Cooper woke up early the next morning and just lay in bed for several minutes, one arm draped over his eyes, debating going back to sleep. His head hurt and he didn’t feel ready to start the day.
He needed to pee really bad, though, and he knew there’d be no going back to sleep once he got up, so in the end he didn’t have much choice.
When he headed out of the bedroom, Cooper found Logan sitting on the sofa in the den. He was doing something on his laptop.
Logan gave Cooper a nod of acknowledgement. “Bianca’s still asleep, so I thought I’d come down here to get some work done.”
Cooper squinted at him. “It’s early for work.”
“Yeah, but we’ll be busy later.”
“It’s Saturday.”
Logan shrugged. “It’s like that sometimes.”
There was still a part of Cooper that expected Logan to tack on something like, when you have a real job. Cooper was starting to get the feeling he wasn’t the type of person who said things like that anymore.
“Is there any coffee?”
“Not sure. There might be some basic things in the kitchen?”
Cooper peed, then went upstairs and scoured the kitchen, even going so far as to climb up on the counter so that he could peer into the very back corners of the cabinets. No coffee.
“No luck?” Logan asked as Cooper headed back downstairs.
Cooper shook his head. He felt more upset about that than he probably should have, but he used caffeine to self medicate his ADHD and being without his one crutch at a time like this made him feel even more vulnerable.
“We’ll get some when we go out. Mason gets grumpy if he doesn’t have his as well.”
Cooper took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. Right. They’d be heading out soon enough and they could just get some then. He could survive not having it first thing in the morning. “I’m going to go jogging.”
“It’s too early for work, but not too early for jogging?”
“Early is the best time for jogging. Or late. If you go in the middle of the day, it’s too hot.”
Logan shook his head. “Wish I had that kind of energy.”
Cooper started out jogging around the lake, but then he spotted a walking trail and headed off down that. He weaved through dirt paths, then came out the other end onto a suburban street. He spotted one of those tall, pyramid shaped rope climbing frames in a park and jogged down a steep hill towards it.
When he reached the park, he made his way up the climbing frame and lay down across the ropes near the top to catch his breath.
For several minutes he just lay like that, eyes shut and the breeze cooling his skin. Finally, he grabbed hold of a rope and pulled himself into a sitting position.
How the fuck was he going to get back?
He’d jogged until he was exhausted, directly away from the lake house and down a hill that he would now need to get back up. The return trip had never entered his mind.
Back at home, he could always rely on Ellie and Abra to bail him out of his own stupidity. They weren’t here, though. But… his brothers were. It was Cooper’s first instinct to call Mason, but he was probably still asleep. He called Logan instead.
“Hey, what’s up?” Logan answered.
Cooper lay back down across the ropes. “Help, I’m stranded.”
“You’re… stranded?” Logan sounded like he didn’t know whether to be concerned or if this was some kind of joke.
“I jogged down a hill. It’s really big, and the thing is that the opposite of down is up, so…”
“You want me to come pick you up?”
“If you wouldn’t mind. Sorry. I know you were busy working.”
“Nah, it’s fine. Where are you?”
“Uhh…” Cooper said, his brain completely short circuiting because usually he and his roommates just used an app that shared their location through GPS.
“Do you have a map app on your phone, or…?”
“Oh!” Cooper switched to maps, found his location, and relayed it to Logan.
“Okay. I’ll be there in like five minutes.”
Cooper hung up the phone, then climbed down and went to wait near the road. He was still struggling to adjust to this new version of Logan. The boy he’d grown up with would have been frustrated with him for not thinking out his jogging route, but this man was a different person entirely.
Cooper had always loved Logan beyond mere family obligation, unlike how he felt towards his parents, but he would have been lying if he’d claimed he’d ever liked him. For as long as Cooper could remember, they’d had an antagonistic relationship. Mason had always been the big brother figure, looking out for him and taking his side. It was strange to be getting those same vibes from Logan. He wished now that he’d made more effort to keep in touch.
Logan took longer than he’d said, over fifteen minutes, but when Cooper got into the car, Logan handed him a hot take out cup full of coffee he’d clearly just picked up at a drive thru.
“You got me coffee?”
“Yeah.”
Cooper stared down at the cup in his hands. “Thank you.”
“No problem. It’s pretty around here. Do you want to go for a bit of a drive around?”
Cooper nodded as he took a deep swallow of the hot coffee.
Logan pulled away from the curb. “How have you been?”
“Today, or…?”
“In general.”
“I’m fine. Really. I don’t care if I don’t have lots of stuff or a big fancy house. As long as I have my friends and the right balance for my mental health, I’m happy.”
“That’s good. I wasn’t trying to judge you or how you live your life. I know I have in the past, but I want to be different now.”
Cooper winced. He had been kinda defensive there. “Sorry. I’m still trying to figure out the kind of person you are now.”
“It’s fine.” Logan offered him a small, vulnerable smile. “So am I, if I’m honest.”
“He seems like a good guy.”
“He’s trying to be.” Logan was silent as he drove, his fingers tapping against the steering wheel. “You know, I’ve been jealous of you since the day you were born.”
“Jealous of… me?”
“Mm. Actually, since before you were born. I remember. I was four and Mason was three. He was excited that he was going to have a little brother, and I was jealous that he was excited.”
“Aw.” Cooper took a sip of his coffee. “I guess it makes sense that you would feel like that, though.”
