The biggest thing I learned from the change in our relationship was that I really liked kissing Cooper. Like the way he felt so perfect in my arms, kissing him just felt…right. It wasn’t even close to any of my previous boyfriends. Kissing them had been nice, but kissing Cooper was a world of its own. I was kind of delighted, too, to watch as his eyes would light up whenever he spotted me in town unexpectedly, the emotions playing across his face as they did – happiness, embarrassment, delight, and sometimes a bit of desire, too. Which didn’t bother me in the slightest.
The next thing I learned, though, was that Cooper really liked romantic gestures. Showing up unexpectedly made him happy, but bringing flowers or chocolates when I came made his night. He’d practically glow all night and couldn’t stop smiling. I even gave his character in our online game flowers once when I couldn’t come over one weekend, and while he complained at me about it, I could hear the smile in his voice and the happiness there, too.
I was in the process of preparing a romantic gesture – a much larger one – one Friday afternoon, finishing up some paperwork and working on throwing some things into a box, when the news on the TV caught my attention. I’d just had it running in the background, set to news for Avenglade because I was trying to catch the weather forecast for the weekend, but suddenly I paused what I was doing to stare at the screen.
“ – attempted robbery at the eastern branch,” the news reporter was saying. “The robbers held bank staff and several customers hostage for over an hour before police were able to surprise the robbers from a back entrance. All the hostages were rescued safely without injury and most of the robbers were apprehended, but one was killed during the scuffle.”
My frowned deepened as I recognized the bank in the background of the reporter’s screen. That was one of Cooper’s branches. Just being the branch manager, this would clearly affect him, but had he been there? I grabbed my phone, about to call him, when my question was answered by the camera shifting slightly and catching a glimpse of the hostages near the back of an ambulance, all huddled around with blankets over them.
Cooper was one of them.
Without really thinking about it further, I snatched up my wallet and keys and rushed out to the hangar. I needed to get to Cooper ASAP, and thankfully I had a faster method than driving. It still wasn’t quite fast enough for me and I felt agitated the whole flight – about an hour – desperately needing to get to him. Cooper had been in danger and I hadn’t even realized it. Why hadn’t he called? Well, it had been a bank robbery, come to think of it – the robbers probably took their phones, and for all I knew he didn’t even have his back yet. Besides, that brief view I caught of him sitting there, he looked like he was in shock, just staring at nothing. He probably wasn’t even thinking about calling me, he was just trying to deal with what happened.
He needed me right now, and I was too far away. That frustrated me, but every mile closer was something of a comfort until I at last landed, took care of getting my plane in my rented hangar, and then summoned a cab to take me as close to the site as possible.
Like I figured, the streets were still blocked off, so I wasn’t able to get all the way there via cab. After I paid him, I rushed forward on foot until I was stopped by a police officer.
“Sorry,” she told me, “this is a crime scene, no one’s allowed in.”
“My boyfriend was one of the hostages,” I explained urgently. “Cooper Doyle?”
“Ah, right, they’ve called family in for the hostages.” She checked a list of names on a clipboard and then lifted the tape to lead me towards where a tent was set up. “They’ve been checked out and as far as I know, they’re all fine, but you can talk to your boyfriend about that.” She held open the door for me. “Good luck. Get an officer to walk you both out when you leave, okay?”
I spotted Cooper sitting by himself, still staring at the ground unblinkingly, and made a beeline for him. “Cooper?” I asked, wanting to hug him tight but opting to instead run my hands over his arms and sides, confirming that he really wasn’t injured.
He blinked a little and made an effort to focus on me. “Tommy? What – how are you here?”
“I saw it on the news,” I explained, relieved to find that he did seem physically unharmed. With that confirmed, I went ahead and hugged him as tight as I dared. “I flew here as soon as I saw – I needed to get to you.”
He automatically hugged me back, but it seemed like he was having a delay in processing what I said. “You…flew here? Already? But it’s only been a few minutes!”
