Good Girl Complex(Avalon Bay #1)(94)

“Hey,” I say, knocking on his open door.

He pauses the game. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

Evan answers the unspoken question in the air. “He hasn’t texted me back either.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Hugging the doorframe, I don’t know what I came here for, but I was bored of stewing alone. I’m a doer, not a waiter. I hate sitting still. If Cooper wanted to punish me for our fight, this is doing the trick.

“Come here.” Evan jerks his head and picks up the second controller for his console. It’s several iterations old and running on a flat screen that looks like it was pawned after getting tossed out on someone’s lawn. There are dead spots on the picture and a crack in the frame held together by black tape.

My first instinct is that Evan needs a new one. As if he senses the thought, he gives me a knowing smirk that says not to bother.

Right. Boundaries. I need to work on that. Not everyone wants my help.

“You’re going to be this guy,” he informs me, then provides a rapid explanation of the game as we sit on the edge of his bed. “Got it?”

“Yep.” I grasp the gist of it, I think. I mean, my objective and how to move around. Basically. Sort of.

“Follow me,” he instructs, leaning forward.

It does not go well. We’re ambushed, and instead of shooting at the bad guys, I set off a grenade and kill us both.

Evan snorts loudly.

“I like the racing games better,” I confess with an apologetic shrug. “I’m good at those.”

“Yeah, princess. I’ve seen you drive.”

“Bullshit. I’m a great driver. I just prefer to go with a sense of urgency.”

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

I nudge him with my elbow as the level resets for another try. This time, I attempt to focus. We make it a little further before I get blown up again.

“This isn’t helping, is it?”

I bite my lip. “Not really.”

I don’t know why I thought sitting next to the spitting image of Cooper would take my mind off him. It’s weird, but I almost never see Evan and Cooper as remotely similar, their personalities diverging in so many ways. Yet if I’m being honest, there are times where I imagine how everything might have been different if not for the whimsy of Bonnie’s indiscriminate libido.

Whatever he reads on my face, Evan exits out of the game and sets our controllers aside. “Let’s have it, then. What’s on your mind?”

Though our rapport has evolved over the past couple months, Evan’s hardly the first person I’d turn to for a heart-to-heart. Most of the time he displays the emotional depth of Daisy’s water bowl. At this moment, though, he’s the next best thing to his brother.

“What if he doesn’t come back?” I ask in a small voice.

“He has to come back. He lives here.”

I let out a breath. “I mean, to me. What if he doesn’t come back to me?” My pulse quickens at that horrible notion. “I just … I can’t shake the feeling that it’s over this time. One fight too many and there’s no getting past it. What if Cooper’s fed up with me?”

“Okay.” Evan seems to ponder that for a second. It’s still eerie after all this time how his mannerisms exactly match Cooper’s, yet they’re like a recording where the audio doesn’t quite sync with the video. Everything’s a half second off. “So not to be a dick or anything, but that’s dumb.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. You remember my brother almost knocked my teeth out because I was an ass to you once, right?”

“Once?” I echo with a raised eyebrow.

Evan grins. “Yeah, well. Point is, it’ll take a lot more than a few arguments to run him off you. There was one summer Coop and I were at each other’s throats over I don’t know what, and we were beating the tar out of each other about every other day.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t mean shit. Fighting is how we worked things out.”

“But you’re brothers,” I remind him. “That’s a huge difference.”

“And what I’m saying is, Coop cares that much about you. You’re not staying here for the rent money or because he likes your cooking.”

He has a point. I don’t cook. At all. Ever. Not once. As for rent, every month I’ve been here I’ve left what I thought was a fair market value of a rent check on Cooper’s dresser, but he keeps refusing to cash them. So I always leave a backup with Evan.

“But …” My teeth worry my bottom lip again. “You didn’t see the look on his face when he stormed off.”

“Um. I’ve seen every look on his face.” He mugs for me, seeking a laugh.

Fine. That was sort of funny.

“Look,” he says, “at some point, Cooper’s going to stumble in piss drunk and grovel for you to forgive him once he’s come to his senses. He’s got a process. You just gotta let him work through the steps.”

I want to believe him. That despite all the ways we have absolutely nothing in common, Cooper and I somehow developed a connection stronger than what separates us, deeper than the scars that keep him up at night. The alternative is too painful. Because I can’t change where I come from any more than he can. If this is the distance our relationship can’t span, I’m not ready to consider what my new life would be without him.