Page 139 of Rhodes

He grins and pulls me into the same hard back-clap hug he's been giving me since we were twelve. He looks different after Spain. Darker, leaner, with his hair sun-bleached at the edges.

Still Coop.

"You look annoyingly healthy," I tell him.

"Spain does wonders when you're not living off dining hall food." He holds up the six-pack. "I brought tribute."

"Come in."

He drops the duffel by the front door and looks around the front room like he's checking whether anything changed while he was gone. His eyes pass over the couch, the coffee table, the kitchen beyond it.

"You good with me crashing here tonight?" he asks. "Nash offered his couch, but I told him I'd rather sleep in the street."

"Spare room's yours."

"Perfect. I'm out of here Sunday morning anyway. I want to be back in Charleston before I officially start the new gig Monday."

"Big corporate man now."

"Shut up." He shoulders the duffel again. "I'm still trying to figure out why they hired me."

"Because you're annoyingly competent."

"That's what my interviewer said."

"Did he use ‘annoyingly?’”

"Implied."

I follow him down the hall. He pushes open the spare-room door and tosses the duffel onto the bed.

The room is stripped back to what it was before Tallulah moved in. There's a new comforter, the desk is empty, and the dresser is bare.

Coop unzips the duffel and pulls out a wrinkled shirt.

"This is weird."

My stomach tightens. "What is?"

"Being back here." He glances around. "Feels like I was gone five years instead of three months."

"It was a long three months."

He hangs the shirt in the closet, and I look away.

"Come on," I tell him. "I've got food."

We end up on the front porch with burgers and beer, feet on the rail while the heat finally starts bleeding out of the day. Coop talks for most of the first hour.

He can't stop talking about Spain, the research program, and a professor who smoked through every field meeting.

"You would've loved the guys on the boat," he says. "They were mean as hell but like family."

"Sounds delightful."

"The captain was eighty if he was a day and could still outwork everybody on the boat."

"Probably because he didn't spend four months eating barnacles."