I let him go just enough to pull back so I could look into his face. “It’s been a couple of hours. It’s after work hours now.” I showed him my phone for proof, and his eyes widened a bit when he saw the time.
I really wanted to take him home, but given how out of it he seemed, I wondered if he should see a doctor. Was he even allowed to leave yet?
“Cooper, have you talked to an EMT yet?”
“Yes.” His hands were tightly gripping my shirt like he was afraid I was going to disappear, but I didn’t mind. “They said I’m okay,” he added after a moment.
I kind of wanted confirmation of that, and glanced around the tent to try to find someone to talk to.
Eventually I did managed to confirm that Cooper was, in fact, fine, just stunned, which probably was normal under the circumstances. He’d already given a statement to police, though he didn’t entirely remember doing so, but I soon got permission to take him home.
As I carefully guided him outside after the police officer escorting us from the secured area, I noticed he glanced towards the ambulance. When I followed his gaze, I spotted a body bag.
Ah. Right. Someone had died during this, but one of the robbers. Maybe that was why he was so shaken – seeing someone die could do that.
I tried to block his line of sight a bit with my own body and gently herded him along, taking his keys from him before he could even attempt to try to drive and securing him in the passenger seat instead.
I only made one stop on the way home to get something warm for us to eat – well, mostly him – then waited to talk until we were inside his apartment, seated at the dining room table, and he’d started munching on fries automatically.
“Are you okay?” I reached out to gently rest my hand on top of the one he wasn’t using to eat. “I’m sure that was terrifying. Do you want to talk about it?”
He bit into a fry and took a couple moments to chew before answering. “I wasn’t actually as scared for me as my employees, everyone there today was human, but we were able to get the alarm off as soon as it started so police were there pretty quickly. I was trying to figure out if I should do something, but I’m not particularly useful in situations like that. I mean, I don’t have magic, just shifting, and I suppose I could bite people but that’s not necessarily any more help against guns than just trying something in human form.” He shrugged a little, and while his gaze was slowly becoming sharper, he still didn’t seem back to normal.
“I’m glad this happened on a Friday,” he added. “At least we don’t have to worry about opening this weekend. I’m kind of worried some of my employees may have PTSD, but the bank higher-ups are supposedly really concerned about their people so I’m hoping they’ll offer counseling or something.” He ate another fry. “The police said they might have more questions for me after they look at the crime scene and review the footage better and everything – since I’m manager – but it is pretty clear it wasn’t an inside job so none of us are under suspicion.”
He actually seemed pretty calm talking about this – even worrying about his employees – which meant that maybe he was getting back to normal? Or maybe the issue was what we hadn’t talked about yet.
I hesitated, not entirely sure I wanted to bring this up. “Did you see the one person die?”
As I was worried about, a strange look flashed across his eyes. “No, not – not exactly. I saw right after, though, when he was bleeding on the floor. It’s just,” he paused, then shook his head a little as if to clear his head. “It was Sean.”
Now it was my turn to be surprised. “As in…your first boyfriend?”
“Yeah.” He sunk down into his chair a bit. “I don’t get it, he wasn’t the kind of person to rob banks when we were together, I’d never have thought he’d do something like this, but then – then there he was. He recognized me, made some comments about predictably boring I was and how if we’d stayed together he could have gotten an inside scoop on banks, but then one of his friends told him to shut up and he did.”
Cooper fidgeted with a fry, then looked up at me, his eyes filling with alarm. “Did I do this? By breaking up with him? Our breakup wasn’t great, but I didn’t think it was so bad that it would push him to something like this, but then something must have, and he’s changed so much and – ”
“Hey, hey,” I soothed, reaching up to gently take his face between in my hands and run my thumbs across his cheeks. “That was what, eight, nine years ago now? If he held on to what happened that much, that’s definitely not your fault. Hell, even if he went out the next day and robbed a bank, that’s still not your fault. That’s him making his own choices, poor ones at that. It’s been years, Cooper, you don’t know what happened since then but it’s clear he’s changed a lot. You’re not responsible for him reaching this point.”
