Meg Cabot - Big Boned

“Cooper.”

“I’m serious, Heather. This guy may have been into stuff you have no idea—no earthly idea—about. Do you understand me?”

True, I’d tried telling him before. But he’d mentioned something about not wanting to be my rebound guy.

Hadn’t Tad proven more than adequate in this position, however?

Still. Poor Tad! How could I do this to him? He has that question he wants to ask me, after all.

But come on. Tad doesn’t even own a TV! Could I seriously be entertaining the idea of spending the rest of my life with a guy who wants me to run five kilometers with him every morning, avoids all meat and meat by-products, and doesn’t even own his own television?

No. Just… no.

“Cooper.”

“Just let it go. All right? Any thought you might have of solving your boss’s murder yourself? Give it up right now.”

“Cooper!”

He loosens his grip on my shoulders and unhitches his own a little. “What?”

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” I say, after taking a deep breath.

I’ve got to do this. I’ve just got to swallow my pride and tell Cooper how I feel. Granted, standing outside my place of work the day of my boss’s murder may not be the best place or time. But where is the best place, and when is the best time, really, to tell the guy you love unrequitedly that you love him unrequitedly?After you’ve already accepted a marriage proposal from another guy?

“What is it?” Cooper asks, looking suspicious—as if he thinks I might break into some song and dance about how it’s important for the sake of my employment that I personally look into my boss’s murder.

“I,” I begin nervously, feeling as if my heart has suddenly leaped into my throat. He has to have noticed, right? Between my madly throbbing pulse and the tears in my eyes, he has to know something is up, right? “The thing is, I—”

“Heather!”

I jerk my head around in surprise as a familiar figure lopes toward us from West Fourth Street. It’s Tad, his long blond ponytail bobbing behind him, a white paper sack in either hand.

Oh God. Not now.Not now.

“Heather,” he says, when he reaches us. His eyes, behind his gold-rimmed glasses, are concerned, his expression worried. “I just heard. Oh my God, I’m so sorry. You weren’t there when it happened, were you? Oh, hi, Cooper.”

“Hi,” Cooper says.

And then, as if suddenly becoming aware that they were still resting there, he drops his hands from my shoulders and takes a step away from me. He looks almost… well. Guilty.

Which is absurd, because it wasn’t like we were doing anything to feel guilty about. Well, I was about to confess my undying love for him.

But he doesn’t know that.

“I came as soon as I heard,” Tad says to me. “About your boss, I mean.” He glances over at the news vans. “Looks like they’re out in full force, huh? The vultures.” He heaves a shudder, then hands me one of the paper bags. “Here. I picked up some lunch for us.”

I take the bag he’s offering, touched by the gesture. I guess. “Oh, you did? Tad, that’s so sweet… ”

“Yeah, I stopped by the student center and picked up two three-bean salads,” Tad says, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. “And a couple of protein shakes. I figured you might need something high in nutrients after the shock you had—and we had that awful breakfast… ”

“Uh.” Three-bean salad? Is he kidding? Do I look like a girl who could use a three-bean salad right about now? Three-bean bowl of chili with about a pound of melted cheddar cheese on top would be more like it.

And our breakfast hadn’t been awful at all. Unless he means awfully delicious.

Still, trying to be gracious, I say, “Thank you so much, Tad.”

“Sorry I didn’t get you anything, Cooper,” Tad says, with a rueful smile. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

“Oh,” Cooper says affably. “That’s okay. I filled up on three-bean salad earlier.”

Tad grins, knowing Cooper is joking, then adds, “Oh, and hey… congratulations. On being an uncle. Well, future uncle.”

Cooper looks confused. “Excuse me?”

I can tell Jordan may have let his fans know about his soon-to-be-expanded family, but he hasn’t bothered calling his own brother. Nice. Also, typical of Jordan.

“Jordan and Tania are expecting,” I explain to Cooper.

Cooper looks horrified—the appropriate reaction, under the circumstances.

“You’re kidding me,” he says. He doesn’t add,What happened? Did the condom break, or something? because he’s too classy. You can tell he’s totally thinking it, though. Because anyone who knows them would think that.

“Yeah,” I say. “Apparently their publicist posted it on their websites this morning.”

“Well,” Cooper says. “That’s great. Good for them. I’ll have to go buy them a… rattle. Or something.”

