Harder (Caroline & West #2)(19)

But in the cab of this truck, drifting down into the cold with the scent of tobacco in my veins, I’m protected from having to feel. Suspended, for now.

I read the texts from my dad while West brings Mrs. Tomlinson to orgasm.

I love you too, C.

What’s the word there—any idea when you’ll be home?

A third one arrives.

Let me know when, I’ll pick you up.

She’s noisy when she comes. I didn’t know people were that noisy outside of movies.

This scene is a parody, a terrible movie I can’t turn off.

Gravel clatters. West getting to his feet. He must see the interior of the truck illuminated by the screen of my phone. Her, too, now that her eyes are open.

The sounds they’re making probably mean something.

I’m supposed to care.

I’m supposed to say something when West opens the truck door and looks at me with nothing in his expression like surprise.

Looks at me with a blazing sort of pride, an arrogant tilt to his eyebrows that tells me he knew.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

I don’t say anything. Not even when he calls me by name. “Caroline,” he says—my whole name, which he hardly ever uses.

I refuse to speak even when he takes me by the shoulder and shakes me, “Fucking say something,” and Mrs. Tomlinson’s making soothing noises, “West, West.”

I’m sinking, and I don’t have to talk to him.

I don’t have to do anything.


He drives me to the airport in the morning.

Up the mountain. Down the mountain. Wordless.

It’s not until I see a sign that says we’re twenty miles from Eugene that I start thinking how this is it.

I mean, this is really it.

When West left Putnam last year, I took him to the airport, and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. It was horrible, but not as horrible as this silent car ride, because what I didn’t understand last year is that everything about that departure was outlined in hope.

I didn’t know if I’d see West again, but I hoped I would.

He didn’t know if he’d ever get back to Putnam, but I know he hoped, too.

We hoped we could be friends. We hoped we could be more.

And the slow death of hope—the suffocation of a future—that’s hard to live through. It’s no wonder he couldn’t take it.

It’s no wonder he told me he’d met someone, just to give himself a reason to stop calling. To give me a reason to stop waiting for the phone to ring.

All of that was hard.

It’s not as hard as this.

This is the wasteland after a volcanic eruption—everything hot and black, covered in sulfur, the sky the color of ash. There’s nothing for hope to feed on in this car. He took it all.

He killed it on purpose.

“I know what you did,” I say into the silence.

His hands tighten on the wheel. “Say what you need to say, Caro.”

“You’re hoping I’ll yell. I bet it would be easier if you could remember me that way. You could think about how it ended, and then you wouldn’t have to remember the rest of it.”

He’s quiet.

I’m not.

I’ve never been a quiet person, and everything that’s happened to me in the last year has driven whatever quietness remained right out of me.

I wish I had a microphone for this. A sound system and a crowd of a thousand.

I wish everyone in the world could hear.

“I love you.”

That’s the first thing I have to say to West Leavitt, and I hear his surprise in the sharp sound of his inhale.

“I came here because I love you, and I helped you the best I could because I love you. I need you to know that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t have done to make this work between us. I didn’t know it when I got here, but I sure as f*ck know it now. If you’d asked me to take time off school, move out here, help you get your sister on the right path, I would’ve done it. For you. If you’d said to me you wanted to raise her, you and me together, take her from your mom and set up a house somewhere, I’d have said sure, yeah, let’s do it, even though it’s scary. For you I’d do it. All I’ve ever said to you is yes, and I was going to keep saying yes, because you were worth it. The way you made me feel. Your mind and your heart and you. Everything about being with you was worth it.”

His eyes are on the road, so I look at it, too, but there’s nothing there.

“Look at me,” I say.

He won’t.

“You look at me,” I repeat. “I deserve that much from you.”

The truck slows. He signals, then pulls onto the side. Cuts the engine.

He turns toward me, and it’s harder.

But it’s already so hard, there’s no point in flinching away from it now.

“You have to leave Silt,” I tell him. “Take your sister, because God knows you won’t leave her, but you cannot stay. You’ll never be happy here. You don’t know how.”

His eyes cut away from me. Out the window, toward the mountains.

“You told me once when I needed to hear it that I hadn’t done anything wrong, so now I’m going to tell you. You did do something wrong. That performance last night? It was a performance. I’m not going to pretend it was anything you wanted, that you got carried away with lust or some bullshit, because that was f*cking calculated. It was mean, and it was wrong. But I know what you did, West. I know why you did it. And the same way I needed to hear that I hadn’t done anything wrong with Nate, that I wasn’t wrong even when a hundred strange *s on the Internet were talking in my head at me day in and day out—”