Harder (28 page)

It feels wrong.

I’ve always believed I could do whatever I put my mind to, but if I want to get into law school with my sex pictures on the Internet—if I want to get
through
law school and out the other side, to practice and advocate for social justice, to run for office and become a legislator and change the world for the better—what do I have to do to make that happen?

My dad says this is what I have to do. Push through the suit. Wear the Jane Doe straitjacket.

I’m not so sure anymore.

At the long table to our left, a big group of students bursts into laughter.

I have to swallow, because my throat hurts. I wonder if I’m coming down with something.

“Caroline?” Bridget reaches across the table to cover my hand with hers. “Why are you doing this when it makes you so unhappy?”

I swallow again.

My throat aches, and my eyes fill with tears.

I don’t have an answer.

I wake up in the dark. The clock reads 2:48 a.m.

West is plastered against me, and he’s way too hot. The air in his bedroom is dry from the space heater running in the corner. I have one nostril that’s completely blocked, and the other is so desiccated I can only inhale a thin stream of overwarm oxygen.

There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep.

When I try to wiggle out from under his arm, it tightens for a second. “Where you going?” His voice is husky with sleep.

“Just out to the living room.”

“You need me to rub your head?”

It’s my favorite way to fall asleep—West’s fingers rubbing circles over my scalp. “Maybe later. I have to pee anyway.”

“Come back soon.”

“I will.”

After I visit the bathroom, I stop in the kitchen for a glass of water, then pad out to the sofa. I wrap myself in the ratty afghan on the couch and sit in the dark.

Untethered, my mind wanders.

I pluck at the holes in the ratty old blanket, which I suspect West’s grandma must have knit in the 90s. It’s got the color palette—maroon and forest green.

In the bedroom, I hear West turn over, rustling the covers.

I think about the depositions. How terrible they made me feel.

I curl into a ball under the blanket and close my eyes.

A spring creaks.

Seconds later, a telltale floorboard groans, and then I hear water running in the bathroom.

By the time he comes into view, I’m sitting up again.

He’s got nothing but boxers on, which seems crazy for December, but West’s internal furnace runs hotter than mine.

He scratches his stomach. “Scoot over.”

When I do, he sits down sideways and positions me between his outstretched legs.

“Pillow.”

I hand him one. He sticks it behind his head, wraps me in his arms, and leans back, pulling me down with him, my body wedged between the couch and his skin, my head resting in the nook beneath his shoulder.

He feels good.

He smells good.

It’s so good being with West.

I wish I could explain to my dad—to anyone who thinks I don’t belong with this man—how I feel in moments like this one. Moments when the
rightness
of the two of us expands inside me, pushing out against the walls of my chest until what I’m experiencing is so much more than I can put in words.

Gratitude. Satisfaction. Contentment.

I don’t know how to say it. There isn’t any way. There’s just this big, blissful feeling that I want to spend the rest of my life in.

West kisses the top of my head. “Pull that blanket up, would you?”

I raise it to cover my shoulders and his stomach, and then
from underneath I tuck it in along his side, pushing a few inches of blanket beneath his thigh, his stomach, his upper arm. I like to fuss over him, but not too much. Just a little bit, where he might not notice and get spoiled.

“Sorry I woke you up,” I say.

“S’okay. What’s going on in your brain?”

“Too much, apparently.”

“Yep.” He shifts his shoulders, settling us deeper into the couch. “Tell me.”

“I talked to Paul again today,” I say.

“Remind me who’s Paul?”

“The senator’s aide.”

“Oh, right.”

“So, I don’t know. I was just thinking about it. Not about him, but more about what it’s like when I’m talking to him. I feel like … like there are things I can tell him that no one else is going to. Things he doesn’t get—doesn’t understand properly—but I can change his mind.”

“About revenge porn?”

“For starters, yeah. I think it’s getting so I could change almost anyone’s mind on that, if I had a clear shot at it. If they aren’t, you know, a prejudiced jerk or whatever.”

“I bet you could.”

“And this is going to sound dumb, but I feel a little bit like I was
born
to do that.”

His reaction is an exhale across the top of my head—a huff of pleasure and amusement. “Maybe you were.”

I twist so I can see his face. “Maybe I was, West.”

His eyes hold mine, steady and calm. There’s no mocking in them.

He runs his hand up and down my back beneath my T-shirt. His palm is warm on my bare skin, but his eyes are warmer. So sure of me.

“He wants me to talk to the media,” I confess.

“Who, the aide?”

“I guess the senator. They think their best shot at getting this passed is to start with a public education phase, and they want to set up interviews with major newspapers and some of the morning shows on local news in Des Moines and Iowa City, the Quad Cities … They want to put a face on revenge porn in Iowa.”

“Your face.”

“My face.”

“Makes sense to me. You’ve got a beautiful face.”

“My dad would shit a brick if I said yes.”

“Yep.”

“But I was thinking …”

“You were thinking you were gonna say yes.”

I smile a little. I can’t help it—it’s nice to be known. I love that he knows me.

“I
want
to. What’s the point of suing Nate, spending all this money trying to destroy
Nate
, if it means I can’t do any of the other stuff I want to do? There’s no point, right?”

“Right.”

He squeezes me tighter. We lie there like that for a while, just breathing. West’s hand warms the base of my spine.

“What do you want, baby?” he asks.

“Right now?”

“No. Down the road. Ten years, twenty years … what do you
want
?”

I hitch my leg up over his stomach and snuggle closer until I’ve got my face in his neck. I tell his throat, his pulse, “I want to be president.”

His heart beats, steady and strong. I can feel him, alive against my lips.