He still looked anxious as he looked back at me, his fingers tightly gripping my sleeve. “But – I didn’t see anything like this in him, and we dated for over two years! This was the guy who helped me survive senior year right after my family died, and he cared about me once, and now – was this always in him and I just couldn’t see it? Am I that bad at reading people?”
“No, honey, you’re not. The person you knew back then wasn’t someone who would rob a bank, you said that yourself. But people can change. They can make choices which change who they are. To be honest,” I admitted, “anyone’s really capable of anything, even the people we want to think would never harm anyone are capable of it. But does that mean they usually will? Probably not. Sean made a series of choices which led him to today and that’s on him. Who he was today, you couldn’t have predicted it back then.”
Cooper blinked a little. “Did I?” He seemed to almost be talking more to himself. “We dated for over two years before I agreed to sleep with him. I mean, I’m demi, so it’s not like I would start out necessarily wanting that, so that was part of the reason to wait, and then my family had just died, and I was figuring out where I stood with everything, and I told him I wanted to be at least 20 before I did, but…I’m not sure if that was really it. Honestly, I mostly agreed because he kept saying we should since we’d been dating for so long. I did think he was my future, though, but…sometimes I wonder if something was holding me back more than just the excuses I was giving.”
“Eh, you don’t owe sex to anyone, even if you’ve been dating a long time.” I shrugged a little. “He shouldn’t have been pressuring you if you weren’t ready. But that’s kind of beside the point, I guess. To answer your question, I don’t know. Maybe you were sensing warning signs you couldn’t quite see yet. Or maybe you were just scared of your first time and now in hindsight you’re adding reasons that weren’t initially there. Whatever happened back then, what you do know is that you haven’t seen him in years, he changed, and that is not your fault. Nor does it speak to your ability to assess people’s characters. I bet if you had met him again yesterday, for instance, you’d have realized he wasn’t someone you wanted to be around anymore.”
He relaxed a little, and I released him in response, but moved to grab his hand instead and link our fingers together.
“What happened in the past is just that – the past,” I told him. “You’re a different person than you were back then, too. Hopefully a happier one.” I gave him a smile and a wink.
He relaxed some more and gave me a small – but real – smile back. “I am, I think. And I have a good career.” He took a deep breath. “After we broke up, I saw him routinely on campus and he just made a point of snubbing me, if he could, or ignoring my existence, but that was it. I think you’re right – whatever happened to change him must have happened after that.”
“Of course I’m right,” I told him with a cheeky grin, earning an eye roll from him.
Then I had a question of my own because I felt a little confused. “I thought he broke up with you when he found out you are a supernatural? But you made it sound like you broke up with him and he didn’t say anything about that at the bank, right?”
“Oh.” He looked almost embarrassed. “I mean, both are right. We were going to sleep together, and I made a, uh, mistake that kind of gave away that I wasn’t human, so when I explained, he got mad and kicked me out. But he was so upset and some of the things he said made me worried that he might end up saying stuff publically and maybe even finding Hunters, so there’s this witch Dad knew through Mason and she gave me a memory potion.” He looked almost uncomfortable admitting this. “I don’t know that I feel great about erasing someone’s memory, but I thought it was necessary under the circumstances. So anyway, the potion erased the three days prior, so he forgot about what happened, and then I just broke up with him instead and told him we weren’t right for each other and stuff. He wasn’t happy about it but I knew I couldn’t keep dating him after knowing what he felt about me being a supernatural.”
I was a lot less bothered by discovering that he’d erased a short period of someone’s life than he was. Mostly because it was an unfortunate facet of being a supernatural – sometimes we had to do stuff like that to avoid, well, dying.
“Sometimes memory potions are necessary, and it sounds like this was probably one of those times. I don’t think you need to feel guilty about it.”
Thankfully, my words seemed to reassure him.
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