Deeper (Caroline & West #1)(80)

Three weeks passed when I didn’t see Caroline, and, even so, she was woven through my life. My memories, my dreams, my thoughts. It turns out you can’t cut someone out of your heart just by wanting to.

I didn’t want to hurt her.

I didn’t want to hand her the power to wreck me.

I didn’t want to f*ck her and walk away like it meant nothing, like she meant nothing.

I just wanted to be with her. All the time. Every way. Even though I was leaving, and even though I didn’t deserve her.

“Deeper or nothing”—that’s what she said before she walked out of my apartment and out of my life.

I was too scared to pick. Too scared to follow her outside, tell her what she wanted to know, go down on my knees and beg if I had to.

I was too caught up in all these questions I didn’t have answers to.

What if you go after the love of your life and it ruins you?

What if you don’t, and you figure out you’re already ruined?

What if there’s no right thing? Only you and the girl you love and your fear. A ticking clock, a mother you can’t trust, a sister who needs you, a father determined to f*ck up anything good you manage to get your hands on.

I’d shied away from deeper, but I never gave much thought to the alternative.

Nothing, or deeper.

My choice to make.

What kind of dipshit chooses nothing?



Smoke fills my lungs, and it’s been so long, the rush is immediate.

The high is ugly. It amplifies my bad mood, so much that I can feel my lip curl, the corners of my mouth turning down. My nostrils flare.

I take another deep drag.

I’m on the sun porch at the back of the restaurant, grabbing a five-minute smoke in the middle of the Valentine’s Day service rush. It’s cold out here, the sounds of the kitchen muffled by insulation and wood siding.

Tips are good tonight. I should be content to work, but I’m crawling out of my f*cking skin.

I haven’t seen Caroline in twenty-two days.

In the window, against the darkness outside, my reflection stares back at me, pissed off and mean.

I look like my father.

I’m the age he was in my first memory of him. He bought me a bike with training wheels and Spider-Man on the seat. I thought he was f*cking amazing. My father, I mean. Not Spidey, although Spidey was pretty great, too.

My dad and my mom were always kissing, hands everywhere. I wasn’t allowed in Mom’s bed at night when he came around. They made noises in there, so I had to squint my eyes closed and send my thoughts away. I would lie on the couch under an old green nylon sleeping bag, rubbing the satiny lining under my chin, thinking about how awesome it would be when they got married. How I’d have two parents.

Kids with two parents lived in a house with a yard. I knew this because I watched the kids at school who had what I wanted, and the main thing they had was dads and moms. Dads with jobs and wedding rings who showed up for school concerts with video cameras and waved.

Five feet away, on the other side of the paneling, the headboard knocked out its rhythm. My parents’ voices blended together, low and urgent, full of pain.

I figured that before too long I’d get a dog to go with the kitten my dad had brought home out of the blue the week before.

Before too long, everything would be perfect.

It didn’t last, though. It never lasted. He argued with my mom, and she didn’t manage to calm him down. He kept harping on how much she’d spent on some shirt she bought. The fight escalated into a tirade about her nagging, her neediness, what a useless f*cking burden we both were.

He got behind the wheel drunk, backed out into the road with a spray of gravel, and jerked the car forward so fast he ran over the kitten.

He stopped then. I threw myself to my knees beside the car. He got out, and both of us looked.

That poor f*cking kitten. I couldn’t stop staring at it. My mom was standing against the door, crying like she was the one he’d run into, while I watched the kitten try to breathe with its chest crushed.

I thought we were united. I thought he was looking at the kitten the way I was, trying to breathe for it, soaked in remorse and confusion and a desperate, unraveling kind of hope for its rescue.

I kept thinking that. Right up until he hauled off and kicked it.

It wasn’t even dead, but he kicked it hard enough to send it sailing on a low arc, inches above the ground. It rolled through the gap in the neighbor’s trellis, coming to a stop underneath, too far underneath the trailer for me to reach.

It would rot there. I didn’t know that yet.

“Quit crying,” he said. “It’s just a f*cking cat.”

When he got in the low-slung car, pulled the door handle shut, and drove away, I didn’t hate him. I blamed my mom for all of it—the argument, his anger, the kitten.

I didn’t hate him, but I understood for the first time that he and I aren’t the same.

He’s the kind of man who would kick a kitten.

I’m not.

My mom doesn’t seem to get that. This morning she sent me a text that said, Happy Valentine’s Day to the love of my life!

I held the phone in a tight grip. It was either that or fling it across the room.

The love of her life.

When she’s with my dad, she calls him that. Wyatt Leavitt, the love of her life. Her sweet man. Her wanderer.