“He only got more obsessed with you after you were born. He was always asking if he could hold you and then as soon as mum would let him he wanted you to be part of our games even though you could barely sit up on your own. And then you started getting older, started developing your own personality and opinions, and of course you liked Mason more than me, because he’d been the one who’d been including you all your life.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“It all happened before you were old enough to remember. I guess to you, as far back as you can remember, you and Mason were like best friends and I was an asshole.”
“Well…”
Logan shook his head, his gaze fixed on the road ahead of him. “I was. I’m telling you how that happened, not debating or excusing it. There was this part of me that was convinced that if I could just find the right way to be better than you, the two of you would look at me like you looked at one another. If I beat you in games, or got better grades than you, or was good at fucking golf. Those were the things mum and dad were telling me mattered. Being better than other people. I think part of me knew, when I looked at you and I saw how creative you were, how you could play with someone else without feeling the need to argue about anything, how much kindness you had in you… I think I knew that the things that really mattered were the things you really were better at than me. That it was easy to beat this kid who was four years younger than me and had severe ADHD at lots of things, but none of it would make me any more likeable.”
“We always loved you. We fought a bit, but I think a lot of siblings do when they’re young. I’m sorry you felt left out.”
“I’m not blaming you, Cooper. It was my own fault. Instead of working on being a more fun person to be around, I convinced myself I was better than both of you. I mean, you both had this diagnosis, this problem, and I was the one succeeding at all the things mum and dad told me were important. As if who has better grades should matter when you’re playing games with your brothers in the backyard.”
Cooper wished they weren’t driving. He wanted Logan to look at him. Maybe it was easier for him to say all this when he didn’t have to, though. “We were kids and mum and dad fed us all a bunch of bullshit. I don’t blame you.”
“I’m not looking for your forgiveness. I just wanted to say, you know. I said a lot of terrible things to you when we were kids, and that’s not how I feel now and it’s not even really how I felt then. I think you’re a great person and there are a lot of things about you that I respect.”
“Oh.” Cooper found himself staring down at his coffee again. Logan’s name was written in sharpie on the lid. “Thank you.”
“I remember once, when you were still in university, I’d gone to pick you up for a family event. We were talking about a movie we’d both watched and you just casually mentioned that you thought one of the main male characters was hot.”
That startled a laugh out of Cooper. “I remember that. You seemed so uncomfortable.”
“I was! I mean, I’m not homophobic, but you just dropped it so casually. I didn’t know how I was supposed to react.”
“You were cool about it, though.”
“I tried to be. Mostly I was just confused, though. You were dating a girl at the time, and it seemed like a pretty serious relationship. Why make yourself vulnerable by sharing something like that when you didn’t have to?”
Cooper found himself smiling. “I don’t know, man. I didn’t have some big plan to come out to you or anything. I didn’t really think it through before saying it.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured in the end. And, honestly, there’s something about that that’s powerful as fuck. Letting yourself be vulnerable is a brave, strong thing. And I never did. The thought of it scared the fuck out of me.”
“What changed?”
“Bianca.”
“Ahh.”
A gentle smile eased some of the tension away from Logan’s face. “She’s such a kind, empathetic person. Even if someone neglects their pet and she's upset about it, she’ll be the first one to bring up that maybe they didn’t have the money or the education to do the right thing, or maybe the owner was going through a mental health crisis or whatever. She goes out of her way to be kind, and at the end of the day I think that makes her so much better at her job. Say what you will about changing yourself for a woman, but I couldn’t be the kind of person I used to be and be good enough for her. I wanted to be with her, but she deserved better than what I was.”
“It doesn’t sound like you changed for her. Or… at least not only for her. It seems like those were already things you didn’t like about yourself.”
“Yeah, that’s true. It’s more like she lit a fire under my ass. I think it can be hard to work on yourself when you hate who you are. Change doesn’t come quick and you have to really be willing to face up to your problems.”
“You did it, though. You seem like a very different person these days.”
“I’m trying to be.” Logan sighed. “Anyway, what I really wanted to say was thank you. When I was trying to figure out what being a good person was, my mind always came back to you. I don’t think I would have figured enough out soon enough to not torpedo my relationship with Bianca if I hadn’t grown up with someone like you in my life. You taught me things mum and dad never could.”
Cooper’s eyes were fixed on his coffee. He didn’t know what to say. Ellie and Abra were always telling him he was a kind person, but he always took it as like… he didn’t have much going for him, but at least he wasn’t an asshole. He knew they probably didn’t mean it that dismissively, but he felt more comfortable interpreting it that way.
There was no way to misinterpret this as something flippant, though. This was a confession, a genuine expression of thanks and of appreciation, and he didn’t know what to say to that. “Can you pull over?”
“Uh…” Logan glanced at him. “Yeah, sure.”
As soon as Logan parked on the side of the road, Cooper leant over the centre console and hugged him as best as he could. This was two hugs in two days now.
Logan hugged him back, tight and warm. “If you ever need anything. Like, anything. Okay?”
Cooper nodded against Logan’s shoulder.
“I know Mason’s got your back too, and you’d probably call him before you called me, but you know. I’m here too, and I won’t hurt you anymore.”
Logan’s voice wavered on those last few words, and that was it for Cooper. His eyes welled over and a tear trailed down his cheek to soak into Logan’s shirt. He wished he could take this less wounded version of his brother back in time and they could all play hide and seek and ninjas and Lego together.
But no. The past was the past, and none of them wanted to go back there.
Cooper pulled away and didn’t bother trying to hide that he’d been crying as he rubbed tears away from his eyes. “Let’s go see if Mason and Bianca are up yet. I think today’s going to be a good day.”
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