No wonder she didn’t mind long car trips. They were a vacation from the pressure she put on herself at home.
“No one’s talking to your family,” Gretchen reassured Keith. “Martin’s not turning in an evaluation to them at the end of every week. There’s no all-unicorn bulletin going out on you. You’ve got time to figure things out.”
He exhaled, his breath puffing out in a white cloud. He looked as stubborn as ever, but he said, “I’ll think about what you said.”
She kind of liked that that was all he was promising. It would have been easy for him to promise her he’d change completely, but he was trying instead to make her only the promise he knew he could keep. It made her think that he took his word seriously.
Maybe he was a pain in the ass, but he wasn’t just a pain in the ass. And maybe, like Martin had said, he could grow out of it.
“Okay. Good.” She grinned at him. “I’m going to see if Dawes wants a snack.”
“Now you’re just doing this on purpose,” Keith said.
“Little bit,” Gretchen admitted cheerfully.
For a second there, she would have sworn Keith almost smiled.
Truth be told, she did like having a flimsy excuse to be extra-nice to Cooper. She didn’t know what to make of that. But as long as she paid attention to what that desire was making her do, and as long as she made sure it stayed on the right side of the stupidity line—unlike that handshake—then she didn’t see the harm in it.
Though maybe that was just because she didn’t want to.
She ducked back into the car for a second, the warm blast from the heater hitting her smack in the face while the rest of her was still outside in the cold.
“Do you want anything from inside? Drink, candy bar?”
He stared at her like she was some kind of beautiful natural phenomenon, like the northern lights or the ocean at sunrise.
It took her breath away. Their eyes seemed to lock together, like two magnets clicking into place.
She knew he had beautiful eyes—a clear, lagoon-like green—but this was ridiculous. How she was feeling was ridiculous.
And right, a little voice in her head said. This is the rightest you’ve felt in a long time.
Gretchen did her best to ignore it. That was what she was supposed to do with her secret voice, wasn’t it? That was the little voice of wishful thinking, and it was just her imagination.
“Just a Milky Way, if you really wouldn’t mind,” Cooper said. It felt like it had been a year since she’d asked him, but some logical part of her brain knew that it had only been seconds. “A Milky Way Midnight, the dark chocolate one, if they have it.”
“I love dark chocolate,” Gretchen said.
Cooper nodded. “The darker the better.”
She seesawed her hand. “Eh, there’s a tipping point. Once you hit somewhere around 85% dark, it falls over the bitterness line into ‘unbearable’ for me.”
“I guess I never paid that kind of attention to it before. I think you’ve been buying better chocolate than I have.”
“I have fancy tastes,” Gretchen said loftily.
Cooper smiled. “How fancy?”
Was he flirting with her? Was she letting him?
Yes and yes, and that worried her.
“You know. Nothing but the best boxed wine and supermarket cheese on Ritz crackers in all the land. To be consumed in my oldest bathrobe in front of the TV.”
His smile had turned wistful. “That sounds nice. I’ve never been a boxed wine guy, but I bet anything’s better than prison pruno: fruit cocktail and a bread heel fermented in some guy’s sock.”
Gretchen shuddered. “Tell me you didn’t drink that.”