Harder (26 page)

I was hard and willing, but it wasn’t like this.

I liked it, what that girl did to me. What Rita did, I hated it, and I liked it, but I didn’t
choose
it. Later, when I did choose, it was always fast and hard and impersonal.

Caroline’s the only woman I’ve ever touched like this. The only one who’s been my choice.

I don’t want to see myself as the loser of a series of battles, all the odds stacked against me from day one, but it’s hard not to wish I’d had more of this along the way.

More love. More touch.

More people who looked at me the way Caroline does, saw me like she does, asked me what I want.

I touch the loose fists of her fingers, and she grips my hands tight.

“Bed,” I say, barely audible. “Get on the bed.”

She does as I ask, clearing away the books. I turn on the closet light and flip the overhead switch off so it’s quiet and dark and we can be just the two of us.

She watches me strip. Watches me crawl up over her, strokes my arms and my shoulders as I lower down to my elbows to kiss her.

“How come you’re so much bigger?” she asks me.

“Landscaping. And lifting weights in Bo’s garage.” Burning off frustration and hatred. Trying to get rid of the habit of her, the knack for hope I’d picked up in Putnam.

“When I got off the plane and saw you,” she says, “I thought you were scary.”

“I felt scary.”

She widens her thighs to bring me between them. Lifts her hips to rub hot swollen slickness over my cock. “You feel good to me now.”

“That’s all I want. To be good to you.”

Her hand curls over the back of my neck. “Be good to me forever.”

“I hope I get to.”

She lifts her knees. Tips up her hips. Invites me inside. “We decide. You and me.”

I kiss her, my tongue delving into her mouth, my boundaries dissolving. She kisses me, her fingertips digging into my shoulder blades, nails biting crescent moons into my back.

When I can stand to pull away, I back off so I can tell her, “I don’t think I ever made a decision on you. It got made for me when we met.”

“Same here. You’ll recall I fainted.”

“Oh, I recall.”

“You were over top of me, just like this.”

“Thinking dirty thoughts.”

“Mutual dirty thoughts.”

“Even while you were passing out?”

“I think I passed out from how dirty my thoughts were.” I rest my forehead against hers, resisting the urgent message of my cock to make this happen now, now, now. She lifts her hips again. “You said you wanted to get inside me.”

“It was hot out. I said I wanted to get you inside.”

“It sounded like the same thing.” Another hint from her hips. “Would you?”

“Get inside you?”

“Yes.”

“We need a condom.”

“Not really. I’m on birth control.”

“I didn’t … It wasn’t like I tried to make you think. I wasn’t fucking other women.”

“Because you love me,” she whispers.

“Because I love you.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever told her.

She already knew, though. She’s known forever.

“I love you, too, West.”

“After all that.”

“You know I do.” She tightens her arms around me. “Come inside me now.”

She lifts.

I thrust.

Gliding, sinking, easy and hard at the same time, but perfect, because me and Caroline—that’s who we are. That’s the way we’re going to be.

Deep, deeper.

Hard, harder.

Fast, faster.

Clutching, gripping, grabbing, pulling, kissing, holding on. There’s nowhere to go and nowhere else we have to be.

This is what I want.

The first thing, the main thing—this woman in my arms, in my life. This woman next to me. As long as I’ve got her, I can figure out the rest of it.

I can do whatever I’ve got to do and be whoever I need to be to keep her.

There’s a reason they call it
falling
in love—because of the way it tips you ass over teakettle and then shakes your life up, hard.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing like it. No better drug. No adventure more fantastic.

But it changes things.

It changes you.

I got West back that November and fell in love with him all over again. It was like that Gravitron carnival ride where you stand against a wall and they spin you and spin you until the floor drops away and you’re stuck there by centrifugal force.

I never could stop myself from laughing on that ride. I’d try so hard to peel my hand off the side, lift my arm, wave at my sisters across the way. My oldest sister, Janelle, always tried fancy stuff, walking her feet up, posing kind of silly. Alison would be white-faced, scared.

I would laugh until my cheeks hurt, slain by the hilarity of my own helplessness.

It snowed early and often that winter, and West and I laughed so much. Talked so much. Fucked all the time, everywhere, completely helpless against the urge to put our hands on each other.

School. Sleep. Food. Sex. West.

I didn’t have the strength for anything else. I was falling, swooping, drifting, whirling around.

Laughing.

When I finally hit the ground, I hadn’t braced for the impact, but I was too dizzy, laughing too hard to care.

I wouldn’t have changed the ride for anything.

When the phone rings, I’m on West’s couch. I’ve got a library book in one hand, Frankie’s head in my lap, and no way to reach my cell.

“Can you get that?” I ask.

She glances at the screen as she hands it to me. “It’s your dad.”

“Oh.” My stomach sinks, and I’m hitting the answer button with my thumb when it occurs to me that the response has become ingrained.

When my dad calls, it’s because he wants to talk about the case, and talking about the case makes me queasy.

I drive to Des Moines and my pulse picks up on the interstate.

I walk past my attorney’s receptionist and start to sweat.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi,” he says. “I wanted to warn you, you’re going to get a call in the next day or two from a staffer at State Senator Carlisle’s office. They’re interested—”

“You guys want to get Chinese for dinner?” West has wandered in from the kitchen.

“I thought you were making Sloppy Joe’s,” Frankie says.

“We’re out of ketchup.”

“I hate Chinese.”

“You like those crispy things. Crab rangoon.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“You liked them last week.”

