Sour Cherry(17)

“But you said Vasquez allied with Outriggers against club vote, so aren’t you really just supporting him after everything is over and done with?” I kept going, accentuating every point by stabbing my index finger into the table. “By turning me over to my club, you’re fueling Vasquez’s agenda. Your club obviously doesn’t want to do business with mine. Appeasing the Outriggers will cost you more votes than it will gain.”

“You’ve thought this through.”

I leaned back in my chair. I didn’t know whether to be amazed by his downright disregard for my life or his blatant stupidity. “And you haven’t.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Tension built between us, the easy-going banter I’d cherished, gone. I wasn’t sure if he actually believed what I’d said or if he’d already set up the dominos for his own plan. The blank expression on his face hid my fate. He calmly took a swig of his soda, aggravating me further. How could he just sit there and pretend he wasn’t willing to serve me up like a pig at a Hawaiian Luau?

I exhaled in rush. This whole covert affair had taken all my energy and my patience. “Right now, I just want to play with balls.”

The soda shot from his mouth and directly onto my shirt. Cooper’s hand shot to his mouth in what I assumed was an attempt to keep the rest from spewing at me, but how could there be anything left? He tried to hide a smile behind that hand, but the laughter and crinkling of the skin around his eyes gave him away. His face sobered instantly as I glared at him in annoyance. He set his drink down. “I don’t think now is the time—”

I motioned with a jerk of my arm toward the pen of colorful spheres. The cold soda seeped through my shirt and against my skin. I shivered reluctantly and ground my teeth together. “Balls.”

I stood without giving him the chance to answer and stalked toward the small entrance of the giant jungle gym. The sign beside the entrance told me I was too tall to play, but it’d never stopped me before. I took my sandals off, tossed them in a cubbyhole and climbed inside.

The smell of disinfected plastic calmed my irritation and made my heart beat faster. I loved racing down the brightly-colored tubes and spying on people from thirty feet in the air through bubbled windows, but the ball pen had claimed my heart the second we pulled into the parking lot. I hesitated on the edge of the pen’s entrance. The blue, red and yellow balls stared at me expectantly.

After the past couple days I’d had, I deserved this.

I launched face first into the orgy of balls, the low rumble of plastic-on-plastic melting my stress. It was childish, and a completely awkward way to show off my playful side, but I didn’t care. After a few laps around the pen, I stilled, lying face up, and stared up at the netting above me.

“Have you ever wished you could feel the way you did as a kid? No stress. No guns or politics.” I didn’t really know if Cooper had heard me, but it didn’t matter. It’d been so long since I felt this kind of peace. The balls pressed into me from every side as I remembered flashes of my childhood. “My dad would let me stay in jungle gyms like this for hours. Said it was good to enjoy the small things.”

Movement from the corner of my eye caught my attention. A second body launched into the pit and I moved just in time to avoid a head-on collision with Cooper’s elbow. He fought his way on top of the balls then smiled, almost to himself. “Haven’t done that since I was a kid.” Turning his cocky grin in my direction, he stopped my heart for a split second. “That was fun.”

To see him so carefree and happy did wonders to my body. I wanted to stretch out like a cat, basking in his radiance. “You need to lighten up. Enjoy the small things.” I laid my head back and closed my eyes.

The plastic spheres rumbled again as Cooper shifted for what seemed like forever.

“Can’t you sit still?” I tried to keep my eyes closed, to live in the moment and enjoy the peace, but when he didn’t answer, my curiosity got the better of me. I opened my eyes to find Cooper’s body much closer than it’d been a moment before.

“I like watching you sleep,” he said. Whispers of his breath drifted across my neck and face. Warm, potato-ish from the fries and soft, they sent a shiver down to my toes. Poised above me, Cooper brushed a stray piece of hair out of my face. The zing that followed his touch went straight to my ladyparts.

“I’m not as—”

His lips silenced me, but I didn’t mind. Not at all. Wrapping a hand around my midsection, he pulled me into him, deepening the kiss as if he were a starved man hoping to siphon air from my lungs. Our tongues slid over each other in a loving caress and the world disappeared.