Roger had been his chief for years, and he had never said that. Monroe, another Marshal in their office, had worked with Cooper all that time too, and he’d disappeared from Cooper’s life completely as soon as the cuffs had clicked around Cooper’s wrists.
It had mostly been radio silence from everyone else he’d known, too. He had hopped around too much over the years to have anyone who really knew him. No family, no real friends.
He hadn’t had anybody on his side in so long that he barely even remembered what it felt like—not just to have someone believe him but to have someone believe in him.
When Gretchen said she knew what kind of person he was, it was the only confirmation he’d ever really had that he was the person he had always hoped he was.
He didn’t know if he could ever explain all of that to her, but he had to try. She deserved to know what this meant to him.
“No one—” He had to clear his throat. “No one’s ever said anything like that to me before.”
No one had ever even called him Coop before, for that matter. They’d never gotten familiar enough with him to nickname him.
“Not even your family?”
He shrugged, feeling awkward about the whole thing. There was no way to talk about his childhood without making the other person feel like they’d been put on the spot.
Nobody ever wants to come to a pity party, his uncle had told him once, so he’d learned a long time ago how to be brief.
“My parents were fly-by-night kind of people, always looking for the next get-rich-quick scheme, and I don’t think a kid really fit into their plans. They just kind of shuttled me off from relative to relative, and nobody was too happy about it. I guess I just never really settled down anywhere. I always felt like I was a board game piece that had wound up in the wrong box, like a Monopoly top hat in with a bunch of Scrabble tiles. Then I’d move again—but only over to a box of Yahtzee dice. It was even like that with my team, and I was—”
He had almost slipped up and said something about shifters. That would have made her trust in him plummet for sure. The last thing he needed to give her was a curveball revelation about people turning into animals.
He picked the story back up relatively smoothly, though: “And I was supposed to have more in common with them than with anyone. We were all doing the same job, and you know you have to care a lot about this job to stick with it and do it right.”
To be fair, that was part of it. The job should have given them something huge in common. Their inner animals—Roger’s jaguar, Cooper’s griffin, Phil’s dragon, and Monroe’s basilisk—should have just given them even more.
But Cooper had felt as far away from them as he’d always felt from everyone else.
“I figured if I couldn’t fit in there, I wasn’t going to fit in anywhere else, either, so I just decided to make the best of it and stop hauling up stakes all the time. I didn’t want to be like my parents. But it never did click. And no one in my office believed me.” He’d never let that hurt him before, but now that he knew what it felt like to have someone trust him, he realized how much that lack of trust had ached all along. “Roger, my old chief, visited me sometimes at Stridmont. But that’s just because he feels responsible for me even though he thinks I’m a bad seed. He doesn’t actually like me.”
Then again, he realized he couldn’t know for sure that Roger really liked Phil or Monroe, either. Roger was affable in a cliché, fatherly kind of way: he handed out shoulder pats and back slaps, he told bad jokes instead of making conversation, and he never said a harsh word about anybody. But underneath, there was never any real sense of warmth.
And when Roger concentrated on the thing he cared about the most—his research into shifter types—his chummy, dad-like looks had changed completely. In those moments, he had looked strange and relentless.
Roger’s slightly cheesy good nature had seemed real enough when it was all Cooper had had. But now that he’d spent time with Gretchen, now that he’d seen Martin Powell again, he could feel how flimsy Roger’s friendliness had always been.
Maybe—just maybe—Roger not warming up to him had had as much to do with Roger as it had with him.
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. She reached over and clasped his hand. “For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t have fit in. I like you. Martin likes you. Keith didn’t want to like you, but he still loosened up enough to make a joke with you, which means he likes you as much as I’ve ever seen him like anyone.”
He got a chuckle out of that but then immediately felt guilty about it, considering poor Keith was still back at the hospital with bandages wrapped around his head. “He is going to be okay, right?”
“One hundred percent. He’s... got good genes.”
Good genes?
His heart sank a little, and he scolded himself for it. If what Gretchen meant was that Keith, for all his prissiness, looked basically like a bronze statue of a Greek god, well, that wasn’t any of Cooper’s business. Maybe the sparring Gretchen and Keith had done was just a barbed form of flirting.
It was enough that Gretchen trusted him. He couldn’t possibly ask her to feel the same electric charge he’d felt.
She couldn’t possibly fall for him the way he’d fallen for her.
“Oh, sure,” he said. He was trying for “upbeat” and had landed more on “squeaky.”
“Are you okay?”
Get a grip, he advised himself.