“Don’t be a jerk-off.” Cooper reset the game — not a sacrifice as crappy as he’d been doing — and pushed the two-player option.
“Heard you after we walked out the door earlier,” Penn said.
Shit. Watching Zoe and her family walk out without him, even though he wouldn’t have joined them if they’d asked, had pissed Cooper off irrationally. Like an overgrown four-year-old, he’d smacked the closed door behind them. And maybe yelled a couple of choice swear words to the empty condo.
He said nothing as Penn took his turn.
“This is why people don’t break up on the phone,” Penn said as he pulled the darts off the board.
“Wasn’t my doing.”
“You don’t have closure that way. Then the next time you run into each other…” Penn shook his head.
“Tell your sister that.”
“Tell her yourself.”
“She doesn’t want anything to do with me.” Cooper threw the first dart of his turn so hard it bounced off the board and skidded across the slick floor.
“Seems like you want something to do with her.”
Cooper gritted his jaw — hard — on the urge to tell his roommate to fuck off. Reining in the need to smash the darts into the board, he managed to toss the next one gently enough to stick in the triple one.
“You can tiptoe around each other all weekend, I guess,” Penn said at the exact moment Cooper threw his third dart, distracting him just enough that he hit the bull’s-eye. Fucking figured.
Cooper walked to the board and slowly plucked out his darts. “You think I should get my ‘closure.’” He moved off to the side.
“What I really think you should do?” Penn tossed in a triple twenty. “Both of you should quit being so damn hardheaded.”
Coop let out a sardonic chuckle. “Good luck with that. Your sister is the most stubborn woman I’ve ever known.”
“Two peas in a pod.” Penn continued to nonchalantly kick Cooper’s ass with a bull’s-eye.
Cooper told him where to go.
“What do you want from her, Coop? You wanna get back together?”
“Two people have to want that for it to happen, dude.”
“Answer the question.”
Cooper took his entire turn without saying a word. Did he want Zoe back? God, he’d loved her. More than he’d loved anyone in his thirty-five years. But it was past tense, love with an ed on the end. Getting back together? He wasn’t going there. Not an option.
“I want her to not hate me,” he said quietly. How the hell had it come to them not being able to say hello, how are you to each other?
“So go do something about it. I’m destroying you so completely at darts it’s getting embarrassing anyway.”
Cooper narrowed his eyes at his roommate, not sure which of his statements pissed him off more. He shook his head. Penn was right about both.
Dammit.
He slammed his darts down on the table by Penn’s keys, felt for his own keys in his front pocket, and headed for the door. “Don’t wait up.”
Zoe paced from one end of the hotel room to the other, bathroom to balcony door, as her mother crawled under the covers of one of the beds.
“You okay?” her mom asked.
Pausing at the balcony door, Zoe moved the curtain aside and looked out at the waves in the moonlight. She would never get tired of the sight — Nadia had set them up with a primo view — but tonight, neither it nor the normally soothing roar was doing a thing to relieve Zoe’s agitation.