“I’ve never said that out loud before,” I admit. “Not since
I was a little girl and Janelle told me women don’t get to be president, and that even if they did,
I
would never be the president because just how special did I think I was anyway? And she was right. I get it, how impossible it is. Even then, I got it. So I stopped saying it out loud, and I kind of stopped letting myself think that far ahead. I just think about, you know, law school, getting a job after, working my way into local office.”

“But that’s not where you want to end up.”

“No, I want to end up in the White House. And I know I don’t have a great shot at it, because nobody does. No woman does. And even if every other star in the universe lined up for me, with what happened last year, it’s probably impossible. The way the world is—”

“Caro,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Stop telling me why you can’t have what you want.”

My cheeks are hot. I’m breathing fast, just from admitting such a deep, foolish hope to him. From trusting him with that. “There are a lot of reasons why I can’t have it.”

“Well, yeah. But if you want Pennsylvania Avenue, baby, you should go for it.”

“You think?”

“Fuck yeah, I think. You’re smart and strong and gorgeous and talented. You’re a leader—I always believed that. You need to do your leader thing, and that means you take what happened to you last year and you use it to change the world. Beat people over the head with it if you have to. Talk and talk until the world’s got to listen. And then if you want to be president, what you have on your record is what happened to you and what you did about it. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

His words wash over me like warm water. They wipe me
clean, leave me pure and righteous. Because what he said—that’s just exactly what I want to do. Just exactly how I want my future to be.

“It’s so big,” I say. “It scares me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being scared. Being scared keeps you sharp. And anyway, you can break it down to one ballot at a time. You’ve got my vote.”

“That’s good. Only 126 million to go.”

“I have faith in you.”

I wriggle up and kiss his jaw. “You’re sweet.”

He takes my cheek in his hand and traps me with his eyes. He’s so solemn. I can see how much he wants me to hear him when he says, “I’m not doing you a favor, Caro.”

My heart is full and my lungs feel bound up tight with love and gratitude, fear and promise.

“I’m glad you told me,” he says.

“I am, too.”

I am, because now I know what comes next, and it doesn’t seem to matter that it will be hard. It’s just the thing I’ve got to do.

“I have to settle the lawsuit,” I say. “It makes me feel like shit, and it sucks up all this time and resources. I don’t think there’s any point to it. When I go home for Christmas, I’m going to tell my dad.”

He smooths his hands over my hair. “Okay.”

“And I’m going to call Paul back and tell him I’ll do the media stuff. Maybe I can do an interview for the school paper and the paper in town. I could write some pieces for online, too. Salon, or HuffPo? I’ll have to look around at where I might be able to do a personal essay kind of thing. Or else—”

He pushes on the back of my head, brings me down to his mouth, and kisses the words off my lips.

“What was that for?” I ask.

“You were getting loud. I don’t want you to wake Franks up.”

“I wasn’t getting—”

He kisses me again, and he does it so well that I’m smiling when I stop to breathe. “Liar.”

“Not to you,” he says.

“You just wanted to kiss me.”

That makes him smile. “Got me there.”

This time, it’s me who kisses him. My excitement becomes our excitement, the kiss sinuous and liberating, like running fast and falling down in the grass and looking up at the spinning sky.

I want to tell him more. Tell him everything I ever hoped for. All the ways I’ve let my ambition be taken from me, yanked from my fingers like so many papers flung onto the floor, scattered around my feet.

Sooner or later, I’ll tell him everything.

He lifts me and carries me down the hall to our room. The blanket falls to the floor when he locks the door, but I’m not cold. Not with his body over me, his eyes on mine, his words inside me.
You’ve got my vote
.

I think, fleetingly, that the reason I don’t need vengeance is that I have love.

Vengeance doesn’t give you anything. It doesn’t fill you up or soothe you, satisfy you or change you.

And even if it did, I don’t need that, because my heart is already full. West’s hands are on my ass, his lips on my neck, at my throat, on my collarbones, moving down. He’s teasing me, smiling and calling me “Madam President,” pulling my shirt off over my head and licking his way down my chest.

“President Piasecki,” he says to my breastbone. “That’s got a nice ring to it.”

I close my eyes.

I’m twenty years old. I have a year and a half of college left. I’m supposed to be drinking too much, partying too much, playing rugby, studying abroad and sleeping around and figuring out what I want to do with my life.

I’m not supposed to know, already, that I want to spend the rest of my life with him.

But I do know that.

I know a lot of things.

“President Leavitt’s got a nice ring to it, too,” I say.

His eyes come up, a question in them. “You’re not talking about me.”

“President Caroline Leavitt,” I say slowly.

I watch him get it. Understanding shows up on his mouth first—always his mouth—and creeps upward, over his cheekbones, into his eyes. A surprised happiness he couldn’t hide from me if he tried.

He doesn’t try. He just grins and glides his hand down my stomach, right past the waistband of my pajama pants and into the wet heat of me, making me gasp.

“You’d make a hot first lady,” I say, before he scatters what’s left of my marbles.

“Bite your lip, baby.”

I do. As he works his fingers inside me, I bite it hard enough that in the morning it’ll be swollen, but that’s fine. That little twinge of pain—that taste of blood—only heightens the pleasure.

He makes me come with his hand, and then he moves inside me and makes love to me so slow, so quiet, for so long that I feel another orgasm begin to build. That dragging sweaty sweetness swelling between us. When it’s rising up, starting to sharpen, he draws me to my knees and pushes inside me from behind.

He pulls my hair off my neck and whispers in my ear, “I’m going to fuck you like this in the Oval Office.”

Swear to God. West.

Head in my hands, my ass in the air, I’m trying not to laugh when he makes me come again, and this time he goes over the edge with me.

I drop with my face into the pillow, heavy and exhausted, drowsy. He’s so hot and heavy and all over me, his sweaty, familiar weight, the scents of our bodies. Nothing can touch us.

I’ve never lost sight of my happiness.

Not for one minute.