Warning(s); Just fluff. Established relationship, that’s really it.
Summary; A saturday morning in late July.
Word Count; 1.7k (blurb! just dipping my feet into writing for Cooper.)
Author’s Note; I had an author’s note written out, but Tumblr didn’t save my draft, so long story short, I will continue to write about NHL players as well as expand to NBA players, but I will not be writing about the Hughes brothers for the foreseeable future. My relationship with writing has gotten a lot better, so I am planning on posting once at week at minimum. Hope all is well in your side of the world! Canucks got screwed in the draft lottery and I’ve been sulking a bit over that, but I’m cautiously optimistic for this off-season. Cheers! - Honey
"Get off me."
The words come out as barely more than a strained rasp, your voice still thick with sleep and rough around the edges. Your throat feels dry, scratchy in that particular way it does when you've been breathing through your mouth all night because someone's considerable weight has been restricting your lungs. The weather has been warming up in Dallas. Not that you learned this from checking your phone or watching the morning news, but from the thin sheen of sweat that's been gathering between your bodies when you sleep pressed together the same way you have all winter. What worked perfectly fine in January, when Cooper's body heat was a welcome furnace against the cold, has become substantially less practical now that it's late July and the Texas heat is beginning to assert itself with authority.
You exhale another breath, slower this time, and try to shift your body even just a few inches to the left. Your right arm has gone partially numb from being pinned at an odd angle. "Coop, seriously."
His 6'9, 220-pound frame is currently draped across you like a weighted blanket designed by someone who has fundamentally misunderstood the assignment. His long legs are sprawled out comfortably, one thrown over both of yours, the other stretched toward the end of the bed where his feet definitely hang off the edge. Your full size mattress was never meant to accommodate someone of Cooper's proportions, but he's never said a word about it. His arms are locked around your waist in a grip that would be endearing if you weren't currently overheating, his face buried somewhere in the vicinity of your shoulder and neck, his breath warm and even against your skin.
You try again to push out of his grasp, pressing your palms against his shoulders and attempting to create even a few inches of space between your bodies. The effort elicits a low groan from him, the sound rumbling up from his chest, still more asleep than awake.
"Stop moving," Cooper mumbles into your neck, and his arms immediately tighten back around your waist like a reflex, he’s done this a hundred times by now. It's not a suggestion, either. It's delivered with the same confidence he brings to everything, whether he's setting a screen or telling you he's ordering Chipotle for dinner.
"It's too hot for you to be laying on top of me right now, Cooper," you say again, hearing the edge creeping into your voice. The heat is beginning to make you genuinely agitated now, that specific irritation that comes from being uncomfortable in your own skin. Your tank top is sticking to your back. Your hair feels damp at the nape of your neck. You'd turned the air conditioning off last night before bed because the weather had promised a cooler evening. And it had been, the temperature dropped beautifully once the sun went down, and you'd fallen asleep with the windows open to a pleasant breeze. But the morning has betrayed you. The sun has been up for maybe an hour, and it's already turning into a scorcher, the kind of day where the heat builds and builds until the entire city feels like it's baking under a relentless sky.
"I told you to leave the air on," Cooper says, and you can hear the smirk in his voice even though you can't see his face.
You roll your eyes at his words, the audacity of being right while also being the primary source of your discomfort, and flick him squarely on the forehead with your index finger.
"Ow," he says, dramatically, like you've genuinely wounded him rather than barely made contact. But it works. His grip loosens just enough, and you take the opportunity to push out of his arms entirely, rolling toward the edge of the bed and planting your feet on the floor.
The apartment is quiet in the way it only is early on weekend mornings, before the neighbors start moving around, before the traffic picks up on the street below. You pad down the hallway to where the thermostat glows softly on the wall, and you bump the air conditioning back on, hearing the system whir to life somewhere in the walls. Then you detour into the bathroom, flipping on the light and squinting against the brightness. You splash cold water on your face, letting it run over your wrists too, feeling your body temperature start to regulate. When you glance up at the mirror, your reflection looks exactly like someone who just got overheated by their enormous boyfriend: hair a mess, face flushed, tank top twisted slightly to one side.
