Games We Play (38 page)

“Really,” he said, his voice a monotone, with no sign of interest.

“Yeah. Don’t worry, you and I are still good,” she said, smiling. “But you should know the things they’re going around telling folks about you,” she said.

“I know what they’re saying.”

“Good. I hope you’re not thinking about selling anything to this Hank person. I hope you know it hasn’t affected your good friends’ opinions of you.”

“It has affected some.”

“I said your
good
friends.”

He smiled at that.

“It’s good what we have here, the kind of town we are building, don’t you think?” she asked.

“I do,” he said, looking at her again, his smooth, old-Cooper smile in place. It was a thing of beauty. It spoke of confidence—sexy, with just a touch of humility.

“Good. I just wanted to make sure. We don’t want the kind of town this Hank person seems to want. No going back to the good old days. We’ve organized, and we’re behind you. A group of us, larger than I’d even imagined, will be in attendance at the upcoming committee meeting, and we’ll do whatever it takes. I thought you should know that you have support in this town, way more than you think,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome. I mean it. Whatever happened in your past should remain there. I’m glad for it, I think, because maybe it’s help shape you into a man you are today, the man who does so much for the town he loves. So thank you, and I’ll let you get back to what you were doing,” she said. She turned at the door, swiveling to face him again.

“I like Kendall too, by the way. She can handle your past, in case you were wondering if you should tell her,” she said, a smile on her face.

He chuckled as he watched her walk through the door, moved by her words and by the words of the others who’d stopped by to lend their support. Portia, the Colonel, and the list went on…And it sounded as though they were only a trickle of a much larger stream of people who were personally in his corner, come what may. It was both overwhelming and comforting. It was past time for him to talk to Hank. He’d put if off long enough. But he needed to do something else first. He needed to talk to Kendall. Portia was right. She could handle his past.

“W
hat’s up?” Kendall said, standing in the doorway to Cooper’s office. She was here tonight, just like she’d been last night. He smiled.

“Close the door and come in here,” he said, with an expression she couldn’t decipher. He pulled her into his lap when she reached his desk.

“You look entirely too serious,” she said, looking into his eyes.

“I used to belong to a white-supremacy group,” he said, and she could feel the tension flow through his body at the release of that sentence. She felt his eyes on her. He was searching for a change in her expression, a sign that she was repulsed by his words. A few minutes of quiet passed before she spoke.

“I know,” she said, which surprised him, took all the remaining words right out of his mouth. He felt a little light-headed, as if an unconscious weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Who knew that he’d been carrying it around?

“I suspected there was more to you…your story from the beginning, and then I met Jeremiah, and you felt you had to distract me. I was curious. And after Hank showed up, I began to meet the other people of Coopersville, people who were nowhere near as friendly to me, and it all pointed in that direction,” she said.

“How long have you known?” he asked.

“A couple of weeks.”

“When were you going to say anything to me? Why didn’t you ask?”

“Would you have told me?”

“No, maybe, I don’t know…Why didn’t you ask?”

“I was waiting, hoping that I wouldn’t have to. That if I was important enough to you, if our friendship was important enough, you’d tell me yourself.”

“What if I hadn’t?”

“Then it would have told me something about you and our friendship,” she said.

“So how much do you know?”

“All of it.”

“How?”

“I asked the Proctor brothers.”

“You did what?” he said; not in any lifetime would he have thought that was possible. “When?” he said, totally flummoxed. Of all the things he’d expected her to say, this had not been on his list.

“It was one of those nights that you were in the back doing something, and I was sick of them staring at me. They were carrying on with their usual whispering about how I didn’t belong here, about how you and I shouldn’t be together. Although they never did a good job of whispering. They
wanted
me to hear, so usually I just did my best to ignore them. That night I was tired of it, I guess.

