini it and figure out what really happened?”

  “No, he walks in from the street. I don’t have the right camera angle to get where he came from.”

  “So, someone came onto our property and moved your car, parking it in another driveway for what?”

  I shook my head and scrolled through the rest of the camera feed, hoping I would see something. “There’s nothing. Maybe it was just a prank. Still, I think I’ll call Cap and have him come over and check things out.”

  Twenty minutes later, I had seven big-ass scary men on my property, looking for any clues of someone tampering with my security system and checking the property for any signs of someone sneaking around.

  Coop walked up to me, concern written on his face. “Are you sure that you didn’t meet anyone when you were out that would follow you back here?”

  “No. We had a few drinks and we danced. We didn’t talk to anyone but the bartender.”

  “What about your drinks? Did they make you feel funny?”

  “No, I’m telling you, everything was perfectly normal.”

  “What about Delaney?” he asked. “Is there any chance that she met someone last night and just didn’t tell you?”

  “Are you serious right now? I’m telling you what happened.”

  He shrugged, but his eyes still burned with an intensity that I always saw. Coop was just a serious guy, and it wasn’t very often that he let down his guard and actually smiled and joked around.

  “Look, I’m telling you that we went out, came home, parked in our driveway, and came inside to go to bed. We didn’t hear anything an
d I didn’t know the car was moved until that guy knocked on our door.”

  “What about him? Could he be the guy?”

  “That moved the car?”

  He nodded.

  “Why would he move our car into his driveway and then come ask us to move it back?”

  Cap interrupted us with a glance at Coop that I knew all too well. He thought that I was going crazy. “There are no signs of anyone walking around the property. There are no signs of anyone trying to break in, and I’m not sure how else someone would get your keys unless you’ve had copies made for someone.”

  “Yes, I constantly make spare keys for my car that cost hundreds of dollars, and then hand them out to random people.”

  “Becky, there’s nothing here. Other than the video feed, there’s no evidence for us to go off of. I talked with your neighbors and no one else has video surveillance. A few have standard security systems, but no one else is reporting a break-in or anything suspicious.”

  “And you don’t find that strange?”

  “Of course I find it strange, but there’s not much more we can do. I’ve called Sean and he agreed to have an officer patrol the area for a few nights.”

  “So, you think it was just a prank?”

  Cap sighed and glanced back at the guys. “I don’t know. This is fucking weird. Look, we’ve installed more equipment around the property, but you know all this could be solved by you moving onto the Reed Security property. I’m sure Coop would like to know that you’re safe.”

  Coop just stared at me, but I couldn’t say anything about our breakup. It wasn’t anyone else’s business, and I didn’t want everyone under the sun knowing what happened between us. Even if there had been witnesses.

  “Thanks for coming out.”

  “You’re sure about this, Becky? It would be safer if you were with us.”

  “You already know that’s not gonna happen.”

  “Alright. Call us if you see anything suspicious.”

  Cap let out a whistle and waved his hand in the air, letting everyone know that they were rounding up and heading out. But Coop still stood there. I was uncomfortable. I had been confident when I left, but I had anger on my side then. I wasn’t angry anymore. I was just hoping for change at this point, some sign that he was trying to do something about the state of our broken relationship.