“Yeah,” I say. Then, seeing that Tad is standing there clutching his bag of three-bean salad and protein shake and looking at me with his eyebrows raised expectantly, I say, “Well. We better go eat, I guess. Before someone else gets shot.”

No one laughs at my little joke. Which I guess wasn’t really all that funny after all. But, you know. Like Sarah says: Often we resort to gallows humor in an effort to break the connection between a horrifying stimulus and an unwanted emotional response.

“Yeah,” I say, taking Tad’s arm. “Okay. So, let’s go eat. See you, Coop.”

And I steer my boyfriend inside.

Tad is concerned about me. That’s what he keeps saying. That he’s concerned.

“It’s just,” he says, “that it could have been you.”

I put down my fork. We’re sitting in the Fischer Hall cafeteria, in a dark, out-of-the-way corner where, if Tad wanted to, he could ask the question he’d shied away from asking this morning, because the time wasn’t right.

Although truthfully, if the time wasn’t right when we were both naked in the shower, the time probably isn’t right when we’re eating three-bean salad a few hours after my finding my boss with a bullet through his head.

“No,” I say. “It couldn’t have been me, Tad. First of all, there isn’t even a window in my office. Remember? That’s what the grate’s for. To let in a little natural light. And second of all, whoever shot Owen obviously had something against him. No one has anything against me. I’m not that kind of person.”

“Oh? And Dr. Veatch was?” Tad laughs, but not like he actually thinks what I said was very funny. Especially the part about the grate. I get that a lot (people not actually thinking I’m as funny as I think I am). “A balding, divorced, middle-aged college administrator?”

“Who knows?” I shrug. “I mean, it’s not like I ever saw him outside of work. Maybe he was selling babies on the black market, or something.”

“Heather!”

“Well, you know what I mean.” I pick through my bean salad with my fork, hoping that through some miracle I’ll come across some stray piece of ham or macaroni something. No such luck, however. Where’s a damned rigatoni when you need it?

“All I’m saying is that there’s a killer on the loose, Heather,” Tad says urgently. “He went for your boss, a man who as far as we know is about as threatening as—as this three-bean salad. That’s all I’m saying. And I’m… well, I’m really glad it wasn’t you.”

I look up from my plastic container with a laugh, thinking Tad’s kidding… I mean, of course he’s glad I wasn’t the one who got shot in the gourd, right? There’s no need actually to say this out loud, is there?

But apparently, to Tad, there is. Because he’s also reaching across the table to take my hand. Now he’s looking tenderly into my eyes.

Oh God. He’s serious. What do I say? What can I say?

“Um. Thanks. I’m… uh. I’m glad it wasn’t me, too.”

We’re sitting there like that, holding hands across our three-bean salads, when Sarah strides up, a mulish expression on her face.

“Hello,” she says, but not in a salutary greeting sort of way. More in a where-have-you-been? sort of way. “There you are. Everyone is looking for you. There’s an emergency administrative housing staff meeting in the second floor library upstairs. Like,now. The only person who’s not there is you.”

I jump up, sliding a napkin over my mouth. “Oh my God, really? I had no idea. Sorry, Tad, I better go—”

Tad looks perturbed. “But you haven’t even finished your protein shake—”

“I’ll be all right,” I assure him—no offense, but that protein shake had tasted like chemical waste. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

I refrain from kissing him good-bye—it’s the cafeteria, crowded with residents on their lunch break, and our relationship is still supposed to be purely student/teacher, after all—and settle for giving his hand a quick squeeze before I follow a still scowling Sarah past Magda’s desk, out into the lobby, and up the stairs to the second floor library, which still contains the nineteenth-century mahogany bookcases that once held the Fischer family’s extensive leather-bound collection of classic literature, and where we’ve attempted, numerous times, to keep books, only to have every single one of them stolen, no matter how battered or cheesy-looking the cover, and then sold on St. Mark’s Place.

The room is still amazingly popular, however, with residents who have a test to study for and who need to get away from their partying roommates. I’m the one who made up and posted the Shhhh! Quiet Study Only Please! and Group Study Down the Hall in Rm 211 signs and posted them under the plaster cherub moldings that a hundred years earlier had looked down on sherry parties, not kids pounding on Mac-Books. But whatever.