My dad’s still talking. “—bill might come out of it, and she thought—”

“Well, what
do
you want?” West asks.

“I want Sloppy Joe’s.”

“I already said we don’t have ketchup.”

“So go get some.”

“By the time I got back from the store, it’d be—”

“Sorry, can you hang on a second?” I slide out from under Frankie’s head and take my call into the bedroom.

As I pass by West, he finally notices the phone in my hand and mouths the word
Sorry
. I shake my head to indicate it’s no big deal. As I step into his bedroom, I can hear him and Frankie resume their bickering.

“—say she was talking on the phone?”

“I thought you saw.”

“Obviously I didn’t. Who’s she talking to?”

“Her dad.”

“Jesus, Franks, and you didn’t think maybe we should—”

The closing door cuts off the sound of their voices. I sit on the edge of the mattress.

“Okay,” I say. “Repeat that last thing you were telling me?”

“Where are you?” my dad asks.

“At West’s.”

“Again?”

“Again.” I scoot on the mattress until my back hits the wall, and then I stick my legs underneath the hideous comforter.
I’ve slept here so many times now that it’s beginning to feel like
my
hideous comforter. My room. Cozy and familiar.

“Caroline.” My father packs a million admonitions into the three syllables of my name.

“Let’s not start this, okay?”

Some days, I wish I’d never told him I was back together with West, because he
will not let it go
. West has always been and apparently will always be “that boy” to my dad. As in,
That boy is all wrong for you, That boy is trouble, That boy is going to break your heart
, and, lately,
That boy is a distraction you don’t need
.

“The sister is there?” he asks.

“Her name is Frankie, Dad. She
lives
here.”

“I’m not comfortable with it.”

“You don’t actually have to be.”

“I was talking to Janelle, and—”

“Stop right there,” I tell him. “Return to the reason you called. Or I will hang up.”

That earns me another sigh, but it works.

Dad tells me there’s gossip on the judge grapevine that Senator Carlisle is looking at introducing a law to criminalize revenge porn. Someone told someone who told my dad that I might be contacted as an expert witness.

Expert witness
. The phrase gives me goose bumps.

I
want
to be an expert witness.

“I know your instinct is going to be to help with this,” he says. “Normally, I’d support that, but we’re in a delicate position with the case, and any testimony you share even informally might come back to bite us in the ass. If they find out that the Jane Doe in the suit is you—”

“I get it.”

“Anything you say right now, Caroline—anything that might become public—” he warns.

“No, right, I get it. If they call, I’ll be careful.”

This is how lawsuits work: they limit your options, choke off your freedom to speak and act and be who you want, because you always have to be thinking about the jury in your future and how they might see your behavior.

“I’m not sure who gave them your name, even,” he says. “We have to be cautious about your profile. This issue’s starting to get a lot of attention, and if you become a spokesperson, get known as an activist, that affects our options down the road. We want to—”

“Dad, I
get
it. Thanks for the warning. You can stop now.”

I can see him in my mind’s eye. He’s in his study at home, I’m sure, feet propped up on his desk, fingertips pressing into one temple, forehead creased in a frown.

Sighing.

“Okay,” he says. “How’s everything going with your classes?”

“Classes are fine.”

“You have everything you need?”

“Yep.”

“You should come down this weekend,” he says. “We could see a movie.”

“I can’t.” It’s the truth, but I probably would have said the same thing even if it weren’t. “I’ve got plans here. Thanks, though.”

“All right. Well, call me if you hear from these people. Or … You know. If you need me for anything.”

“I will.”

West cracks the door open, looks in to see if I’m still on the phone.

“I’ve got to go, Dad,” I say.

“Okay. Goodnight, sweetheart.”

“Goodnight.”

I hear him say, “I love you” as I’m hanging up, but it’s too late to say it back.

West sits down next to me. He slides his hand down my blanket-covered leg and squeezes my toes. I wiggle them in his grip, relieved for no good reason that he’s here.

“Everything okay?” he asks.

“Yeah. He just wanted to warn me about a phone call he thought I couldn’t be trusted to handle without his advice.”

“You sound testy.”

“I
am
testy.” I thought I’d established boundaries with my dad last year. I thought we had an understanding, but every time I turn around I have to remind him once more that I’m a grown-up now.

And then there were those two words:
expert witness
.

West drags his hand up my thigh. “Me, too. Frankie’s driving me fucking nuts.”

“Sorry. She doesn’t do that with me.”

“Because she worships the ground you walk on.”

“It’s a girl thing. I remember when I was her age, I was completely in love with my music teacher. She had long blond hair and wore silver jewelry and diamond studs, and she smelled like spicy perfume. I couldn’t decide if I wanted her to be my mom or my girlfriend. She lived down the street from us and hired me to feed her cats when she was out of town.”

“You don’t even like cats.”

“I know. But I spent hours in her house looking at all her stuff and thinking how I was going to have a place decorated exactly like hers someday, and I would dress like her and act like her. It would be impossibly glamorous.”

West gives me a once-over. I’m wearing jeans and a ratty sweatshirt. I put my hair in a loose ponytail right after I showered this morning and left it there. Some of it’s probably still wet.

“Impossibly glamorous, huh?”

“Shut up. Your sister thinks I’m glamorous.”

“We both do. We can’t help it. You’re the most glamorous creature either of us has ever met.”

I lean forward and shove his shoulder. He catches me under the arms and drags me over his body as he lies down. We end up crossways on the bed, laughing.

When he tries to pull me close enough to kiss, I resist.