Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(106)

I love you, too.

She knows it, I think. If she doesn’t, I was doing something wrong all those weeks we had together.

She knows it, but it wouldn’t do either of us any good to have it out in the open. If I’d said it, it would’ve been just another loss for us to carry around.

I thought about saying, You shouldn’t, but I couldn’t bring myself to say that, either.

She shouldn’t. She does. I’m glad.

More than glad, I’m greedy over it. I can’t find any piece of me—a finger bone, a molecule, a single atom—that wants her to feel different.

She’s in love with me.

Thank f*cking Christ.

So I wanted that picture. Caroline, standing in the sun with our friends gathered around her. Bridget and Quinn on the steps, listening as she told them something. I’d asked Bridge to take care of her, but seeing Caroline there, I realized she doesn’t need to be taken care of anymore, if she ever did. She had those two arrayed around her and her dad in a car by the curb, awaiting her commands.

She was the leader.

Her dad pulled a few strings, got me out on probation with permission to leave the state as long as I complete some kind of drug program back home. There’s still hoops to jump through, but the public defender said the misdemeanor’s going to drop off my record once I’ve hopped on through them. The PD said I was getting a sweet deal—maybe sweeter than I deserved.

Her dad said he’d be glad to see the back of me.

I get where they’re both coming from. If I were them, I’d feel the same.

Sweeter than I deserved—that was Caroline. Head to toe, beginning to end, every day I had her.

I ought to be sorry I slept with her, sorry we got to be friends, sorry I ever walked out to where she was sitting by the curb in the dark and pulled her into my life.

There’s things I am sorry for. That I left Frankie. That I thought I might have a place in the world somewhere other than home, thought I could put down the responsibility I picked up ten years ago and trust somebody else to carry it.

I’m sorry I ever came here, because if I’d stayed in Oregon, maybe I could have kept this from happening. Kept Mom away from my dad. Kept her together with Bo, and kept Frankie tucked away safe with stuffed animals in her bed and glitter on her fingernails. I should have been there, telling her bedtime stories. Telling her she can be anyone, anything she wants to be.

That’s what’s in my power—to give Frankie that. Not to take it for myself.

I’m sorry I tried.

But I’m not sorry about Caroline. Not even a little.

I wish I had that picture, though.

Her smile.

Her eyes in the first instant when she looked up and saw me walking out, a free man.

I wish I had it, just to have something of Caroline to keep.





APRIL

Caroline




I had him for one more week while they got some legal stuff sorted out.

Seven days.

He tried to pull away from me, but no way was I letting that happen. I slept in his bed. I kissed him and licked him, bit him and scratched him, put my tongue on every single spot on his body it wanted to be.

He was mine. Mine, and I knew I had to give him back, but I didn’t have to do it yet. I refused to cry over losing him when he wasn’t gone.

I helped him pack. I helped him sell his car to Quinn.

I took him to bed.

I walked him to Student Affairs and forced him to formally withdraw. Not because I thought he might come back, but because that was the right way to leave. With deliberation. With care.

I deliberately, carefully, slowly drew his cock into my mouth and sucked it until he stopped saying my name and started bucking off the mattress, his heels catching the fitted sheet so it rucked up underneath him and he came with his hands tangled in my hair, his fingertips gentle behind my ears.

I held him.

I touched him.

That last night, I stroked his back and his shoulders, his hips and his ass, his arms, his neck, his face.

For as long as he was still mine to love, I loved him.

Then I let him go.



At the airport, I don’t know what to say.

We hold hands on the walk from the parking lot to the checkin counter.

We hold hands on the walk from the checkin counter to the security line.

We hold hands until the moment is finally here when he has to go and I have to stay and we can’t hold hands anymore.

He drops his backpack on the ground and pulls me into his arms.

I can’t think of words to tell him that mean anything. It’s easy, with my body, to press up against him. To rub my damp eyelashes against his shirt, feel his lips on the crown of my head, his arms so tight around me.

I won’t tell him I wish he didn’t have to go. There’s a little girl on the other side of the country who needs him. There’s a place he fits into, a life that’s not this life, and I can’t question the claim it has on him. I don’t have the right.

I can wish things were different. I’ve wished it a thousand times. But as long as they’re not different, this is the way it is, and I won’t tell him I wish he would stay.

“Hey,” he says.

I look up at his face. I push my hands up his neck, cover his ears where they stick out because he’s wearing his black baseball cap. He’ll get on a plane next to some lady who thinks he’s an anonymous college dude, nobody important. She won’t know that he’s everything.