In My Dreams I Hold a Knife(43)

I could still hear those words: I’m telling you upfront. I need more. I need you over and over. Even remembering them brought heat to my face.

“But more’s not enough.”

“What do you want, then?” My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it rattling my rib cage.

He looked at me, green eyes serious. “I want everything.”

The words were like a spell. The weight of what I’d been holding back for a year hit me—meeting in secret, stealing time, wanting him so badly I ached with it, alone in my bed, trying not to think about what it meant that all I thought about was Coop, Coop, Coop. The truth was there, yet I hadn’t let myself look until now. Because I was afraid.

I knew what could happen if you loved someone with your whole heart.

“But Mint—” I started.

“You don’t love Mint,” Coop answered, so confident I would’ve laughed if I hadn’t been scared. Coop didn’t understand what it felt like to walk across campus with Mint, arrive at parties holding his hand. The way people looked at me: appraising, envious, wistful. The rush of being valuable. What it meant to me. I did love it.

“The drugs,” I said instead. It was my ace card, the only thing we ever fought about. Coop insisted it was low-level dealing, mostly pot and molly to college students, just to keep a cheap roof over his head and shield his mom from debt. He refused to sell the hard stuff, which nowadays meant tweak, sometimes heroin. He’d never sell that, he insisted, no matter how pissed it made the people above him. He wouldn’t mess with real addicts.

I’d never told him about my father.

“I quit,” Coop said, and waited for my reaction.

“What—when?”

“Yesterday. I told them I was out. It’s senior year, so I’ll be gone by May anyway, and I’ve saved up enough money. It’s time.”

I kissed the corner of his mouth. “I’m really happy to hear that.”

Coop turned his head, finding my lips, and kissed me hungrily. Still as urgent as the first day, a starved man.

“Jess,” he said roughly.

“What?” It was hard to talk, or breathe, when all I wanted was to kiss him.

“Say it.” He wrapped his arms around me and crushed me to him, pushing a leg between mine. Warmth bloomed where his leg rubbed me, and spread. I arched into the bed and he kissed me harder, pushing hands through my hair, lowering his body over mine. I ran my fingers over his shoulders, the hard planes of his back, feeling the dip at his waist, pressing him against me, wanting to feel his weight.

He tilted my head back. “Tell me you love me.”

There was a sharp crack behind us, and the glass shattered on the French doors leading to Coop’s backyard.

I screamed, scrambling to sit up, and Coop rolled quickly to his bedside table, groping for something.

A hand snaked through the broken pane on the door and untwisted the lock, swinging the door open.

“Fuck,” Coop hissed, tearing open his bedside drawer.

Two men walked into the apartment, glass crunching under their shoes. Though my instincts screamed not to, I couldn’t help it—I looked at their faces.

They were both tall. The one with long hair had a scar running diagonally across his pale face, so deep it changed the shape of his mouth. The one with a buzzed scalp had eyes so dark the pupils were drowned.

I froze, heart thundering. These were not good men. I could see the evil in their faces.

“Cooper,” said the one with the scar. “Bad time for company.”

Coop reached an arm across me like a shield, his other hand still rooting in his drawer.

The one with the buzzed scalp stalked to him and wrenched his hand from the drawer. He reached in himself and pulled out a long knife—a machete. “Nice try.”

Coop had a machete? Next to his bed, this whole time? That meant he knew he was in danger, no matter how much he insisted he wasn’t.

The man with the buzzed scalp pointed the tip of the knife at Coop. “I told you you’d regret trying to leave.”

“Fuck off,” Coop said. “I have neighbors. Cops are probably already on their way.”

The man with the scar smiled a jagged smile. “In this neighborhood? Nah. I’m sure we have plenty of time.”

My attention had narrowed to one place: The machete in the man’s hand. My body was so tense, so still, it was like I was dead already, suffering rigor mortis, head to foot.

“I’m not changing my mind,” Coop said, brave and stupid as ever.

The man with the scar walked closer, shaking his head. “Not only are you changing your mind, but you’re going to level up. From now on, weed’s for high schoolers. You’re on tweak, making us some real money.”

“I don’t know what I have to say to get this through your thick skulls—”

The man with the scar seized me, and I screamed, the rigor mortis broken. I scrambled in the bedsheets, trying to wrench my arm from his grasp.

He pulled a gun out of his jacket with his free arm and flipped the safety. He held it to my head, and my entire existence became a ring of cold metal pressed against my temple.

“Watch your mouth, or I’ll put something through her skull.”

Coop lunged at him, moving so fast I didn’t have time to react, knocking the gun out of his hand and shoving him to the floor.