Sugar & Spice

19|not alone at Hudson

From one chaos to the next, Aria Willows was finally back at Hudson University and leaving the troubles of Tom Landry behind her - for now. As she was soon leaving back home for the trial of Brody Jensen the team had decided to speed up the process of getting the expose on Laura Patterson published which would be accompanied by the charges filed against her and in order to speed things up they needed help. Cooper Knight had been speaking to Michael for quite some time after their first phone call and Michael had managed to convince Cooper to join the team; and now he was flying to Hudson for a visit. 

The problem with having Cooper at Hudson was of course the presence of Laura Patterson. If she saw Cooper spending time with Michael, or any of the other's, Laura would catch on and possibly ruin everything they'd worked for. So Cooper had arrived in the middle of the night and was posted up in a hotel room not too far from campus, where the team had arranged to meet him. Leo was holding his lap top bag close to his chest as they walked into the lobby of the hotel. 

"Can you stop holding that bag as if it was stolen money?" Jane encouraged Leo and shoved him with her elbow, in his side.

"Everything that we are going to use is in this bag, it's making me paranoid about someone stealing it." Leo mumbled and looked at Jane and Aria when she spoke.

"The back up hard drive is in my bag so you can calm down a little bit," Jane whispered to Leo, "as long as that bag doesn't leave your hand or your watch; nothing is going to happen to the material." 

Peyton, Keith and Michael had arrived before them as they were concerned in being seen by Laura. It all felt like a movie with the way they were acting and what had happened in the past few weeks; Michael's drugging, stealing the video off Laura's computer and now having Cooper Knight at this hotel...it was a drama and action movie rolled in to one. As they reached the room Peyton opened the door and ushered them inside to meet Cooper. It was good to finally see Cooper Knight in person and he appeared to share the sentiment as he smiled toward them all. He was tall, a buzz cut and piercingly blue eyes and had a tattoo just below his neck - it was a spider web. 

Aria was the first to reach him and she stretched out her hand for his hand which he quickly shook, "We're really happy that you're here, Cooper, all of us are!" Aria said and skipped the formalities.

He studied her for a moment, up and down, and then smiled. Aria had seen that look before in so many other's and she knew exactly what it was about; Brody Jensen. At this point she had come to terms with the fact that Brody and her would always be connected somehow, it was the same for Jane and Rebecca.

"I've read a lot about you, Aria Willows," Cooper said with a smile before he looked at Jane, "the same goes for you Jane Nolan; I hope you nail that son of a bitch in a few days." 

Aria and Jane smiled at Cooper. Even if his look had said he knew what happened he understood more than anyone what had happened to them, because he had suffered too. Even if Jane wasn't looking at her anymore Aria still continued to smile, because even if her world felt like a storm right now it felt good to know that she were among people that fought for justice. Tom used to be her mountain in the wind, the one she could always cling to when things fell a part, but now she needed to find something else to cling to - at least for a little while. 

"Let's get started before some of us has to go to class," Peyton urged and asked Leo to open his bag to spread out the material they had, "this is everything we have so far, including a certain video that Michael has told you about - but we found pictures too." Peyton made sure to spread them out on one of the beds, for Cooper to see.

Aria had found them first but she hadn't really studied them that well, but what she saw made her cringe. It seemed that Michael wasn't the only person she had caught, timely, while under the influence or possibly drugged like she allegedly had done to Michael. It was a pattern for her to do this because she knew that neither of these boys would have done this willingly. Cooper seemed to share Aria's feeling of cringe as he moved away and stared out of the window instead.