“So I went over and sat next to Hugo, the less scary of the two. It was funny actually. You should have seen their expressions of shock. They had plenty to say on the subject of the Coopers, particularly Cooper Three’s penchant for hanging out with the riffraff—Juan, Luis, and now me. There are loads of riffraff living in this town,” she said, laughing. “But I listened to what they had to say, which was plenty. He told me your whole history—the things your father did to you, leaving you after he’d beaten you, living with that old nigger man and his wife.…I can only assume they were referring to Aunt Myra and Uncle George with that comment,” she said, shaking her head and chuckling. “You got to love the Proctor brothers,” she added, chuckling still, “what you see is truly what you get with those two.”

“They can be dangerous,” he said.

“I know. I’m not stupid, but I’m also not afraid of them.”

“I know you’re not stupid. Still, please don’t underestimate them.”

“I won’t.”

“So what do you think about what they told you?” He asked.

“You’re not that boy anymore,” she said, leaning over and placing a kiss on his nose.

He laughed and pulled her close and lost himself in her kiss for a while, a place he now knew he needed to be. He loved her, all of her challenge and spirit.

“I can’t believe you talked to them,” he said after he pulled away from her kiss.

“They weren’t too bad to me, not in a room full of people.”

“True.”

“I can’t allow them to bother me. African Americans have lived through some pretty unimaginable things at the hands of people like Stanley and his brother. Some of it was really, really painful, and I totally understand how it’s hard for some to move beyond that period. I totally understand the anger, the resentment, and the hate that comes from living through what my ancestors had to live through. I get it. I acknowledge it. But
I
can’t live that way. And I especially won’t let it interfere with you and me, or me and anybody else I want to date. I don’t want to live my life hating or holding on to hate.”

“Myra and George became my refuge before my fork in the road.”

“Your what?” she asked.

He chuckled. “That’s my name for what happened to me that night my dad beat me. Before that happened, I used to sneak off to see the Millers when Cooper One and Two came calling. My dad hated that I would choose them over him. He did his best to make life difficult for them, but your aunt and uncle stood up to him, and they wouldn’t back down. They saved my life.”

“What happened to Hank? Why does he hate you so much?”

“I don’t know, really,” he said. “We were buddies—me, him, Juan, and Luis spent our time golfing and doing whatever else we could get into. Hank lived with his mom and dad. His father was the town drunk, and Hank’s mother…

“Hank’s mother was a horse of a different color. She was unhappy with her life, and she wanted more than her husband could provide, always had. She was mean too, mean to Hank and his father, but she was very beautiful. She started sleeping with my dad, because she thought he could give her more of the life she deserved,” he said.

“Your father? Oh,” Kendall said.

“Yes. Oh.”

“Where was your mother?” she asked.

“She was gone by then.”

“Gone where?”

“Another story for another day,” he said.

“Cooper One and Two loved women, and in this town, they both usually got whomever they pursued. It was hard to pass up all that money, not that they were ever going to get any of it, but the allure made more than a few put up with more than they should have,” he said.

“You didn’t like your father.”

“I hated him, and if it’s any consolation, he hated me too, or so I thought. At the end, when he was dying, he started to regret some of what he’d done. But I think he knew I was different, knew it from the start.”

“So your dad and Hank’s mother…” she prompted.

“Got together, right under Hank Sr.’s and Jr.’s noses. Made no attempt to hide it. And as it turns out, it wasn’t their first time together. She and my father had a history. They’d been together the year before Hank was born, and off and on since then. She told Hank Jr. that Cooper Two was really his father, but that he should keep it a secret.”

“That could not have been nice for either of the Hanks.”

“It wasn’t. Cooper Two was a bully who took pride in rubbing the whole thing with Hank’s mother in his dad’s face,” he said.

“Is Hank your brother then?”

“No, he isn’t, but until DNA testing became available, we thought he might be. He went with us everywhere, and Senior tolerated him at first. He started to use him more after the fork-in-the-road incident, treating him like his long-lost son until he grew tired of Hank’s mother’s continued attempts at blackmail. It was a hard blow to Hank Jr. not to be a Cooper. My father was a better choice than his alcoholic one, which isn’t saying much at all, but he really wanted to be Cooper Two’s son. Way more than I ever did.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh,” he said, and went silent for a few minutes. “His mother moved on to greener pastures, and left him behind to live with his newly confirmed biological father, Hank Sr. As you can imagine, that didn’t turn out so well for him.”