By the time you make your way back into the bedroom, Cooper hasn't moved much from where you left him. He's still sprawled across the bed, taking up approximately seventy percent of the available mattress space, but he's rolled onto his side now. The sheet has slipped down to his waist. His eyes are still closed, but you can tell from the change in his breathing that he's more awake now, hovering in that in-between space. Upon hearing your footsteps against the hardwood, he cracks one eye open.
"Come back," he says, and his voice has that low, mumbled quality it always has first thing in the morning, before he's really spoken to anyone.
You do come back, because despite the heat and the sweat and the mild suffocation, cuddling in bed with Cooper is one of your favorite things to do. You fall back into your side of the bed, the left side, the side closest to the closet door. The side that's become yours over the months Cooper has been splitting his time between here and everywhere else his life takes him. The mattress dips under your weight, and immediately Cooper's large frame shifts to engulf you again, though he's more careful this time. He doesn't put his full weight on you. Instead, he molds himself against your side, one arm draped over your stomach, his hand slipping under the hem of your tank top to rest against your bare skin. His fingers trace absent patterns there—circles, figure eights, nothing in particular. It's something he does without thinking, a habit you've noticed over time. When he's tired, when he's content, when he's thinking about something else entirely, his hands find you and just move in these slow, gentle patterns.
"Better?" he asks, his breath tickling your shoulder.
"Mhm," you confirm, even though you're still warm. The air conditioning hasn't had time to do much yet, but at least you're not being fully compressed anymore.
It's summer now, the off-season for Cooper, which is both a blessing and a strange adjustment. You'd gotten used to the rhythm of his season: the games, the travel, the structured chaos of the NBA schedule. You'd learned to exist in the spaces between his obligations, to build your relationship in the gaps. But now it's late July, the season is over for everyone, and Cooper's time is his own again, at least for a while.
He'd spent his first blip of freedom back in Newport with his family, visiting his parents, his brothers, just spending time in his childhood home for cookouts and boat days and all the normal things that Cooper missed during the season. You'd seen the photos he sent: Cooper and his brothers on the dock, Cooper holding someone's baby cousin, Cooper looking genuinely relaxed in a way he never quite does during the season. Then there were a handful of other obligations, a couple of sponsor appearances, a youth basketball camp where he'd spent three days teaching defensive rotations to kids who barely came up to his elbow, a spontaneous trip to New York.
But after all that, he'd come back here. To Dallas. To your apartment with its full size bed and its temperamental air conditioning and its kitchen that's approximately the size of his walk-in closet. He'd shown up at your door with his duffel bag and that particular smile he gets when he hasn't seen you in a while, and he'd folded himself into your space like he'd never left.
That was two weeks ago, and he hasn't mentioned leaving. His stuff has gradually migrated out of the duffel bag and into your drawers, onto your bathroom counter, onto the coat hooks by your door. His sneakers live by the front door now, the size of them hilarious in comparison to your own. There's a second toothbrush in the holder in your bathroom, and your refrigerator has more food in it than it has in months because Cooper cannot survive on the random assortment of leftovers and questionable yogurt that you consider adequate groceries.
Cooper doesn't have any obligations right now, not really. Besides his self-regimented summer training, which he does every single day without fail. You've learned that this is non-negotiable. No matter how lazy the morning, no matter how late you stayed up the night before, no matter what else is happening, Cooper will do his workout. He frequents a gym about fifteen minutes away from the arena, and every day around mid-morning he'll extract himself from whatever you're doing, change into activewear, and disappear for two or three hours. He'll come back sweaty and energized, endorphins making him chatty, and he'll drink approximately a gallon of water while telling you about whatever podcast he listened to or whatever funny thing his trainer said.
But that's later. Right now, it's still early. The sun is filtering through the curtains you never quite close all the way, casting the room in a golden haze. Cooper's breathing has evened out again, and you think he might be drifting back toward sleep, lulled by the slowly cooling air and the comfort of having nothing he needs to do.
You turn your head slightly to look at him. His face is relaxed, peaceful in a way it rarely is when he's awake. There's always something active behind Cooper's eyes when he's conscious. He's always thinking, always processing, always three steps ahead. But like this, asleep or nearly asleep in your bed on a Saturday morning with nowhere to be, he looks younger. More tranquil.
Today feels like one of those days where he'll probably want to do nothing, which is completely fine by you.