“So that ended your friendship?”

“It didn’t survive that, no. He’d started to stay away from us—me, Luis, and Juan, that is. He began to believe he could be the next Junior, replacing me. Hank didn’t have much, and he wanted to be better than his parents. But by the time he left town, which was right after he graduated high school, he hated anything and everything Cooper.”

“Too bad,” she said.

“Yes, too bad.”

“So this is like some type of revenge, the reason he’s back?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. Although I would have thought any reason for revenge would have died with my father,” he said.

“So you help Myra now? You’re the one who provides the financing for her projects?”

“Most of them, yes. I satisfied my desire to give it all away at once by giving it out more slowly. Didn’t think we Coopers deserved any notice.”

“You included yourself in with the Coopers who don’t deserve it.”

“Yes.”

“I understand why you’d think that. This is better, anyway, don’t you think? You and Aunt Myra quietly helping the people of this town, changing the composition and the mindset of the place,” she said. He smiled for the first time since starting this conversation, relaxing visibly. She smiled too. “See, that wasn’t so bad, you telling me about your past. Nowhere near as bad as you thought.”

“No, it wasn’t, Professor. Not bad at all.” He smiled and pulled her in for a kiss. He loved her—he knew that now with certainty.

It was near midnight, and she was in his bed, sitting astride his lap, nude and working to rid him of his clothing. She lifted his shirt and placed a few kisses on his smooth, firm, muscular stomach. She sighed. She was so happy to have gotten beyond his past, a major hurdle if they had any hopes of making their relationship long term. She smiled against his stomach, so pleased with the gift he’d given her, the gift of trust.

She continued to kiss him, moving down his stomach until she reached the part that she currently held in her hands. She kissed him on his tip, spread a few kisses down his lower stomach, and then took a small nip. She heard his breath catch. His hand went to the back of head, grabbing hold of her ponytail as he slid his hips into position beneath her. Using his hold on her hair, he gently guided her, putting a little pressure on her head, pushing her down to take more of him into her mouth as he lifted his hips to meet her. He moaned at the contact, her mouth warm and wet around him, her tongue softly stroking him, slowly moving around the tip of him, teasing him. Then she slid down again, taking him in deep, and he moaned. She felt that moan, and she smiled inside as she heard his breathing go all catchy with pleasure.

She looked up and stared at him. His eyes were closed in pleasure, but then he opened them and looked at her, his gaze hot enough to heat water.

She smiled and slid her lips around him again, moving up and down, and he helped her, using his grip on her hair to show her what he wanted, what he liked. He moaned again at the way her mouth felt around him, so warm and wet, and then he pushed his hips up ever so slightly, not much, an inch or two maybe, his hand still on her head, her tongue skimming the tip of him. He lowered his hips ever so slightly, an inch or two, nothing more.

“Kendall,” he said, giving another, more tortured groan this time as he moved his hips up slightly, careful not to use too much force—he just wanted to hold on to this, the soft wet feel of her mouth moving over him. He groaned again, his hips continuing their slow movement, downward this time, and then back up, his hand firm on her head, enjoying this slow pace like crazy, the wicked good feel of her lips touching him, tasting, teasing, his skin itching with the way this felt, her lips covering him, her head in a stationary position as he moved his hips in a slow circle around her mouth, then out and back in, movements in and out of her mouth that would be best measured in centimeters.

“Kendall,” he said again, his senses overwhelmed by his slow glide into and out of her mouth as he moved his hips, the smooth, satiny glide of her mouth moving around him, and he moaned again, careful to not lose control.

He moaned again, continuing to move her head, his hands on the side of her face now, his finger at the point where her mouth touched him. He opened his eyes again and watched as she touched him, kissed him, stroked him, softly; he moved her head slightly so that she took more of him into her mouth, moving her head faster to accommodate his growing need.